Work At Home

When it comes to working at home for a living, you often have to call into question the viability of running a home business and all that entails. That’s assuming your income is not as comfortable as you would like or want. Of course, if things are going along swimmingly, then you probably have no need of a post such as this, so I guess its really only being written to help those who need a boost.

So what should you look at in terms of the level of success of your own home business?

Primarily, you need to be aware of the gross income first and foremost. This is what will determine if you need to look at other areas to make any changes or not. Now, the actual dollar value of that income will have different consequences according to where you live. A country with a high cost of living will mean, obviously that you’ll have to have a high gross income in order to live comfortably. Conversely, countries with a lower cost of living will allow you more room for movement. The actual level will therefore be determined by how much you need not just to live, but to cover all costs and leave some aside for a rainy day.

That leads us on to your home business net income, or that dollar amount that you are left with after all the business expenses have been deducted. That includes the costs of domain hosting, domain purchase and registration renewal, software purchse or lease, fees from banks and online payment systems such as PayPal etc. It also includes your real world expenses such as office supplies, stationery, computer expenses or renewal, printer consumables cost of Internet connection etc. Then you have to factor in the cost of your home office space such as a proportion of the mortgage or rent, rates, electricity, telephone etc. Then there is setting aside a portion of your income to cover taxation.

What is left is your net income, or disposable income. Disposable income is no longer accounted in your home business, but is spent nonetheless on things like food, running the car, schooling expenses for the kids, buying clothes, entertainment and all the things that are a part of everyday life.

What’s left is for holidays, savings etc.

If your home based business net income exceeds all your normal outgoings and leaves some in reserve for savings, then you can consider it successful on a moderate level. If it exceeds this and generates a large volume of excess cash, then of course it is successful on a larger scale.

If, on the other hand your home business net income falls short of your living expenses, then you need toloo at ways to bolster it and improve its income levels in order to make up the shortfall and then to place you into a situation where you ahve a surplus.

That’s something I’ll look at in a future post.

Terry Didcott
Work at Home

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Work at home SEO is really all about getting your website or blog onto page one in the SERPs. The last post Work At Home to Make Money Online, went a long way to explaining how to make money online by working at home once you’ve got the traffic showing up. So now its time to talk about ways to get that traffic to show up!

Getting your website to feature on page one of the search engines results pages, in particular Google as it generates most of the traffic, is a process known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There are two sides to SEO, which are known as on-site SEO and off-site SEO.

On-Site SEO

On-site SEO involves optimising your website or blog so that when the search engine bots come calling and crawl all over your pages, they like what they see because its easy to crawl (logical interlinking of internal pages) and it is relevant. Relevancy is all about including your main keywords that you want people to find your site with in the search engines in your content, in the titles of articles and blog posts, in your page header and in your site header. Focusing your site on one particular theme, such as this one is focused on “work from home,” is always a good idea. This makes it easier for the search engines to place your site in their index in the most relevant place so that people will find your site.

Off-Site SEO

Off-site SEO is all about getting links to your site. The more links you get, the more authority that the search engines place on your site and the higher in their index you will rise. The more authority that a link has, the more authority your site will get. Its fairly simple, yet off-site SEO is largely ignored by most website and blog owners. That’s a shame, as off-site SEO probably accounts for 90% of your total SEO.

Did I hear that right?

Yes you did. In fact, with enough high quality links to your site, you can rank number one for your keywords and your site can lok like total crap and be so un-optimised it’s untrue! If you think I’m yanking your chain, just do a search on “credit cards” in Google and then look at the number one, two and three sites.

You’ll find they have very little relevant content and their pages are not particularly well optimised. What they do have, to get to the top of what has to be one of the most competitive, tough niches there is, is a boat-load of quality, authority links. Nothing else.

So if you want to get to the top of your niche, that’s what you’re going to have to do as well. But don’t just get any old links. The best ones come from authority sites, that are relevant to your site and your keywords are anchored in the link. A few of them will help you to outrank a site with hundreds of unanchored links, or links from blog comments or social sites.

So think about that if you work at home and want to do well in your online business with your website or blog. Get onto page one of the search engines and you will attract traffic that will convert into dollars. That’s about all there is to know. The rest is just fluff!

Terry Didcott
Work at Home

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