Operation Swatantra

After leaving our random jobs Niall is helping me and Niraj become swatantra which means ‘free’ or ‘independent’ in Sanskrit. He was determined to help us earn money through the internet and become authority as well as location independent.

The day we started operation swatantra was Friday the 13th, actually a superstitious day. It was raining heavily when I reached there (the coffee shop).  He first gave us instructions on what to do and what not to do and then he made us clear about our goal. In that way we were organized. So operation swatantra looked something like this:

– Goal: Earn $10 per hour each doing web design, at least five paid hours per week, by September 15th.

– Meet 2-3 times per week at a coffee shop and go through a few things.

– Phone timers, always track time.

– Start blogs, post at least once per week. (This is what I am doing)

– Ask stupid questions.

– Teach someone else. Once per week, paying it forward.

– Figure out how to get paid online.

– Read Don’t Make Me Think. Don’t Make Me Think is a book by Steve Krug about human-computer interaction and web usability. The book’s premise is that a good software program or web site should let users accomplish their intended tasks as easily and directly as possible

– The most important thing will be self-direction and self-discipline.

Enwil and Niall Doherty during operation swatantra.

So our goal was to earn $10 per hour each doing web designing with at least five paid hours per week by September 15th. We will be meeting 2-3 times per week at the coffee shop and go through a few things. We will also have some projects of Niall to complete.
We were supposed to post at least one blog post per week and we won’t just be talking about web design, but also about productivity, client management, working with deadlines, going the extra mile, attention to detail, being honest with clients, to the point of turning them away if we don’t think we can offer them the best service.
We were also supposed to teach someone else so that we could pay it forward and it would help us as well. We tend to understand more on a subject when we teach others. Since Niall will not be whipping us too hard, the most important thing for us would be self-direction and self-discipline. In the end it’s on us to put in the work and show that we really wanted this.

I knew this hard work would pay off later on, so I started to be serious on this operation. This was hard but also worth it.
We started off with HTML and CSS as they were the building blocks of every website.

Niall starts,”We basically need three pieces of software for making a website.”
1) Text editor
2) Web browser
3) FTP(File Transfer Protocol) client

First thing to do is to purchase a domain name. In my case it’s http://enwil.com. We also need a Web host for hosting our blog or website. For the moment Niall will be helping us with Web hosting. He set up in our blog in dream host.
After that you will need to install wordpress. Nowadays, it’s easy to set up wordpress because most of the web hosting sites offer quick installations.

“You don’t need to be expert at anything, you just need to know more than your clients” –Niall Doherty

After installing wordpress, it’s upto you to change the settings in your wordpress dashboard. The default theme will be used as your blog theme so you should consider changing your wordpress theme. You can choose free as well as premium theme. It’s upto you to choose the theme. A simple google search will bring you many themes to choose from. After you choose a theme you will want to modify and make necessary changes to it. So to make changes to it you will need to create a child theme so that you will not mess up the whole original theme. You can find many tutorials of these things at google and one of the site i recommend for it is 50 dollar blog.

“…….. and remember it’s more important to know what’s possible than to know exactly how to do something.” –Niall Doherty 

Finally, In the first week of operation swatantra we covered HTML, CSS basics, blog organization and theme modification by making a child theme.

Resources we used in operation swotantra:

Sources for free learning:
w3schools
codecademy

Tips, techniques and motivation:
steve pavlina
socialtriggers (Organizing your blog + Marketing strategy)

Any question and queries:
google :p
Actually, knowing how to google correctly will make it really easy for you to figure out your problem because the same question you have is already asked by someone before. If not then you will be the first to question. So, It’s a win-win situation.
If you want to know how to google then you can still google “how to google”. :p