[sbrscnds]

Is that how you do it too, -Jrabbit? I have to admit, the process seems pretty intimidating. Guess I'm a wuss. I believe JR is a freelancer, but he'd have to answer that.

What I did, and do, is I have an agent who farms me out. Agent sets me up with client, I write for client. Of course that doesn't stop me from building up a portfolio, and finding work myself.

If you're going to write, I encourage you to build up a portfolio first. Just write about things that interest you. I try to anticipate future desires, and it's been a long time since I've had to write on deadline. Most of the contracts that I get are for work I'd written years ago, and it's just a matter of dusting it off, sprucing it up, and away it goes.

[famosetroie]

Ben, can you provide links for any articles you've had published under your name?

[Finanziamento]

For me it's less intimidating than finding a job that you know is going to schedule away the next 30-40 years of my life somewhere I wouldn't choose to live.

If you don't like doing keyword research, just write about topics that interest you. It doesn't have to be anything special. Just get it up on the internet whether it's on your own site or some third party that has ad revenue sharing (the ones I mentioned before). 10k posts suggest you can do it.

The benefits are you can work however much you want to, whenever you want to, wherever you want to (as long as you can get online), and the ceiling is just about limitless.

So basically you just write a blog and collect money from ads? That pays well enough to live off of?

[lakraboob]

So basically you just write a blog and collect money from ads? That pays well enough to live off of?

Don't forget he lives in the Philippines. And I think he has a farm.

[LomodiorCon]

Boy, where I'm from you don't communicate that poorly except on purpose, like when you want to say you think Melville's writing was all about his discomfort with uncircumcised penises and not get laughed at. THEN you write something really vague using unnecessary jargon; it's called "Lit Crit."

Filosofy

[fount_pirat]

Don't forget he lives in the Philippines. And I think he has a farm.

Ah, that sounds nice. I should run a farm in some global backwater.

[ARKLqAZ6]

The official tutorials seem written for people who know more about programming in general than I do, so I'm trying some site called javabeginner.com that's a little more dumbed-down--but not as dumbed-down as I'd like:



Uh, okay.

Looks like you found something to write about.

[RilmAlime67]

Boy, where I'm from you don't communicate that poorly except on purpose, like when you want to say you think Melville's writing was all about his discomfort with uncircumcised penises and not get laughed at. THEN you write something really vague using unnecessary jargon; it's called "Lit Crit."

A major problem with beginning object-oriented programming is that most of the tutorials want you to jump straight into objects and classes - when I started programming I did nothing but loops and arrays and if-statements for the first umpteen months. Maybe try starting out with Small Basic tutorial or something like that - if you go with Small Basic then there's a bit of a syntax change when you switch to Java or C#, but nothing too problematic. One thing: it looks as though Small Basic supports the "goto" statement, which you shouldn't use (it's "considered harmful") - you can do everything you need with while loops.

By the way, my attempt at a translation of the javabeginner atrocity you quoted is: if you want "squares" and "circles" then you can abstract the common properties, e.g. perimeter and area, into a common "shape" class; the squares and circles encapsulate their individual methods for calculating the perimeter and area, so a programmer can be given a random shape and query its perimeter/area without having to know what kind of shape it is.

On second thought, maybe I've been programming too long to de-jargonize.

[8Zgkdeee]

Seriously, I would recommend you go with C# before Java. Java just plain sucks. Find this book: The Object-Oriented Thought Process 3ed this is a good book for object oriented programming in general. For C# I recommend: CSharp 2010 and the dotNET 4 Platform 5th Edition. Just google these for ebooks and grab VS 2010 through other means as well.

Java does not suck, what are you on?

[GypeFeeshyTes]

Don't forget he lives in the Philippines. And I think he has a farm.

I actually spend more here than I ever did in the US. Of course it goes a lot further here, part of the reason I feel it's worth it to earn/use more.

The farm still isn't helping yet in that regard.

[scemHeish]

Not just blogs. Not just ads. (Some affiliate/commission/referral sales. Some sales of my own products.)

There's an extremely wide variation on how much you can make from a website. As I said earlier, I'd expect about $1/mo per 500 word article. I've done better than that in most of my writing projects, sometimes significantly so (such as the $2/word website last year). Most of the people I know who do this full time do about the $1/mo per article though. If you wrote 20 per day, after a year you'd have a good shot at having an income of more than $5k/mo that would likely last for 10-14 months if you never did any more work. (Standard sale price for a no-name website is 10-14 months earnings, which means that's around the market's expected lifespan for the earnings without further input.)

Of course there's risk involved. You could end up with a 0. Some of the websites I've made have never earned a penny. It happens. It could also really take off. The lady who put together dogbreedinfo.com for instance (a very famous example since Adsense highlighted it). She was making $600 per day several years ago. Last time I looked at her rankings she was getting traffic worth around $1 million a month to advertisers. I'd guess she only captures a fraction of it, but she's probably making 6 figures a month.

What definitely is possible for just about anyone who can write average internet English is to sell $10 articles. If you approach it as a full time job, you should be able to make at least a couple thousand a month. It's a lot of writing, but 20 of those articles a day is certainly possible. I can't stand to write anywhere near that much, though when I write it's at better than that pace usually. I know people who write 30-40 of them a day.

Well I applied for an AdSense account, I'll guess I'll see how I do.

[VovTortki]

Yeah, 90% of all the programmers that I've hired didn't have CS degrees.

[Jalieteplalry]

I take it you already have a website?

http://www.oneandfour.org/

[CarmenSanches]

oo lala when you google Ozzy's real name, google auto-finishes it for you. Then it comes up with all these hits, including the wikipedia article on him. Got his photo on the side of the search results. Related searches include: "exclusive interview *********" Exclusive. Sexy.

We have such a celebrity here

[Stoottnoiciek]

When you google my real name you're taken to the Linkedin profile for the only other person in the country who shares my name. My aunt met him on an airplane once ("hey you have the same name as my nephew"), apparently he's a douchebag ("**** you lady").