My plan this year is to do away with clients totally by the end of the year. Be 100% self reliant income wise.

How am I going to achieve this? The same way anyone else can. By investing my time and energies into my own business ventures, building web based applications based on subscription models and by investing my excess revenue into offline businesses.

I have a whole bunch of targets I need to meet financially, but with the right planning and by putting the right steps in place I should be able to get there.

The same goes for anyone, and anything. Work out what you want to do with your X (X being your website, business, blog, life, whatever). And then sit down and research ways to achieve this.

For example if your goal is to make money from your blog, you really need to work out how that’s going to happen, why would people read your blog, what hooks are in place to get people to register to your mailing list or subscribe to your RSS feed, what value are you delivering to the end reader that they can’t get somewhere else?

In my opinion for a blog it really comes down to content and hooks, if your content delivers value people will read and search engines will index, if your hooks are of value people will take the bait and refer other people to it as well.

If the goal is to build traffic to the site to sell ads or something, then work on small targets, 100 a day, 200 a day, 500 a day, 1,000 a day etc. But don’t just set random targets without ways to achieve them, for every target put in place a set of actions that will make that target achievable.

It’s easy to say I want 5k visits a day and you’ll get that from writing good content. Well you might but you probably won’t, it’s better to say I’ll get 500 a day from writing good content, and search optimising my site, networking with others in my industry, buying ads on related sites and building some link bait.

And then go from there; work on sustaining that traffic and then growing on it to reach that 5k, it’s the same old story on the internet, once the traffic is there the ad revenue will follow.

For me in my position I’m working on building web applications that generate revenue, I’ll be building them with my team of developers in between client projects, and once they are ready for the public we’ll start small with some basic marketing, and no fees for usage, grow the user base, and start working on ways to monetise once the application has a healthy number of active users.

Until there’s a good amount of users on the system, just like high traffic numbers to a site, there’s no point of trying to monetise, you’ll make shit all and you’ll only drive people away.