Archive for Work at Home
Teaching for Fun and Profit
Posted by: | CommentsIt’s taken me a while to figure out what I want to do with my life. After obtaining a master’s degree in engineering and doing structural engineering for four years I quit and went into IT. I would commute downtown, travel to other cities sometimes which involved flying, stay in hotels, rent apartments, you name it. I never really enjoyed the office/cubicle environment.
At times I’ve been fairly depressed, wondering why I have so many issues with the typical work environment, when others seem to be okay with the situation. One of the key thoughts I had was ‘There’s got to be a better way.’ I’ve never accepted the status quo, which is good in many ways but also bad as you tend to be unhappy this way. During the last few years I started to work at home for my IT contracts and it’s worked out great for both the client and myself. I knew I was onto something!
During this time I’ve realized that I really enjoy working at home, as well as learning and sharing that knowledge with others. I like teaching and getting feedback from others. And to sell anything online these days requires teaching even if you do this via your own blog. I also wanted to work from home, be able to live anywhere (not dependent on major city for employment) and have more freedom. Freedom to take my dog for a walk during the day, take a nap and work into the evening if I want.
I can’t think of anything better than an online business, especially in the area of information and affiliate products. The online learning market is huge and growing exponentially. Distance learning even at universities is very popular – people don’t have to commute or quit their jobs to study online. Plus there’s no office space to lease, no equipment and no employees!
You can easily create your own information products such as ebooks, videos, software demostrations and podcasts and sell them online. If you’d like to learn how to do this I highly suggest checking out Teaching Sells which has just re-opened for a little while (a while back they closed their doors to new members for many, many months). I was a member of Teaching Sells until I absorbed all the content and got my own sites up and running.
You not only learn how to create content in a variety of multimedia formats, how to organize your content, how to set up your sites (or get others to do it for you), how to market your site online, how to outsource content creation or any other part of the business, and how to joint venture with others (even if you don’t have your own content – find an expert and partner with him or her).
One of the big benefits of teaching online is the scalability and potential for much larger income. If you get paid by the hour, say working downtown, or teaching music one-on-one, you will be limited by the number of hours in the typical week. By creating content once, you can resell this information again and again even when you’re sleeping!
How to Get Started Being Self-Employed
Posted by: | CommentsWhether you want to supplement your income, or work at home part-time or full-time via data entry jobs or freelance writing jobs, or selling your own or other’s products and adsense sites you can consider yourself to be self-employed. While that can be scary in some situations (you don’t have a day job for example), it is a really exciting way to go, and will provide you with the freedom that most of are looking for.
Building any type of business or getting more work requires persistence. In other words, there are a lot of mental challenges as you try to grow your income from home. In most cases you need to educate your market, by writing lots of educational content for them, or even selling your own (or other’s) educational content via how-to courses or membership sites. Here’s a great free guide (blog post) on how to get started being self-employed from ZenHabits.
Leo talks about whether you should quit you job or do this on this side. It’s a personal choice of course. I’ve chosen to do this full-time from home for various reasons, including the fact that I love working on my online businesses and writing so much I don’t want to do anything else.
Why You Should Sell Other People’s Products
Posted by: | CommentsWhen most experts talk about how to make a living by selling things to others, it is usually implied that you are selling your own products or services. For example, musicians are taught to sell their cds, and possibly selling merchandise such as T-shirts and mugs. Many entrepreneurs struggle to create and sell their own products.
Often times the lack of ability to make sales comes down to the facts that either there is no market for your product, or you don’t have enough traffic coming to your website. When you have a product-focused mindset (as most of us do) you focus too much on creating the product (the cd, the information product, etc) and not enough time on the marketing side of things. In other words, most of us aren’t great marketers or salesmen. So doesn’t it make sense to hone our sales and marketing skills before we spend too much time on product creation?
By becoming an affiliate and selling someone else’s product, the emphasis automatically becomes on finding a market and getting traffic to your website. The other genius of doing affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to worry about taking payments and delivering the product. This is all done by the vendor. And not to mention the ability to work at home.
So how do you find a market? Well, for starters you need to find products that are already selling. With some of the affliate networks like Clickbank, they organize products into categories such as Health and Wellness, Business, Entertainment, etc. You can drill down within a category you’re interested in (and ideally have some knowledge of) and find a product that is selling. In the case of Clickbank they have a variable called ‘Gravity’ which tells you the relative success of the product in the market.
Once you have your product you need to promote it on your websites, blogs and social networks. The key here is to determine the keywords that people are searching for in your niche of choice. This is how most people will find you, via searching by keyword phrases. You need to put these keywords in your titles, descriptions, tags, and content. Keep in mind there is a lot of competition these days so you’ll want to find keywords that aren’t super-competitive. When you search for the phrase in Google, try to find phrases that have well under 100,000 competing webpages (shown at top right of search results), but still enough searches to be useful. Combine this with using the Google Keyword tool, to make sure there are enough searches.
I like to think about affiliate marketing this way: “People are already buying billions of dollars worth of products online every year. So therefore I will try and get in between every transaction by referring people to those products, that I truly believe in and recommend to my readers.”
For an in-depth online course on affiliate marketing, check out Opportunity.com or check out this book on Affiliate Marketing.
