![\"IMG_20131201_194810\"](\"http:\/\/wanderlustadventurer.files.wordpress.com\/2013\/12\/img_20131201_194810.jpg?w=225\")
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
I don’t know yet. But I’ll definitely keep you guys informed on my experiments.<\/p>\n
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:<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
2. Bid 10 jobs per week and get response from more than %50 by the last week.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
4. Finish my freelancing website and upgrade my ESL blog.<\/p>\n
5. Spend less than $700 here.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
More tomorrow. For now, I need food.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … <\/p>\n