Ask HN: $7000 per month freelancing

Your personal financial situation is unlikely to be interesting to people other than you, and in particular it actively hurts your ability to get the best possible deals from clients.

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.

Hey Patrick, Thanks for your hints. These are really useful for me. The one thing I want to note is that I am going to compete using my skills, not using my financial situation because I agree it's not interesting for my potential clients. Other than that, I agree I should be a problem solver in eyes of my clients. I am going to work more on my objectives and tools using your thesis. Thanks!

I'm worried you may have missed Patrick's point. He's stipulating that you're using your skills. He's not accusing you of trying to sell sympathy. He's saying, the way you're positioning yourself professionally is going to damage your income.

If you are going to write a blog denominated in 92 days, anything other than "92 days of riveting new success stories from my clients" is a waste of your energy.

In particular, do not tell the rags-to-riches story. Prospective clients, like it or not, will see the "rags" and discount your bill rate 35%.

Having read all the comments I think I should shift my focus from creating such a blog to developing my personal professional brand in another way. I see now I should rethink my strategy. Thanks for all your thoughts, I really appreciate it!

Don't worry about "developing your personal professional brand" - just work. Stop trying to be strategic, and instead spend your time actually doing freelance work for money, which you need right now. Then, later, you won't have to develop a brand, because it will have happened by itself ("I'm the guy who did this great work for this long list of clients").

I agree with patio11. In 2009 I lost everything, and no amount of bitching or asking for help helped on my slide down. The thing that did help was writing a blog about what I thought would work. It worked so well that I now have several people working for me. My contact info is in my profile if you want to know more.

Blogging about how you're overcoming a difficult financial situation is likely to be interesting to a lot of people. The issue is that it's unlikely to be interesting to his particular clients, who may find it unprofessional or off-putting.

With very good execution, it may be possible to overcome those issues or even turn the whole thing into a positive with his clients. But it's a big risk.

It's also time he could be devoting to productive activities. Blogging and creating infographics for daily posts are time wasters. Given his desperate financial situation he needs laser focus on making cash. Which for most people means "get a job and give up your hobby until you get some savings in the bank."

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.

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.

If you're main focus is to make $X per month to support your family, stop doing anything that doesn't make you money. 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, stop doing it and switch to making money.

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.

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!)

Great comment, thanks. Though it was not about narcissism. It was not my only way to get paying clients, it was just one of the ways. I also didn't say I had no paying clients. I have some and we work on a couple of projects and they pay me. Though, I am aimed to increase the income and your tips convince me once again that I should focus on something other, not this idea. Thanks.

It's a very easy trap to fall into. You've heard of certain bloggers and respect other technologists because you've read their blogs. It only seems natural that someone would read yours in order to find you.

However, in my personal experience (a long lesson to learn!), it's a bit like Field of Dreams thinking: "if you built it, they will come." That does work, but it's a long process, and I suspect it's generally a side effect of the blog.

Think about it this way: is your ideal client really going to be spending a lot of their time reading blogs like yours? I would guess not; the people who would likely read it would be other technical people.

When I went from Field of Dreams thinking to direct line to profit thinking, I was amazed at how much work I was doing that had no chance of yielding income. I discovered I was only doing profit-generating things for about 2 hours per day. I thought I was busy and going to be successful, but I was just wasting my time.

HTH. Good luck to you. I think you definitely can make that much money per month in income, but make sure you have a definite value prop.

FWIW, when I was doing blog/email marketing/web design work, I found the best path was thus. Get them to sign up for a webinar on your blog, and give a live webinar via GoToMeeting once a week. That was my best success -- I think the key was that it qualified leads a ton, and gave me a chance to exhibit my professionalism and skillset before I asked for money.

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.

I really need to work on getting better clients!

I had the same problem 5 years ago. It's experiences like these that got me out of freelancing completely. It's exhausting and isn't worth it in my opinion.

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.

I do, however, like the idea of cash flow transparency, since people tend to really consume that type of content.

/also, paragraphs.

Cash flow transparency works for MicroISV-types, most of whose customers uniformly don't read their blogs.

I'm gravely concerned that it will not work for professional services. Clients hold preconceived notions about the value of an hour of work. And it's blissfully unencumbered from any of the risk factors that produce true (2-3x FTE) consulting bill rates.

More importantly, very few --- maybe none! --- consultancies are surefooted enough to have a consistent bill rate established across all their clients. Contract rates happen on a case-by-case basis. As the dynamics of your business change, so will your rates. Publishing your cash flows just invites drama.

And who, exactly, is it helping? Other people with 92 days to dig themselves out of a hole? Get yourself out of the hole first.

I absolutely agree, thanks, Thomas. I should better take myself out of the pit first. So, I will go on thinking about how to do that in another way. I think I got a hint I searched for.

The way to do it is to work hard. No hints, secret strategies, or clever tricks. Just work hard, deliver results, and get referrals from happy customers.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Do not do this.

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.