Workism.com

When working at home, it may be hard to manage your time wisely.  There is always something else that needs to be done - both with your business, and around the house.  Here are some tips to help manage your time better.

• Set certain hours.  Even if you can’t work 7-8 hours in a row, try to set a specific schedule so you know during those hours you should be working on your business, and not doing one of the many other things that need to get done.
• Make lists.  If you make a list the night before, you will know exactly what you want to accomplish by the end of the next day.  This will help you make sure you get certain things done, and also help so you don’t spend all of your time on your business.
• Multi-task.  If you’re waiting for someone to get back to you for your business, it could be a great time to do the dishes.  If you’re in the middle of doing the laundry and are waiting for the clothes to dry, it could be the perfect time to write that email you keep putting off.

It can be difficult to manage your time well when you are working at home.  If you try to do a few of the above items though, it can be easier for you to make sure you get the most out of your time.

Starting an online business can be great.  You can work from home, or anywhere else for that matter.  All you need is a computer or laptop, and you are set.  If you know you want to start an online business, but aren’t sure yet what type to start, here are some ideas:

•  eBay - If you like to sell things, this is a perfect business.  You can get stuff to sell at garage sales, flea markets, stuff around your house, or make things to sell.  You could also start a business where people drop off stuff for you to sell on eBay, and you get to keep a portion of the profits.
• Create an online store - If you like to sell things, you can create an online shopping cart and sell things online.  If you don’t have anything to sell, you can find a dropshipper, where you won’t have to deal with any merchandise at all.  You will just pass along orders to a company, and they will do the shipping.  You get to keep the profits!
• Sell a service - If you have some knowledge that others don’t, you can sell your services online.  For example, you can start a tutoring website where you help others with certain subjects.  You can also write for others, program, or many other things that people need but don’t always know how to do themselves.
• Create your own product - If you know a lot about a certain topic, you can create your own product on it.  If you create an ebook, audio, or video teaching someone something, you can sell it online.  If you have a program set up to automatically give the customer the digital product once they pay, you can start making money 24 hours a day, even when you are not around!
• AdSense - if you have a lot of knowledge about something, you can create a website sharing that knowledge with others.  You can then put Google AdSense on the website, and earn money when someone clicks on a link.

As you can see, there are many different types of online businesses you can start!  Hopefully that will give you an idea on how to start.

Once you decide that you want to start a home-based business, you still have a lot of choices in what type of business you want to start.  Here are a bunch of ideas that will hopefully help spark an idea that you will be interested in.

• Crafts - If you are creative, you might consider creating jewelry, clothing, candles, or anything else, and sell it.
• Web Based Business - If you love being on the computer, there are many types of online businesses you can start.  You can create your own products, or sell someone else’s products.  (I’ll talk more about that tomorrow.)
• Writing - If you love to write, there are a lot of businesses you can start from home that involve writing.  There is the obvious, such as writing articles for magazines, or trying to write a book, but you can also write content for websites, or help ghostwrite things for others.
• Travel Agent - If you love to travel, you can become a travel agent from home.

What you should do is first think of what you enjoy doing (since you’ll be spending so much time working on it!) and what are you are good at.  Once you do that, hopefully it will be easier to figure out what type of home based business you want to start.

If you’ve started a Squidoo lens, you might have noticed that there are a lot of different choices, and that you can be rated really well, or have a real low lens ranking.  Here are a few tips to help you get around your lens better, and that could help you get a higher ranking:

Make changes to your Squidoo lens every few days.  Even if you don’t really have any new information to put on it, at least edit it and change around the order of your modules.  Frequently edited lenses do better than ones that are created and then never changed.

Have some modules that require interaction, like polls, or a guestbook.  If others comment on your lens or vote on your lens, you will be rated higher.

If you have an RSS feed, you might want to put it into your lens.  That way people can find out about your blog, and you can get traffic from your lens.

Hopefully some of these tips will help you with Squidoo!

When starting your own business, sometimes it takes a little while to get things off the ground.  During that time, you might go out to eat a little less, not buy certain things that you would like, or vacation less, just until things pick up.

One way to get a little something extra with just a few minutes of work is by joining MyPoints.  They give you points in exchange for reading and clicking on their emails, which have offers from different advertisers.  You can also shop through them, but even just by getting and clicking on their emails, the points add up.  Once you get a certain amount of points, you can exchange them for gift cards to many, many places, such as Barnes & Noble, Macy’s, Bloomingdales, Circuit City, Olive Garden, and so many more.

It’s really a great way to be able to “splurge” a little while things are tight.  While you might not go out to dinner often, when you get a $25.00 gift card, you can go out one night without thinking about it…or you can go buy a nice book about starting a business.  You can even use the points towards a vacation, such as Hilton HHonors points, or Hyatt or Marriott certificates. 

It only takes a few seconds of reading an email and clicking on it to get the points, but MyPoints does add up, and I’ve gotten quite a few gift cards in the past few years through them.  It does take a little while to add up, but I would say I get at least 2-3 $25.00 gift certificates a year, and love it!

While this doesn’t exactly fall under the category of running your own business, it is a nice way to pick up a little bit of extra income.  There are many companies that offer Mystery Shopping jobs.  Here is a list of a bunch of them to get you started.  It’s really great.  You get to go to a store, restaurant, hotel, apartment complex, etc… and buy something, eat, or whatever makes sense depending on the store, and what they want you to check out.  You then report back to the company, letting them know about the service you received, the food (if it’s a restaurant), and things like that.  In turn, you get a small fee, or a product (if a store), or food (if it’s a restaurant).   Sometimes you get the food and a small fee, which makes it even nicer.

While it in no way could replace an income, it is a nice way to get a free meal, or pick up a few extra dollars every now and then.  You can choose the ones you’d like to do, based on their availability. 

Personally, I enjoy doing the restaurant ones.  It’s nice to get a free meal every now and then, plus I like the fact that I can report back on the service to make sure that the restaurants are offering good service.  I have to admit though, more often than not, the servers are all very kind, and I have very rarely had a problem while doing a mystery shop. 

So while this can’t exactly replace an income…while you are starting up your business, here is a way to get out for a little while, and earn a little bit of money.

You may have heard about Squidoo lately.  It’s a social website where you can make lenses on any topic, and others can take a look at it.  It’s really great for two things.

First off, you can have multiple ways to monetize your lens, and you can make money.  So you don’t even need a web site in order to make money!  There is Google AdSense, where you will get a portion of the money earned.  You can also add modules where you can earn money.  Some of these modules include Amazon products or other stores.  By spending a few minutes creating a lens, you can earn some money.

Secondly, this is a great place to advertise your websites and get traffic.  If you add links to your website, or an RSS feed, you can get people to go to your websites!

Setting up a lens doesn’t take much time, and doesn’t require any programming knowledge at all.  So it makes sense to spend the time, since you can get a lot of out it!  While I created my Squidoo lenses recently, I have already gotten some traffic out of it, and am sure I will be seeing more in the future!  In the future I will give you tips on how to get your lens to be ranked higher.

JP Schoeffel also really knows what he is talking about when he talks about AdSense, and about making money on the web.  He is the creator of Niches-In-A-Box, where every month you get 15 websites, each related to one another, so you only have to buy 1 domain name.  You also get 8 different ways to monetize the site, so it is a lot more than just AdSense!  Besides all of the articles and the template, each month you also get a special report to sell!  You also get an autoresponder, and messages you can put in the autoresponder to help get people back to your site.  I have seen a lot of JP Schoeffel’s work, and he really goes out of his way to provide great products.

Another great thing is if you aren’t ready to spend any money, he will still help you!  At the bottom of the Niches-In-A-Box Page, there are links to some of his other sites, one of them being the Ethiccash Free Internet Marketing Club.  As a member, you can get free sites that he creates that you can put up!  He also has a forum, and other information.  You can’t ask for better than that!

If you want to start earning money online and just don’t know where to start, there are many places you can get help.  See some of the programs I recommend on the sides of this page.  One I really recommend in particular is Joel Comm’s Instant AdSense Templates.  While there are hundreds and thousands of products out there, I only recommend a very few.  Joel Comm is amazing when it comes to making money with Google AdSense.  He knows exactly how to do it, and in his Instant AdSense Templates, he offers you 50 templates a month, plus 250 PLR articles. 

What does this mean to you?  It means that even if you don’t know how to program at all, you still can have up to 50 websites a month.  It also means that if you don’t know what type of content to write, you don’t have to!  You can use these 250 articles each month to populate your sites.  This is a very easy way to get multiple websites up a month, and will let you make money quickly.  With this, you can spend your limited time promoting your websites, instead of worrying about creating them!

The best types of sites to use Google AdSense on are ones that get a lot of traffic!  The more people who see the ads, the more chance you have of someone clicking on them.  If you have a website that gets a lot of traffic, you can try putting Google AdSense on it, and see how you do.

If you do not currently have a website, and aren’t sure what type of site to create, know that content sites usually do well with AdSense.  If you have a blog, or write a lot of articles, these would be great to put AdSense on.  As people read your articles or posts, they might click on some of the ads. 

In the next post, I will let you know of some ways to get a head start if you don’t have the time to create your own web sites.