My Company Journey

October Monthly Online Income

Part of my business is making money online. I do this through various affiliate programs that are out there. While these earnings are spectacular I hope with some work that they will increase over time.  I also hope that this demonstrates that one can really make money while they sleep.

Here are my online earnings for October 2009

Google Adsense: $35.85

eBay Partner Network: $106.80

Linkshare: $15.65

Total $158.30

Not to bad for not really doing anything.  My hope is that I can double this every month, however I am going to really have to hustle to do so.  You too can make money online.

The Plan For My Company

I have been working on the master plan for my company. while this isn’t a complete business plan just some general ideas.

By choice I left my 9-5 job and decided to go out on my own.  I am going to take a multiple pronged approach. to my business.

1. I will do some software consulting – I see lots of software consulting requests on Craigslist. And while you will not get every gig it does increase awareness of you and your site.

2. I am going to create products that I can sell. These will be smaller software packages like Wordpress Plugins, Drupal Plugins or small scripts that people can use on their site.

3. Affiliate marketing – I have been doing this for a while now with eBay and make a couple hundred dollars a month at this. One the the tools I use I hope to turn into something I can sell (see  item 2)

What kind of web scripts/plugins are you looking for?

PHP My Web Language of choice.

I gravitate towards building interactive web content with PHP.  To me it seems to offer everything that I need and since I have been doing it a while I have a collection of code snippets I can use it makes my job even easier. PHP is pretty simple to learn and powers many of the popular web publishing CMS platforms including  Drupal and Wordpress. If you know PHP you can begin to build plugins for these platforms and customize these platforms as you see fit. If you are new to web devlopment or looking for a new skill I would recommend trying PHP.

This Week Will Be Better

I want this week to be better than last. I am finding it hard to get the things I wan to get done, done with all the interuptions. I can see that I am going to have to log more evening time since that is when the office poeple go home and leave me alone.  It seems like working till dinner time and then getting back on later in the evening might work best. As long as I am up in the morning to field and phone calls and answer email that will be good.

Last week I attending a Drupal users group meeting. The group seemd pretty fun and I ended up staying till 11:00pm. Drupal is something that I want to play with me. Perhaps I will setup www.edisonave.net like I always wanted to do. Kind of a local network for people that live on the street. Will they use it? I don’t know, don’t really care just might be fun to use drupal.

Today I spent some time and started a new eBay affiliate site using some software I have written. My goal is to do one site a day. however with this site I am creating smaller sites under 1 domain name. I want to see how the search engines will treat this site. This site is based around Football and I think I can do one conference a day (4 team sites) I should have the whole thing done in a week.

I have also kept up with learning iPhone development. It is going well but I need to pace myself.

Tomorrow is stacked with phone calls already looks like an early  morning so I can get some things done between all the meetings.

I am on the phone

Today was all about phone calls.  I spent most of the day on the phone talking to potential clients. It was nice to talk to them and figure out what it is that they would like to do but I would rather be coding.  I did have a chance to start going through all the Stanford iPhone videos that I have downloaded. My plan is to get through all the classes and complete the assignment. Once I am done with this I will work on one of my ideas that I have.

I am hoping tomorrow will have less phone time and more iPhone time.

Doing the same stuff just in a different location

Today I did what I would have done working for a company. I got caught up on my email and then spent most of the day working on a requirements document. Creating documents is one of my least favorite things to do. However is was required for the project. The gentleman that I am working with on the project has shared with me a spreadsheet that has some requirements on it, but I wanted to blow it out and up so that I could get a handle on it. I am really excited about the project as it is rather largish, but this also scares me since it increases the price that  I will have to charge. I will be talking with him tommorrow so we will see how it goes.

While I was taking mental breaks I did get another project on my site. This makes the scrolling slide show on the top of the page much nicer. I need to spend more time on the site to make sure there are not a lot of spelling mistakes.

I am also feeling a little frustrated at myself. There are some projects that I want to work on that I haven’t had time to yet. I am trying to limit my work time so I don’t get burned out but I can see that I will need to adjust my schedule. Perhaps I will have to start waking up earlier. I hope this gives me the time to reach one of my goals of creating a new affiliate marketing site per day.

The First Day

I finally did it, I am out on my own. It is really great to finally feel like I am in controll of my destiny. I feel like I have learned a lot about business and the world in the last 12 years since I have been in the working world. Even in this horrible economy there is a lot of work out there. People are trying new ideas and they need help implementing these ideas. That is where I am trying to help. I want to get these ideas into tangible things that customers can use.  I also have some of my own ideas that I am hoping to try out.

Today was pretty uneventful and not a whole unlike a regular job, I only got half the stuff I wanted to get done.  For my own purposes here is what I did.

1. Installed the backup site for a sub contract that I was working on. (codename bte)

2. Invoiced a client for some work I did on a provider search and CMS system (EBPHI)

3. Worked on some bugs (3) for a long term project that I have been working on. (HHCPO)

4. Sent email to various people informing them that I am out on my own.

5. Looked at some site for any new and interesting projects.

6. Started working on a project requirements document. (ELF)

7. Had a lunch meeting with WAC to get IP and ND docs signed.

8. Lastly I made a blog entry right here. I hope to do this at the end of every day to catalog what I do.

So far so good. It was a good first day.