Some business changes

Looks like I may need to graduate from a blog to a full-time website. The reason?

I'm starting to diversify. It's not just content generation, article writing, and journalism. I had my fifth writer in less than a month contact me for help/info on how to get started in the industry, based upon my success stories that I've been posting around the various community sites that I visit.

My success story? It's simple, in principle. I have a "no such thing as failure" attitude, combined with a healthy dose of practical business application knowledge from my previous business in the US, and a belief that no job is too small on the way to obtaining your end result.

Thing is, I regularly post my successful "vibe" at community sites, and apparently it's starting to attract attention. New writers are tired of coming to community sites, fresh out of college, and being rebuffed by the veteran writers when they ask for advice on how to get started, what to charge, how things work, etc. The most common response from the veteran writers is "try harder". That's it. A simple, generic response, dictated out of arrogance and irritation that these newcomers are moving into their territory and potentially stealing clients away from them with "bastardized" rates, because as we all know, newcomers have to price things lower, which means it's more attractive to clients in the long run, especially in the days of recession and global financial crisis. Paying for quality is one thing, but if the quality has a beyond-ridiculous price tag attached to it, people are going to look elsewhere.

So I started offering little caveats to the new writers when I've seen them stumbling along for answers. And I think I opened a can of worms about a month ago when I offered to give advice openly on a forum, because now I'm at my fifth writer.

The end result? Time to start charging for consultations. My wife and I are going to start researching rates this evening and I'll be including consultation to my list of "what I can offer". Hell, I may even write an e-book on "how to", using practical knowledge, not the generic crap that most "freelance advice" writers give. Things like the topics my "The World is your Oyster" cover.

No more freebies, folks :) Sorry!

So now I need to start looking at building my own website. Which means more of my spare time eaten up, grr. Maybe I should look at hiring a cheapo to put together something for me, so I don't have to deal with it myself.

As I've said before, I have no desire to turn this into more than 4-5 hours a day, at most. The problem is that...it's proving to be a fairly lucrative career choice, with opportunities coming at me so fast that I'm hard-pressed to keep my work load down to under 4 hours a day. And while I really want to transition to full time novel writing next year (which means finding enough time to finish the first novel THIS year!!), the paychecks are starting to tempt me.