August and September ISC report

As far as my ISC activities are concerned, the last two months have been pretty bad. Actually the last month has been the worst since I started working on oDesk regularly. The reason being I was away on an assignment for my day job and that had a very significant impact on my ISC activities.

Actually I left the country towards the latter part of the month of August. Therefore I had to miss out on the last 10 days of the month. Due to this my August ISC income was around $570. This was about $500 less than my target.

I returned back to the country in the middle of September. By then I had already missed out on half the month. And as soon as I returned I had mad rush at my day job as I had to catch up on a lot of things there as well. And I had been away from my family for over 3 weeks. Therefore I gave prominence to spending time with them after I returned. So it was work and then time with family after work, which left me with very little time to work on freelancing projects. As a result, I have managed to only earn $ 410 for the month of September.

My income suffered due to my lack of time to put into the projects. But the last two months had been pretty good in terms of building customer relationships.

One of my long standing oDesk clients decided to leave oDesk due to some of the issues he had with oDesk. But he still wanted to continue working for him directly. I worked out a method to send him time sheets and invoices so he can pay me for my work. He gave me two pretty good projects to work on which should keep me occupied for some time.

Another oDesk project which I am doing is progressing pretty well. My client is extremely happy with my contribution to the project. Hopefully I should be able to complete that project within this month. That would dry up one of my continuous work streams but I will be seeing the end of a product and it will start selling in the US market. I can add another reference to my cap!

The best news in terms of clients during the last month had been striking of a relationship with another US based client through oDesk. Although I lost the initial project that I bid on for this client, due to a delay in my part in responding to one of his emails (I was overseas and didn't have access to email for one whole day!), he liked me so much that he gave me a few small odd jobs to try me out. I think I came through pretty well on that and now I just got the third job from him! I can see this working relationship blossoming into a very profitable relationship for me as well as for him.

My hope for the month of October is to get back to my targeted earning level of $ 1000. There is a spanner in the works for that too. I am required again to travel overseas for an assignment on my day job. But luckily that will only be for about 10 days. And that schedule does not seem that hectic. So hopefully I will be able to continue my freelancing work even while I am away.