I’ve also started trying to keep more and more lists and notes on the computer, so I can find them again.

@Andrea- Draft mode can be found by going into your printing options when you choose to print. On some printers is it called ‘draft’ on others you can choose ‘economical’. The printer prints documents very quickly, but with occasional smudging and the ink is lighter. It saves a lot of ink.

I have to disagree about the free hosting, to those who do not think it can be professional. Before I purchased my domain, I used WordPress as a personal site. You do not need to worry about ads, plus you can post your resume, writing samples, a personal introduction page, and never spend a dime doing so. WordPress useage will show potential blogging clients you have experience with that platform.

As for worrying about a professional email address, Gmail has become the standard even for companies. Gmail has so many functions that your standard domain email will not include. Many of the domains also have a spam filter that will email someone back and force them to verify they are a real person. This is not something I want a potential client to have to do, jumping hoops to hire me.

Phone services all across the US now offer a standard flat rate for unlimited long distance. If you use long distance often, (i have family all over the US), this will save you a lot of money!

And the ink? Ugh. I won’t refill my own again, it looked horrible on me and leaked all in the printer, even though we followed directions to the ‘t’. Other than the ink and phone card advice, I really enjoyed this article. We freelancers are rich or poor, depending on the day/week/month! Great job!

As for free hosting, not all of the hosts display ads on the sites. Weebly.com is one of the ad-free hosts that comes to mind.

@ #2 – Not all of us are critiquing your choices, just adding what our own experiences have taught us. You’re right, they won’t all work for everyone and many of them are good starting points.

Also, I highly recommend using a spiral notebook for notes. I used to be the Post-It Queen, and wasted a lot of time searching for that one darned note that contained the info I needed – and, invariably, that was the one the cat ate. I happened to hit a back-to-school sale at Wal-Mart and found 70-page, college ruled spiral notebooks for 10 cents each, and haven’t looked back! I’ve noticed that for the past few years, Wal-Mart (and Target, I think) have had super-cheap back-to-school sales where you can load up on certain things at a substantial savings.

I also use an ink refill kit, which has saved me a lot of money on ink. There have been a couple spills, but once you get the hang of it, it’s easy. I spent $14 on a refill kit, which has refilled my cartridges at least 6 times and I still have plenty of ink as well as good print quality. New cartridges for my printer are $30. You do the math.

Thanks for the article.

I have used both the do-it-yourself refillable ink cartridge kits and purchased the reuseable cartridges and concluded that the quality of the print and ease of refillable ink cartridge depends on the printer and the ink cartridge itself.

As for the free webhosting, a free website (with minimal advertising) is a starting point for all writers lacking adequate funds thus making it a viable, cost free alternative. It is better to have a website (no matter how small or inexpensive) than to have nothing at all online to advertise oneself.

My local print shop charges a fee for transferring a file from a CD to their computers before printing it out, so watch out for that as well.

And VOIP instead of a calling card is an excellent suggestion.

1) If you are putting the site up to act as your resume, or to represent you in any way then the last thing you want is for the company you go through to host their own ads on your site. Not only do you have no control over the type of ads shown, you never get even a penny of revenue for them either.

2) Hosting services are not that expensive. GoDaddy.com has reasonable hosting for around $6 a month – as long as you do not have a high traffic site.

When people are hiring you virtually, then you want to put up the best appearance you can, and your website may be the first thing they look at. To me, that’s more than worth the monthly investment of actually paying for a domain name and hosting.

Just my 2 cents. Overall I really enjoyed this article. You can tell you put a lot of thought into it, and I like many of the suggestions. Especially the quote at the end – it is very true.

~Connie

Get unlimited long distance with VoIP. Skype is the cheapest if you want to keep your landline. T-mobile has a new deal for $10 monthly VoIP service if you have a T-mobile cell phone. We’ve had Vonage for almost 4 years now and have been very pleased with it instead of a landline. There are lots of options.

“Local print shop” could mean kinkos, the UPS store or even an independent copy place. Many have high-quality full-color photocopiers/printers that print in good quality and will let you email them your files. Watch for when they have special prices on copies.

I don’t have experience with refilling printer cartridges, but I wrote about it and what I found out is, they’re not all created equal. Pick a few sites and read their FAQ sections, you’ll learn a lot about how they do things, you might find you chose a cheap option the last time and there are better ones available.

I just recently found this site. I hope it’s okay for me to jump into the comments

And I have to wonder, what on earth are you printing that 100 pages uses *two* ink cartridges?? With my last printer (a cheapie Lexmark) I could squeeze out two draft copies of my ~350 page novel on one ink cartridge.

And another issue I’ve run into – I stopped using my long distance (out of state) service, instead using my cell phone for out of state calls. My phone company called me up one day and said because I was not making out-of-state calls, they would be charging me a $5 a month non-use surcharge. Verizon is the only phone company in this area, so instead I asked them if it was possible to remove long-distance completely, the surcharge for that was $2 a month, so we opted to do that.

I agree. But the post seemed to promote do it at home.

May I also suggest hosting your website at http://www.1and1.com – they’re extremely inexpensive, simple to use, and offer really great tools for building your website and monitoring marketing statistics!