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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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!
Your personal financial situation is unlikely to be interesting to people other than you, and in particular it <i>actively hurts</i> your ability to get the best possible deals from clients.<p>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.<p>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 <i>are not poor</i> and, by and large, <i>are not actively interested in the problems of poor people</i>. "Hey hire me because I'm poor" will <i>not</i> 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.
Why are you writing the blog, again? If it's for accountability, great -- do it, but make it private. If it's public, you are going to spend too much time and effort working on it, when you should be working on paying clients.<p>Additionally, it's going to take more than 93 days to build a following on your blog. And I would doubt that you get very good advice from visitors, especially at first.<p>If you're main focus is to make $X per month to support your family, <i>stop doing anything that doesn't make you money</i>. Stop reading HN/reddit/cnn. Stop writing your blog. Stop asking for advice. If you cannot draw a line from what you are doing to profit, <i>stop doing it and switch to making money.</i><p>Blogs are hugely narcissistic, which is only going to take your time away from making money. There are some great ones out there, but it sounds like you need to make money, not navel gaze.<p>I highly doubt that you will make any significant money off of your blog in 93 days. Or ever. You know where you will make money? By solving an existing problem for a business that increases their income. In exchange, they will give you money (so much better than the attention that blog visitors give you!)
I only bring in about $2500/mo in freelance design/development work because I've not yet had success in finding good clients. Mostly I've ended up with idiots from Craigslist who insist on wasting all my time and then drag their feet when it comes to payment. Then you add scope creep and people insisting on meeting in person for a low budget project and I make almost nothing.<p>I really need to work on getting better clients!
I think you're going to find it fairly difficult to scale up to $7k per month in 3 months with no existing readership or client base.<p>I do, however, like the idea of cash flow transparency, since people tend to really consume that type of content.<p>/also, paragraphs.
The biggest problem isn't so much making 7k per month. That's really just an arbitrary number. Some service providers might blow that number away, others might not hit those numbers after several years. It all depends on your business chops.<p>The problem here is that you have a family to feed and you are looking to get out of a financial pit. I wouldn't suggest such a route (freelance web dev) without a nest of savings to rely on.<p>I don't think you would benefit from posting your numbers. What freelance web developers make is very personal. I have seen "internet marketers" post monthly earnings on their sites but that seems less personal to me and these people generally work for themselves (freelancers always have a boss... the client.)
Just Do It! Pound the pavement now for paying gigs! Freelancing is a relationship business. Find your target market and start wining and dining them. Attend their events, speak at their events, write articles with solutions to their problems, meet them, befriend them. 2-3 months is about as long as it takes for the first gig to happen. As you continue the above process, you'll continue to have customers. Ppl do business with those they know, like, and trust. Deliver on time and within agreed upon terms. Be responsive to your customers, return calls and emails on the same day. Start at a lower hourly rate at first, to get your first paying customer, raise rates for new ones if you can afford to lose the work. Most importantly, do not waste time creating an ideal portfolio. Number one, find these potential clients. Get those clients signed up, get that money coming in.
> <i>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><p>This feels like a terrible idea to me. I've been consulting for a while and the last person that clients want is to hire someone who 1. can't make decisions without asking the Internet for help, and 2. puts all the tiny details about their work out there for the public to see.<p>Do not do this.<p>I think you should go buy Gerald Weinberg's "Secrets of Consulting" now - it's a quick read. Freelance/consulting work is about solving other people's problems, not putting your own problems out there for other people to solve.