I am in my late 40's, and I currently do a job in electronics. It is very tedious boring, and long hours. The money isn't too bad though.

I repair electronic controls for various customers at my place of work. This involves repairing PCB's drives, power supplies, and all sorts of electronic equipment.

I have had a few attempts at a career change, two major attempts were to become a Physiotherapist, and a driving instructor, when I was in my late 20' and then 30's for the driving.

The Physiotherapy went "south" because the university funding ran out and it was all canceled and called off. DOH!

As for the Driving - suddenly getting this job in electronics, (I needed a regular income), and the red tape in the driving with changing laws all the time helped me fail my final assessment driving test, and so I ran out of time and enthusiasm.(you get 2 years to do all 3 tests, with 3 attempts allowed)

Now I am totally bored in my current job, so I started a website mark-lawton.com, to see if I could make some money from Google AdSense, and so become a "pro-blogger" maybe!

Well I am not a problogger, but I do make about £50 a month on my site, which isn't great, but it is something.

I have now been approached by the gas board to repair their Horstmann Newbridge time clocks for the gas lamps at Buckingham Palace, because I wrote an article about them on my website.

Years ago I used to repair them, but the company is now closed, so they asked me if I knew where they could get them repaired.

I said that I would do them; and so they have sent me six clocks to repair as a "trial".

If I do OK, then I will be repairing 12 per month!

So maybe there is hope there, as well as paying my mortgage off in the next year, so I can manage on a lot less money!

I have another site now, all-round-controls.co.uk so maybe this could be the start of something special!

I can't bear working for anyone else for much longer, and I am weary of the tedium, and non-variation of work. I don't get out and about enough, and I am stuck in a rut.

On a positive note, I did wonder how many web domains I could make and create some more income, or could I make a living from just the one website?

Maybe a combination of clock and control repairs, self-employed, blogging, and my website, may be the way to go in the future.

I have the skills, so I just need to put the effort and time in, and to fine tune and hone them.

Ok enough from me, so I will hope that I have said enough.

Certainly some suggestions may come in!

My site was as high as Alexa 330K, but now it is 1.2M, however it seems to be making a lot more money as the time goes on!

Then there are the clock repairs!

Thanks for reading this.

Mark Lawton

http://mark-lawton.com

The Generalist's Repository

Reply by Peter Fisher

Thanks for this introduction, Mark.

Its great to see someone who doesn't give up - if something isn't working, you try something else.

I think your combination of providing a repair service, blogging and building a website is a winning combination because thats exactly what I do too.

Being even more positive, I would say that your controls website could be developed into something really significant in income terms if you based it on using your controls knowledge to build some interesting content. But I have to say that a Wordpress blog platform while good, will never come anywhere near to using SBI like this site your-career-change.com which provides a full time income for me.

I know what I'm talking about because I also have 6 other domains and use different platforms using Wordpress, like this one: Definition of Leadership and self built websites.

To get a really good business-orientated and therefore income generating website you need SBI which covers all the bases and lets you concentrate on building content using your specialist knowledge. Find out more about career blogging.