Work At Home

In a previous post here at Work At Home, I said I was going to expand on the point of getting your blogs ranked in the search engines and how to do that. Well, here goes…

If that wasn’t enough, you also have to be thinking about keywords. What? These are the terms that people are going to key into Google in order to find your site. Here’s a timely tip. DO NOT START A BLOG ABOUT HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE! There are too many people doing the same thing and to get anywhere, you will have your work cut out for you, so its better to avoid that one for starters and concentrate on keywords that are less competitive.

Take a product that people are likely to buy online, or a service that people are likely to search for. Anything that people need. Where there is a need, there will be websites providing a solution or in some way filling that need. Then look at the competition. Are there millions of competing sites for that keyword phrase, or are there just a couple of hundred thousand? The lower the number of competing sites, the better chance you have of competing yourself.

Then create your main blog targeting this niche. Write your posts with originality and include a liberal smattering of your main keyword as well as some longer related keywords (known as long tail keywords). Here’s an example: Say you decided to target the finance niche (not really recommended as it is also highly competitive). If your main keyword is “Refinancing Credit” then you could also look at similar terms, such as “refinancing home credit” “refinancing personal credit” etc.

Then create several similar blogs on more general aspects of finance and write posts that contain a link to your main site. Make sure the link is anchored, or don’t just link to the url of your main site, but include the keywords in the anchor text of your link. This is important in the nth degree! This will improve your main site’s chances of rising in the SERPs because it has authority. Without the keyword anchor, you will not pass on authority for the keyword, so it is important that you do so!

It will take time, granted, because the search engines and in particular Google are quite slow at counting inbound links for a site, but it will happen and when it does, your site will have authority enough to launch it to wards the front page of the search results, which is where you want to be in order to attract sufficient traffic to make money online from your main blog.

This is how to work at home and how to make money online from your efforts. The process is a long difficult one, but once you get past the initial setting up and promoting stages, the rewards will start to be reaped if you’ve done your work properly.

Isn’t that worth going the extra mile for? See you next time.

Terry Didcott
Work at Home

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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 to look 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 have a surplus.

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

Terry Didcott
Work at Home

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