I find myself often asking this question... when will I quit my fulltime job and work for myself... And by working for myself I don't mean find projects to work on for other people (at least not entirely). The problem is we spend the most amount of our time working for someone else. It's a vicious cycle that I hope when broken will reap major benefits.

I've been working for seven years right out of school and only for the past year I've really started looking at how to make money online, by using your own projects.

The Skills

I love the fact that I have the skills to take a project from start to finish without relying on others, it gives me the potential to move fast when I need to. The major problem I have is free time, working everyday is just killing any routine I want to establish for my own projects. I still get some work done and I thank everyday that Lindsey isn't getting sick of me working nights on some of my projects. I don't see this getting any easier in the future, and the time I can spend on developing my projects isn't enough to get them developed fast enough.

The Projects

Over the last year, I've worked on 3 of my own projects. Two blogs and one custom social site. The social site (QuestionVille.com) was doing great in the beginning but has since slowed down, mainly to not having time to develop needed features and promote the site. Most of my time has been going into aboutmyplanet.com, an environmental blog. I'm in the process right now of a major overhaul of the entire project in an effort to expand and monetize the site even further.

The Goals

Just this past week I sat down and made some goals for myself to be able to quit my fulltime job. I figure I need to take this leap to truly find out how much money I can make online. As I mentioned above working on those projects for the last year I'm now are at the point that I'm making about $7000 a year. Not much but if you think that it was done all in my free time, it's not bad. My goal is to be setup making almost a full salary when I quit, not just on my sites but also with some money I have invested.

Here are my goals:

AboutMyPlanet.com Forum

Setup Blogs for Members

Setup Green Gallery

Get Members up to 2000 (Currently 652)

Get Posts up to 20,000 (Currently 5887)

Get Threads up to 2500 (Currently 834)

Hire professional posters

Setup Subscription Model

Get to one subscription per day = $7300

AboutMyPlanet.com Blog

Get to 3000 uniques /per day = 1,000,000 / year

Adsense $60/per day = $22,000 / year

Setup Store & Go up to 1 order per day = $3600 / year

Other

Investment to bring in $1500 per month = $18,000 / year

Get 5 Support Web Projects Going = $2000/year

Save $20,000

I've also been thinking of trying to find a job where I could work 4 days a week or a job where I can work from home. Both scenarios would give me a good transition to getting out on my own. I'll be keeping a good log of tracking my goals because I truly feel that it's where I'm mean to be. I'm sure if you're an entrepreneur like me, you feel the same way. If you don't, you just haven't worked for enough of your life to realize that working for a corporation is a waste of time and energy.

Personally, I've have had enough of the corporate BS, quotes like "Let's make this happen, even if we have to work long hours" are just getting to me... I've been through this before when I was right out of school... full of energy and easily influenced to work my ass of for a company that in the end looks at numbers and only numbers... remember it's not personal it's only business.