Monday, July 13, 2009

Shape of Things to Come

I'm faced with an interesting choice.

Over the past few months I've learned a few things, a few painful truths, the most important being that making money is hard. It's a padded pain in the ass and frankly I should have seen it coming from the start.

Most Entrepreneurs starve. I'm slowly coaxing a business into the light but I'm faced with a conundrum. I'm broke. Not wholly, but awfully close. Debt is mounting in the form of the ever-present pile of wedding expenses, and my time is at an all time low. Between work, and exercise, and sleep I'm left with precious few moments to actually do anything that could generate extra revenue. Add to this the frighteningly low profit/hour of website work and I find myself squarely between a rock and a hard place.

I need to find a way to generate recurring revenue. However, website design is not it. It takes me hours to build a site from scratch, and at $125-$250 a site I'm coming in around $10-$12 an hour. Add to this the fact that most people are content with a Geocities-esque disaster it makes it even harder to get people to bite, even with my measly price tag.

I've looked into teaching but the gigs I'm finding pay roughly the same amount per hour and are sporadic. hardly enough to live on.

So, I'm expanding my business. I'm looking to add a few stand-alone sites. My objective is simple. Build a site, generate traffic and through either ad-revenue, Google ads, or pay-to-play services start generating revenue.

However, the issue is that it's a long-term plan. Getting a site from zero, to generating revenue can take months if it happens at all. I'm taking another risk, I've been doing that a lot lately, and I would love to say it scares me but truth be told I don't care anymore. I need something to work, I need something to produce some steady income so I can get the bills paid. I just hope I get somewhere sooner, rather then later.