{"id":7,"date":"2013-03-11T02:38:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-11T02:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.benkrefta.com\/transformation\/2013\/03\/11\/making-money\/"},"modified":"2023-03-08T18:20:26","modified_gmt":"2023-03-08T18:20:26","slug":"making-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.benkrefta.com\/transformation\/2013\/03\/11\/making-money\/","title":{"rendered":"Making money"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.benkrefta.com\/transformation\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2013\/03\/hard-work.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-86 size-medium alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/www.benkrefta.com\/transformation\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2013\/03\/hard-work-263x300.jpg\" alt=\"hard-work\" width=\"263\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.benkrefta.com\/transformation\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2013\/03\/hard-work-263x300.jpg 263w, https:\/\/www.benkrefta.com\/transformation\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2013\/03\/hard-work.jpg 790w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 263px) 100vw, 263px\" \/><\/a>One part of my life I need to turn around is my career. Or lack of! My worrying question is this:<\/p>\n<p>What do you do when you&#8217;re a 30 year old with no in-demand skills, a lack of confidence, little motivation and a resume consisting of just 3 or 4 irrelevant jobs over the last decade with each one mostly lasing no more than a matter of months?<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s pretty true what they say about the 30 year milestone in one&#8217;s life = a time to reflect and assess. I am a fully qualified adult now! Or at least I should be. In reality I&#8217;m in the same financial situation I was after just leaving school. How the hell did this happen?&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Being in employment has never been easy for me and I&#8217;m sure anyone who has a long history of anxiety, avpd, depression and so on can relate. I STILL don&#8217;t know if there is a job out there or some way of working I can do and feel comfortable with. My preferred option has been the idea of working for myself, being a freelancer and entrepreneur. I get to escape the constraints of working to someone else&#8217;s rules or working with people I hate BUT then I lack the self motivation and real world knowledge to make a success of things.<\/p>\n<p>So far as going it alone, I have tried:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Spending several months creating a personal portfolio and promotional website for myself from the ground up. It&#8217;s allowed certain customers to find me, but now only generates a dozen or so hits per day and next to no substantial work. I don&#8217;t know how I can substantially promote it. With insufficient knowledge and resources I find myself spending weeks just to get a dozen or so crappy back-links in place.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Spending months promoting myself via Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Deviant Art, Youtube, Blogger, Squidoo, Forums, Google adwords. I followed the advice I was given by creating decent content on these sites but couldn&#8217;t figure out why I would get next to no traffic to these sites, let alone be able to funnel that traffic to my personal portfolio and then convert into real money-earning business opportunities.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Entering several art and design competitions. I&#8217;d win or place in small $20 prize pool competitions, but it&#8217;s hardly worth entering if each takes an average 20 hours of work. For substantial competitions I realize my work is often just not near being good enough to place. There was one exception where I won a $5000 prize.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Selling stuff online. Over the course of 5 years on and off I made nearly $18,000 profit selling video games until the competition muscled me out business.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Creating two Zazzle Stores. One with 500 products, the other housing over 3000 products. I must have pumped like 500 hundreds of hours into this project, but so far it&#8217;s only generated $250 or so!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Creating a line of greetings cards and pitching these along with my own design services to over 50 card companies. Unfortunately with no success.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Asking over 30 illustration agencies to represent me \/ find me work. No takers<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Asking several fine art galleries and art agents to represent me and my work. No takers<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>&nbsp;Taking art and design commissions via Devintart and Crowdsourcing sites like Freelancer.com. I got several very small jobs, but in the end they&#8217;d typically work out at like $2 an hour! Not enough to bother with.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Creating custom Tshirt designs for Designbyhumans. My submissions were not ranked high enough to be made, so no luck there.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Sent dozens of self promo letters out to potential online stores and businesses, but these generated no work or even replies!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Sent several letters to design agencies asking to work with them on a freelance basis, but these generated no work or even replies!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Spending 3 months on creating a high quality, professional 10 page mock-up art manual book for a book project and pitched it a Publisher I knew, but with no success.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Tattooing! I bought $2500 worth of equipment and tried teaching myself on and off over the course of 2 years. I earned enough to pay off the cost of equipment but could not get the hang of it enough to start charging anywhere near what a professional would. I spent weeks visiting and writing to over 40 tattoo shops in the area in an attempt to get an apprenticeship, but had no luck.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Attending several networking meetings to promote myself. I talked to people who couldn&#8217;t really find a use for my skills and ended up with no leads from this.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>I found a semi-regular paying client! I freelanced for a company I was employed with for a short time as a web designer, they only helped to generate me $3000 of income over the course of 3 years.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Spending months applying for about 100 employed roles as a designer. A few interviews, but no job. Not sure I would want to work in that capacity anyway?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I give myself credit for making an effort despite my problems and no one else to help me. I had a few prestigious one-off freelance jobs. One with a very high profile client. It only lasted 3 days, but earned nearly $1000 a day! If only I could get that every day! And I worked with another client for 18 months which earned me around $70,000. I&#8217;m happy about this, but after 10 years I would have liked to have earned a fair $500,000 total, like many of my peers. The actual real figure is closer to $150,000. I&#8217;m now at a stage where I don&#8217;t have my own place and not even earning enough to run my car. I don&#8217;t know how to earn a decent wage. I&#8217;ve mostly worked for myself and relied on luck to get by, but I want more than to just exist while living with my parents. I&#8217;d like to be financially free to move out, support myself and a family one day. I&#8217;m 30 now and it&#8217;s about time I considered how I&#8217;m going to do this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One part of my life I need to turn around is my career. Or lack of! My worrying question is this: What do you do when you&#8217;re a 30 year old with no in-demand skills, a lack of confidence, little <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.benkrefta.com\/transformation\/2013\/03\/11\/making-money\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">  Making money<\/span><span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,11,4,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-money","category-rant","category-self-understanding","category-to-do"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p68SmO-7","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benkrefta.com\/transformation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benkrefta.com\/transformation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benkrefta.com\/transformation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benkrefta.com\/transformation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benkrefta.com\/transformation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.benkrefta.com\/transformation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":265,"href":"https:\/\/www.benkrefta.com\/transformation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions\/265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benkrefta.com\/transformation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benkrefta.com\/transformation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benkrefta.com\/transformation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}