Day 5 – Foods for thoughts

Not sure what to talk about today but it’s 10:44 PM and I haven’t written a daily post. So bear with me while I ranble for 500 words or so.

Today was supposed to be a day for working on my blog, figuring out how to advertise and sell my skills, and getting started trying to make a little freelance income. The hard part is that, in my head, I have two skills and one of them is hard to sell on a piecemeal, client-by-client basis, and the other one is widely known as not a good way to make money these days.

The first one is computer hardware and software troubleshooting, diagnosing, building, and maintaining, also known as Help Desk. I have done this in the context of businesses and agencies for decades where it makes sense. Staff a phone and inbox with techs, tell the employees or customers where to call, and let them meet in the middle to hash things out. Working in those jobs, I often get approached by other employees who eventual say “Hey, it’s not a work computer but I’ve been having trouble; could I ask you to take a look?” On that basis it always seems like there are people out there that want or need help and can pay. But it’s few and far between, and there’s a difference between troubleshooting a computer bought by a business and configured in a standard way, and troubleshooting a computer that someone bought for home use without knowing much about computers, software, or standards. No offense, y’all but the things a lot of people install or allow to be installed on their home computers can be downright frightening.

So my instinct when offering computer support is to try to narrow things down a bit to just recommending computer builds, adding or removing hardware or specific software, things like that. And it just doesn’t seem to be worth it to be a freelance “computer tech.” I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong? How do JayzTwoCents, Linus Tech Tips, and Gamers Nexus do it? Hmmm, guess they’ve built a video empire, not just selling their time and experience taking on one problem at a time. Food for thought.

And of course the other skill I have is copywriting. I can write clean straightforward friendly stories, I rarely make grammatical and spelling errors, and I have done this for my entire life. My insecurity here is that I don’t have a degree, and I don’t have a lot of bylines outside of my own blog. I can write but, as I mentioned a few days ago, I don’t seem to be able to market or generate traffic. Yet. It’s a skill I think I can learn, but there’s that little nay-saying voice in the back of my head that says nay. That is the skill I’m working on building, though. I’m taking some online classes in marketing and writing catchy ads and it’s given me a lot of food for thought on this topic, as well.

It’s all a learning process. And at least it is costing me nothing to try right now. I’m already paying for this blog space. Stay tuned.