Fired @ Christmas -- Please Advise

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I've kind of summarized the independent contractor life here, although I'm just getting started. I've done it briefly twice before, so I'm building upon that. So far, sort of good.

I think, if anyone is an independent PHP/MySQL/PostgreSQL freelancer/expert, Affiliate Marketing should come naturally to you.
 


Interesting post, happy to hear you're making progress. I think in the situation you're in consulting is the best idea for a quick buck. But don't lose site of owning a "business" owning a business doesn't mean get contracts and work for people. That just means you're an outsourced employee to be honest. Try and strongly think about how you're going to build a system that runs itself. That's a business, whether through employees or software. Self automated systems that run themselves. In the affiliate world you consider things like

blackhat automated systems
ppc -> affiliate arbitrage systems
ppc -> ppc arbitrage systems
emailing systems
whitehat site creation systems with a staff and hire help

All these can be developed into models where they can run themselves and produce you an income on their own. Consulting is great for a quick buck but here's the eventual problem. You get so good you get more work then you can do. So you decide to increase your rate to some rediculous amount and then you're still good so people pay it. Now you hit a ceiling where you're working 12 hours a day have no time for you family and friends and don't enjoy life and everything was "easier" as an employee. Sure you're making great money but your quality of life SUCKS. Therefore I invite you to do yourself a favor and start thinking in advance how you're going to build a system that runs itself so some day 2-3 years down the road you have a close to 100% automated income generating machine.

P.S. I've been in the position where I did so well promoting myself and such quality of work I ran myself ragged just trying to please all the people all the time. So that post comes from experience.
 
Thanks for this..This thread is very inspirational, it makes me want to start working from home ASAP.
 
good luck, i totally feel what your going through and believe i will face the same challenges as you shortly down the road.
 
I got laid off last December 17, so I am so with you Bro. Good luck, you will do fine! At least your learning curve isn't like a noobs
 
I may have like won the lottery. I was just coming off a small $1K PHP gig when I received an email today in my inbox. It's from Ubuntu. My resume that I put in two months ago? Yeah, after not hearing a word back for two months, they want a phone interview this week. It's a long shot, but hey, I've worked at some impressive places before. The job is a telecommute Linux sysop job with some programming. The flights for it may happen quarterly for brief periods, and it's international travel. And I'll still be able to catch AM work and perhaps a web design, web hosting, or PHP gig on the side. (However, I may not get the job with Ubuntu at all.)

At any rate, I've figured out a formula that now shows me how to make $1 of AdSense cash in 4 hours with one blog and one reddit post. Imagine if I brought up 50 of those a day and one or two of those became viral. I made one of those dollars last night after only making 85 cents for two weeks worth of my wife's blogging. We've also expanded in other ad networks just slightly and I've found that if you add a tiny game gadget on your blog, people stick around. Sure, we're still noobs, but we're learning and doing.
 
supermike said:
I may have like won the lottery. I was just coming off a small $1K PHP gig when I received an email today in my inbox. It's from Ubuntu. My resume that I put in two months ago? Yeah, after not hearing a word back for two months, they want a phone interview this week. It's a long shot, but hey, I've worked at some impressive places before. The job is a telecommute Linux sysop job with some programming. The flights for it may happen quarterly for brief periods, and it's international travel. And I'll still be able to catch AM work and perhaps a web design, web hosting, or PHP gig on the side. (However, I may not get the job with Ubuntu at all.)

At any rate, I've figured out a formula that now shows me how to make $1 of AdSense cash in 4 hours with one blog and one reddit post. Imagine if I brought up 50 of those a day and one or two of those became viral. I made one of those dollars last night after only making 85 cents for two weeks worth of my wife's blogging. We've also expanded in other ad networks just slightly and I've found that if you add a tiny game gadget on your blog, people stick around. Sure, we're still noobs, but we're learning and doing.
Click to expand...

Sounds great Supermike, Good luck with the interview - am sure you will do great.

In relation to your blogs, its a very simple yet effective method and as you said, scale scale scale..
 
The Canonical interview went good. Meanwhile, I emailed some top SEO-ranked PHP freelancers and got some surprisingly nice comments back. They said the market is exploding right now for PHP and AM and there's plenty of work to go around for good developers. Two guys said they need to update their site because they're scaling back the PHP work to focus purely on AM because they're doing so much in AM revenue right now and just need to scale from there. One guy said that there's a huge number of people paying just $25 to $50 to fix a broken web page or adjust a script on a server, and said I could do those almost all day for 15 minutes of my time per task.
 
All I can say is, the help I've received has been overwhelming. I sat for 6 long years being abused by a global company doing Linux Sysop and PHP Dev work, not being appreciated, not getting the kinds of cash that other guys like that were making. You get trapped in that mode, fatigued in some companies with the alerts going off on your Blackberry all the time, the security audits all over the place, the aggravating rules that prevent you from doing your work effectively, slightly-technical managers who have no clue how valuable you are and why you're late on their ridiculous deadlines, working long hours and driving home in the dark, perhaps even falling asleep while driving, taking years to move up in the corporate ladder, and managers who keep denying your training requests but ask you to write ones up year after year. You get in that mode and your kids and wife and relatives don't know who you are anymore, and you get so busy that you can't stop to THINK. You become a miner, putting on your miner hat every day, heading into the mine. And it's dark in there, you can't breathe, and all you think about is that work right in front of you.

But now, I've received AM strategies that succeed from people all over the world, and guys who used to do PHP work, who now do AM work, and they're redirecting new PHP clients to me! My wife and our two teens have jumped in to help with the AM article writing and we see so much of each other. And I've got a $1M (anticipated) web project that I plan to get up this year to bring in nothing but ad revenue.

Do you know how easy it is to make my old salary simply by doing article writing and catching a few PHP gigs or small sysop chores for people? Incredibly easy compared to the workload I used to experience back at the "mine".

The only question I have now is, why didn't I do this sooner? Man, what an idiot!!!
 
Supermike, great to hear. With hard work, knowledge and perseverence in this business, there's a ton of money to be made. Good luck.
 
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