Truthfully I’ve made the vast majority of my money from IT consulting. Businesses have the means (money) and desire to improve their business via technology. So sometimes you have to face facts and go where the money is. Luckily over the past couple of years I’ve been able to land remote, work from home contracts from my country home on the east coast. Technology allows us to work from anywhere nowadays (Skype, VPN software, email, Desktop sharing such as Webex, Live Meeting and even Google+ Hangouts.

I’m getting calls almost daily for integration projects using webMethods and turning them down since I’m finishing up a contract as we speak. I feel bad turning down projects with millions of people unemployed (at least in the US) but I need a bit of a break after this project. Also I’m getting into mobile development (phones/tablets, etc) so there is some potential there to go into that business.

People around the world are sharing content as part of the social experience. We can learn from each other so the teacher/student barrier is becoming blurred. I enjoy sharing what I learn, as I learn jazz guitar or mobile phone development for example. Selling content and knowledge is pretty difficult these days, although I think it can be done. The people I know that are successful seem to be mostly focused on internet marketing or things for enterpreneurs (ie things that have a financial motivating factor).

So the basic question is can digital content continue to be sold or will the prices tend to zero? Many people use the content to market their services, since that is a live, personal experience that can’t be digitized.

Let me know your thoughts below in the comments.

The return flight for 2 people was about $2,000, the hotel is over $100 per night and the rental is a few hundred dollars. The flights in particular are a lot more than they were a few years ago, probably in part due to higher fuel prices. There were no WestJet flights on Saturday out of Moncton and most of the flights leave at 6:30am. Plus there are no direct flights to Calgary, so we will be stopping in Toronto on the way. Needless to say flying has become an expensive, annoying pain in the butt, and I haven’t even talked about US security pat downs!

When I travel for an IT contract I either charge an increased hourly fee or add the travel costs (flight, hotel, car rental, meals) to the invoice. So the client ends up paying more money which is bad, right?

With all this annoyance and cost I hope that employers will start to take advantage of all the available technology such as Webex (for virtual meetings, desktop sharing), Skype (basically free long distance, desktop sharing, video chats), VPN connections (for secure connection to network) and of course email and phone.

After a couple weeks of stressing out because I didn’t have network access, had insane deadlines and so on, one of the projects I was working on moved out of my scope. So I then only had about 50% workload and upcoming work nowhere in sight at the moment. So I mentioned this to some of the managers. ‘We’ came up with the idea that I work from home part-time and wait out the upcoming work, which they couldn’t say when would happen exactly. The key takeaways are that I mentioned I didn’t have enough work (which many people don’t want to admit at their job) and secondly that you present it in a way where they can come up with the idea themselves.

So on friday I just picked up the key fob (for remote vpn access) and today I just booked a flight to Florida! After I got the key fob it suddenly hit me: Once you are able to work remotely you can basically work anywhere in the world! My family (mom, 2 sisters and brother-in-law) is renting a house in Palm Beach for the month of February.

It’s hard to believe but I’ve actually talked to people who would rather go to an office to work so they don’t have to do work at home. They forget about getting dressed for work, commuting, buying lunch, dealing with annoying co-workers, cubicle hell, meetings, parking and so on!

So plan to start working remotely. Ask the boss to work one day a week from home or find another job that let’s you work from home one or more days a week. I recently applied for a job that is completely virtual. And read the book ‘The Four Hour Work Week’ by Tim Ferris. Time to live the dream baby!

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.

• Find a product to sell
• Sell the product online
• Deliver the product
• Handle customer support
• Transfer the money into your account

Instead of having your own products, packaging them up and shipping them to the customer you can use a drop shipper like Doba.com. Some like Doba will even handle obtaining the products for you so you don’t have to send them the products. Instead they handle all the gory details for you. You can even sell them via Ebay.

Looks like I’m getting some agreement on flexible work arrangments.

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.

I learned a lesson early on in my career. As I mentioned in my IT consulting e-book, I got laid off after 14 months on my first job. The company got bought out. Two months before, I got a raise of about 30 cents per hour which was almost insulting. They gave me four weeks notice, and during that time I managed to find another job. The funny thing was I got a 30% raise. My first lesson was ‘You make more money jumping between companies than staying in one company’. That may have been short-sighted but it kept working. I jumped again a couple years later and got an even bigger raise (plus I went contract). I was getting $35/hour which at the time felt huge!

I eventually ended up in IT in a couple start-ups, but got exposed to webMethods software which is used in the integration space. I started to get my head around consulting rates in the $100/hr range. This is because I was talking to sales people from the company and discovered what they (and others like IBM) charge for professional services – from $150/hour to over $200/hour. At the time those numbers were unimaginable as I wasn’t even making six figures as an employee. My general view was that I would make cost of living increases or possibly up to 20-30% more if I jumped to another position.

I’ve been making the same amount of money for years, and recently realized that it was because I hadn’t set a larger target since the early days as an IT consultant. So I was getting was I was envisioning. I needed to think big, to set bigger goals. We all need to create challenges and strive to meet them. This is what gives us excitement in life, not the money but what money can enable. I believe that we are mostly seeking freedom in life. Freedom to make our own choices, and live the life we choose. This usually requires money!

So I recently set some new, bigger business goals. This has re-energized and refocused me.  I’ve started to take action already, I’ve tried a few things so far that haven’t had much success online, but I will persist! I’d like to share the path that I’ve taken and the new goals I am setting and hope you will do the same:

• find a niche market to target (Done!)
• start a corporation and start consulting at $90+/hour range (Done!)
• start working remotely so I can avoid commuting, meetings, get more accomplished during the day and have more freedom (Done!)
• find more contracts that allow remote work and diversify my client base globally
• reduce time-based pay (getting paid by the hour) by finding and creating products to sell online
• obtain recurring revenue by creating membership sites
• move out of the big city and work remotely from a home in the country
• generate $1 million dollars per year of revenue
• give more to animal charities (up to 10%)

I’ll be talking more about working remotely (ie. working from home) and generating online revenues via internet ventures in future posts.  So set your new, bigger goals for 2009 and beyond now! Remember, what you focus on expands.