I started blogging as my hobby, and till date I continue to blog only as hobby. I never had the intention to live and lead my life out of the income generated by this blog! That’s the main reason why I can provide unbiased information and opinion about any topic and any product.
Freelance Work Life:
I started freelance work accidentally. Some one asked me for help, I did it for free. I helped some more people like this for free. Later on, these people started referring their friends and slowly I started getting clients who were willing to pay me. I started charging modest fee to all my initial clients. They liked my work and they eventually started referring their friends, hence it started making me some serious $cash$. So from here, making money online started making some real sense!
Need for Some Improvements:
Since I started getting good income, I thought – why not invest more time and money into this ? So thought of shifting the work place.
It wasn’t that big move: I shifted from a congested room to a more spacious room inside my home. But moving around things took lot of effort, and time to convince my mom.
My clients were happy for me and they extended the deadlines of project by 2 days 😉
Actual disaster:
It took some more days as we had to get new earthing wires etc and drill the room wall for new electric switches etc.
Finally when everything seemed great, my Internet connection got disconnected 🙁 🙁
It was a regular thing with my old ISP, so decided to even fix that. So I ordered for India’s leading ISP.
Once I made my mind to switch to Indian’s no1 broadband provider(i.e., BSNL), they told me to give me the service in 5 days after I apply for it. So I went ahead, disconnected Reliance Broadband and applied for BSNL broadband. I was excited to have the highspeed internet in my new work place. But it never came 🙁 I called their customer care and they sent me my cheque back informing me that there was an error while processing my application and I will have to do the whole process once again!
I went the same day and applied, after 8 days they promptly came to my home installed the landline and the next morning another person came with new WiFi modem and configured it.
It was great feel to get back and tell “hi” to all my internet buddies and to my clients. I was sure they would support me when they know what went through in my life.
Lot of Mails To Respond:
Eagerly I opened my email and to my disappointment there were a lot of new emails I had to reply to 🙁
Most of the mails were from my clients and they were asking whether everything is ok with me and my family and why am I not replying. I started explaining them via email, and I replied to a lot of them, forgetting some common sense TOS of Google App(my email provider). I had(probably) exceeded the limit of emails that I was supposed to send in a day. So my account got blocked 🙁 🙁 🙁
I started feeling sick for staying awake all day-night, and replying everyone.
Now I was totally pissed off knowing that my clients would be pissed off by me.
I tried all means to contact Google regarding this. My account was blocked more than a week and thankfully restored some days back. I had to reconfigure CName etc with my domain registrar, so not sure what exactly had went wrong.
Now the real challenge: from where to start replying to my emails. There were more and more replies and I had to write this post(finally).
Lessons learnt:
1. Have contact with your clients in more than just one place: I have created Technotip Page on Facebook. Please make sure to join and share with your friends.
2. Take only one or two jobs at a time. Don’t give assured dates to more than 2 or 3 clients.
3. Accept only those works which you are expert at. And don’t accept works which will take time and you need to figure out a lot to start the work.
4. Have some contract: Over years I have seen clients who pay once and keep asking for modifications every month. This actually put me into immense pressure.
5. Have some kind of backup plan.
6. Spread your income. Don’t keep all the eggs in a single basket.
7. Stop taking minor fixes job. These minor fixes take most of my time. So I will be mostly concentrating on my major freelance works, like blog migration, app development etc.
8. Will start building my own apps and make SAS (Software As a Service).
9. Will concentrate more on blogging, even though it doesn’t pay my bills. It makes me enough money to have my tea and pocket money. But it has bought me opportunities, which other wise wouldn’t be mine.
10. Will start educating my clients about online stuffs.
Recovery Plan
1. Have to take blog migration works soon inorder to cop with my ever increasing bills/expenses.
2. Have to send mail to all my clients, in batches, informing the fiasco! I’m sure they would help me recover.
3. Stop taking minor jobs/works, which take lot of time.
4. Keep working.
5. Stop getting stressed.
6. Stop thinking more about the past, and concentrate on the present.
7 Ask clients to support by referring their friends.
8. Concentrate on health.
9. Make sure to work satisfactorily before moving/taking next client.
10. Stay in touch with clients – start ‘clients only’ news letter. It would be like friendly mails and not sales pitches.
