Work at Home Based Business Blog

Stop Chasing Shadows and Make Money!

The title might give you a clue to what’s coming here and it isn’t pretty or even very nice, but unfortunately the truth often stings and this is a truth that really can’t be ignored. At least not by anyone who is actually serious enough to want to make money from the time they spend online. What is this latest revelation to put a dent in the vast majority of wannabe Internet marketers?

Its all about chasing shadows.

By that I mean latching on to this or that latest, most innovative idea that some self styled money making guru has put out in the hope it’ll go viral and make them a lot of money off the backs of all the headless chickens who will follow them blindly down a blind alley. Its a shame but a truism nonetheless that people will follow where someone they see as an expert leads. Even if they lead them to certain disaster, which is what most of the gurus tend to do to their flocks.

The trick is to recognize a shadow when you see it!

They are all around and most of them promise a lot while delivering little or nothing. The old saying “if it looks too good to be true, then it probably is” should be uppermost in your thoughts when confronted with a “great idea to make money online”. Chances are, that “great idea” will make money for its creator but will leave you spending a lot of time chasing that particular shadow in circles and not making any money from it yourself. That wasted time would have been better spent working on your own long term income stream that you know works because you have actual proof it works. And I don’t mean some hyped up sales page statistical chart which is probably faked or doctored in some way to make it look highly favorable. Like “I made $3,000 in a week” should really read, “I worked my ass off for two years solid and eventually one week I made $3,000… but my average is closer to $300…”.

Ok, that’s the reality of working online. Most people who do make money, only make an average amount and often its just enough to consider it a working wage. But if you can get to that stage, you can truly say, hand on heart, that you make money online. Because you do and you are living off it! Then you are at least qualified to show others how you do it, if you want to that is.

Think about this.

If you really did find a working formula that made you, say $1,000 a week online on average and it kept producing income no matter what, would you want to sell that idea to a bunch of noobs for $47 a pop and expect to retire on the proceeds? No way, man! It does not compute. It does not add up. And it does not make any sense to do that. I certainly don’t go shouting from the rooftops how I make my money online. Hell, I don’t want the competition taking a slice of my pie and neither would anyone who really does make good cash online.

So what does that tell you about 99% of all the “golden opportunities” that are rammed in your face every time you surf for ways to make money online? Yep, they’re not what they seem. They are shadows and if you go chasing them you will be disappointed.

So the moral of this article is to find something that works for you and work hard at making it work. Its the only way to truly make money online, as there are no free lunches and shadows are fleeting at best. Good luck and I wish you every success.

Terry Didcott

Make Money from Twitter for Free

Yes, it’s true; you really can make money on Twitter for free! I am not a big fan of Twitter at all. In fact, I usually tell people not to waste their time on it and I rarely use it myself. I definitely don’t think it is good for marketing an online business, which seems to be what most people try to use it for. So, in that way, I think Twitter is useless for making money online.

However, I have found a way to make money from Twitter without really doing anything and it’s 100% free. There’s a website called Ad.ly that is basically just a middleman between “Twitterers” and Advertisers.

They match you with potential advertisers based on your account settings. Then, they send out one tweet per day (from your account) from advertisers that you approve. You set the price that per tweet that the advertisers pay. They even suggest a price point for you based on your account just in case you don’t have a clue what to set it at.

It’s all incredibly easy to set up and only takes a few minutes. And as I already stated, it’s completely free. Once you join you really don’t have to do anything else except approve advertisers and accept/deny tweets. Very simple and almost entirely hands off income!

Three simple steps for getting started:

1) Create an Ad.ly account and authorize via twitter. Takes about a minute and it’s free.

2) Accept or deny the advertiser’s message from your admin dashboard when they come in.

3) Ad.ly delivers the message into your Twitter feed and you earn money.

This is the first “make money tweeting” system or any other “make money on twitter” product or service that I have EVER recommended. And there’s a good chance it will be the last.

Anyway, I am not one for hyping stuff up too much. You probably won’t get rich or even make a lot of money doing this unless you have a zillion Twitter followers and advertisers are willing to pay you big money. But it is an easy way for almost anyone with a decent amount of followers to make some extra cash. Give it a shot: Ad.ly

Four Key Manual Traffic Exchange Secrets Exposed!

Manual traffic exchanges offer a quick and easy way for Internet marketers to get traffic to their web pages and can be an effective way to market your online business website provided you apply a few key manual traffic exchange secrets.

If you expect to make money simply by posting your sales pages on a few traffic exchanges, you will most likely be disappointed with the results. Instead, think about why people surf traffic exchanges and design your campaigns around those factors. In most cases, they don’t surf them to read other people’s web pages but to earn credits to get their own pages seen. They will be clicking away from your page just as soon as the timer counts down and they’ve earned their credit.

Worse still, a lot of people use multiple browser tabs to surf several exchanges at the same time, which means that they won’t look at your page for more than a couple of seconds before hitting the next tap and clicking on another traffic exchange page.

That is why a simple squeeze page or lead capture page will work much better for you on traffic exchanges – it has a simple message that can be conveyed in a couple of seconds… Using splash pages instead of sales pages is one of the most important manual traffic exchange secrets…

Ideally the message should be targeted at the audience – TE surfers – and include an element of personal branding to achieve maximum effect. It’s simply a matter of squeezing the best possible results out of a cheap method of promoting an online business. You do that by focusing on where your audience is coming from and getting your name and image as well as your offer in front of them. Personal branding is another key secret to success on traffic exchanges.

Typically, a manual traffic exchange audience consists of people who are looking for ways to get as much traffic to their website as possible for little or no expense. Think about how you can appeal to that need when make your pitch on your lead capture page. Think about how you can get seen across several TEs and build up your personal brand at the same time. TE surfers might not take you up on your offer the first few times they see your page, but each time they see it, if it has your photo, or video and NAME on it, you will be impressing yourself upon them as the go-to person in your field… especially if what you offer is UNIQUE and offers a relevant solution to the typical TE surfer’s problems…

Here’s another traffic exchange secret…

**Not all traffic exchanges are equal!**

You need to know how many new members each traffic exchange attracts each week, and how much traffic each traffic exchange delivers. Popular traffic exchanges are capable of attracting a lot of new members every week, bringing hundreds of fresh eyes to your splash pages.

Seek out and join the most popular traffic exchanges because they are the ones that are likely to be growing fastest and will have the largest membership base for you to appeal to. You can find out which are the 100 most popular traffic exchanges by checking the Affiliate Funnel Rank Report.

Finally, you will need to track the performance of your splash pages across the traffic exchanges. If you don’t track your results you will have no way of knowing what works and what doesn’t. If you don’t track your results you can’t systematically improve on them.

That is the “secret” that most TE surfers miss. However, a new development has made it easier for every TE surfer to track their results from now on…

Just recently, traffic exchange experts Paul Kinder, Tim Linden and Jon Olson launched a free service called TE Toolbox which includes a splash page creator, rotator and tracking service all in one convenient place, completely free of charge at the basic level. I have been playing around with TEToolbox and find the free service is perfectly adequate for my TE campaign needs.

If you do your research, appeal to your target audience in a way that suits the medium where they are to be found and track your results, you will have mastered the secrets of manual traffic exchange success and will have set yourself up for TE marketing success!

Good luck!

David Hurley
Grasp-The-Nettle.com

5 Ways for College Students to Make Money Online

There are several college students interested in finding out how they can earn additional money on the Internet. College students do not have a lot of time because of classes and studying. Assuming that college students need money as quickly as possible, blogging is not always a feasible option due to the amount of time and commitment it takes to maintain a blog. So, how can college students make extra money online? Here are a few suggestions:

1. Emails, Online Surveys, etc. There are a number of different companies that have hundreds, even thousands of emails that need to be read every day. Of course, the top executives of major businesses do not have hours every day to spend reading emails. The solutions they find is outsourcing to other people, like college students looking to make a little extra money. You should be able to find several companies willing to outsource such tedious tasks as online surveys, product testing, mystery shopping and more.

2. Freelance Writing. Can you string a sentence together? If so, then you have what it takes to earn extra money online as a freelance writer. You do not have to have a degree in English or journalism to succeed. In fact, if you are able to write in a way that is easy for others to read, they you have everything you need, You can find work online by signing up for job posting services and finding projects that you can do.

3. EBay. College students have been quite successful with selling stuff on eBay to make a little extra cash when they need it. As a college student, you most likely have stuff that you can sell to other college students. In addition, other college students have stuff that they may be willing to let you sell on the online auction site for them and earn fair commission. You can also find dropshippers or wholesalers that are great places to find products for you to sell and earn money on eBay. Garage sales and estate sales are also great places to find stuff to sell that will not cost you a lot of money up front.

4. Online Tutoring. The pay for this type of service varies from one college student to the next. Some companies are available that you can sign up with if you prefer. In fact, online tutoring is a service that is in high demand these days, and getting more and more popular by the minute. If you enjoy helping other people to learn, online tutoring may be the perfect way for you to make money online. Depending on the service you decide to go with, you can expect to work from a couple of hours or more every week.

5. Online Juror. Do you know what lawyers do to practice and hone their talents? Places are available online that stage mock court trails so lawyers can get the practice that they need. If you become an online juror, you can expect to make as much as $60 depending on the complexity of the case. There is no guarantee that you will get a case, but it is worth a try if you need to earn a little extra money.

Dena White writes about how to obtain an online undergraduate degree and how to make money online from home.

Working At Home is Bad For Your Health!

When I used to drag myself to someone else’s office five days a week I used to dream of working at home! The thought of not having to get dressed, not having to rush to get out the door, not to having to sit in traffic was enormously appealing to me.

The reality, as so often in life, is a little different. There are the slight annoyances – suddenly the bill for toilet paper and coffee goes through the roof – but is probably off-set by the savings on lunches and snacks at work. There is the fact that you are the one that gets the door-to-door salesmen and the telephone survey “opportunities”.

The single biggest issue I had, working from home and working online, was health. Basically building my own business was hugely absorbing and I could work for hours and hours and not get up from the computer – in fact barely change position. My body hurt – I didn’t have full-blown RSI but I would certainly have developed it had I not noticed and changed my keyboard and mouse positions around to stop myself hunching over the keyboard quite badly.

I got lonely too – although I have always vowed loudly and often that I didn’t go to work just to meet people – not going to work I certainly found quite isolating. My poor partner came through the door every afternoon to a barrage of chat as I practiced using my voice again! That only lasted about a month or so and I got used to it though. It was tougher for me because I was living overseas at the time, but then I am also quite self-contained so I don’t need to have social contact every day. If you do I seriously suggest you think twice about working from home – it is a very different environment than working in an office.

Then one day you look up and find you don’t fit your jeans anymore. Even if you don’t currently walk or cycle to work, even driving involves a few more calories moving between car and buildings than moving from bed to home office, and all too often, via the fridge. If you don’t want to put on weight when you start working from home you really are going to have to make an effort to exercise. I am lucking that I take ballroom dancing lessons three days a week. Dancing to me is all the fun parts of exercise without any of the boring bits – and thats the key you need to find something physical which you enjoy doing to get you away from the computer and active. The human body is not designed to sit inactive in front of a screen for hours on end. If you don’t plan to get some exercise into each day your working from home lifestyle will be far from healthy.

Lis Sowerbutts is passionate about ballroom dancing and has competed for over 10 years with her partner. She has tried just about every form of partner dancing from salsa to tango to rock and rolls so she decided to start a website all about dancing in Wellington, New Zealand her home town.