Self Employment
Waste of Time, Effort, and Money
I find that often with mid-sized businesses on up, there’s a lot of wasted time and lost productivity, mainly due to multiple layers of management and departments. Things like status meetings and conference calls are held to update a bunch of people who add no value and can’t contribue to the process or task at hand. Those very same people don’t understand technical details but insist on being updated on them, even when said details won’t help them in decision-making. I often see excessive micro-management. Or maybe it’s just too much adherence to the status quo and traditional way of doing things in corporate environments. Or maybe it’s just incompetence.
Being Lazy Under This Insanely Hot Weather
Everyone in NYC knows we’re going through a heat wave - heck it’s going to be 98 tomorrow! This kind of unbearably hot weather makes me so lazy. I have air conditioning but I try not to turn it on until the afternoon - I try to not turn it on during peak hours. The sleep deprivation is definitely catching up to me too. For the first half of today I just couldn’t stay alert. The combination of my extreme drowsiness and the hot weather made me extremely sluggish. So needless to say I was not very productive.
Managing Personal/Business Finances
I pretty much use only 1 credit card for all of my personal expenses and 1 credit card for all of my business expenses. If I can swipe, I’ll swipe instead of using cash. It’s just so much easier to manage especially with online account access and statements. My main card is a rewards card so even though it’s not much, I’m still getting a little bit back. When the monthly billing date comes around, I simply pay the statement off using electronic transfer from my checking account. This makes my personal expenses incredibly easily to manage and lets me import everything into Quicken (I may move to Quickbooks, but Quicken is enough for now).
The Need to “Beat” Everything and Everyone
I don’t know what it is but I’m very competitive, even if I don’t directly show it. Although my web hosting service isn’t exactly live yet, I regularly keep tabs on every direct competitor. I conduct periodic competitive analysis so I can find every gap, every opportunity I can exploit to compete against these incumbent firms. It also helps me track competitive trends (like whether a competitor is stagnant, innovative, up to date, etc.)
People Should Hire Me For SEO
My business site came flying out of the Google sandbox with a PageRank of 3 - this is after about 5 months, a little earlier than expected but hey you never really know what Google’s algorithms will do. So I recently checked and my site is now listed in the first page for a geographically targeted keyphrase relating to one of my services. Cool.
This post is half serious, I’m still not quite there yet in terms of being some type of “search engine marketing consultant” but I can effectively gear new sites for organic seo and achieve recognizable results. The truth is SEO isn’t really that hard - you just have to know what you’re doing. Find a really effective way of boosting listing on the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages)? Don’t tell and keep milking it. And charge for it. A lot.
Apparently Wishing Does Work
But be careful what you wish for. Two posts ago ago I was just talking about not getting enough new work and things slowing down in July. Well it seems in the past week, I’ve picked up 4 times more work than the entire month of June. I’ve started a long-term subcontracting relationship with a larger, corporate web development firm. My original plan didn’t really include all this freelance work but the money I bring in with this I can really use for other business development, so it’s good. Not to mention basic things like living expenses.
Nothing Much, Just Another Random Post
So there’s this small commercial area a block from my home, it’s got a few grocery stores, drugstores, and other small shops. There’s this corner store that ever since I could remember, businesses that got set up in that space always went out of business. A long time ago, it used to be this bagel place and that went out of business. Then up until recently, there was this exotic rug/material shop, which also ran out of business. But now there’s construction again and guess what, they’re opening a Dunkin Donuts!
Building the Next Yahoo
So my dad was asking me about what I do and with my limited grasp of the Chinese language, I basically told him that I designed websites. I really do a lot more than that but as long as he got the gist of it, there wasn’t that much more I could explain in Mandarin. So then he tells me, “you should build a big, successful site like Yahoo.”
I had to chuckle. Okay, let me get right on that.
Look out Yahoo. Look out Google. In about 5 years my secret [ insert absurd meaningless word here ] project is going to take the online world by storm. Seriously.
Business is Picking Up, Somewhat
Consultative Sales
So yesterday I get contacted by a potential client about some info I had sent him regarding developing a certain website for him. He needed template coding and a backend system to manage the site, except he didn’t really know where to start. So I suggested a solution and patiently described how it would benefit him and why it would save him money. Because I answered so many of his questions without ever pressuring him into hiring me, I got the job.
My Beautiful New Monitor and Web Design
Samsung 940Be
I recently purchased a Samsung 940Be which is a 19-inch LCD monitor. Thanks to the falling prices of LCD monitors and Newegg’s low prices, I got a really good deal. I was originally going to wait until the holiday season, but some time in the last couple of months, there was significant price drop. As with all my electronics/computer purchases, I did a lot of research online comparing features and reading reviews. Man, I LOVE this thing. The viewable space is HUGE and it is so BRIGHT. So much more working space, it makes my web development work much easier too.