Work from Home

When you have made the important decision to work from home, a whole new world of possibilities for making money spring up.

Now you can earn an income online by making use of the Internet and its global reach to connect to potential customers or clients from around the world at the click of a mouse or a tap of your finger.

However, working at home on the Internet is not as easy as it may look at first glance. There is a lot to learn and a lot of experience to be gained before you'll see your first dollar.

That means putting in a good quantity of research, self-education and hard work to get your home based business off the ground and into a place where it will generate that highly sought-after income. It also means you will need to spend some of your income on growing your business, all of which I'll cover in this section of the website.

Getting Started

Where do you start? The obvious answer is "at the beginning" but if you don't know where that is, you're back to wondering where to start. Here's an outline:

work from home The first thing you'll need to do is to set aside a space for your home working environment. That should be a dedicated room with a door that you can close for privacy and not be disturbed by family members while you are "at work."

You'll need to populate that room with some general office furniture and equipment, such as:

A good sized desk
Document filing cabinet or drawers
A good quality, comfortable office chair that you will be spending several hours a day sitting in
A dedicated computing device (PC or laptop with physical keyboard and mouse is preferred)
A printer
A phone

You'll also need some office stationery and sufficient power outlets to power all the electrical equipment that will accumulate over time.

Once you have all the physical accoutrements of a working home office, you'll then need a working plan of what you intend to use it all for to make money.

The Plan

You may have a number of ideas in your head as to how you're going to generate an income from that office, which is good. You'll need to solidify those ideas into paper so that you can scrutinize them closely to see if they are actionable and if you can figure out how to put them to work.

A plan needs to set out what type of business you will do and how you will start and subsequently build it into a profitable concern. It should include things like finding and deploying suppliers, market research to ascertain if there is indeed a viable market for what you want to sell and a time frame for completing each phase of the business and starting the next.

It should also include how much money you intend to make each day, week and month as profit. This is important because you need to have a figure to work toward and achieve and then to scale up to greater things.

The Business

Ecommerce

One common idea that a lot of would-be entrepreneurs have touches on starting an ecommerce business. That entails selling physical goods via a website-based store like Shopify or Etsy where you keep an inventory in your garage, or a no-stock option called drop-shipping where a third part supplier produces the items to sell upon orders being generated such as print-on-demand.

This is similar to starting a physical store-based business without the brick and mortar store and all the overheads that go with it. It involves a steep learning curve to begin with but once it is set up and running, it can make a good profit as long as you can keep scaling it up.

Services

Another is providing a service to an established industry. This can entail such things as content creation, web development, application programming, search engine optimization (SEO), promotion and advertising etc.

Providing a service will involve attracting clients with established businesses that will require such of the services you may be able to offer. So you'll need to be able to present yourself as an expert in your field and sell yourself for a fair price (both to the client and to ensure you are paid fair compensation for your time, effort and expertise).

Affiliate Marketing

Another is affiliate marketing, where you promote and sell someone else's product for a commission. This is an option taken up by many beginner online entrepreneurs because it it relatively easy to get started with minimal assets and scaling to the highest level is possible.

Affiliate products that you can sell can be sourced from physical sellers such as big stores like Amazon or Wal-Mart for example. On the other hand you can sell digital products that come from companies like Clickbank or CPA (Cost per Action) companies like Peerfly or Maxbounty for example.

Pay Per Click (Website and Video)

Pay per click (PPC) advertising as yet another aspect of online money making that you can get involved with, leveraging the income potential of a giant like Google Adsense to make money from ads placed on your websites or videos (Youtube).

While in recent times the capability of making a lot of money from Adsense has seen a decline in website-based ads, the rapidly increasing side of PPC is in video. There are a number of Youtube millionaires that have mad their fortunes by simply making videos and attracting high numbers of viewers and subscribers to their channels.

Work Ethic

With a plan that suits your own working preferences and abilities in place and a means to make the money you want to make, the next aspect of making a success of working from home is down to your own work ethic. That means how determined and persistent you are at doing the work and how productive you make your time.

It's no good completing a couple of hour's worth of work then taking an hour off to watch videos or play computer games in your office. This is the worst kind of procrastination that will bring you nothing but failure!

Unless you have already surpassed your income goals for each day, there is not really a commodity called "spare time" that you can indulge in leisure activities or goofing off. Remember, you're not working for someone else any more. The buck stops with you!

If you can dedicate your working time to actually working, it is possible to enjoy a realistic work day with realistic hours that are productive rather than finding yourself locked in your office for 14-16 hours a day but seeming to get very little work actually done. Remember, just because you're sitting in front of your computer it doesn't mean you're working unless you really are working!

Lastly, you need to make a promise to yourself that you will spend your working hours doing the work that you need to do in order to make the money flow into your bank account.

Do all that and you can safely say with hand on heart that you are indeed working from home and making money online from your home based business that you built from the ground up!