In any case, it’s a great time to start your own online business!

If you would like to know my secrets to making more money as an IT consultant and working remotely check out my e-book on secrets to getting high hourly rates as an IT subcontractor.

Many of the guests got laid off and never expected to be unemployed. Many of them never saved any money. But the biggest fallacy that many had was the expectation that many recent grads have – they’ve been promised that if they study hard, get a degree and work hard, they will live the American dream. The reality is there is no job security and there probably never was.

As challenging as getting a degree and finding work is, it’s trained us to work for others, and lose that natural entrepreneurial spirit I believe we all have. I always think back to blacksmiths, general store owners, people selling food, and trading services amongst each other before the industrial age kicked in.

Take this opportunity to find your true passion and start your own business – becoming an entrepreneur. Sell your expertise online through information products, start consulting out of your home or develop some other home-based business. You might have to support this with a part time job, but resolve to never be in this situation of dependency again! Who knows, with hard work you could be one of the next entrepreneur success stories.

There’s never a better time to start your own independent consulting business now! http://thewealthyworker.com/

Companies’ attitude towards contracting goes in cycles. Sometimes they want lots of contractors, then they return to wanting employees. Right now with all the layoffs, companies are actually more interested in hiring contractors because they have work but they don’t want to commit to long-term employees at this point.

So get out there and find those contracts!

Over the years I’ve built lots of websites and I recently realized that I have a lot of skills to offer clients in the Internet space – from setting up websites and blogs, to adding email autoresponders, shopping carts and membership sites. Not only that my ability to communicately clearly with non-techies is also valuable. Whenever I talk to people who need a website they often spend tens of thousands of dollars and the projects go off the rails due to all the custom coding. The sites I create are easy to update for a non-techie saving them money in the future usually spent to update the site. I’ve also figured out ways to get more traffic by adding Google analytics and seeing which sites and keywords bring the most traffic.

I like to use hosted solutions (also called software as a service) because there are no installs and upgrades required. You just pay a monthly fee to get ready-to-go code which has been fully tested. I use email autoresponders, a content management system and shopping cart systems that are all third party. You just have to copy some html code for the sign up forms and you’re good to go. Then you can focus on adding the content and marketing the site.

Getting back to Elance.com I’ve bid on a few website jobs over the last few days. In general the budgets are fairly low (given by the buyer) and the most common problem is a lack of clear requirements – do they need a header logo? Will they enter the content themselves? Do they know how to add content? How many iterations will there be if they want changes?

Some of this scares me but we’ll see how it goes. My feeling is that over time I will find a few high quality clients that will be the majority of my focus. Just like with webMethods the 80/20 rule applies. 80% of the work and revenue comes from 20% of the clients. Here’s my Elance profile.

if you’ve read my blog and reports/e-books you will understand that the most important thing you can do to be successful is change your attitude. I believe there are 2 basically belief systems out there. One is ‘The world happens to me’ and the other is ‘I create my world’. People with the first belief system say ‘Companies aren’t hiring’, ‘Employers only give cost of living raises’, ‘I’ve heard I need 10 years of experience to be a consultant’ and so on. People with the latter belief say ‘I don’t accept standard salary guidelines or pay rates dictated by employers and on job boards’, ‘There’s lot of work out there if you know where to look’, ‘I take full responsibility for my career success’.

So spend less time worrying about the recession and more time developing your skills, attitude and network.