Looking for a summer job? Don’t.
If you’re wondering what you’re going to do for the summer you’re probably in the same boat as millions of other college kids. You know you should get an internship, but it is much easier to work at the mall selling cell phones or satellite radio. No matter what you’ll be tied down to a job all summer and before you decide to do something with friend you’ll have to think about whether or not you’re scheduled to work.
That sounds like a pretty mundane way to enjoy your time away from school, if you ask me.
What you should do
Why not use the opportunity to start a company? See if you can earn an income from freelance work. Try to develop a product that you can sell. Do something to support yourself without submitting applications to all the local stores trying to get a job that pays you less than $10 an hour.
My story
Last summer while I was trying to get a job I noticed that all the jobs I wanted were taken by people who got out of college earlier than I did. Ohio State gets out in mid-June, much later than the semester schools, most of which are done in early May. What was I going to do?
By chance I read a blog that talked about selling websites on the SitePoint.com forums. I thought it sounded too easy but I decided to try to sell a website. To try it out I spent $10 on a domain, http://www.thegolfvault.com and developed a simple, static website over the course of two days. I let the website sit for a week until it was indexed by Google, MSN, and Yahoo search engines. Then I put it up on SitePoint.
I decided to setup the buying process as an auction and set the starting bid at $25 and the Buy It Now at $250. Within a few hours I got a private message from someone offering to pay me $250. I tried the same process again – I bought a domain, http://www.mylaptopguide.com, built a small website (this time with a blog format) and let it sit for a week. I put it on SitePoint with a BIN of $350. Someone offered me $350 a few days later and I had suddenly earned $500 for just a few hours of work.
I repeated the process a few times and I ended up selling about 5 websites in a matter of two or three months and didn’t have to keep looking for a job. Since the websites were so simple I had tons of free time to relax and go out with friends. Had I taken the “job” more seriously I probably could have developed 3-5 websites a week and keep selling them for $200-$300 a piece.
I was making money on my own and after my $10 investment I had taken my bank account from $150 to over $1,000.
It was at this point that I decided to create a blog about poker. Since I didn’t have a job my weekends during the summer were wide open and I played a lot of poker. I thought that people might be interested in reading my stories on a blog and I was right. I started getting regular traffic pretty quickly, I wrote once a day and I had friends help with writing a few posts here and there. I made a few hundred dollars from the advertisements and affiliate links and decided to sell it after 3 months of work.
Since The Poker Blog sale I’ve been getting client work and have started working on a few projects, like Problogging.com. It all started because I couldn’t find a job for the summer. Maybe I don’t have a world class resume with internships at investment banks in New York, but I would argue that my experiences are just as valuable.
. Freelancing work is also another great way to go in terms of flexibility. And I agree, if money is not too much an issue, the entrepreunerial route is best. I still need to get a innovative idea…
I can’t imagine myself working in a supermarket in the summer so I am having the same thought of starting my own web-based business. I have found it is good to have vison but not to get too unrealistically dreamy about it.