I Want to Work from Home… Where Do I Start?!

It seems the newsletter really struck a chord with people this week. YAY. (You are subscribed right? It’s once a week awesomeness). I’ve gotten quite a bit of email. Many of them started something like this…

Jackie, I really really want to work from home. I just don’t even know where to start!

They’ve gone on to say… there’s just so many options and so many things I can do, how do I know the right place to start?!

That, is The. Truth.

There are a million ways to work from home online, and most all of them work. The question is though… whether they will work for YOU or not.

Which is exactly where I start my reply to these emails.

It’s not about picking the “right” place to start, it’s about picking a strategy that’s going to be right for you. That’s the most important thing. If you pick an internet marketing strategy, just because some knucklehead guru told you it was THE thing you should be doing… it’s quite likely you’ll fail.

What you have to do is figure out a strategy that is going to play to your strengths, be fun for you, fit in with your family life, and lifestyle and work for you LONG term. (Because working from home online is NOT fast money ~ no matter what the highlighter splattered sales pages try to tell you).

So what are the things I suggest you look at before trying to make a decision?

Here’s a few.

Do you like to write?
Do you like to interact and get to know other people?
What things would you do in life, even if no one paid you for it?
Can you sit in one spot and do tedious/boring/monotonous things over and over (and over) again?
What types of products do you use/love?
Do you have a hobby/interest that you could talk about to others… does it have products/services that could be sold in conjunction? for example… cooking ~ recipes/books/kitchen gadgets/tools.

Why would I have you ask yourself these kind of questions?

Because every online strategy is a little bit different and will require different skills as well as play to different temperaments.

Blogging = long term writing about 1 topic on 1 blog. It’s going to take building a community around your topic to get traffic. It’s going to take you getting social and using social media services like Twitter and Facebook. You can monetize with advertising, products, services (affiliate marketing) ~ you can also create your own products/services as well. Which means you’re going to have to be willing to see yourself as an “authority” on a subject and be willing to put yourself into some products or services. (This is my preferred method of business because it suits me/my personality well)

Affiliate marketing with Niche sites = well, it can look a lot of different ways actually. You can have one big site that offers a bunch of different but related things, or you can create a bunch of smaller sites that are all unrelated. The key difference in this method though is that your traffic will mainly come from the search engines. When you’re going for search traffic it means doing a lot of keyword research and spending a LOT of time over a long period of time building links. Building links is monotonous, and tedious and VERY boring… so it takes a certain kind of someone to be able to do this and make it work long term.

These are the two biggest ways I’d suggest someone totally new get started. There’s still a lot to do once you make the decisions, but setting up a strong foundation ~ including knowing that the strategy you’ve chosen is something that will work for you is key to long term success.

If you have no clue… and still feel lost but ready to get started, I might suggest we work together a little. 🙂 I’ve just opened up my Momentum Mentoring program to the public and it might be just what you need to figure things out and get started. I’m here for you. If you’ve got questions, feel free to ask in the comments and I’ll do what I can to answer. 🙂

3 Responses to I Want to Work from Home… Where Do I Start?!

Marion Roach Smith says:

July 20, 2011 at 3:03 pm

You are so right on about authority and writing. Memoir — which most blogging is, actually — is about territory, and that territory is staked out along the perimeters of our expertise. We all have many areas of expertise, women in particular: sisters, mothers, wives, partners, home owners, pet owners, writers, bill-payers, board members, athletes, and more. But to succeed in a blog, or as a memoirist, we must write from one of these at a time. A hard thing to know. You clearly know it, and we thank you for the reminder here.

- Jackie Lee says:
  
  July 20, 2011 at 3:57 pm
  
  Marion,
  Thanks for stopping by! I totally agree with your comment… I keep trying to encourage people to figure out what their site is about ~ and then write about that. In the beginning that seems really tough to do. While it’s fairly easy to wrap your head around the idea a book is “about something”, it’s so easy to feel you’re going to “miss” people if you write about 1 thing on a blog. It seems much easier to “reach everyone” by talking about a bunch of different things. However, the opposite is actually true. You end up really really connecting with just the right people, the people who are really interested in that one thing and those right people end up sharing you with more right people.
  
C @ Kid Things says:

July 21, 2011 at 12:19 am

Blogging is a lot more work than most who have just started to jump in realize. The money doesn’t come overnight, if at all. It is actual work, of networking and socializing and sales and oh yeah, writing. In the end, though, it’s worth it when it happens. Or at least I hope it is. I’m still not there yet, either.