I’ve always told myself that I should probably do a better job of advertising my services to the local business community. As a programmer I’m not exactly the sharpest marketing tool in the drawer so I need help when it comes to things like advertising. A big part of advertising when you’re trying to operate locally is with direct mailings and printed materials. Companies like PS Print Printing offer printing solutions for individual and business use that you might find helpful.

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.

I’m a pretty avid watcher of the website sales at SitePoint and Digital Point. I’ve written about my experiences at these two sites before as a matter of fact.

Recently, over the course of the last few months, as the economy has taken a nosedive I’ve seen a similar drop in the number of quality sites being listed and sold at these sites. You can take a quick look yourself and see that people on SitePoint and DP that are selling anything are more or less pushing spammy junk for cheap prices. It’s a rare occurrence when something good comes along and when it does it isn’t on the market for long before someone snatches it up.

Finding Good Sites For Sale

Since the people normally involved in the buying and selling of websites trade are slowing down their activity it’s time for people looking to buy in this market to get proactive.

If you’re looking to buy a real, quality web site you should no longer be looking on SitePoint and Digital Point with any hopes of success. Instead, go out and find sites you like and contact them directly and ask if they’d be willing to sell.

You might be surprised to discover not only the number of people willing to sell their site to you but their asking prices as well. I certainly recommend giving it a shot and seeing how things go. The worst thing that can happen is someone says no.

Content management systems are a huge part of both my business and my everyday life. The term has almost become ubiquitous online for any piece of software that lets you manage information to be presented in another form or fashion to end-users. Thanks to the increasing need for multi-user systems for managing all of the information available inside corporations and other groups the need for quality content management is rising exponentially with each passing month. If you’re looking to publish online or in print and have tons of information to manage a CMS is the only way to go in order to get your project in motion.

In my own business, building a custom content management system is definitely not a rare request but I also offer other services so I’m not always in a position to fill that need. There are companies, such as DPCI, that specialize in building and selling digital asset management software.

By going with CMS experts, like DPCI, you can be assured you’ll get the system and assistance you need. There are so many content management options on the market today that it’s important to find a vendor or consultant that knows how to separate the good from the bad and get you a working system that will help your business or project succeed.

In my years of freelancing, I’ve come across the need on several occasions to find a viable provider of Exchange hosting. A lot of businesses want the benefits of an Exchange system but are afraid of the inherent costs of the hardware and IT maintenance.

An alternative to an in-house Exchange server is a hosted solution. SherWeb is one of the providers I find meets the needs of most companies looking for Exchange hosting. At just under $9 per mailbox the plans are affordable and come with no minimum number of users. That’s a big plus for smaller sized businesses looking for the benefits of an Exchange Server without the normally high costs associated with one.

SherWeb also provides hosted Sharepoint for those businesses looking to take advantage of Microsoft’s popular collaboration environment. The Sharepoint web hosting that SherWeb provides its customers comes with built-in integration for Microsoft Office and their hosted Exchange service. With an online collaboration environment it’s easier to keep offices in proper communication on their projects.

SherWeb offers a complete set of hosted business tools and applications and better than competitive pricing. I highly suggest businesses of any size, or freelancers looking to make recommendations to their clients, give SherWood’s product line a good, hard look.

Even in the middle of the worst economic crisis in half a century, I find myself entering into the Fall “busy season” for the fifth consecutive year. As of Wednesday of this week, my calendar is booked into January of next year. That’s not too bad considering recent economic events in the US.

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.