Alright, so I’m being honest here. I’m having a hard time feeling any enthusiasm right now. I just saw that yet another job I bid on closed without the client choosing a freelancer. This one is worse since they’d contacted me as one of their top three choices for the job, and I spent a couple of hours putting together a pretty detailed proposal. What went wrong? I wish dearly I could get a “Dear John” letter from each rejection, something that simply said “We’re not hiring you because of x, y and z.” But life isn’t like that. College is, but they don’t pay you to be in college. This is real.
So, one of my big goals for this month is to get better at writing proposals. I’m at less than 50% response rate, and again at less than 50% hire rate for those jobs where I do get a response. I need to improve those numbers or I’ll spend most of my time bidding jobs without profit. But how can I get better rates?
I don’t know yet. But I’ll definitely keep you guys informed on my experiments.
In other news, I had a beautiful day yesterday going up to the mountains, contemplating life and the direction of this next month. I’ve come up with 6 business goals:
1. Earn $1500 — $2000. This is a challenge, especially with a high stretch goal, but I know I can make at least one thousand in four weeks just repeating the success of the last two weeks. As long as I learn more this month than I knew 2 weeks ago, I can achieve this.
2. Bid 10 jobs per week and get response from more than %50 by the last week.
3. Get English students so I’ve got multiple streams of income and daily variety. I’ll also be working on a side blog that I started a while ago for ESL lesson plans, so teaching will help me generate useful content. My goal for the last week is 4 hours of teaching at 1000 baht per hour.
4. Finish my freelancing website and upgrade my ESL blog.
5. Spend less than $700 here.
6. Make a payment on my student loan. The loan is in default right now, so it’s going to take some paperwork to get things straightened out, but I need to start getting it paid off. My parents are starting to worry.
Alright, so those are the goals, and I’ll be writing each day about how I’m reaching them. Today I continued work on my second job incorporating the client’s design changes, I migrated my ESL blog to my new web host, I created a draft of handbills to advertise English teaching, and I got my freelance design website functioning.
More tomorrow. For now, I need food.
