In my last post I talked about how I started developing my own mini-API so that I could keep some of the data I use on different sites of mine in the same place, for example my links for different web sites I use around the web, you can get it in XML here http://www.bmdev.org/links.xml or also get it as JSONP here http://www.bmdev.org/links.json?callback=

I also said in my last post that I started two new freelance projects. I'm still in the early design and strategy phase for both projects. With both projects the clients want to be able to do things like have an update-able news feed and a photo gallery that they can manage. Now both of these things are not too hard to do with some simple PHP (I was actually thinking at the beginning I could just take the CakePHP news section I already had coded for another client and re-purpose it), but then I thought what if I just have my clients use services like Flickr (something I talked about in my last post) to manage there photos.

What I talked about last time is how using external services like that can save us a lot of development time. But after meeting with one of my clients and talking about using Flickr and also Twitter in their site I also realized that using these services is a massive benefit to them as well. Most (if not all) of my freelance clients are just small companies looking to get there name out there on the net, because of how small they are they know there not going to have massive amounts of traffic, that would be nice but its unrealistic. Now in the past I've helped clients use SEO to try to drive more traffic to their site, I'm not going to stop using SEO since I do think its important for most clients. However if you think about it logically its much less effective to try to get your users to come to you then going out to your users.

So by using services like Flickr and Twitter to manage different aspects of your clients sites not only does it save you development time but it gets there name out on sites that see millions of hits a day and can be a great way to get your clients name out there.