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.

Today more and more companies start to understand the importance of PM software which is targeted to solve numerous tasks and thus gives an opportunity to increase profit potential and decrease costs

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.

This has been a crazy week of server maintenance, PC crashes (buy Macs people, please) and client technical support problems. I spent a huge amount of time already this week logging in to various remote systems to fix a handful of disasters and problems. And none of it would have been possible without VNC.

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.

For the last several weeks, I’ve been trying my hand at some amateur SEO (or, Search Engine Optimisation) with my rankings for Fore Score on the term “golf stats” and I’ve had a bit of success. People don’t search for “golf stats” quite a whole lot, and the competition is pretty stiff at the top of the rankings, but I thought I’d give it a shot anyway just to see how I could do.

When I started this, Fore Score was the 10th result on the first page for a “golf stats” search on Google. Occasionally, it was dipping to the top of the 2nd page as well. After working on some of the code and putting extra effort into getting targeted backlinks with the right anchor text I’ve seen Fore Score rise to the #4 or #5 position depending on when you run the search. I’d say that’s a step in the right direction. I’ve managed to outrank some pretty large competitors: Sports Illustrated, Golf.com and USA Today to name three of the biggest.

This has been an interesting little experiment. In the world of Internet marketing, SEO and monitoring and tracking keywords and search engine results is a part of daily life. Internet marketers usually have a much better understanding of these things than someone like myself, who is mainly focused full-time on web development.

I’m probably going to switch my focus to another keyword or keyphrase here as the summer wraps up. I’ll keep everyone posted on the results.

It’s been a really long time since I had a post with a coding solution here. So today I thought I’d throw up something I needed earlier this summer for anyone else looking for similar code.

On an older site, still running Classic ASP, I needed to redirect anyone visiting a page with standard HTTP to the same page using HTTPS. Here’s the solution which I included at the very top of the page before any other code is called:

<%
	if Request.ServerVariables("HTTPS") = "off" then
		srvname = Request.ServerVariables("SERVER_NAME")
		scrname = Request.ServerVariables("SCRIPT_NAME")
		response.redirect("https://" & srvname & scrname)
	end if
%>

Basically, whenever someone visits the page it checks to see if they came from http://www.example.com/page and then redirects them straight to https://www.example.com/page to ensure they’re visiting the page on a secure connection.

There are probably much better ways to do this but since this is what worked for me I thought I’d share.