Hey fellows. Being a freelance web developer and designer, a father of a wonderful 1 year old boy and a husband of an amazing woman I am in a temporary financial pit now, I am now working on creating a blog where I am going to describe my current financial situation, what I have in property, what I have to pay for, what I don't have to pay for. How much I spend for this and that, and how much I receive as payments for my freelance work.
I registered a domain name 93days.com for this and hope to make it live by the first day of summer. So, getting a picture of who I am and how I got into the downturn, the readers will be able to see all my daily work on the road to success. To make it more interesting, I set the timeframe to 93 days, let it be summer months plus 1 day as a bonus. This way I will be able to track my success, what I have done that is useful for my business and where I lost my time for nothing.
I will post all small and big thing I have done that day, will place some ratings and charts of my performance and other things like that. I will post where I sent my previous works, where I applied as a candidate for a job, what design and development works I have done, what projects I have been involved in.
I am going to let users easily direct me in my decisions and actions. They will be able to vote for doing this and not doing that. I am trying to build this site visually appealing and easy to use, add infographics. I had good and bad times being a freelancer but I like this business and I am not to give up. I want to set objectives and one of them is my monthly income.
So, one of my questions to you fellows who gets the bulk of income freelancing, do you receive at least $7000 or so per month doing your design/development work? It surely can be a difficult task but at least a good shift to that figure in three months will be great to achieve. Do you think it will be interesting for someone like me to track how I am getting out of the pit? Undoubtedly, I am open to any new suggestions regarding the site, please share your ideas about how to make it interesting, what info you would like to track in details and so on. Thanks!
I would strongly suggest you not let users direct your decisions. Most people are not freelancers. Most career advice I receive from people outside IT is shockingly bad. ("Glad to hear about the business being successful, Patrick. You know, you could go back, get your MA, and then get a nice secure government job! They'd love having someone with business experience! And you'd get a pension!") The intersection of "people who are in financial difficulty" (and would be interested in reading that blog) and "people who give good career advice" is vanishingly small, partly because many people who are experiencing financial difficulty got there as a predictable results of choices which they feel committed to justify.
With regards to freelancing: first, get out of the mindset that you are providing development/design. You are solving business problems for clients. Dev/design are two things in the toolbox that help you do that. Can you earn more than $7k or so solving problems that prevent businesses from making money? Yes. Absolutely yes. The people who you need to convince to buy your services to do this are not poor and, by and large, are not actively interested in the problems of poor people. "Hey hire me because I'm poor" will not be a successful tactic with them. "Hey hire me because I have a track record of producing useful things which made rich people like yourself even richer" is much closer to the mark.