This week’s Startup Junkie comes to you a little late, courtesy of a much-needed long weekend. I used the time to reflect on all the help that’s readily available to bootstrappers (and business geeks of all flavors) these days. Today, I’d like to bring you, Lifehacker-style, some tools to help your indie startup along. If you’re comfortable in a corporate environment, don’t quit reading; some of these can boost your existing career trajectory as well. All of them are either free or offer a basic level of service for free.

• LinkedIn. A business networking community. It’s the work equivalent of Friendster, or the Business 2.0 equivalent of the Lions Club. Create an account and enter your profile. This could be as simple as a one-sentence description, or as rich as a resume. Once you’re done, import your email contacts. LinkedIn will search for current LinkedIn members on your contact list. If you use Gmail like me, it’ll import everyone you’ve ever corresponded with. This is more powerful than you may at first realize. The CEO of that small software company that gave you tech support two years ago may now be a multimillionaire. That person is now your contact, and all his LinkedIn contacts are now your contacts. Like they say, it’s all about who you know.

• Basecamp. A web-based project-management tool. Share to-do lists and calendars online. Track time spent on various projects. Edit documents collaboratively with [Writeboard]. If your organizational needs are less business and more personal, use Backpack, Basecamp’s little brother, instead. 37 Signals, the people behind these apps, are the poster children for Web 2.0. Everything they make is incredibly intuitive, and so pretty it hurts.

• Writely. If you need to share and edit documents, but don’t need the other business features offered by 37 Signals, you can give Writely a spin. Its killer feature is import and export of Word documents.

• Elevator Pitch. If you’re following my earlier advice and going out on your own, how are you planning to advertise your services? In addition to LinkedIn, try polishing your elevator pitch. An elevator pitch (so called because it should be short enough to deliver between floors in an elevator) is like a mission statement that actually means something. Use this site to develop, focus and get feedback on a pitch for your venture. You may even scare up some customers.

• Squidoo. Let’s go way outside the box. Are you an expert in any subject at all? Have you thought about keeping a blog, but don’t think you have anything interesting to say? Take a look at Squidoo. It’s an entirely new business concept in which ordinary people create web pages on a particular topic of interest. The more people visit your site (or lens), the more ad revenue you generate. It’s like a co-branded blog, focused on a particular topic, without the fluff. Or like your own personal portal, if you can hear that word without flashing back to the dot-bomb days. Seth Godin explains it much more thoroughly in his free ebook. The Squidoo service is currently in invite-only beta, but you can apply. I did.

If your career is going in circles, or if entrepreneurship just seems too scary, take heart: someone, somewhere, has done it before. Many of your problems have been solved by technology. You can make business contacts that could slingshot you to the next level. You have time-tracking and collaboration tools galore at your fingertips. And if you’ve always wondered how to make money off of your mastery of Star Wars trivia, we’ve covered that as well. You’re running out of excuses for not doing something great.

Of course, these tools can be used for evil as well as for good. It’s as easy to waste time playing around as it is to save it by being more productive. So choose your tools wisely, and stick with what works for you. See you next week.