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This post is part of a (badly neglected) series of interviews which profiles some of the more creative and innovative ways to earn a location independent income.

The posts in this series are not intended as “How To…” guides but are mainly to show you how creative you could be when it comes to thinking about ways to earn a location independent income.

Whilst some of the examples may be completely unsuited to you and your skills, perhaps they’ll get your creative juices flowing and open up unexplored avenues and lines of thinking when it comes to your own personal and professional ventures.

Today’s interview features a successful software developer-turned-entrepreneur. At the LIP meet-up in London, we spoke to quite a few web/software developers struggling to set up on their own and become fully location independent.

If that’s you, you’ll probably want to pay close attention to what this man has to say…

Can you briefly introduce yourself.

My name is Rob Walling and I’m a web developer turned entrepreneur. I started writing software professionally in 1999, started a consulting firm “on the side” in 2002, and went fully independent in 2006. At some point in 2005, in an effort towards location and time independence, I started building and acquiring my own software products and revenue-generating websites.

In 2008 I stopped accepting new client work, and at this point earn a full-time living from several software product and websites I own (what I call my product portfolio).

Why and when did you become location independent? And where have you lived, worked & travelled to since being able to work from anywhere?

I wouldn’t have opted to make the move to location independence, but my wife was getting her PhD and that brought about four moves over the course of six years (two of them cross country).

I realized as we were closing in on the first one that I didn’t want to be looking for a job every couple of years so I set a few goals that involved producing a full-time income from consulting. Within a few months I had my first project and within a year I was self-employed.

I’ve moved 10 times in 10 years, all within the U.S but my locations have been far from exotic as they have been dictated by my wife’s schooling. Cities include Sacramento, Pasadena and Fresno (all in California), New Haven, Connecticut and Boston. I’ve also traveled quite a bit to areas in Europe, Ghana, Costa Rica and Mexico. We’re currently planning a trip back to Europe in 2010.

Can you explain what you do for a living and how you earn the income to live wherever you want? How did you get started doing this?

My goal for the past two years has been to create a specific lifestyle through a portfolio of one-person technology businesses (software products, web applications, e-commerce sites, information product, etc.).

At any given time I run between 5 and 10 revenue-generating websites. I own a great piece of web-based invoicing software for small businesses called DotNetInvoice, run an online community for software developers/entrepreneurs called the Micropreneur Academy, and own a handful of smaller software products and content websites in various niches.

I also recently sold two solid sites to reduce my weekly time commitment and re-invest in higher earning ventures; one was a beach towel retailer (all product was drop-shipped), and another was a WordPress theming service for designers. I now have that cash in hand, waiting for my next acquisition.

I stumbled into this approach to entrepreneurship about five years ago when I launched two of my own websites, purchased two more, and learned the ins and outs of internet marketing the hard way. After four or five years my product portfolio is in a place where I can leverage it to provide time for me to create and acquire new products.

Your business/academy is focused on helping solopreneur software developers be successful. What made you focus on this market?

I’m part of the solo software developer market, so it’s a natural fit. I’ve been down the road that solopreneur developers are about to travel in getting their first (or second) product out the door. It’s a no-brainer to put together information that can help them reach their goals because it’s what I’ve been doing for the past five years for myself.

Secondly, there’s a dearth of marketing focus in the software development community. As developers, we tend to focus on the features of a product or website since that’s what we are familiar with. But to turn a product into a business you have to know how to market it.

That starts with product selection and leads into internet marketing: Google AdWords, search engine optimization, social bookmarking, blogging, and the myriad of other online marketing tools…topics we cover in-depth in the Academy because we know that’s where the greatest need lies.

What are some of the successful software launches you’ve helped spawn?

We have a Micropreneur Academy Product Showcase that showcases products launched or acquired by Academy members and there are another 6-8 I’ll be adding to this list in the next month or so.

Examples of products are:

• Orchestrate – A hosted workforce scheduling application
• BidSketch – Proposal software for designers
• Flip-Start – A foreclosure listing website
• HotNameList – A domain name idea engine
• ThoughtMuse – Online mind mapping software
• CashWaltz – Hosted family expense tracking

What top tips do you have for developers (or anyone else) wanting to replicate your success?

Find someone, anyone, who’s done what you are trying to do and learn from them. Trying to figure things out on your own will literally take years and there’s no reason to spend that much time when there’s help available.

It doesn’t have to be something like the Academy, but a structured community that provides accountability and scaffolding as you proceed can mean the difference between success and failure.

The next tip is to stay focused. Once you find a small, and I mean small number of blogs, books and experts that you trust, ignore everyone else. Find out who provides high-quality content in your niche and go on an information diet outside of those resources. Be brutal with your time management.

Another tip is to never build a product without first measuring demand. The market always comes first; your product is last. Once you’ve confirmed there’s demand (and then tested that demand), you can think about starting to build it.

Building a software product is 400-600 hours of work from start to finish…that’s a lot of time to waste if there’s no one out there to buy it.

And finally, one thing we talk a lot about in the Academy, is don’t be afraid to outsource. Finding good designers, programmers and virtual assistants has made the difference between success and failure in most of my businesses.

What have you found to be the biggest challenges in being location independent (and nomadic)?

The lack of personal connections is difficult. Moving every 6-8 months for the past 3 years has forced many long-distance relationships, and knowing we would be relocating means we had a hard time investing in friendships.

The other challenge is that all of our family is back in California so we had many long plane flights with our two-year old back to visit the grandparents. Living closer to family would not only save time and money, but a bit of sanity as well.

What’s your best advice to anyone just getting started in setting up a business they can run from anywhere?

The first is to go niche. Find a niche market with a pain point and cater to it. Solve a problem for that market so well that people can’t help but tell their colleagues about your product. As many have said before, it’s better to have 500 raving fans than 5,000 lukewarm associates.

The second (this may be obvious) is that the internet is the place to be. Learning online marketing will help you no matter what you do for the rest of your life. Learn Google AdWords, search engine optimization, social bookmarking, blogging, and the myriad of other online marketing tools.

They will open up your business to hundreds of millions of potential customers, and any business you want to start will need the same skills.

Finally, learn to outsource. This doesn’t mean you have to outsource every part of your business and work 4 hours a week, but don’t get into the habit of doing everything yourself. Outsourcing is a skill that you should learn as you’re starting up, not once you’re in over your head.

Virtual assistants (VAs) are a great way to tame the overwhelm of starting a business. You may never meet them face to face but they can save you tens of hours a month (if not more). I have two different virtual assistants who save me literally hundreds of hours each month.

The more you outsource the more time you have to focus on the important, revenue-generating aspects of your business like marketing, networking, building partnerships, and so on.

In hindsight, is there anything you would have done differently or anything you wished you’d known before you became location independent?

I wished I’d known that it was possible for someone like me, with a wife and a young child, to separate myself from the standard location-dependent, job-dependent 9 to 5 lifestyle. Reading the 4-Hour Workweek, which portrays the globetrotting of single guy Tim Ferriss, only helped to cement in my mind that you have to be young and single to do this kind of thing.

But the constraints have nothing to do with your marital status or your location. The constraint is needing to be at a certain place at a certain time. Once you’ve broken that chain it doesn’t matter if you move to a new state, province, country or hemisphere. What matters is your mindset.

Once you taste the freedom of location independence you will never go back.