PSP provides a low cost alternative for printing custom postcards, business cards and even greeting cards. You supply them with a photo, or a prepared advertisement image, and PS Print will print your item for you. They have a simple ordering process that makes it easy for anyone interested in printing their own cards for Christmas, birthday parties or weddings to get the job done.

For my purposes, business card and brochure printing is available for cheap prices. I’m also thinking about getting some postcard printing done for some direct mail work to area businesses to promote my services in programming and web site design. Outside of work I find a lot of the services offered by PS Print to be useful when the holiday come around and my family is looking for a change of pace from the typical store bought greeting cards.

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The majority of my freelance business centers around the sports industry with a particular focus on baseball, although 2009 will see expansion into other North American sports. As summer draws to a close and teams wrap up their seasons I begin to see a dramatic increase in work requests and project proposals. In the fall, teams shift their focus from the happenings on the field to the happenings off of it.

The Downside of the Busy Season

Of course, the inevitable downside of the busy season is the opposing slow season. When we near the end of spring next year, my sports work will more than likely dry up unless I establish connections with new clients. This is something I’ve had to deal with every year since 2004.

Because of this downswing I’ve developed to growth strategies during these times for my freelance business/ With such a reliance on a cyclical industry and work schedule it is incredibly important for freelancers caught in that kind of loop to find “offseason” clientele or use that time to develop income generating side projects to help you supplement your income.

Finding new clients in a pinched economy isn’t always easy so building sources of passive income might be easier for you. There’s a great quote I heard last night on CNBC in reference to IBM’s business model. A talking head said that IBM “eats while we all sleep.”

A Slowdown Solution

That’s exactly what you want to be doing in your freelance career during down swings in activity. I’ve been an advocate of side projects here on this blog since I began writing it and now, during these potentially difficult times, they are even more important than ever.

There’s something satisfying about building a product, or web site, that generates hands off revenue for you 24 hours a day. If you can begin to generate your own revenue, without relying on constantly churning new clients and getting paid by current ones, you’ll be able to buckle down and make it through the ongoing uncertainty.

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One of the most positive points of project collaboration software is that it gives a possibility to improve the overall work on numerous projects. For example, many managers of your group fulfill different functions and work on different parts of the project. It would be a hard task to estimate the work of everyone and also see the work in progress. Only imagine what will happen if just one of them does not work properly or makes mistakes. It can spoil the work of all members of the group.

But if you have special online project collaboration software you can see the work of every manager online and of course correct their work online. Another advantage of this particular kind of custom software development is that it works with the help of Internet thus it gives a possibility to connect all your offices which can be situated all over the world. As you see there are numerous advantages of installing PM software.

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VNC, or Virtual Network Computing, is a method of accessing a remote system. It’s basically a simple way to do desktop sharing. I use it to help troubleshoot client problems by logging directly onto their computer, taking control of that machine’s keyboard and mouse and walking through the problem live with my client. It’s an invaluable tool that every freelancer needs to become intimately familiar with.

This whole setup is very easy to install. I use RealVNC on each client machine and then, since I’m a Mac user, I connect to them using a program called Chicken of the VNC. Chicken of the VNC also has one of the best application icons of all time, as you can see on the right.

Anyway, if you have clients and find yourself in need to some hand holding with them you should definitely look into using VNC.

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Programmers and designers who work freelance have a sometimes deserved reputation as being a bit flighty and unreliable. Well, I’m here to tell you that freelance writers have earned the same reputation with me after this experience. I’m not going to mention any names but I’ve hired about half a dozen different writers so far and have only had success with three of them. The others either took the money and ran, never to be heard from again, or they were so slow in getting the finished product to me that they caused delays with my projects. For the most part, I was pretty unimpressed with the quality of work I was finding regardless of the price.

To be fair and balanced I decided to see what life was like on the other side of the transaction. I found someone looking for articles to be written about WordPress. I offered my services for $0.015/word and they agreed. My first article was accepted and I was paid promptly. They were happy enough with my work that they asked for a second article to be written. After the second article was written they said they weren’t happy with the topic (it presented a conflict of interest with the site they would be posting it on) so I agreed to write a third article instead. The third article was written and delivered. I never received a reply on the work and was never paid. It was like they totally vanished off the face of the planet.

So I guess the freelance writing game is tough from both sides. Both buyers and sellers alike can be disappointing and let you down. My suggestion, at least from the buyer standpoint, is to stick to someone like glue once you find a writer that is reliable; no matter what their price is. The money you spend on the writing might be higher than most but the time you’ll save will make it worth it.

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Still Not Enough

I still think WordPress isn’t right for any of my clients at the moment. I really wish it was flexible enough to be used in all of the situations I run into in my freelancing work and maybe 2.5 is a step in that direction.

Part of the problem is that I have a very strong “do it yourself” mentality and would much rather invest the time in building my own content management programs than waste energy forcing a program like WordPress to meet my demands.

Now if a client wanted a blog (side note: not once have I been asked to build a blog for any of my clients) I wouldn’t hesitate to use WordPress with a custom theme built to match their current site design. WordPress is, without a doubt, still the best blogging platform available today and with 2.5 it’s gotten even better. There’s no denying that.

If you haven’t given 2.5 a try you need to find the time to download and install it soon.

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• I finally found a newsletter winner for the Single-Use License of Adii’s Premium News Theme for WordPress. I had a really great response to that contest so I definitely plan on running another one soon.
• Along with client work I’ve been spending a lot of time working on a new side project that, unfortunately, I don’t plan on discussing here in any great detail. It’s basically a brand new type of content management system I’ll be using internally to manage a network of sites my friend and I will be launching. Again, I’m dying to talk more about this but in the best interest of the project I’m going to remain silent.
• Thanks to this intense workload I’ve started to dip my feet into the outsourcing pool for some help. This is a topic I’ll definitely be writing about more in the future but probably in a more general sense. It’s been a really interesting experience so far and I’m looking forward to using outsourcing again very soon.

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The web development market is getting flooded with the explosion of overseas outsourcing and the avalanche of free reference materials. Now anyone with a text editor and a shared hosting account can get into the game and try and turn a buck. The job market is flooded with people that can most definitely work for cheaper and maybe even outperform you.

All Is Not Lost

It’s not all doom and gloom though. Even though the competition right now is as fierce as it has ever been there are steps you can take to set yourself above the rest and make a decent full-time or part-time living from freelance web development.

The days of getting freelance gigs from job boards is over for anyone in an English speaking country. You just can’t compete with the pricing that’s being offered from the Europeans and Asians. Thankfully, there are other ways to use your skills for profit that outsourced work isn’t as likely to interfere with.

Work Local

Most of the businesses in your local area haven’t even heard of the term outsourcing before. If they’re looking to get a project done and you’re fresh and new and looking to expand your portfolio this could be a perfect match. Just beware of long hours for low pay as local clients aren’t appreciative of current freelancing rates.

While this is a great method for anyone just starting out it’s not something I’d recommend to a veteran web developer. Local clients are usually pretty time intensive and people with larger client bases aren’t interested in the hassle.

Work Niche

This has been my own personal tactic for several years now. I found an industry that had a need for quality web development work (in my case, professional minor league sports) and built a quality product (in my case, a content management system) to match the need.

I stumbled into my own little niche mostly by accident but sometimes that’s the best way. If you do a job for someone and think there’s a broader market for the same businesses do some research and give it a shot. Once you become a known face in that market you’ll start seeing more work come in through referrals and word of mouth.

Work Passive

The easiest solution is to just not work at all! When you have down time between clients try and develop some projects that generate passive income. That’s what I’ve tried to do with Fore Score Golf Stats and all of the news aggregators that make up Jack’s Sports Report and so far things are going great. I’m generating money each month with sites that are basically hands-off propositions.

It’s A Big Garden Out There

Let’s put this lame plant metaphor to rest. Even if you are one of millions there’s still ample opportunity for you to succeed. Just remember to try and narrow your focus and worry about competing in small markets and not against small prices.

The jobs being outsourced aren’t jobs you would really want anyway. They’re being presented by people with big ideas and big demands that they can’t meet with their small budgets.

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Speaking Of Contests…

As an incentive to subscribe and to help promote the launch, I’m going to be giving away a Single-Use License for the popular Premium News Theme for WordPress to one of the newsletter’s verified subscribers. It’s free to subscribe so you’ve got nothing to lose by signing up.

Subscribe Now

In fact, I’ve made it really easy by including the sign up form right here:

I’ll be picking the winner of the free premium WordPress theme at midnight on March 7th, 2008. Feel free to tell everyone you know about the contest and have them subscribe to Jack’s Newsletter for their chance to win.

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As I said in my comment on Chris’ post, Digital Point is “one of the dirtiest corners of the Internet.”

It’s also one of my favorite sites on the web.

Even though Digital Point is sort of a den of thieves there are some money making opportunities there. I spend a lot of time in the Buy, Sell or Trade section looking at sites for sale (all the time I was wasting doing this was actually the impetus for building Web Auctions Daily). There are also a lot of great opportunities to find freelancers to outsource your extra work to.

I’ve had some experience both buying and selling things on Digital Point so I’ve put together some tips for people looking to get their feet wet over there.

Buying

• First off, the old expression “buyer beware” applies triple-time at Digital Point. If you get scammed or ripped off you have no one to blame but yourself. There are systems in place to give scammers bad reviews but it’s by no means a fool proof system and it doesn’t get your money back.
• Avoid the “get rich quick” schemes and ebooks. The only people that get rich with those are the people selling them. Use your head here. If someone is really making $300 a day doing no work then why are they wasting their time trying to sell their secrets to you for $4.99?
• Do your research. This applies to buying sites, links or hiring freelancers. Make sure the traffic and AdSense stats are legit as well as the PageRank. This is especially true when buying links. Again, use your head, if someone is selling permanent PR 5 links for $5 it’s probably bogus. If you’re hiring a freelancer make sure to see their portfolio and work out payment before any work gets started.

Selling

• A lot of people post sites, templates, domains, etc. for sale by starting a brand new thread that quickly gets buried under the pile. One neat trick I’ve learned when I’m selling something is to search the particular section I’m thinking about posting in with the term “WTB” (that’s short for: Want To Buy) and see if anyone has asked in the past for something I’m offering. That’s a simple way to fish out potential buyers.
• Be prepared to be insulted. Everyone is guilty of overvaluing whatever it is they have. Your first offers on your sale will probably make you cringe. You can either ignore them or take them into consideration. You won’t get much love if you berate the person who made a low bid though so try and keep your cool.
• Chris touched on this in his post but if you’re a freelancer please, for the love of all that’s good, do not give work away for free. Anyone who wants sample work is just looking to get something for nothing. That’s how the scammers get you.

I’ve droned on long enough. The thing I want to stress is that with some common sense and due diligence you can get a lot out of Digital Point. Be smart and play it safe so you have a good chance of having a nice experience.

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