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Hi! I'm Joshua Otwell.

Figuring things out...

Published almost 2 years ago • 2 min read

Some housekeeping.

I originally had 2 different forms for this email list before re-branding it to the current iteration. If you signed up here or here and no longer wish to receive these emails, please opt out at the bottom of this newsletter. No hard feelings at all.


"Skills pay the bills…"

That is the jest of it at least.

However, are self-taught or self-realized skills also valuable?

Sometimes I feel I need some form of validation for the skills I've learned on my own as a self-starter or self-taught developer. (I started a thread over on my Substack page about this very topic.)

And honestly, I'm not sure why.

Here are some of the skills I've developed that I want to use. Many (or all) of them I continue to build.

I'm categorizing them as major and minor with major being those I've been working on for more than 3 years (at the time of writing), and the minor skills in a time frame less than that.

Major
  • SQL (MySQL in particular)
  • PHP Backend web development
  • Technical Writing
  • WordPress Webmaster
Minor
  • WordPress page builders (SeedProd, Elementor)
  • Carrd landing page or single-page sites
  • Newsletters
  • Email marketing
  • E-commerce (my Kofi and Gumroad shops)

It only makes sense that wherever these skills overlap is an area I can make gains.

I am already producing a great deal of content in 2 similar areas; WordPress blogging on the Digital Owl’s Prose developer blog and publishing a weekly Substack newsletter, OpenLampTech.

Technical writing, MySQL knowledge, PHP knowledge, and WordPress skills overlap in these 2 areas.

I haven’t really found any ways to monetize these particular areas (yet) for any meaningful impact. Both blogging and newsletters seems like a "slow go" type of monetization.

Other interest

Several of my skills already meet in interesting areas that I could turn into lucrative products or services:

  • Newsletter writing
  • Blog posts writing
  • Email writing
  • Building landing pages
  • Connecting landing pages with email sign-up forms
  • Building email sign-up forms and landing pages
  • Building simple WordPress websites and blogs
  • Classified ads for newsletters

The burning questions I have about my skills and earning an income with them that keep me up at night are:

  1. How do I monetize them?
  2. How to I effectively find clients through targeted (or any kind of) marketing?
  3. Which skills do I focus on the most and how to market them?
  4. What if I take on a project that I don't know everything I need to complete?
  5. Do I have the time capacity, mental fortitude, and desire to take on side projects while working full-time with some family commitments as well?
  6. Do I commit fully and just jump in head-on and go for it?

I'll go ahead and state the obvious now. I have a bad case of Imposter Syndrome. (That's a whole other newsletter or series).

I'm interested in a lot of technical things and I'm not 100% sure if that is a hindrance (Shiny Object Syndrome) or an asset.

I know I could be semi-successful at several different things but, should work towards mastering one thing or scope really well.

In the next newsletter, I'll go over goal setting and plans using any or all of these major and minor skills, in order to begin earning some income.


I'll leave you with these 3 links to sources I've read this week and learned something from:

(Cover photo credits: Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)

Hi! I'm Joshua Otwell.

Backend SQL and PHP developer with an infusion of technical writing and entrepreneurial dreams. Working towards paving my own way in the creator economy with lessons learned and more importantly, those yet still to come.

Read more from Hi! I'm Joshua Otwell.
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Read in browser I've noticed an interesting metric that I believe deserves some attention (from me at least). In 4+ years of weekly blogging on my Digital Owl's Prose developer blog, I have approximately 180 readers who receive an email every time I publish an article. To be fair, this isn't necessarily the same thing as an email list but, is instead a WordPress(dot)com thing. However, in 6+ months of publishing my weekly OpenLampTech Substack newsletter, I have amassed approximately 132 (at...

almost 2 years ago • 1 min read

Some housekeeping. I originally had 2 different forms for this email list before re-branding it to the current iteration. If you signed up here or here and no longer wish to receive these emails, please opt out at the bottom of this newsletter. No hard feelings at all. Read in browser I notice 2 specific skills that have stuck with me over the last couple of years that are intertwined together: Writing Programming and Code Writing about programming and code Oops. Yeah, I know. That's 3...

almost 2 years ago • 2 min read

Some housekeeping. I originally had 2 different forms for this email list before re-branding it to the current iteration. If you signed up here or here and no longer wish to receive these emails, please opt out at the bottom of this newsletter. No hard feelings at all. I believe goal setting is essential in order to track progress or regression. My short-term goal is to consistently make $50/month combined from any of my side hustles. Seems reasonable right? Not too overly ambitious. I'll...

almost 2 years ago • 1 min read
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