Prep Work Before Freelancing

Before you become a PHP Freelancer, I recommend you consider the following advice, and try to spend weekends and evenings working this out before you step foot into the bull pen. Otherwise, it can be a rocky road for you.

Debts. If you have a second mortgage, or a boat you're paying on, and other big risks right now, you need to get those off your plate or pay them down a great bit. Otherwise, the foreign competition, will often work for peanuts, will outbid you on contracts.

Spouse. You need a spouse with another income coming in to help you ride out the tough periods, and you need a supportive spouse that can tolerate the ups and downs of your work from home, and can tolerate seeing you in sweatpants and a T-shirt every day with uncombed hair and badly in need of a shave. You need one who trusts you and won't consider you a bum, and you need to do your part of the bargain by bringing in gigs every month so that you don't start to become a real bum.

Capital. For USA residents, you need at least a $20K or higher IRA or 401K out there that you can borrow from (as long as you return the money in 60 days in order to not incur a tax penalty). For anyone else, you need a pension or retirement account which gives you a borrowing arrangement, or some kind of savings account. As well, you also need about 2-3 months salary saved up and liquid enough that you can use it as you get started in your company.

LLC. For me, I found that the LLC is the best structure to have your startup company in. It's easier to do taxes, has the easiest corporate rules, has some liability protection, and shows clients that you are serious and not some guy goofing around.

Professionalism and Experience Are Crucial. You may not need a college degree for this business, but going off to college and getting at least your Bachelor's Degree does change you and make you a bit more professional. If you can act professionally and mature, then perhaps you don't need a college degree and more power to you. Still, having a college degree gives you at least something to fall back upon if times get tough. As well, you also need sufficient experience to do what you're doing, and not just in programming. You will work a lot with Linux when doing PHP, and so you need to understand Linux command-line sysop work in addition to clustering, web farms, database clustering and replication, Apache directives, and so on. And most of all, you need to be the kind of personality that is calm under pressure, that knows how to not be so whiny and defensive when communicating with people, and can empathize with your clients.

Type Fast, Real Fast. It's obvious that if you have brutal foreign competition out there that you need to type and think extremely fast. Nuff said.

Get Ready for Long Hours, Initially. You have long hours now in your cubicle programming job, but get ready for a shocker -- as a PHP freelancer you may find you work far more hours than the cubicle job, at least initially until you get regular work and have other websites up that bring in residual income.

Brainstorm Residual Income Ideas. Before you even think of jumping into this industry, you need about 15 projects out there that bring you residual income with minimal effort. I don't care if it's a series of blogs with ad revenue, or an eCommerce thing, or selling "bling" graphics for MySpace kiddies -- you just need several things that bring in at least $3K a month, combined, and which really only occupy about 30 minutes of your time each day, or 2 hours every other day. Having this sort of thing helps you ride out the tough periods as a PHP Freelancer.

You're Not Just A Web Developer. You need to change your mindset as a newbie PHP Freelancer. Most of your clients will be AMers (Affiliate Marketers/Internet Marketers). In order to better serve them, you need to understand their world and understand terms like pixel tracking, CPA, CPM, PPC, EPC, and so on. You also need to let their ideas and successes help influence your own residual income projects, and do a good bit of AM work yourself. There's nothing finer than making $100 a day for doing almost absolutely nothing each day and only having to spend like 4 days each month doing your AM projects.

You're Not Just A Web Developer, Part 2. In addition to web development, you'll be frustrated to know that web designers get paid more and work with less frustration. Sure, web designers do graphics and XHTML/DIV/CSS work, but they get more gigs available to them and don't have to spend a lot of time doing them. Demand is higher for their work than pure development, unfortunately. So, if you want a way to hedge your bets, you either need to learn graphic web design and get good with the latest trends, or at least know how to convert any graphic design into XHTML templates that use DIVs and CSS.

Skills. I recommend the following skills:

• PHP5 (and get ready to learn PHP6 because it's coming fast)
• PHP libraries like gd (for graphics), and several others -- think about what might be in big demand, and learn it
  
• MySQL 5.1 (and better) -- know how to install from RPM or DEB or custom compile, along with configuration, basic SQL commands, importing and exporting data by command line, working with temporary tables and transactions from command line and from PHP, backup strategies, normalization, the case for denormalization, database optimization, and so on
  
• osCommerce, Zen Cart, and Magento Commerce (all three) -- installation, customization, and understand how to hook the login mechanism
• Drupal and Joomla CMS -- installation, customization, and understand how to hook the login mechanism
• vBulletin and Vanilla (getvanilla.com) forums -- installation, customization, and understanding how to hook the login mechanism
• Smarty PHP Templates
• Zend Framework
• jQuery -- recommended instead of ExtJS, Scriptaculous, Prototype, or any other Javascript platform. When you study jQuery versus the other Javascript platforms, you'll know what I mean. jQuery changes the way you think about Javascript, and it's crucial to know because the largest time killer in web projects is fighting with DHTML/DOM work, and all the cross-browser quirks
• Affiliate Marketing/Internet Marketing -- know the terms like pixel tracking, ad copy, CPA, CPM, PPC, EPC, content arbitrage, and so on, and not from a terminology perspective, but actually attempted it as well
• XHTML along with DIV/CSS work
• A little bit about using graphic design packages
• An understanding of Web 2.0 design and the latest design trends (like what you see on webcreme.com)
• Apache 1.5 and 2.0 -- installation from RPM or DEB or custom compile, along with configuration
• Reverse Proxy -- understand open source products like Pound and how you can use a reverse proxy to build a cheap web farm
• AJAX, JSON, and REST -- hugely important
• Linux sysop command-line stuff -- can't stress this enough
• Building Linux clustered systems, Linux virtual machines, web farms, database replication and clusters, and REST web service communication
• CVS or other source code checkin/checkout tools
  

Brand. You need to prepare for the launch of your company. So, you need to make your LLC, you need a great logo, you need a name you won't get sued for using, get some golf shirts and oxford button down shirts ready, and some really nice cards. You won't use your cards that often, so splurge a little on them, such as getting plastic ones or fullcolor ones. You also need a great domain name and a website that shows the kind of quality that you can offer your clients. As for the design of the site, I recommend you compare it to the stuff you see on webcreme.com. As for what to put on the cards, don't even mention PHP because most clients won't care. Get ready to leave these cards in businesses, grocery stores, and restaurants all around where you live, either in a pack with a card holder, or a pinned up card or two. On the cards, all you really need to say is that you can do website design, logo design, and web payments (catalogs, shopping carts). Everything else, like PHP, database work, and web applications -- these are all implied and don't need to be mentioned. And you'll find that your #1 clients from handing out cards will be doctors, lawyers, and real estate firms, so get ready for that kind of clientele and their needs. Now, note that these won't be your primary clients, but they'll be a sizable portion of them, especially after awhile when word of mouth gets around.

Client on Retainer. One of the first things you should do after you figure out what your hourly rate should be (and after you have tested it and learned whether that rate works out pretty well), is to put out a Google AdWords ad, a SitePoint.com ad, and a WickedFire.com ad (trust me on these) to work on retainer for half your normal rate. So, if you plan to charge $50 an hour, then put out an ad that says something like, "Get a Part-Time PHP Developer on retainer for $25 an hour." Sure, it may take you a good long time to wait for someone to take advantage of this, and you might have to do the ad campaign, give it a rest of a couple months, and try again, but eventually you'll luck out and someone will agree to pay you either $15 to $25 an hour for 100 hours a month, on retainer. By being on retainer, this means that they are supposed to pay you whether they have work for you or not. And if you don't believe me that this works, then look at me -- I found that some AMers out there are wealthy, and one of them snatched me up to do this very thing.

Understand Common Website Types. You need to sit down and list out common website types you see and have visited. For instance, sites like a catalog/shopping cart site, a politician site, a doctor's/lawyer's office site with newsletter, contact page, and scheduler, a business directory site, a real estate listing site, and so on. Then, combining PHP, MySQL, jQuery, AJAX, Smarty PHP Templates, and a few other packages like Drupal, Joomla, and Magento Commerce, build sample sites. This allows you to hit the ground running when you become a freelancer because you'll already have a site template you can pull off the shelf and customize for a phenomenally low rate, yet still make a profit because you do more of then in a month than your competition.

Work Environment. I recommend getting everything on laptops instead of desktops for a few reasons, but, that said, I also highly recommend getting a keyboard and 2 or 3 flat panel displays. You'll need at least 3 laptops, if not a couple more. The reason I say laptops is because you'll often need to pick up the project and go somewhere with it, especially when trying to meet a deadline but yet you need to attend your son's baseball game, or if you need to take it on vacation, or if you're going crazy at home and need to hit the beach and work from there. Getting a laptop just makes it easier to get up and go. However, laptop keyboard durability is weak, so you really need a USB keyboard that you hammer on each day, and you need a flat panel display that's larger and better quality than your laptop's display. I also recommend 2-3 screens set up in multi-display mode so that you can drag windows between them. As for multiple systems, it's because you need to be able to test your apps against a Mac Safari browser, Windows IE6 and 7, Windows with Firefox, and Ubuntu Linux with Firefox. You also need a color laserjet and a really nice set of desks and cabinets for your work. Even the chair needs to be ready to go and very comfortable. It just makes life easier to have all this going before you decide to go full-time as a PHP Freelancer.

Start Your Portfolio. Before leaping in full-time as a PHP Freelancer, you need to find some clients in town or on the web who wouldn't mind you doing their work for absolutely free, telling them that you're trying to build a portfolio. When it's free, they can't complain or hassle you. Plus, in exchange you can let them know you want to include the site image in your portfolio and have a back link to them as a reference and a way of advertising their site. Sure, they may change the site eventually, but at least you'll have the initial image and a link to the client, and you can discuss what you did on the project that makes it interesting and unique. You need at least 4 sites completed in a portfolio you are proud of before you can begin. Otherwise, you just come off as an amateur. And if you can get at least one catalog/shopping cart site in the mix, that's even better. Now, if you want to take a shortcut, just make some fake sites with fake company names, hook it up to some fake address and some real (although free) voicemail, and register the domain by proxy (cloaked whois info) so that no one can easily see that you built this yourself for yourself.

Relationships. You need to find some contractors out there that you can sublet your work to who are quite affordable and reliable, and most will likely be foreign guys. This helps you do work you don't want to do or aren't particularly good at yet, such as XHTML, and to help you meet your deadlines. I mean, who can beat a PHP guy who can work for you for $8 an hour? Imagine what you can get accomplished with that kind of help.

It's Not Just PHP/MySQL. You'll find as a PHP Freelancer that it's not just PHP and MySQL work that you'll be doing. In fact, that's the easy part! Your biggest time killers on projects will be, in this order: Javascript DHTML/DOM work and cross-platform testing; AJAX and AJAX debugging (quite difficult); DIV/CSS placement and alignment consistently across browsers and platforms; Admin pages; eCommerce; and understanding various packages like Drupal, osCommerce, and so on. So, to that end, you'll need to know jQuery, JSON, AJAX, DIV/CSS placement and alignment techniques, browser quirks, and packages like Drupal and osCommerce, among others. But the biggest thing to learn is jQuery because it is such a time-saver.

Style. You need to build your own style, and templates for the source code of your work. For instance, I recommend you build your own date/time class for doing date/time manipulation, strings class for manipulating common things you do with strings, web class for all web functions like redirects and cookie management, encryption class, database class, and so on. Then, I recommend that your average PHP page be composed of sections where you consistently do things, filling an empty file with comments so that all you have to do is add source in the right area and move on -- it helps you keep your pages consistent, easy to read, and helps keep your mind in gear on projects.

Job Board. Instead of getting ready to take gigs from job boards, go bring up your own and make it popular, providing a way for clients and devs to post their needs and respond to them, and make it so that devs who want a client have to pay like $5 to have a promoted listing in yellow or something, sorted to the top of the list. And, as expected, make it email you when certain keywords are triggered so that you potentially have first dibs on all the work that comes in.

Don't Use Other Job Boards. Many job boards are complete rubbish. They either make you complete "tests" or jump through other hoops in order to get gigs, and they may require that you and a client go through some sort of agreement. Well, what you'll find here are that few job boards actually land you any kind of decent client, and few will give you a client at a decent rate. Instead, get ready to advertise.

Advertising Is Vital. You'll need to learn that Google AdWords and other advertising venues are very important in getting work and getting quality clients. There are several AM forums out there like Warrior, WickedFire, Cash Tactics, and so on, and you'll want to pay for advertising with them as well.

Build an Admin Scaffolding. After you build many of the common sites your customers will want, you may realize that admin pages suck up a huge amount of your time. Therefore, use a concept called scaffolding. This is where you create a set of forms and database interaction that help you do 80% of the required CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) on a project's administration pages needs, and then you customize the last 20%. So, if you can build a script that you can point at nearly any database, and it automatically builds for you a set of admin pages that you can then finalize, it's a tremendous time saver and makes you that much more brutal against the competition.

Take An Interpersonal-Communication Seminar or Class. This is critical and will make a huge difference. You need to be mindful that not all clients are the same, many are cranky, and you need to learn diplomacy, the art of negotiation, and watching what you say or how you say it. For instance, I had one client love it when I told him that his site could look better, and he and I collaborated on a new design, and that was in addition to reworking the code on the site. That worked well. But, dummy me, I took that optimism and used it on another client with the same tactic, telling him that his site could look better if he'd let me suggest some options, and that shut the client down immediately and I got a terse response: "Based on your last email, I think you and I would not work well together, so I'd like to discontinue this contract." And that's a bad day, my friend. So, watch out with your optimism and you eager nature -- it can backfire at times.

So that about wraps it up. If you can achieve all this before you become a PHP Freelancer, then you're a better man than me. Instead, I had to learn this all the hard way, with very little time, and it was either sink or swim. At first, I just about sank until a benevolent CEO at some AM startup heard about me and decided to pay me on retainer. And that's how I eeked out a living in the first few months.

Why Become A PHP Freelancer?

First, let's push aside the word PHP for a moment and focus just on being a web dev freelancer, working from home, trying to earn an honest buck. So why do it? Can it be done?

To answer that, let's back up to look at the guy who works in a cubicle doing web development for a big company. More than likely he's a frustrated person right now, or will be in a year or two and have to find another place to work. I know this because I was that guy.

First, managers are often idiots -- they don't really know what it takes to build a project right, and you do, but they won't listen to you and want to cut down your estimates by 40 and 50%.

Second, they won't give you a walled office (few do) because then they think you'll isolate yourself and not communicate, because they are idiots and think that you need to communicate face to face in order to get work done, when this isn't the case at all.

Third, they will often think they can throw any programming project at you, in any language, and you'll just say, "Sure, I love doing projects in Pascal. Please give me more."

Fourth, they can throw 3x as much work at you, steal all the praise on your successes, take your raise and promotion opportunity instead of you getting it, and then pay you the same rate even though you work 3x as hard now.

Fifth, the foreign competition is brutal and if you're in the UK or USA, you experience foreign immigrants in the office, or work being outsourced offshore, and it's a frustrating experience to see guys take away your projects and work for half as much as your salary.

Sixth, contracts dry up within a year or two and you have to transfer to another department, maintain some tar baby you don't want to maintain anymore, or struggle to find new work because you've been laid off.

Seventh, you're so preoccupied putting out fires and reworking someone else's spaghetti code that you miss a lot of training opportunities.

Eighth, and this is most important -- you read about guys who are freelancers on the web, who have time to keep up with the latest trends, and they're doing exciting things and using the latest ideas and technologies, and you're stuck with weaker skills and not enough time and training dollars to improve yourself.

Sure, not all programming environments are like that in a company, but a lot of them are. Now let's counteract that with what it's like to be a freelancer, point by point.

First, you are your own manager as a freelancer. You can estimate work as much as you want and work it out with clients. They may not always agree, and in fact you may lose a potential client because of a broad (even realistic) time estimate or cost estimate, but hey, at least you get to say what you feel without getting shot down and ignored.

Second, your commute is like 5 seconds from bed to home office desk, and you no longer have a cubicle. You can take your job literally anywhere you can get a sporadic, even weak, Internet connection. You can take your job on a vacation at the beach. You can take your job in the backyard with a laptop. You have complete peace and quiet in order to focus. You have no interruptions except an occasional chat window or perhaps a cellphone call, but you can block those when busy and force people to email you. You don't have to put up with the same old dumb office jokes, or antics in the office, or frustrating people to have to ask favors from, or anything like that. Heck, if you need to, you can stop all work and take a month off as long as you have the bills paid. So, you have a lot of freedom.

Third, you can choose any programming language you want, but you have to use what the client is looking for. However, at least you won't have a manager dictating to you if you say only know Visual COBOL, to suddenly have to do everything in Java. So, you have to pick a language that has good profit potential and good demand. Right now that's either Visual Basic (still a lot of need for that out there), C#, ASP.NET, Java (on Linux and Windows), and, of course, PHP (mostly on Linux). For me, I picked one based on ease of use, has a fairly good speed, has a great developer community, is stable, has a wide function base, runs on Linux because my faith in Windows is extremely low in the server room out of security and performance concerns, and has great customer demand -- and that means PHP.

Fourth, if I work 3x as hard in a given month, I can make 3x as much. There's also a lot of clients out there who just want a template site using products like Joomla, Drupal, osCommerce, Zen Cart, Magento Commerce, etc. And with template sites, once you build one, you can repeat that knowledge fairly rapidly, over and over and over again. So, when you want to make 3x as much, you can try to skim off client projects who just want a template site that you've already done before, and you can repeat this and increase profit.

Fifth, by being a freelancer, you are a lean machine. Now, instead of your manager skimming much of your profit away, and all the other business overhead, you can keep 100% of the profit. This means that you can work for a slightly lower rate for a client than your previous employer could, and keep far more of the profit. This makes you a bit more competitive against a foreign market. As well, you'll save money on gas, such as spending $50 a month rather than $50 a week, and you'll save money on lunches because you can eat at home on a cheap budget and not be influenced by the smells of other lunches that cost too much.

Sixth, when contracts dry up, you just go find another one and don't have to wait for a stupid salesman to do it for you, or wait for a manager to clear up all the dead weight tar babies off your lap so that you can grab something new. You make your reality, every day.

Seventh, every day you get up, or before you hit the sack at night, you can spend 2-3 hours training yourself on something new. Because you're not wasting 2 hours every day in a long commute in heavy traffic, and aren't wasting time in endless meetings, you can utilize that time. And, if your bills are paid, you can take a week or two off and put yourself in a training class if that suits you best.

Eighth, you can keep up with the latest trends and technologies and move with that in order to keep getting new clients, rather than being stuck with tar babies from the past.

Now, out of this, I have put a positive light on being a web dev freelancer, but there are downsides too, and I'll discuss those in another article.

Lessons Learned

Since my last posting, I have focused on the PHP web development side of my work, not focused on affiliate marketing except for my client's AM needs. I have to work to the point of fatigue, but I get faster over time and learn to estimate hours better and learn to optimize by using shortcuts like frameworks, cut and paste from previous projects, and so on.

February was a fantastic month for me of $10K. I know that once I get my own AM projects up, I'll do better, but $10K is great for a starting business. However, in March I only earned $2500, and will only earn $2500, so this is a learning month for me. But that's okay. That still pays the bills.

Meanwhile, I've managed to get a brief vacation here of sorts, but I have my laptop and am working from the beach. That's the great thing about doing business in the AM and web development fields -- you get to work from anywhere in the world where you can get Internet access. And it's so cool these days where I can get free wireless practically anywhere. I'm working from the beach on free wireless now, and I just so lucked out where the signal is strong and I'm running faster than my own DSL back at my house!

In March I took a look back about my slipped deadlines and why. It was due to three problems: (a) poor time estimation, (b) lack of an admin generator*, and (c) lack of knowledge about jQuery.

On a, this just gets better with more experience where you get to know yourself and what you can do. Also, by optimizing time with frameworks, you can speed up your web development.

On b, I learned that every website needs some sort of admin system of its tables, and that we developers end up rebuilding that same system, over and over again. It's roughly a CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) tool for each table in the database. So what I need is to follow the 80/20 rule and build like 80% of the functionality I need, wrap it up into a reusable generator script, and then build the last 20% custom on each project. Along the way, I can use AJAX and jQuery to please customers with less roundtrips to the server. Admin pages have typically required lots of roundtrips to the server, and AJAX can reduce that.

On c, I learned that there's a lot of frustrating cross-platform testing for all the Javascript/DHTML/DOM work I do, and that this takes a lot of time to build. The good news is that some of the guys from the Mozilla Foundation started jQuery, which is a project that gives you screen widgets and other effects to use in web pages with very few lines of code, and which has all the cross-platform testing built in. The repository of widgets is fairly rich, the project has a lot of momentum behind it, the source code for the project is thin, and the learning curve is fairly small. Once I learn this, I can throw out all my previous work with DHTML, Javascript, and DOM and focus purely on living within the confines of jQuery.

Part 4 of the AM Mastery Series

At this point, you're an AM rockstar and other AM rockstars know you on a first-name basis. You'll have enough cash at this point that you can put a manager completely in charge of your AM business and can be like Donald Trump, moving on to more lucrative investments in real estate and venture capital. And, like the AM business, you'll have learned what it takes to build a great company, and can pass on those ideas like a guru. However, never lay off on the accelerator. Keep strong like this until you retire early at 45 or 50. Keep putting out books on those things you've done that made you successful. Yes, do seminars, but make them less and less and charge people more for them because your time and thoughts are valuable.

Eventually you can manage the managers of your empire for years past the end of your retirement, and live on a private island with a helicopter.

Part 3 of the AM Mastery Series

At this stage, you've got zero debt except your monthly hosting bills. You fully own the titles to your vehicles and your house. You may even be working towards financing your own children's college education bills.

You did it by hustling and hard work, listening to the advice of others, making connections, taking risks, networking, being the best that you can be, cutting things off that fail, invigorating things that you think can still get better, sticking with winners when possible to offset your losses, not being afraid to fail, thinking as hard as possible and much harder than others, and realizing that it's all about eyeballs, return customers, SEO, and ads. The Internet is your real estate home and you'll be working to own compelling sites upon it.

Now is the time to bring in more outsource contractors and have them do the work for you, using more script automation so that you can generate the base site for an idea in a matter of seconds, then customize from there.

However, if you want to become a millionaire, it's still a long road ahead. I mean, you might be a quarter of that at this point. To help give yourself a boost, you need to move into sharing your knowledge with ebooks, books, tapes, podcasting, videos, and perhaps even seminars and workshops. Some may say, why would I want to pay you for this advice when if it's so good, why do you need me? Tell them up front that, frankly, the reason you need them is because you have knowledge to share, and sharing that gives you even more money, and because there is risk involved here and not everyone can make it to the top. They'll appreciate that if you tell them this up front. Then, move on to helping them understand the systems and how you made it big.

Eventually you'll be on the seminar tour around the world, and it will feel like hustling again. It will be tough because while you do this, you'll be paying employees and contractors to follow the same things you're teaching others to do, and you'll be making money from their efforts. As you do this more and more, you'll improve your seminars, books, and so on.

Part 2 of the AM Mastery Series

Eventually something starts to happen. You start to realize that your skills are so good that you can do high-quality sites for other people and charge them. You'll become a PHP/MySQL and Perl expert. You'll have taught yourself Flash, AJAX, JSON, great Web 2.0 CSS, and can use that as a way to fill in gaps in time. You'll have a great eye for photography. You'll become a Linux expert and can even build web farm projects. You'll have cash to invest in more large project sites and even new small web startups that do interesting new things in order to gain ad revenue. You may even begin to form startups that build your own ad networks where advertisers will switch from another more expensive ad network to yours if you can deliver a better return on their investment.

This is the hardest part of the game. You'll be doing so many things at once and working very hard all on your own. The trick is to not over-extend yourself, watch the site analysis numbers and strategize against that, stick with short-term stuff and grow from there, and network with people, attend seminars and conferences, in order to build these partnerships to get things off the ground.

Sites like wickedfire.com will be very useful to you in learning about new opportunities and joining others for them. Note however that at this stage of the game, you'll ultimately be taking risks in your re-investment into your business and will fail here or there because that's natural at this stage.

With a lot of effort, working with friends you meet online and strategizing, you may have enough in this stage to even pay off your house!

So, what you find is that at this stage the role of AM has opportunities for branching into other fields you might not have anticipated, such as small angel investor, PHP/MySQL and/or web design consulting, SEO expert, or even building your own ad network.

Part 1 of the AM Mastery Series

Okay, by now, you're bringing in $1K a month from all your forum and blog sites on your own servers. However, because it's still a good idea, a portion of your time is still spent on blogger.com and Google AdSense -- never give up on the free stuff for starter projects. In this business, you need to hedge your bets with multiple strategies.

By now you've probably enrolled in many forums like wickedfire.com and cashtactics.com are getting some great advice and want to keep on moving up the food chain with larger sums of cash each month.

At this point of the game, the cash tactics you'll be focusing on are:

• Better SEO, and preferably the whitehat kind


• Getting more forum volunteers


• Improving content by even paying for it


• Better site and ad analysis


• Better ad networks, even moving into widgets, contests, surveys, and games


• More automation, such as rapidly building forums and blogs through scripts


• More opportunities to move sites out of subdomain incubation projects and into their own domains


• Using more outsource partners for design and SEO advice


• Inventing new forms of compelling content, such as templates for social networking sites (Facebook, MySpaces, WordPress, etc.), screensavers, desktop backgrounds, cellphone ringtones, powerpoint presentations, spreadsheets to run a business, you name it

However, eventually you'll even get opportunities where it costs less to host your own multiple projects on your own servers rather than at some rented shared site. At that point, you might even move into your own small web hosting company to some degree. The key point is to keep an eye on costs. Yes it's good to reinvest somewhat, but you'll want to never over-invest without an eye on the returns, or re-invest before you're ready.