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Linen Life Park Avenue (1375 Park Avenue in Emeryville) is more than an art gallery. It’s a car showroom, for one thing. It’s also a performance space. The gallery’s tagline is “An Artistic Space…A Spiritual Place,” and it’s appropriate.

Unfortunately, TLL doesn’t have a website just at the moment (they did for a little while, back when they were still on Hollis), but if you’re interested in holding your party, reception, wedding, business mixer, or other event there, you can contact development director Baylan Megino (that’s pronounced “by-lahn meh-hee-noh”) at 510-526-1575 or linenlifelounge@aol.com.

Baylan holds regular Wednesday morning networking events there, which are always a joy. I’ve also been to evening arts and business mixers, which combine live music, free chair massage, and a chance to hang out amidst wonderful contemporary art (predominantly African) and the artists who create it.

As January got underway, I noticed something strange happening with my pointer. It would start wandering across the screen when I wasn’t anywhere near the trackpad or the stylus. The problem got rapidly worse, until I couldn’t do any “mousing” at all. (And I was right in the middle of something that really couldn’t be done by keyboard navigation alone when it happened, of course.)

After a brief interlude of panic, I remembered that when I bought my used Dell Latitude 610, it still had time on the service contract the original purchaser had signed up for. So I dug up the information and called Dell Gold tech support.

To my considerable astonishment, I found myself connected almost immediately with a living, breathing human being—and a native speaker of English, to boot. After asking me a few questions and attempting a couple of diagnostics, the consultant on the phone arranged for a repairperson to come to my house the next day to replace the parts most likely to be the source of the problem, to wit the keyboard and trackpad.

The repair guy showed up comfortably within the allotted time, carrying a stack of boxes. He lacked a bit in the personal hygiene department, but made up for it in efficiency. The repair was finished in less than half an hour, and the computer works fine now.

I’m not normally the type to sign up for service contracts, but I’m sure glad I had this one!

Really sophisticated power networkers not only enter all these cards into their contact management program but create e-mail follow-up templates along the lines of “great to meet you at _____. Here’s a link to something useful I’ve written. Let me know if you or any of your clients ever need help with _____.” By means of grouping the contacts and mail merge, they can send these personalized follow-up notes to everyone they met.

I’m not quite that organized or sophisticated, and while I go to lots of networking events and meet (by my own standards, anyway) a lot of people, I haven’t become quite this systematic. (I did recently set up a CardScan for a power-networker client who collects business cards by the bushel, however.)

My current preferred follow-up technique is to send my new acquaintances e-postcards from Red Jellyfish. This organization is dedicated to saving rainforests and endangered wildlife, but I have to admit I mostly stick to the free e-cards. You select one of the gorgeous images and can, if you wish, include an appropriate quotation, as well as your own message. Red Jellyfish sends you a copy of your card and a notification when it’s received.

I’ve gotten very positive feedback about these cards. They’re a simple way to stand out and stay in touch, and I’ve begun sending them to friends as greeting cards, because I think they’re a lot classier than most of what I see from Blue Mountain and the like.

Some needs are common to both small and large businesses: mail, fax, phone, and marketing among them. Here are ten low-cost services to save you from having to try to do everything yourself—and keep your business fitting inside your home office.

I’m planning to do a whole separate article about websites for advertising freelance services (and finding contractors to work for you), so I’m not including them in this list.

1. Don’t waste your billable hours standing in line at the post office! Sign up with Stamps.com and print your own postage in any denomination, including Priority Mail, Express Mail, Parcel Post, and International.

2. Set up a conference call for as many participants as you want, whenever you want, for free! Just follow the instructions at freeteleconference.com. No reservations needed. (The conference line is a toll call.) Or host a toll-free teleconference for 12 cents a minute at TWI Budget Conferencing. Teleseminars are a great marketing tool, not to mention a way to extend your consulting services outside your local area.

3. If you need visuals for your presentations but don’t want geographic constraints, try Netspoke, Go to Meeting, and WebEx, which combine phone conferences with live web hookups so you can show your PowerPoint slides.

4. Manage multiple client databases with an online shopping cart system which also handles client follow-up with autoresponders (programs which send messages at set intervals once a client has taken a particular action such as buying a product or signing up for a tips list) and lets you send newsletters and e-zines to up to 10,000 subscribers (like my weekly Backup Reminder Newsletter) at Ecomincs. Their shopping cart is compatible with over 50 different Merchant Service providers.

5. Merchant Services are companies which allow you to accept credit cards. Even if you sell services and not products, you’re probably going to need them. PayPal is one of the most widely accessible and least expensive systems. There’s no charge to set up a business account, but they charge 3% of each credit card transaction. Some people avoid PayPal because of its past security problems. If you’re a Costco member, you can get good rates on NOVA merchant services. (NOVA is one of the country’s 3 top providers of merchant services, not just online but everywhere.) The transaction fee is 1.65%, but there is also a monthly service fee. There are tons of other Merchant Service providers; these days I get more mailers from merchant service companies than from the credit card companies themselves.

6. Now that you’ve decided to add teleseminars and web seminars to your arsenal of marketing tools and/or consulting services, you need to let people know about them. Full Calendar provides event promotion services for the San Francisco, Southern California, Seattle, New York, and Boston metropolitan areas, and also provides a directory of networking and trade associations and event venues. They’ll announce your event to daily and weekly papers, fairs and festivals, event websites, and convention and visitors bureaus for $20.

7. Read your e-mail from anywhere with Mail2Web, a free service which lets you check your POP or IMAP e-mail accounts from any web browser. PC users can also synchronize their e-mail and Outlook data across several machines with BeInSync. The free version limits the number of files you can synchronize; the pro version costs $59.95.

8. If you don’t have room for a fax machine, or don’t want to bother with getting another phone line, get your faxes by e-mail instead with eFax. An eFax number works just like a regular fax number; the person sending the fax will never know the difference. There’s a fee for a number in your own area code, or to send outgoing faxes.

9. Get a personal toll-free number and multi-mailbox online voicemail system for as low as $9.95/month with Freedom Voice. You can even get your voicemail messages e-mailed to you.

10. Send attractively formatted, CAN-SPAM compliant online newsletters with Constant Contact and Topica. Free for lists of under 50 subscribers; monthly charges for larger lists start at $20.