No Contacts, No Money!
Contacts are extremely important if you hope to make any money doing web development. As a web developer, stay in touch with people you have done work for! Make sure these people think of you first when they need more work done! If you are developing your own website or blog, again, contacts are key to success. Make quality comments on forums and blogs with the genuine intention of helping these other sites, and you risk gaining these people as clients or visitors in the future.
Take some time every-day to help others by posting on their website and forums. Write articles about other sites from time to time. These relationships you will build will come back to benefit you in the long-run. Do not spam your link or advertise yourself. Taking the time to earn trust and respect will help you build up contacts and incoming links that will translate into more traffic and more opportunities.
What’s the best way to stay in touch? I’ve recently installed the ChatZilla IRC Client for Firefox. I love using IRC for group meetings since it is lightweight and easy for everyone to connect and join in the discussion. And best of all, the discussion can be logged so nothing important will be forgotten.
Gmail is of course the next obvious tool to stay in touch. Gmail is free and lets you access your email from anywhere which is what makes it more useful than using Outlook on your computer. Of course, there are many web-based email services available, but Gmail is by far the best for two reasons: Search and Labels. Labels are way better than folders because you can attach multiple labels to a single email that falls into multiple categories. Search is fast, so you can find that email you need very quick.
Instant Messaging is the next great way to stay in touch in real-time on a more personal level. There are many different messengers available, so it can become a hassle managing an MSN list, ICQ list, AIM list, etc…! To avoid this problem I use Trillain, which is a tool that combines all these instant messengers into one!
Lastly, use a tool like Google Reader to know when your contacts are posting on their website and what they are posting about. This way, you can visit them and comment when they cover a topic you are genuinely interested in.
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