Because I got cut off fron AdSense (thanks for nice emails, ya’ll), I decided to channel my thirst for web-related knowledge elsewhere, particularly the renegade website-building gigs. Because for the longest time I’ve been focusing on the interactivity aspect of web as opposed to the design, I’ve gotten a good idea about homebrewing simple php+MySql sites that can do some neat interactive things, like sessions.

Moreover, these little php tricks impress the living hell out of the local website-needing public as well as website-building folk. Hey, there’s a clear upside to living in rural Michigan – all of these hackey Frontpage 4.0 warriors cringe when they hear php and CSS. With a decent word-of-mouth campaign and some revenue reinvested into promotion, I could literally quit my day job.

Case and point – I wrote this script that uploads a jpeg on the server, resizes the picture to 75×75, and inserts the name and path into a MySQL table to be later pulled into a list of products as a thumbnail. It was a part of a laughably simple website, so I charged $350 for the whole thing. Imagine my surprise when I learned the owners were ready to pay $1,000 for the laughably simple website alone! A grand, as in “spend 4 hours building and setting up a website, and then skip work for the next two weeks because comparatively speaking, your day job is not even worth your time”.

Then it was my time to cringe and hit the phone to see what the other web-building renegades are charging. Turns out, even if you are not that good, you can still make money! This, for instance,

would cost around $400-500. This hot little layout

goes for $500-700. Finally, based on the rates the design firm charged this guy,

they must have cleared around a grand.

If you think about it, when a fuel pump in your car takes a dump and you have to tow the car into the shop, you don’t ask yourself whether it’s really going to cost the mechanics $400, $600, or $800. Most people (and you too, admit it) simply fork over the money. Same thing with intellectual labor – they don’t know it takes me just a few hours to build a fully functional semi-interactive website. They are simply ready to pay someone to do something they can’t do themselves.

If I keep getting referred, I might depart from the affiliate marketing thing because the A.M. pay is tears in the ocean. Salty tears of ass-breaking labor, lack of motivation, and false hopes in the vast ocean of vicious competition and unfair practices.

After immediately learning from my first renegade web-builing experience, I charged market rate for my second and third, and I am a happy man.

For those familiar with a programming language, check out this Slashdot post and comments. Truly geeky humor. I laughed my ass off.