MIMF

Here are some platitudes I've learned to take seriously after 27 years of this. There are no shortcuts. The work has to get done. The work can be as liberating or tedious as you make it but don't ever pretend that it isn't work.
"Demand" is a misnomer. There is no demand, there is only marketing. No one will beat a path to your door if you don't make the effort to beat a path to theirs first. Everything you do poorly will be held against you and everything you do well will (and should) be taken for granted. One last point (well two) that you should hear over and over again (and that I did my best to ignore because they didn't seem practical); It's not what you know but who you know. And lastly location counts for an awful lot more than it should.
The successful folks I've met along the way generally were really good salespeople, (often in spite of themselves). They had good skills but they knew exactly when to delegate.
You need money to make money. That means you have to be profitable to start with. If you aren't doing more than covering your expenses then your expenses are too high. The result is that you have no money left to reinvest. You can't pay for a top notch web site or a social media presents or old fashioned advertising. That's not going to be sustainable. You can't pay for the better tools that will save you some time and allow you to compete with the guys that already have everything. You won't be able to take the time to work on new products or personal development. I could go on and on. I say I wish there was someone back at the beginning that would have told me a few of these things but I'm pretty certain I wouldn't have listened.
It's way too easy to work really hard and not make money. You need to set yourself a goal for every day. "I need to make "X" amount of money today and everyday and I'm going to do that first and then I can do what I want to do with the rest of my day". Many days I don't hit my earnings mark until after 11 PM which doesn't leave much time for a family or a life. I rarely get to work on the stuff that really interests me. I try to work faster and I try not to give things away but that's also hard. That said I have no idea what else I could do for work so I stick with it and hope for some inspiration along the way.

David King wrote: It's way too easy to work really hard and not make money. You need to set yourself a goal for every day.

Absolutely. In the last three years Ive changed the way I work, but not the hours. My profit has increased exponentially. I was already doing alright back then, now I'm hitting it out of the park.

I am not money driven. I am goal driven. Goals might be bright shiny objects, or just doing something someone said I couldn't, or just pushing my limits past the point of being scared or frightened. I have two year, one year, 9/6/3/2/1 month, and 2/1 week goals, constantly. I know what Im doing (within reason, as some things change) for every week of 2014. I know when jobs need to be done, payments need to be made, releases need to be scheduled, bills and invoices submitted, and have "spare" weeks every now and again for R and R, or catch ups, or developing new products to continue to evolve.

If you can get your marketing down, it is extremely easy to make a very nice living. My budget for 2013 was $365... a dollar a day. I'm going for $0 this year (although I will give a few hundred worth of stuff away for free). It isn't how much you spend, but how you do it.