[patio11]

If you can design, code, and talk business goals with non-technical people, it is highly unlikely that the W-2 rate paid by your current day job is in the near ballpark of what you'd reasonably expect to achieve by going into consulting at an appreciable fraction of full-time. Quitting your job and hanging your shingle as a consultant-who-solves-business-problems-with-technology will trade a lot of the certainty of your biweekly paychecks for more occasional payments on invoices which would blow your mind.

If you add the constraint "I want to keep my day job", then I'd suggest negotiating with them (and, er, not mentioning that you're unwilling to leave them prior to having that conversation).

There are many people who have, in recent memory, made appreciable fractions of your goal numbers by taking one service offering which they'd be really good at as a technologist -- say, designing iPhone apps or what have you -- and wrapping that service into a teaching product. There are a variety of form factors: book, video course, in-person training event, online webinar, yadda yadda. This does not get less viable if you mix substantial business expertise into the offering or your promotion of it.

If you want to execute on that, I'd start building up a mailing list of people who have given you permission to talk to them about $BROAD_OUTLINE_OF_YOUR_TOPIC post-haste. Virtually no plan for building products gets worse if you have 100, 300, 500, etc people who are willing to hear from you about it.

[orangethirty]

Let me put your point in plain words:

Consulting currently pays a lot of money. You can make 6 figures without much hassles. Don't quit your job to start consulting without having a group of prospect to sell to. Build your prospects list first, by doing content marketing and networking in site like linkedin.

If you want to take the business route, you can make that amount of money by automating tasks and selling the software. What should you automate? Everything that has to do with lead capturing is worth its zeroes and ones in gold. Start there.

Anything else?

Yes! Start blogging. About your skills. About your projects. Get people reading about you. Even if you don't have an idea at the moment, people will gravitate towards you and give you good ideas.

Whatever you do, realize that this will take time. At the very least, two months of work. Worth it? You bet!

Good luck.

[andyakb]

The original point was put quite simply and your "summary" has messages the original didn't. Just seems a weird way of adding your own opinion as when you start with "let me put _your_ point in plain words," you imply that you are still keeping the point the same, just rewording it, not editorializing.

[msrpotus]

If you can, just meet with people. Sit down, talk about their problems, and how you can help them. Far more direct than blogging and hoping someone reads it.

[orangethirty]

I don't disagree with your point, but blogging has a purpose. Which is to define him/her as a an expert in the field. When you go in to a business meeting, your credibility plays a big part. Through blogging, you develop your credibility. Same as publishing a book (even if its self-published). Being a published author makes a huge difference. I've had people contact me from the other side of the planet asking for a consultation. All through books and blogs.