by Joe Wallace

Those who dispense advice about iPhone app creation often advise bloggers to ask an important set of questions before deciding to create an app for a blog or website. Some of those questions can also help inform your freelance business model and how you promote yourself in a very crowded marketplace.

1. What Problems Does Your App Solve?

If you’re creating an app for a website, what’s the thing your proposed app does that makes it better or more efficient than just looking at the web page? The answer varies in every case. How do you translate that question to your freelance business? What does YOUR business do that other freelancers don’t? Do you have a corner on the market with a particular skill, the way you work with your clients or what you can offer them? Define what it is you can do for your potential clients that other can’t do or won’t do as well.

2. What Do You Want Your App To Do?

In the same way that a blogger should give serious thought to the answer to that question, freelancers should ask themselves what they want to be doing for their clients. A great many freelancers (all right, I mean ME) cycle through too many gigs that turn out being unsatisfying because they aren’t really what the freelancer wants to be doing. Don’t take on ALL comers–decide what you’re best at and what you really want to be doing and commit do working THOSE skills.

3. How Hard Is Your App To Use?

In the same way a mobile app needs to be simple, user-friendly, and easy to understand, so should a freelancer’s resume page and list of services offered. Make everything readable at a glance. Sometimes that’s all the time the reader has to decide whether to add you to the “for further study” list rather than the “never mind” file.

Simple advice, to be sure, but it’s often the most simple things that trip up a freelancer in the struggle to slice out a piece of the freelance pie.