I’m Too Busy Making Money to Worry About a Bad Economy
Yes adorable LOLCAT, the sky is indeed falling. At least you would think so as you browse your favorite tech blogs these days. While its pretty clear things have gone from worse to OMGWTF, you wouldn’t know it around my household. I’m bringing in the highest salary I’ve ever received and my personal web sites continue to bring in more and more delicious income. How can this be possible during such tough times?
First of all, chances are most of you reading the doom and gloom blog posts are not VCs, maybe not even CEOs. You are like me, Joe Sixpack of Twitter accounts. So while the already super rich fight over the financial market, where do you fit in? More importantly how do you survive and even flourish during these times?
Let’s go through a few things that can help.
Personal Branding:
I’m a big supporter of this of course, now its going to be more important than ever. With more layoffs on the horizon comes more competition for your dream job. To stand out you need to constantly keep building your personal brand. Start with your own website or blog, in my case this blog has brought me everything from book deals to TV appearances and finally job offers galore. Engage in social media and build your followings across several platforms. Make sure everyone knows you are a rock star and whatever you do, the more niche your talent the better.
Side Income:
If you develop web properties for your day job, why aren’t you creating your own sites on nights and weekends? Focus on ideas that are cheap to launch and quickly profitable. Your end goal should be something that generates roughly the same income as your day job. This way no matter what, you have something to fall back on during hard times. When times are good that’s just more gravy for you. In our case my personal websites allow wifey to stay home and gives us some great business tax write offs. Small things like Audis and various gadgets.
Stop Launching Vaporware:
If everything VC memos tell us is true, I’ll be glad to see a few 100 start ups disappear in the next 6 months. Far too many “lets figure out monetization later” plays have be rolled out these last few years. If your start up isn’t profitable I’m not very interested. Sure lots of these services are fun, sites like Twitter and so forth. However just like in Web 1.0, that fun can only take you so far. If you find yourself working for a startup like this, jump ship before it sinks. Your next job might not be as sexy, but at least they can make payroll. Make money, or go home.
What Others Are Saying:
On FriendFeed, this post was liked by 3 people and commented on 2 times 
October 13th, 2008 at 8:07 am
Sean – Nicely written and you make some excellent points. Perhaps expanding on your ideas, but taking an entrepreneurial approach, is a great post written on Tim Ferriss’ blog and the guest post from Cameron Herold. http://tinyurl.com/4l2gpl
October 21st, 2008 at 8:08 am
Dear James Percival,
Great post. I would like to rent you. KTHXBYE.
Much love,
J
December 10th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
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July 4th, 2009 at 10:44 pm
Topic of your article is very interesting, i have bookmarked your blog
regards
fluflaken
November 4th, 2009 at 7:54 pm
Recently, there has been a good deal of inquiries by the
US Federal trade comission against bloggers and website promoters
for not stating their advertising profits, or existing
relationships with advertising networks.
What are your ideas concerning how this could impact
the blogging world?