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I’m not a big one for New Year’s Resolutions. Whatever I resolve to do (or not do) is usually steeped in the sort of wooly terminology that would make a politician blush, giving me enough wiggle-room to flaunt my new regime without fear of guilt or embarrassing finger-pointing.
Perhaps surprisingly then, I do tend to set quite specific goals in my life in general, when I consider something important enough. I’m in the business of web design as a result of achieving just such a goal, after I became so utterly bored of my job designing furniture for various supermarkets that I decided a career change was necessary.
A similar decision to change my job to suit where I wanted to be in life also led to me going self-employed (just over a year ago), and 2007 looks set to see another shift in the way I make my living.
One week in, and it’s already looking like being an exciting 12 months (or terrifying, depending on your attitude I guess); I’m approaching the completion of two projects (in terms of my input at least) with my colleagues over at Denfield (more on those soon), and should be launching another site before January is out.
It’s this third site that I’m most excited about (so expect much more rambling entries on this subject), because it’s representative of the sort of thing I want to concentrate on this year. Developed with my good friend Mark over at Blue Egg, it’s a bit of a gamble in that we’ve waived any sort of fee in favour of a commission-based income. Put simply, if the site makes money, we make money.
And this is where it gets exciting (for me, at least). As well as designing and building the site, I’ll be responsible for most of the ongoing content-population and search engine marketing work (with Mark providing some invaluable guidance), which means that I get to learn lots of interesting new things.
The search-engine related gubbins really is fascinating stuff, and the great thing is that it’s measurable. You can try things out, and if they don’t work you just tweak them until they do (or you run out of money, patience, or the will to live). Similarly, I’ve had far too much fun setting up the goal-tracking side of Google Analytics, and am positively relishing the thought of honing my (rather rapidly knocked-together) designs based on some decent statistical feedback.
It’s a big risk, in truth, as my somewhat unforgiving cash flow spreadsheet pointed out to me this afternoon, but it’s also a very exciting time. If I get it right, the potential earnings far outweigh those of a usual “here’s my time for your money” type project, and even more important is the fact that I’m really enjoying it.
It’ll be interesting to see if I’m similarly upbeat in 6 months’ time…
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