Managing Your Life When
You Work From Home
At the beginning of this book, I pointed out that not only
does my Internet business bring me a decent chunk of money each
month, it also brings me time. Now that my system is set up, all I
have to do is check that my affiliate partners are sending me cash,
suggest the odd joint venture to a partner, and stay in touch with
my customers. I rarely spend more than three hours in front of my
computer each day.
But it wasn’t always like that. It took a lot of effort and a
lot of work to get into the position I’m in now. When I first
started, it was a bit of a struggle to organize myself. My first
website took ages to launch and while the other ones went up
quickly, my family went days without seeing me.
Let’s be frank, if you don’t set up your business properly
right at the beginning, you’re going to make your life much
harder—and your income much lower.
The problem is that until now, you’ve always thought of your
home as a place to relax and the office as a place to focus and
work. Now you’re going to have to focus at home—and that’s not an
easy shift to make. You need to keep the same rhythm (without
stopping to watch your favorite daytime soap!) and the same kind of
discipline you had when you had to commute every morning.
The first thing to do is to give yourself an office. I’m not
talking about a laptop on the coffee table or a corner in the
library; I mean a proper room with a door you can close and a desk
full of goodies: from a computer with broadband to a place to put
your safety clips. If you don’t have a spare room to start with,
then use your bedroom. But if you’re serious, think about finding an
office once your business gets running.
The next thing you’re going to need is a schedule—a realistic
one. This is one of the greatest challenges when you begin working
for yourself. At the end of each day, I’d make a list of all the
tasks I was going to do the next day. If I got half of them done, I
was lucky. I spent weeks frustrated and grumpy.
Once you get a feel for how long each task takes you, whether
it’s approving a new site design, planning a new marketing program
or answering customers’ emails, set yourself a timetable and keep to
it. Turn off the radio, shut the office door and get to work! And at
the same time, don’t get annoyed if the day ends before your work
does.
Of course, all work and no play makes Michael a dull boy. And
it doesn’t do much for his wife and kids either.
When you have a family as well as a business, time in the
office is time away from the family, and it’s hard to know
when to stop. You can easily find yourself in front of the computer
at midnight and all weekend too. Sometimes working from home seems
to be a double-edged sword. If you spend too much time with your
business and not enough time with your family, the most important
relationships in your life can suffer. But if you spend too much
time with your family and not enough with your business, the success
of your business can be in jeopardy. And, since your business is
likely your main source of income, its success can also determine
the wellbeing of your family. Tricky.
Fortunately, it doesn’t take a superhero to make the work/
family division work. All it takes is some patience, a little savvy
scheduling and a lot of willpower. In fact, if you have the time to
read the following tips, then you have the time to do them!
Not easy to do, especially when you’re just starting. But if
something doesn't fit into your schedule and impedes on another
activity you've already planned, just say "no." For example, if a
client calls at six in the evening and pleads with you to have a
teleconference with him at seven, but your son's basketball game
starts at the same time, you’re allowed to reschedule. Clients
actually like to work with people who sound busy.
How often have you said: “I wish I had my own business. Then I could
take a day off whenever I wanted.” Now you can do it! Chances are,
you’ll be working more days with your own business than you would
when you were employed by someone else. If you don’t take the
weekends off from your business, make sure you take at least one day
a week for no work and all play. Then, on top of that, schedule one
day per month for a mini vacation.
For one day, do no work whatsoever and spend all day with your
family. That means no computer (unless you’re helping your kids
with homework or playing games), no business phone, no fax, no
meetings, and no paperwork for one entire day. Have fun! I do.
If you learn how to successfully make deals with your family and
clients, you'll see how simple it is to balance your time between
both. Running a home business and a family can be tricky, and that
frustration does no one any good. It’ll cost you clients and create
a frosty atmosphere in the house.
If a client, for example, gives you a week to complete a
project, and contacts you two days before the deadline saying she
needs it right away, don't let your frustration show. Offer her what
you’ve got and tell her you’ll send the rest later. She should be
able to meet you halfway. The same is true of your family.
And the end result of managing your time properly should be
fostering the right attitude for business. Here are six ways to
build a positive attitude.
1.
Be Committed
It took me a couple of years to reach the
point I’m at now. I could have given up any time before I got here
and I had a million different reasons for doing so. But I knew what
I wanted and stuck it out. That’s the first key to success.
2. Accept
Challenges
Being your own boss and owner of your own
online business can be scary and a bit intimidating. It takes guts
to leave a 9 to 5 job and start your own online empire. It takes
guts to have a dream and to go for it. You ultimately determine
whether your business succeeds or fail.
3. Be In Control.
Keep your mind focused on important things.
Set goals and priorities for what you want to do and accomplish.
Develop a strategy for dealing with potential problems—and when
those problems surface, feel confident in your ability to handle
them. The worst you can do is fail.
4. Don’t be too Critical
There is no use criticizing yourself once
you’ve made a mistake. Saying “I should have landed that account or
handled that situation differently” is not going to make any
difference at all. It’s just going to drain you of your energy and
discourage you. Simply learn from your mistakes and move on.
5. Practice Makes Perfect
And stop worrying about getting everything
right. It’s not going to happen. If Time Warner can buy AOL, you can
create a website that bleeds cash. Just keep trying.
6. Ask for Help
You want to work for yourself not by
yourself. There is nothing wrong with asking for help. Don’t think
you’re incompetent simply because you can’t do it all. Professionals
hire other professionals to do the job properly. Don’t be afraid to
bring in a specialist when you need it.
If I have to warn you that there’s nothing more important than
getting the work/family balance right, then the chances are you’re
going to learn the hard way. I went into this for the money. But
there’s no question that the greatest benefit my business has given
me is the extra free time I have to spend with my family. I’m sure
if I put that time into building more websites or creating more
products, I’d make more money.
But there’s more to life than money.
Conclusion: All You Need To Skyrocket
Your Web Profits
In this e-book, we’ve looked at a whole range of different
ways to make money on the Web. We’ve talked about search engine
optimization, affiliate programs, joint ventures and even e-books
and software programming.
It should be clear that at the center of the book—and at the
center of all your online marketing efforts—is traffic: hits to your
site by potential customers. That’s what all the marketing chapters
in this book are about, bringing people to the site so that as many
of them as possible will buy. As you build your online business,
concentrate on marketing opportunities that provide targeted
traffic.
You should also concentrate on programs that are multi-level
in nature such as affiliate programs. If you are doing all of the
work yourself, your income will be limited by your time and
resources; when you bring others into your program, your income
potential becomes unlimited. Affiliate programs increase the ways
you can turn your traffic into cash, and that’s what money-making on
the Web is all about: buying traffic and earning from it.
It should also be clear that the most lucrative opportunities
are those that have a repeat customer component. It costs less to
maintain a customer than to find a new one. That means it’s
always smart to take opportunities that generate repeat business.
It’s also worth creating a newsletter that keeps your customers
informed, in touch and in your revenue stream.
And the more revenue streams you have the better. On the
Internet, as in the real world, chances come and chances go—online,
they just come and go a lot faster. If you are diversified, you are
more likely to survive market dips that would otherwise shut you
down—and that will certainly already shut down many of your
competitors.
It should be clear now that a lot of what people have said
about online business is a load of old bunkum. You can see that it’s
possible to make money; you can see that you can do it by yourself,
right now; and you can see that whether or not you succeed is
entirely up to you.
You can also see that the following myths are simply untrue:
1.
Your site has to have millions of page views to make money.
It doesn’t. Small sites with good conversion
ratios can make more cash than large sites with lots of
click-through traffic.
2.
Ad revenue and affiliate revenue don’t make money.
They do, if you know how to use them.
3.
It’s easy to make money: just put up a website and the money
will roll in.
If only that were true! Making money on the
Web takes time, effort and investment.
This is a newly emerging but extremely targeted and effective
form of promoting your online business. Consumers download specific
software from a contextual marketing network organizer (such as
Gator Corporation, Hotbar, Save, or WhenU) at no cost and install it
on their desktops. When the consumer is about to make a purchase for
a specific product or service or is placing a search query for that
item, the software will beam advertising messages from suppliers of
that product or service, offering some incentive to the consumer
such as discounts or promotion offers. Through this facility, the
advertiser (supplier) is getting an opportunity to promote his
offering to a targeted consumer and that too at the point of sale or
when there is an intention to buy. Thus contextual marketing offers
a highly targeted marketing tool that connects the supplier with a
genuine lead and spurs transaction.
The effectiveness of contextual marketing can be seen from the
fact that response rates and conversion rates are from 5 to 20 times
higher than the results from conventional online advertising.
There are hundreds of websites emerging online everyday. Some
survive, some don't. Of these new businesses, many are one-person
bands. Some are partnerships as well as a handful of others have
formed a company with the view to operating 100% online.
The part which makes or breaks a business like this is the
website management and maintenance. Don't assume that once the site
is online, your work is completed. If people are to return to the
site, it will need to have fresh content in order to make the site
"sticky". Since this is the most important part of your online
business it is very important to be able to keep the administrative
tasks to a minimum. One of the best ways to achieve these objects is
to automate all possible marketing as well as administrative
procedures of online selling.
The ultimate in automation is when all automated functions can
be pre-programmed to be carried out at regular intervals with an
in-built scheduler. You can go on holidays and have everything
carried out for you in your absence as if you were sitting at your
terminal for the duration. There are many E-Business Automation
Systems available that automate the entire web marketing procedure
along with many of the redundant administrative tasks. This is like
running your business on “Auto Pilot”. One of the most popular tools
is discussed below:
QuickPayPro.com
QuickPayPro is a remotely-hosted ecommerce automation system
that includes a shopping cart system, secure, real-time credit card
processing, digital product delivery, affiliate marketing system, ad
tracking, mailing list manager and email marketing autoresponders.
This system is available at a reasonable monthly cost and is
easy to set up on your website. Some of its other features are:
-
Sell digital or "real" products and services.
-
Single-product order form or full shopping cart version.
-
Secure, real-time credit card processing, with or without a
merchant account.
-
Supports payment gateways such as 2CheckOut, PayPal, PaySystems,
Revecom, Authorize.net, QuickCommerce, EMS and SkipJack.
-
Digital product delivery with automatic download link expiration.
-
Two-tier affiliate marketing system with real-time statistics for
both your affiliates and yourself.
-
Option to export affiliate commission payments to upload and pay
via PayPal, or import into Quickbooks or other applications for
automated check writing.
-
Ad tracking system and sales calculators for web site and email
advertising.
-
Unlimited email mailing lists.
-
Unlimited sequential follow-up autoresponders.
-
Mail merge personalization.
-
Customizable order and thank you pages to fit your site's look and
feel.
-
Remotely-hosted - Manage account using any web browser.
The fact is, just because you can make money on the Web, it
doesn’t mean that the streets of the Internet are paved with gold.
Like any opportunity, there are scams and hazards. As you set up
your Web business it’s important to stay alert, use common sense,
and keep your feet firmly on the ground.
First of all, don’t be tempted by get-rich-quick schemes that
promise you instant wealth with no investment of time or effort.
There are lots of these on the Internet. One of the most popular are
those emails that fly around every now and then from someone
claiming to be a wealthy political dissident who’s having trouble
getting a huge sum of money out of their (normally African)
country. They’ll ask you to open an account put some money in it
and they’ll add the rest in return for a fat commission.
Lots of people have fallen for this scam. It’s real. And real
stupid.
As soon as someone tells you they can make you rich—all you
have to do is send them some cash—be sure they’re trying to scam
you. The Web is just like the real world: if something looks too
good to be true the chances are, it is.
And just like the real world, It takes money to make money.
The Internet has provided a very economical way to do business and
there are some inexpensive Internet marketing options; but marketing
is imperative to the success of an online business and productive
marketing campaigns do require some cash down. That might be
money for search engine campaigns, payment for a programmer or a Web
designer, or even just the fee for your hosting company, but you
will need some money to get started; you get nothing for nothing.
I’m not going to promise you that there’s no risk involved
here. There is. The size of the risk depends on how much you want to
invest. You can start small with a cheap hosting company, a site you
create yourself and so on. You’ll still make money like that; it
will just take you a little longer. Alternatively, you can splurge
right from the beginning by getting a pro to create your site and
marketing it hard from the get-go. It’s entirely up to you.
Me, I started small and spent more money as it came in. How
you do it will depend on how much spare cash you have and how
confident you feel.
þ
Keywords and phrases
Have you developed the key words and phrases that will ensure good
placement in the search engines?
Remember, you can think up keywords yourself, you can see which key
words your competitors are using, or you can simply pay a specialist
company to find them for you. Once you’ve submitted your site to the
search engines in all the keyword categories you want, it’s crucial
to monitor your traffic carefully.
þ
Optimization
Have you identified what you need to do to ensure that your site is
fully optimized? Do you have the means or resources to effectively
complete the task?
Once you’ve figured out the keywords, you have to decide where to
put them and how. You also have think about link exchanges to
improve your ranking even more. Remember, the more sites link to
you, the higher your position in the search engines.
þ
Content
Have you developed content that is not only attractive to your
potential clients, but also search engine friendly? Do you have
content and tools other than your main text that will assist with
search engine ranking and drive visitors to your site?
Content has to contain persuasive sales text with a fine scattering
of crucial keywords. You also have to update it as often as
necessary—not so often that it gets in the way of your business, but
often enough to keep fresh traffic pouring in and the site
interesting and attractive.
þ
Traffic
and promotion plan
Do you have a plan for promoting your site and driving traffic to
it?
There are all sorts of ways you can bring traffic to your site. In
this book, I mention just a few of them—the ones that I’ve found the
most effective. When you set up your Internet business, you should
have your entire promotion campaign planned out in your mind. You
should know which methods you want to use, and what to do if they
don’t yield the results you want in the time you want.
þ
Target
Market
Have you identified your target market? Do you know how to reach
them? Do you know what they want? Do you know how to attract them?
The more finely you target your marketing, the greater your sales
rate will be and the higher your profits. Those high profits begin
with a clear understanding of who your ideal audience is. Make sure
you know your market before you even build your site, and keep it in
mind as you prepare your promotions.
þ
Time
Are you prepared to put in the time required to make your site a
success? When the site launches, will you be ready to roll?
The biggest investment of time comes before the site is launched and
in the period immediately after it launches. First, you have to do
all the research. You have to understand how you’re going to break
into your market, and know exactly what you want your online
business to do. Once your first sites are built and launched, you
have to do all the marketing. Only once it’s up and running will you
be able to relax, move into monitor mode and begin thinking about
your next opportunity. How long that takes depends on how much time
you invest at the beginning and how successful your marketing
efforts are. It usually takes a few months.
þ
Advertisers and Affiliates
Have you identified advertisers and affiliates who will promote your
site, your products and your services?
You can start looking for advertising opportunities and affiliate
programs before you even launch your site. The more prepared you are
when you launch, the quicker you’ll be able to move from inception
to income.
þ
Opt-In
Email
Have you identified features for your site
that will build a marketable opt-in email list? Have you though
about what you’re going to put on your pop up and how you’re going
to manage the list when you get it.
The people on your opt-in email list are like
a little pool of potential customers—and repeat customers. The more
people you can bombard with your marketing material, the more money
you’re going to make. Ways to trap email addresses should form a
part of your site design.
þ
Monitoring
Have you identified monitoring features for your site that will
provide you with information about your target market? Do you have
a way of knowing who has visited your site? Do you have a method of
collecting data from your visitors to help you improve your site?
The Internet changes constantly. One week, you can have top rankings
and a sales rate to die for; the next week, your site be down on
page fifteen with traffic made up of spam from Romania. You have to
keep track of your traffic, and be prepared to make changes to your
marketing plan.
þ
Joint
Ventures
Do you have an idea who you could partner with to offer
complementary services that bring real benefits to you, your partner
and your users?
Joint ventures are your partnerships for success. They allow you to
pool resources with other entrepreneurs to bring real benefits for
all of you. Start by talking to the people who send the newsletters
you like to read each week. Then move out into people who provide
complementary services to the ones you offer. As you build up your
business, keep your eye open for new opportunities all the time.
þ
Vision
Do you know what you want to achieve and what
you’ll do when you get there?
If your goal is only to make money, you can
achieve that in your first week on the Web. Most of us have bigger
goals than that though. Whether you want to be the Bill Gates of
online marketing or simply set up an automated revenue stream that
will bring in a constant flow of cash with very little maintenance,
you can do all that on the Internet—as long as you know what you
want.
We have looked at various strategies and options related to
Internet Marketing. One of the key factors while devising your
strategies is your cost budget and the ROI you get from it. In this
guide, we have studied a number of different techniques for
marketing your product or service. The importance of each option is
closely linked to your own objective, and consequently your budget
in terms of management time and expenditure.
Marketers would be interested in knowing the results of any
campaign and most often the result is desired in terms of increase
in company revenues. Name recognition, brand image creation and
other outcomes are important; however the bottom line is sales. ROI
should be able to determine your website’s conversion rate in terms
of the ability to persuade your visitors to take the action that you
desire them to take. At the same time, the success in terms of
increase in sales depends on several other factors such as the
competitiveness and value in your product or service offerings and
the quality of your website to induce the visitor to take action.
Focusing your marketing campaign is crucial to ensure maximum
ROI. Your marketing strategies should be able to target prospective
customers that are most likely to buy your products. You have to
introduce the right product to the right person.
Perhaps the whole promotion cost for small or midsize
companies may come to a minimum of $2500 plus the consulting and the
services cost and the production costs. Remember that budgets for
marketing will just zoom up as you go along the way. In some cases
the final cost could be three times the above number or even more.
Whether this budget is right or not, depends on what you perceive as
the market potential for your offering. You may choose to pursue
only a few of the strategies mentioned in this guide and still get
reasonable success.
The key is to make use of some of the tracking tools mentioned
for each of the strategies. For instance, tools that measure the
traffic coming to your website and identify the source of the
traffic. In other words, tools that tell you what search engine did
the visitor come from, or which ad/affiliate program directed the
visitor to your site. Moreover tracking tools can also tell you what
the visitor has done online, including page visits, time spent,
actions taken (relevant for e-commerce sites or query/contact forms)
and so on.
Proper analysis of the data available is required to relate
the traffic history to the revenue results.
Being a successful Web entrepreneur doesn’t require massive
amounts of investment or a genius idea. It simply requires some
initial time and effort. It requires an understanding of how
business works on the Web, and it requires the drive to succeed.
Are you ready to begin?
God
Bless You And Your,
 
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