Aubrey Portwood, Freelancing?

So I think I need to write this: I am looking into freelancing.

I’m not writing that because I want everyone to know that I am up for any freelance gigs (quite the contrary), but that I am in the process of looking into it. Freelancing has always been something I wanted to do, but I never tried. There have been a lot of reasons:

Will I survive?
Can I work with people?
Finances
Can I run a business?
Do I want to do all the other work?
My job now is fine…

…etc. So I’ve never really entertained it. I’ve spent the last few months learning about what I want to do—WordPress Site Optimization & Performance:

Core Web Vitals
Server Optimizations
WordPress Optimizations
Code Optimizations
Fixing issues with sites (I’ve always loved fixing bugs)

…just basically getting your site to run it’s best! Now I’m trying to figure out how I was going to do that. For me there were two options:

Get a job at an agency or hosting company and ask them to let me do this stuff
Start my own business

As a part of my learning process I have learned so much through the people I have connected with that already do the work I want to do…and how do they do it? That’s right, most of them (actually all of them) run their own business. And so that got me thinking about freelancing again, and all the same fears came up again. The idea of jumping out there into another company who is going to tell me how to do things—especially with AI—wasn’t feeling great, and I didn’t know why at first. I have used the sign of excitement in this sabbatical to alert me to things I should gravitate towards: and when I started thinking about freelancing I started to feel some excitement around it. This time I decided I was going to do something I never did before: actually learn about freelancing. I have the time! So yes, that has meant reading more books, watching more YouTube videos, and talking with freelancers—and of course trying out some freelance work! I just want to learn if I’m cut out for it, because honestly I don’t know, but I’m excited to find out.

I can’t say enough how much these resources have helped me just over the past couple of weeks:

The content Daya posts—especially—has been insurmountable in helping me understand what I might be looking forward to. Check them out if it’s something you’re also looking into…