Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Why Would You Want To Work From Home
At lot of people say they like the idea of working from home. However how many people actually take the plunge? Sure, working from home sounds great but it's not all a bed of roses. There are advantages and disadvantages with working from home. It's like anything else in life. There's no such thing as perfect.
Advantages
People like the idea of working from home so that they can spend more time with their family. Perhaps you have young kids and want to be able to drop them off at school in the morning and then pick them up when they finish. This is certainly one advantage.
Another good thing is that you won't need to use your car as much. A lot of people spend a lot of money driving to and from work. Cars are expensive. They use up fuel, need insurance cover and then there's the potential parking costs. By working from home you won't have these hassles.
If you are working from home and you're also self-employed you can put a lot of things down as business expenditure such as envelopes, stamps and possibly car repairs. An accountant will be able to advise you what you can and can't claim for.
Disadvantages
Because you work from home, friends and family will think that it's OK to phone you up whenever they like and ask favors from you. Just because you are working from home doesn't mean to say that you can be at everyone's beck and call. You need to make it clear that you are at home working. You're not just sitting around doing nothing.
Separating your work and home life can be very difficult. If there are a lot of things you need to get done then it's very easy to start working in the evenings and weekend in addition to working a regular 9-5 work pattern. This can mean you will be overworked and won't be able to enjoy life as much as you can.
Because there's a lot of responsibility in being your own boss, you can end up thinking about things when you go to bed. Because your mind is overactive, you can have trouble getting to sleep. The result is that you will wake up feeling exhausted.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Make Money Writing
There are loads of ways you can make money these days. The internet has been really great at providing money-making opportunities for us all. It doesn't really matter what qualifications we have or how much money we have to invest. There is always a way that allows us to either earn extra pocket money or a full-time income.
Writing is perhaps one of the easiest ways to make money. In this article the area of non-fiction is what will be covered when it comes to writing for money. Some lucky people might be able to do well in fiction however there is a much greater demand for people to write informative articles.
If you are just starting out you will need to think about what you will price your articles at. If you are in India then charging a minimum of $3 for 500 words might be a very good pay-rate. However if you are in America you will find it much more difficult to earn good money at those rates. Normally Americans will be able to charge more however finding clients who are willing to pay a lot more than that will be difficult.
At the end of the day clients are looking to get articles for as cheap as possible. And if an Indian writer can do this then that's fine. Some clients are more fussy and want articles by someone who is a native English speaker.
If you still want to pursue a career in writing articles then signing up for accounts with companies such as Rentacoder, Elance and Odesk is a good idea. Make sure you put plenty of information in your profile about who you are, what qualifications you have. Having a portfolio of articles is excellent too. Some freelance writers specialize in a particular topic whilst others will write about everything from Aardvarks to Xylophones. Make sure you make it clear what category you fall in.
There are other services that freelance writers provide to their clients such as:-
Spinning - Customers often want words in their articles spun with different variations. There's a special format that this comes in so for instance if you want to spin the word good you would do this: {good|great|excellent|fantastic|amazing}. This allows the client to create multiple unique articles from just the one article. There are a couple of software programs on the market that allow you do this much easier. These are Magic Article Rewriter and The Best Spinner.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Writing - Most clients want their articles for publishing on their websites. This means the articles should be written with the search engines in mind. Keyword density is important so make sure you know what the client wants and also write about the topic with as many keywords as possible. So if you are writing about dogs you should also include the words, canine, pooch, pet and puppy.
Blog Posting - Some clients want to do as little work as possible and therefore might ask you to publish the articles to their blog. Most blog as created in WordPress (WP) so learning how to use WP is a good idea.
Make Money Blogging
We all dream about ways that we can make some extra cash, even while we sleep. Strange as it may sound it is actually possible to do. You just need to have the know-how. If you blog you're not going to earn money for the actual act of sleeping, but there are methods of earning money whilst you are asleep. Another way of describing it is to say that it's passive income. Basically you do the work once and then you keep getting paid. Does this sound interesting? Sure it does! If you do a search for "make money blogging" you will find all sorts of interesting topics discussed. What you need to be careful is that a number of people make their money by selling your products and services that don't even work very well. They just want you to part with your money to make them rich.
A lot of people want to make money blogging but don't want to spend any money on it. You can easily spend quite a bit of money in terms of buying a domain and then getting hosting. If you don't have any money to begin with it can seem like a lot to be spending and you don't even know if you will be successful at it.
If you are looking for a free way of making money blogging then you can go over to Word Wolf and create an author account. You then set about writing "how to" articles and then you talk about what products and services can be used to help these people with whatever problems they need to resolve. At first you should aim to write 10 articles and then you can sign up for Google Adsense if you don't already have an account.
The great thing about writing for Word Wolf is that the website already has a lot of authority in the search engines meaning you'll be able to get traffic to your articles a lot easier than if you bought a brand new domain. If you buy a brand new domain it can take many months for the search engines to trust you enough to start sending visitors your way. You see there are folks out there who just want to make as much cash as possible for as little work as possible. The result is that they create websites that are just junk and of no use to searchers whatsoever. So basically search engines are very wary of any new websites popping up.
Hopefully you will be able to see the benefits of blogging to make money. Please note, when I say make money blogging, I don't mean you should write about how much you hate football or what you had for dinner last night. You are just going to write about how people can resolve their problems. Perhaps you could write about getting rid of dog pee from the carpet or how to remove a dent from a car door. That sort of thing.