I remember being a recent college grad in the early 90’s looking for a computer programming gig and not getting very far at all. I was chronically underemployed and my inexperience wasn’t helping.

After awhile, I simply stopped handing out resumes, printed up some business cards and started handing those out instead. Things picked up pretty quickly. Instead of being a recent grad, out of work, looking for work, I became (to paraphrase Robert J Ringer) the “expert from afar”. People were far more willing to hire me as “a consultant” to do a particular job for my then outlandish rate of $20/hour, than as a recent student willing to do the same project “on spec”.

Today you can do a lot better than printing up business cards and for less than $100 you can bootstrap yourself into a respectable “consulting practice” that on the surface would be barely distinguishable from a top shelf firm.

• Register a domain name with email and web forwarding, $35/year (disclosure: I own this company)
• Grab a virtual fax service $10/month
• Get a toll-free 1-800 number for calls in, google it, I see offers starting at $9.95/month
• Open a Skype account to cut your long distance bills to near zero, use skype-out (free to all numbers inside North America) to return calls you received on your handy dandy 1-800 number above
• You can shortcut your website by simply starting a blog, which you can get for free at some place like Blogger and then redirect or point your domain name to it. Later on, you can develop a more in depth site.
• Open a Google Adwords account and start drilling down into some niches where you can advertise your services, starting at whatever you can afford. $1/day may bring you a trickle of pre-qualified leads which will be the foundation of your consulting practice.
• Opening a Paypal account, which is free, allows you to accept credit card payments, even from non-paypal users.

There you have it. By following the steps above, you’ve gone far beyond what I did with my measly business cards over a decade ago, but if you decide to print up business cards they will look very professional because you’ll have a toll-free phone number, a fax number, and a web address (be sure to use an email address at your own domain name, even if it forwards to your ISP mailbox).

Mark Jeftovic has been a self-employed internet professional since 1994, currently he is the founder and president of easyDNS Technologies Inc., the DNS hosting company and domain registrar. His personal blog is at http://mark.jeftovic.net