If you run your own business and have been looking for advice online lately, you might have stumbled upon one of the Donut websites. There are three of them at the moment, providing marketing advice, help starting a business and legal assistance.

All the content on these sites is written and reviewed by experts so you can be sure you’re getting tip-top advice to run your company. Having said that, I’d better declare a vested interest: there’s another Donut in the pipeline and I’m hard at work on it at the moment.

While you’re waiting for that to emerge, how about dipping in to the existing sites now? Appropriate places to start might be these tips on working with a copywriter and how to write web copy that gets the job done.

There’s a good interview with Google’s Mark Pilgrim over on The Setup. The really interesting stuff (for me) starts about a third of the way in, but the whole interview is worth a quick read. My favourite quote:

Writing doesn’t actually take that long. It’s the long stretches of procrastinating that take up most of your time.

It would be funny if it also wasn’t a bit too true. Talking of which, I really must get on.

(Hat tip to the always-impressive 43 Folders.)

In what’s rapidly becoming a semi-regular feature, here are a few interesting snippets I’ve spotted online in the last couple of  weeks:

• Over at Men With Pens they’ve taken a good, hard look at how to deal with clients that suck. Let’s be honest, most freelancers have run into at least one or two of those. There’s no magic bullet, but these tips can help a lot.
• Here’s one that’s relevant if you’ve ever worked longer hours on the basis you’ll automatically be more productive. Sorry to break it to you, but as this great article from Lost Garden explains, it doesn’t work like that. It’s worth grabbing the whole presentation there too.
• I love Moo because their website just works, their products are gorgeous and they understand the freelance life. Their advent calendar is a case in point: every day till Christmas they’ll be linking to a great creative or marketing resource.