It’s unavoidable—when the economy starts going down, it becomes suspiciously hard to find freelance work. Maybe you use freelancing to pay the bills while you go to university and are working on your startups—such as I—or maybe you have a few kids and you’d like to make their Christmas extra special this year.

The bottom line is we’re all hurting in one way or another, but whining about it won’t do any good. Here are some things I do to leverage a bad economy:

1. Network Aggressively

In one of Seth’s latest blog posts he talks about his friend Tara who took a bad economy and used it to propel herself into a premier position as a job hunter as it started turning back around into a growth cycle.

The best time to start a gig like this is right now, when no one in particular wants to connect with and help out the superstars. Later, when the economy bounces back, your position is extremely valuable.

I’ve recently joined a local group SEO group at Meetup.com which proved to be a valuable experience just after going to one meetup. I made a client who is showing promise in the long-run with his new startup as well as two other great people who are great at what they do and can surely lead to meeting others within the field. It doesn’t matter if SEO is exactly what you do; it’s not for me. The key is to meet people within the same general area of interest. I actually think it’s better to avoid meeting only people from your specific niche. This helps you branch out and become more versatile—something any freelancer needs.

2. Focus on Efficiency

One thing I love about this little niche I’ve carved for myself as a designer is how clients love how fast I provide for them. I follow a little principle that always seems to impress my clients.

The sooner I get in and out of this project, the sooner you get in and out of it as well.

This might not click with your methodology, but I like to be done with clients before the day’s end. This gives two great advantages:

1. Your time becomes more valuable. I charge a minimum of $50 per hour for my work because the entire project is usually done in less than 10 hours, ultimately costing either the same or less than other designers, but the speed of delivery allows the client to implement faster, which is where the real value lies.
2. The client gets out of your hair sooner. Sure, I have a few clients I love to death, but any client turns bad if you give them too much wiggle room in the process, and clients get buggy the longer a project takes. Being straightforward means your life is less full of hassle, which I think we can all agree is great.

This core competency has become a great marketing point to many of my clients and makes it really easy for them to recommend me to their business associates. No matter what you do, being efficient at it makes life easier. A great benefit of this approach is that it weeds out clients you want to avoid naturally. Flaky clients will not be committed to paying the 50% down payment within the first 30 minutes of talking to you, but super-focused and super-dedicated clients will every time.

3.Think Small

Find small markets to enter

I wont’ give out where I go to find a large bulk of my work, but the great thing about the web is that almost everything is monetize-able. This means for every niche or every style of marketing that exists, there are communities of people who focus on profiting from them. When it’s tough finding larger clients, don’t underestimate the value of clients who need multiple landing pages for their split-tested campaign or who are looking for a large quantity of simple designs.

For the quickest, simplest projects, look for affiliate marketers, Myspace app developers, SEO firms who want to outsource simple design work, the list goes on and on. The main idea here is that you don’t have to rely on one or two projects for this month’s rent. Find a niche where you can find three or four clients a day who need $30-40 worth of landing pages or ads designed, or some small bit of code tweaked in their back end.

4. Leverage Past Work For Profits

If you’ve made a brush, vector, stock photo, or even bits of useful code for anything in the past, you are probably missing out on some of the easiest income ever. There are many people who make livings off of selling stock art to sites like iStockPhoto. Businesses leverage their past works all the time be repackaging a product and selling it under a different idea or to a different market that hadn’t been tested before—what’s stopping you from doing the same?

There are tons of blog entries and news articles about people making well over six-figures, or selling over 500,000 pieces of stock art.

Here is an incomplete list of sites you can sell your stock work on:

• iStockPhoto - Stock photos and vectors
• Shutterstock.com - Stock photos
• Flash Den - Stock work for Flash
• Turbo Squid - Stock 3D models and vectors
• Audio Jungle - Stock mp3’s
• Them Forest - Stock themes

More education on selling stock art as supplemental income:

• Freelance Switch - Search for “stock + art”

5. Avoid Overworking

Truth be told, bad times don’t necessarily need to call for desparate measures. A lot of people carry the mindset that working more means they’ll be more successful.

This is never the case.

Read Tim Ferriss’ book The 4-Hour Workweek as well as his blog to learn about the art of working harder, by working less. Reducing stress from your life makes everything more enjoyable, no matter whether the economy is good or bad. For some, it’s even beneficial to approach life as a fght against stress.

As designers and developers, we are naturally inclined to want to work more, work harder, work faster. It’s great to have this drive, but it’s unhealthy. Learn that hours spent designing and developing are not scalable, but the end product is, and focus on creating scalable, usable, necessary products.

Reduce your expenses as best you can and and stay out of debt. Will fall into place if you stay focused and conscious of your goals.