So here goes.

I was sitting in my car outside tescos in Oldham today and saw that there was a shopping trolley in the middle of the road and cars were having to drive around it. It was about 5ft from the edge of the road.

Now, I only sat in my car for 5 minutes, but in that time at least 6 people, of all ages, walked right past that trolley, within 6 inchs of it, and not one of them thought to move it out of the road. That pissed me off. Why are people so friggin up their own behinds (I’m trying not to be too rude hear) that they can’t just do something that will make someone elses life easier (the car drivers)? It wouldn’t even have taken any effort to move the bloody trolley!

So I got out my car to go into tescos and moved the trolley on the way in.

Then, on the way out, I noticed someone had just dumped a different trolley in the middle of the exit when the trolley park thingy was only 5ft away. Just bloody ignorant!

It’s just that mentality that really, really annoys me.

That is all.

I have now been freelance for coming up to 3 years and I have been in the fortunate position of not having to have looked for work, it all came to me through my large network of contacts I had built up before making the leap to freelance and word of mouth advertising. Two of the most useful ways to get work!

So you may be thinking, ok, this all sounds great so why is he going back to a full time job? What about the freedom of freelancing? What about the money, freelancers are all loaded aren’t they?

Well, the reasons are, in no particular order:

• I’ve been getting cabin fever working at home. It’s only in the last 8 or 9 months that the lack of the the social side of office work and lack of office banter  has hit me, and I miss it!
• Working all hours. This last year has been busy for me, with a fair bit of work and working weekends and evenings as well as during the day has taken it’s toll and I’ve had enough of it. I haven’t had any time for my main hobby, photography, and have no social life and I want more time to spend doing what I want to rather than working on other people’s web sites.
• The bad times, financially. Even with a lot of work there have been times when I have been completely skint. Most of the time this has been caused by clients not paying on time, but I’m also not the luckiest person in the world and just when I think my bank balance is recovering, my car will break down or something will go wrong that puts me another step back. A regular salary will be a great help.
• Career progression. OK, working for yourself is great, being your own boss has a lot of benefits (although mine has been a slave driver) but in three years I am still working on the same sort of thing, nothing very high profile (in web terms) and want a bit more to show for my skills.

Now this all sounds quite negative, and most of it is down to me not being very good at selling myself, hence he type of work I’ve been doing, but also for financial reasons I have had to take on work just to pay the bills instead of taking on the more interesting projects.

So I guess what I wanted to do with this post is give you some advice from someone who has done it, enjoyed it, but decided it wasn’t quite what they wanted. So here you go 10 tips to be a successful freelancer (in no particular order):

1. Have a backup fund for the bad times and keep it topped up when the times are good. Believe me you will need it! I didn’t have one and suffered because of it.
2. Learn to say No. This has been my big problem, taking on too much at once.
3. Get rid of problem clients quickly. If a client is failing to pay on time or anything else that means you are spending more time fire fighting them rather than working on the project then politely terminate working with them. Don’t let it drag on causing you stress and hassle.
4. Network. Since starting freelancing I haven’t met many other freelancers or people in the industry. Make time to get out there and network.
5. Work to live, don’t live to work. Another of my problems. Work took over and my life outside of work was non existent. So make sure you separate work from your life. Don’t work evenings unless you really have to. If you do it all the time, clients will expect it of you.
6. If you don’t already wear glasses, you will probably need them soon. My eyesight went downhill quite quickly staring at the screen all the time. Take regular breaks, set your working environment up properly and get regular eye check ups.
7. Get your fingers in lots of pies. If one aspect of your work slows down then you will have other options. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket and other such sayings.
8. Exercise. I used to be quite fit, regularly mountain biking, but 3 years on and I my bike has cobwebs on it and I have a beer belly. That’ll be changing when I get my evenings and weekends back.
9. Prioritise and schedule and stick to it. If you have 5 jobs to do that day, prioritise them and don’t let anything else get in the way. Obviously sometimes things crop up, but be firm with clients. If you have a project to finish, don’t start doing small site amends for someone else and then miss your deadlines.
10. Work always takes longer than you think! Add in extra fix and tweak time to all work and charge for it!

Well there you go. 10 tips to hopefully help you.

Don’t get me wrong though, freelancing has been great and I wouldn’t have changed it. For me though I think I’ve done enough of it. I am off to work for an online company as a senior designer/developer type person working on front end stuff as well as mentoring junior staff, which for me is great and I can’t wait to start.

Oh, the regular pay cheque is a bit of a good thing too. Money coming in each month is definitely a good thing!!

Anyway, this is just a bit of an adsense update really. I have several sites running with adsense context sensitive ads on them and the income has never been anything to wow anyone, but I am now averaging a massive 3 dollars a day. What will I spend it on!! Actually the last 7 days has averaged out at over 4 dollars which is good…. at least for me.

Although it doesn’t seem much, it’s passive income meaning I don’t have to do much to get it. 4 dollars a day, 28 dollars a week 104 dollars a month, 1248 dollars a year. It pays for my hosting reseller package and a bit of beer money. Can’t argue with that can you?

Anyway, at least it’s a really simple job to do, another reason why wordpress is so good!

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A large amount of this is due to a mini site I made. A one page site with information about a particular niche, keyword rich, but still reads well, and some adsense ads. My forum and other few sites are still pulling in a little too, but the noticeable gain has been via the mini site.

When I set the site up, I linked to it from this site and posted one comment on a popular blog on a similar niche and google didn’t take long to find it and start sending people my way.

OK, so what next?

Well, more one pagers I expect for now with my next target being $5 a day average which is a big jump. I’ve also got an idea for a larger site on the same theme as my current mini site, so that may help a little too when I can get round to building it.

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With that sort of audience, it also has the potential for driving traffic to your own site. Once registered you can create groups on just about any subject you like, and if you look at some of the groups you will see that it can be about absolutely anything. So, if you have a site that has a reasonable user base, why not create your own Facebook group for it. Drive traffic to that group via your site, then as it grows in size on facebook it will help drive traffic back to your site. All for free!

Every little helps, as an advert for a supermarket says.

Scott is running a competition to win fictionforum.net which requires me to write what I would do with the domain should I be the lucky winner.

Well, here goes.

If I was to win fictionforum.net I would initially keep it as it is, but maybe moneytise it with amazon affiliate links. I would then work on an idea that sprung to mind when I heard the domain name. Did you ever read those ‘choose your own adventure’ books where you read a bit of the book and then had a few choices of where you wanted the book to go. Well how about a community driven site where they build the choices.

From a starting paragraph or two, people can register and then submit a choice for the route the story would take. Maybe there could be a limit to the amount of choices each juncture could have, and the amount they could write would be limited too. So a story will unfold, from people writing their own fiction.

When someone reads the story, it records what choices they make, thus giving them a complete book …. if the story ever ends of course.

How about that idea then Scott?

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It’s been a few years since then, but now my love of LEGO is back and it’s all due to the little figures that come with the various LEGO kits.

I’ve seen a few people on Flickr recreating scenes from films, music videos and history and I thought I’d give it a go. So after some digging around at my parents house, my box of LEGO was found and I dug out my collection of figures. I found about 20 or so figures, but they were all old ones. If you look at that figures you get now, they have lots of extra things like better wigs, better accessories and other stuff like capes, beards, and helmets. You can also get flesh coloured figures too, so it’s not just the normal yellow people.

LEGO has also capitalised on the major films too. You an now get kits and figures from Star Wars, Harry Potter, Batman and Spiderman, plus there are also pirate, wild west, space and medieval knights kits and figures available.

The figures are now very collectible and ebay has lots of LEGO figures available, some going for a fair bit of money considering they are just little bits of plastic. For instance, if you have a Jango Fett figure from Star Wars, then you can expect to get around £40 for it on ebay. £40!!!

I’ve now built up a collection of around 100 figures, with about 12 Star War characters (not Jango Fett unfortunately) a couple of Spiderman characters, a few from Harry Potter and the rest is a mixture of knights, spacemen, cowboys and various other figures.

So, if you’ve got some LEGO in the attic or a cupboard. Dig it out and relive your youth, or just flog it on ebay, you may make some good money!

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With porn.com recently selling for $9million, domaining can be a lucrative thing to get into, but obviously getting your hands on a domain like that is not an easy thing to do. So is it worth it, well yeah. There are plenty of niches left to target, think a bit laterally, think about what’s happening in the future that may be worth a domain or two and don’t ignore domains like .org or .org.uk for instance. With all the popular .com and .net domains being bought up, it can be profitable to snap up the other domains too. Maybe not as profitable as a .com but hey, even if you make a small profit it’s worth it.

Sites like SEDO allow you to buy and sell domains, but it’s worth watching what sells and what doesn’t for a while to get an idea what words to go for.

I must add that I am no way near a proper domainer. I don’t buy and sell…. just buy at the moment, and I have a small collection of domains with not much happening on them, but maybe they will prove worth it later down the line.

Have a look at some of the domains I own at randomdomains.co.uk. I’m open to offers if you fancy any of them!

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In my last report I said I had been using the google adsense heat map for forums to position my adsense ads to try and get maximum benefit from them. I positioned them on several of my pages on my Dynax Digital forum and used different adsense channels for each ad so I could track their progress.

After doing this I noticed an increase in earnings, but I only got back to the level I was at before I reskinned the site. Most noticeable was that the adsense ads positioned at the top of the first post in a thread performed the best, earning nearly 4 times as much as the second place position which was the ad placed at the top of the list of forum boards.

Unfortunately the amounts aren’t anything to write home about (but maybe enough to blog about) but I got back to a level where my monthly hosting was covered…… but….. recently these amounts have dropped again. Why this is, I don’t know, but it’s annoying.

I have pulled in a little bit from my other sites too, but the forum forms the major (if you can call it major) source of adsense income.

As a bonus though, I got a ad deal with shopzilla which is part of bizrate.co.uk, a price comparison site. This deal gives me income for a year, paid quarterly and is enough to cover my hosting. So again, not loads, but it all starts to add up doesn’t it.

I am now expanding the forum site a little which should provide more opportunities for affiliate schemes which may prove a better source of income. I read a post on selfmademinds about using one big site (I know I keep going on about that site, but it is good!) which confirmed, for me, that this would be a good way forward.

I’ve still got a long way to go before I can retire on web site earnings alone, but with a few small steps in the right direction I might start making some inroads into that dream.

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