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Tag: online business
Working from Home: The Advantages (or Disadvantages?)
Company employees often fantasize about working from home. With cheaper commuting costs, fewer distractions and no boss, working from home seems like the American dream. Of course there are advantages and disadvantages with everything, and working from home isn’t for everyone. But just in case you’re considering starting a business from the comfort of your own home, here are some of the advantages (and of course, disadvantages) you can expect.
Boss-Free
The boss is one of the biggest challenges of any job. When you work from home, you are the boss. While it’s nice not to have to answer to someone else, you still have to answer to someone. Your clients need results by a pre-determined deadline and bills are due on certain dates. You are now directly responsible when things go wrong.
However, if you’re one of those people who would rather lead instead of follow, or if you have a problem with people telling you what to do, you will thrive as your own boss.
More Affordable
Without costs associated with commuting, like transportation costs and daily lunches, working from home may be more affordable than traveling to the office. Of course you will be responsible for paying for everything that a business needs to survive. Utilities, Internet access, advertising, cost estimating software and meals are now all on you. There is also the issue of taxes.
Unless you telecommute and receive benefits from the company, your tax and insurance costs increase. As an independent contractor, you must pay self-employment taxes, contribute to Social Security and pay the full amount of your health and life insurance policies. Without matching funds from your employer, these expenses quickly add up.
On the bright side, you can wear whatever you want (no pants? No problem!) You can work wherever you want (including the comfort of your own bed), and you can make your own coffee, breakfast, and lunch, which is way more affordable than eating out in the long run.
Flexible Schedule
This is one of the greatest advantages of working from home. You can set your own hours and work at your own pace. Client meetings, project deadlines, bill due dates and balancing work and family require you to conform to a time clock in order to make money, but you will still have more flexibility working from home than you would in an office.
As long as you keep your clients happy, you are free to schedule your time as you please. If you want to sleep in until noon every day and work a little later into the night, that’s fine! Perhaps your spouse works early and someone needs to take the kids to school every morning—you are free to do that.
Fewer Distractions
This one is tricky. At the office, your co-workers, the telephone, the water cooler, boss demands and client meetings distract you from your work. It’s easy to think that someone who works from home can just lock his or her home office door and work distraction-free.
In reality, different distractions plague home-based workers. Personal calls, dirty dishes, computer games and family responsibilities can steal time during the day. Likewise, friends and family often think that it’s okay to bother you because you’re home. This all depends on how crazy your home life is. If you don’t have children and you live alone, you will have minimum distractions. If you do have children and you work at home, you may have a few more distractions. The main thing to remember is that even though you’re at home, you’re still at work. Once you balance that out you’ll learn how to manage your distractions.
Like everything else, working from home definitely has its advantages and disadvantages. The real question you need to ask yourself is do you think you would thrive better in an environment where you are fully responsible for yourself and your company, or do you need that office mindset to be productive. Everyone is different, you just need to figure out where you would produce the best you.
Guest Poster Byline: Michelle is an aspiring writer and blogger with a passion for the Internet, specifically social media and blogging. She loves how social media connects people across the globe, and appreciates that blogging gives her the opportunity to voice her thoughts and share advice with an unlimited audience.
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How To Make Money Online – Your First $100k From Blogging
Most people, when they try to make money online, overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.
That is why I often tell brand new bloggers to focus on the first $100 rather than the $100K figure.
That said, how was it possible, that we could create a brand new blog and only 30 days later, have already earned over $5000?
Today’s post will answer that question.
The IncomeDiary Blueprint for Making Money Online
Idea —> Take Action —> Build a Brand —> Create Content —> No Leakage Rule —> Blog Funnel System —> Free eCourse —> Product —> Money
All great websites start with solving a problem.
Step 1) How To Come Up With Website Ideas | Solve a Problem
At IncomeDiary we focus on the make “money online niche”.
Making money online is something that interests a lot of people, from many different demographics.
As soon as we started we had people ask us how to start their first blog.
And once they had started their blog, how could they make money from it?
Some even asked us to build websites for them.
There was a PROBLEM that people wanted help in SOLVING!
From the responses we where getting and our own research it was clear there was a demand.
But how do we make money from this demand?
In the case of IncomeDiary we knew a lot of our income would come from affiliate links.
That is where we started.
If you are a first time blogger you will need a domain, hosting, blog design, email list management.
Fortunately there are plenty of affiliate programs for services like this and in any case we needed all these services ourselves.
As an example if someone signed up for a domain, hosting and a blog design through our affiliate links, we would earn $100.
All we needed to do was convince 50 people to follow our advice and we would earn $5000.
Better still we where recommending products and services that we where using ourselves!
In blogging as in all business having a plan is essential.
A clear vision, backed by definite plans, gives you a tremendous feeling of confidence and personal power ~
All we needed to do now was estimate / work out how much traffic we would need in order to accomplish our goal for month one!
We are simplifying the calculations here a little – not everyone will need a domain or hosting for example – some will purchase more services, some will purchase less.
But for the purpose of planning these where good starting points.
Of course your niche may be entirely different from Make Money Online – but for just about every niche there is be affiliate programs you can promote to your readers.
As an aside, our sister site – ExpertPhotography.com covers a completely different niche to IncomeDiary – but when it started out, it used exactly the same strategy as IncomeDiary to get its first income – great content combined with affiliate income!
Step 2) To Make Money Online – Take Action
Now that we had an idea, we had to create a website.
This is an easy step, something that only took a few hours. I go over this in detail on this page.
Step 3) To Make Money Online – Build a Brand
Branding isn’t something a lot of people think much of.
But branding is important. It’s what someone thinks about your website.
When people think IncomeDiary, we want them to think, authority website that teaches people how to make money online.
To achieve this, we did a few things:
Domain Name
You want it to be easy to remember, easy to spell and you want it be a .com.
When I create a website, I don’t begin until I have found a domain that I think is good enough.
Sometimes it makes sense to buy a domain that has already been registered from a Domain Broker.
For example, IncomeDiary.com was bought for $100 from a blogger.
And we paid $2000 for our sister site – ExpertPhotography.com – via a domain broker.
Blog Design
If your blog doesn’t look good, it reflects badly on your brand. I’m not saying you have to spend a lot of money, we didn’t.
We started with buying a premium theme for $80 and getting a custom logo created. We kept the website simple and easy to understand.
It’s also important to pick a good color scheme for your site. When someone sees the green color we use, I want them to think IncomeDiary.com (I also wanted them to think money!)
Create Top Lists (read before you scroll past this)
Now I know most people know what a top list is, but you need to know what posts we created, why we created them and how they influenced our brand.
Some examples of the top lists we created:
- 30 Top Earning Blogs
- 30 Top Earning Websites
- 50 Most Influential People in Blogging
- 20 People Who Started As Bloggers, Who Are Now So Much More!
Creating these posts, made us stand out as an authority on the subject.
If we are the website to decide which bloggers are the most influential, then we must know a lot about blogging.
Interview Experts
Interviews don’t get us a lot of long term traffic.
What they do though, is associate our website with experts in our industry.
We are not going into detail on conducting interviews in this post – but read any of our interviews and you will have interview templates you can follow.
Step 4) To Make Money Online – Create Compelling Content
To make money, we firstly had to get traffic. To get traffic, we had to firstly create interesting content.
We have spoken a lot about creating content.
The strategy for getting a lot of traffic from blogging is simple – create amazing content.
Look at this post as an example:
- The subject of the post is something people are looking to read about
- Over 2000 words (average page on first page of good is over 2000 words)
- It’s easy to read (checked spelling, grammar, post styling)
- Headline draws the reader in
- It provides real value
- Post images add to value of the post
The 10 posts that received the most traffic in the first few months were all top list articles.
Looking back, their was very little traffic going to any posts that were not top lists or interviews.
One big benefit from writing top list posts and interviewing authorities in your industry, is the amount of links and social media shares you get. Often when we write a post saying that someone is one of the most influential bloggers in the world, they want to link to it on their site, because it helps with their own brand.
All these links and shares tell Google that we are a great site and they should rank our posts higher in their search engine.
You can see how our traffic would spike every time we published a top list on our site:
Step 5) How To Make Money Online – The No Leakage Rule
The no leakage rule is when you create a website in a way that either a reader signs up for what you are promoting, or they leave your website.
Let me explain further:
The goal of IncomeDiary is to get people to subscribe to our email list. Now to best accomplish this, we need to keep distracts to a minimum.
That means having no banner ads, no blogroll, no top commenters links and so on…
If a website visitor is leaving our website to look at an advertiser, they are not signing up for our email list.
It’s the same reason we don’t want to link to guest bloggers at the bottom of blog posts, because if our visitors are checking out their website, they are not signing up for our list.
Step 6) Make Money Online – Blog Funnel System
This is all about getting your visitors to go where you want them to go, or shall I say, how to funnel them to your desired location.
The goal of our blog is to get people to subscribe to our email list.
That is how we make the majority of our money.
To accomplish this, we get the majority of our subscribers through a popup using OptiMonk. Read this post on: how we use OptiMonk.
The longer someone stays on the site, the more likely they are to subscribe and for us to make money.
Step 7) Make Money Online – Free eCourse
When we started IncomeDiary, not a lot of bloggers were giving incentives for signing up to a mailing list.
Those that did, often gave free eBooks.
I liked the idea of a free eBook but there was one problem.
I wanted readers to take action and if they received to much information all at once, they would feel overwhelmed and would be less likely to follow my guide.
So instead, we decided to split up what we wanted to teach and give it to subscribers over 7 days.
We called it: 7 Day Free eCourse To Creating Your First Profitable Blog
I would explain to everyone signing up that “You may have to spend some money if you want to make some money” – not a lot of money just a little if you really wanted to be serious about blogging. (Less than $100). I included special offers on domain names and offers on hosting such as get your first months hosting for 1 cent and coupon codes. (People love coupon codes)
This worked amazingly well.
Pretty much one of the reasons it worked so well was because I showed my readers exactly what I’m doing. I was not asking them to do anything that I had not done myself.
It’s also important to point out that I was solving a specific problem. I wasn’t simply trying to help people become better bloggers.
Setting up a Autoresponder
Once people opted in and joined my eCourse, the auto-responder would start sending them an email every day for a week.
The course was very much step by step – “Day One, installing your blog” – “Day Two, adding a theme and customizing your blog,” – Day Three: monetizing” etc
Every day subscribers would look forward to the next addition. Often I would get people email me saying, “Hey, is there any chance I can get Day Two now, rather than wait until tomorrow?”
Subscribers took action straightaway. I told them, “Look, take action on this today, and then you’ll be ready to do tomorrow’s assignment.”
Marketing Your eCourse
Another huge benefit of having a squeeze page, or a separate page on WordPress dedicated to your free course, is people have a link they can share with friends if they wish to recommend it. It is great when people Tweet things like “Check Out IncomeDiary’s Free Blogging eCourse” and link to this page.
This also meant I could mentioned this page in my blog posts – for example if I did a Top 30 Bloggers list I would finish it with a link says: “Follow in their footsteps, check out my free course”.
The signup page became so popular that it was the third most visited page on the site.
Step 8) Make Money Online – Selling Your Own Product
Once someone has gone through our eCourse, we want them to be thinking, WOW, that was amazing, I can’t believe that was free.
If they think this, then when we tell them that we have a paid membership site, they can only imagine how good it must be.
When creating products to sell on IncomeDiary, we think about what our readers most want.
The two biggest struggles of new bloggers is getting traffic and making money.
For us, getting traffic has always been easy. And if it’s easy for us, surely we can make it easy for our readers. So we created an eBook called Traffic Domination which is a blueprint to getting over 100,000 visitors a month from top list articles.
We also use to offer a training program called Site Profit Domination which showed our customers in detail how we were monetizing our blogs.
Step 9) Making Money Online and Reinvesting
The reason for a lot of our success is the way we reacted to making money.
When we make money, we reinvested it. We may have started our blog with a small budget but as soon as we had the money, we made it a lot better.
I was not entirely happy with the blog theme, so I spent sometime customizing the design. This included a big change to the homepage – allowing us to display a large opt-in box.
We also used some custom graphics on the side-bar to direct visitors to our best revenue producing pages.
We even bought advertising for IncomeDiary, which at the time, was not something we would normally recommend with a new blog, but earnings per visitor was so good, we could afford to buy traffic.
One final note on making money online.
I love this quote from Paulo Coelho …
It is essential to know your visitor numbers and your earnings per visitor!
For some, attracting the first 1000 visitors will be the big goal and for others it will be attracting the first 1,000,000 visitors
Set yourself high, but realistic targets and go all out to achieve.
Hoping and Guessing is not a business strategy – but FOCUS and CONCENTRATION is.
What you focus on, EXPANDS!
Take the time to build your brand, build your following and build your website into the premier site in its niche.
Making $100,000 PA is a Big Goal – but it is not an impossible goal.
Believe in you – believe you can do it.
It is also the strategy you need in order to set yourself for the ULTIMATE Pay Day!
That magically day when you eventually sell your business.
Good Luck!
The post How To Make Money Online – Your First $100k From Blogging appeared first on How To Make Money Online.
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