Accountability Update (12-09-10)

Posted on 12. Sep, 2010 by Aaron in Accountability

Well things are getting very close I think to going either full time or part time (half days) as an affiliate and web designer. Came so close to calling it a day in my regular job Friday and making that final leap of faith into the unknown.

Trouble was my wages were late (nearly 2 weeks) and instead of my boss doing the honourable thing and telling me straight away when the payroll was done he just hoped I wouldn’t ask, and I should know when the payroll is completed because I’m the one who does it (yes, on top of IT, web, ecommerce and general business duties) and I rush it through as priority on the 1^st of every month. Trouble is my boss had decided to pay everyone, apart from me and a couple of other senior guys.

I thought shit!!! This is no better than having a non paying client so thought I’ll give them benefit of the doubt and a chance to rectify the problem, kept chasing and kept getting fobbed off. Until the Friday where I thought enough is enough, if I’m not paid I won’t be back Monday.

Well, I finally got paid in the end but I have a gut feeling something is horribly wrong with the company and it’s all coming to a head tomorrow (Monday).

Thing is another affiliate wrote about job security, and to be honest if you have a good business plan and discipline to get things done there’s no reason why you shouldn’t succeed, in fact the more I talk about the web design side of my business the more certain I am it’s going to work and compliment my affiliate activities. Everything has been costed to the Nth degree and even better I pitched what I do to one of my training buddies today and really felt no guilt about what I was doing, where a few years back I might have had some doubt because I either thought I was being greedy or my skills weren’t up to scratch, right now if someone rejected my offer I wouldn’t think ‘oh well ….’ I’d be thinking ‘what’s wrong with you, this is a fantastic offer’.

For those of you just starting out as an affiliate, one piece of advice I can give you is look to see what other services you can add to your own private affiliate projects (site flipping, link building, article writing etc). My plan is to run a web design service for a limited amount of private clients and work on my own private projects, this way I not only have a safety net if someone like Amazon bans me (don’t know why they would) but also having a good reliable ‘business’ income source I can use to start up my paid traffic activities, in fact the first month I’ll be ploughing hundreds of pounds back into PPC for my web design leads. This is a huge plan, which is infinitely scalable, and I’m writing processes for everything so I can cost up at my hourly rate and outsource the low skill parts of the job.

I have never felt so close to achieving my ultimate goal of breaking free from my day job and going it alone. Already the sense of freedom is amazing because I feel like I no longer have to accept what my boss says. If I don’t like it I’ll leave, but on the other hand I want to stick around for a little while. Last thing I want to do is walk only to find out a week down the line I could of ended up with a nice tidy redundancy settlement.

I say bring it on mo-fo, never been so ready in my whole entire life