Work at Home Based Business

Archive for the ‘Guest Authors’ Category

If you’re the type of person who knows how to listen and give credible advice, then becoming a certified life coach can be a great way to make easy money from home. The work is extremely interesting, particularly if you enjoy working for yourself from home but miss having daily contact with other successful people. A benefit of being a coach is that you are always pumping people up, elevating their expectations and helping them see what is right with their world. This type of enthusiasm is infectious, and everyone I know who has become a life coach reports that they are happier and more productive than ever before, on account of being so intensely focused on motivation and performance.

There are a few different accrediting bodies that offer life coaching certification, but the most widely recognized is the International Coaching Federation (ICF). The ICF does not, however, provide any kind of life coach training program. You will have to take an independent training program that prepares you for the ICF certification exam. Keep in mind, certification is not necessary in order to practice in the United States, since life coaching is not yet regulated by any state or federal licensing body. However, this may change, and even if it does not you will find that consumers and professionals alike have greater trust and respect in individuals who have gone through the certification process for this career path.

Many people begin by enrolling in a university psychology program, but this may be a mistake. Those programs tend not to be very relevant to the specific business goals of your coaching practice, although they can provide some good background information on human behavior and motivation. However, a more cost effective method will be to enroll in a specialized life coaching certification program.

Secondly, you’ll want to focus intensely on establishing your own support network. It would be much easier for you to pursue your career if you get full support from your family and loved ones, particularly if they are able to offer a financial buffer while you get your practice off the ground. More importantly, you need to make professional contacts who can provide you with some early professional experiences in providing life coaching services and send you referrals when their own practices are full. Training programs are probably the best place to make this kind of connection, as you can work hard to impress your instructors, who will tend to be practicing life coaches.

You will not be able to apply for ICF certification until you have completed your training program an logged 75 hours of practical experience. Fortunately, there are some techniques you can use to market your practice that will actually yield revenue in and of themselves. For a complete tutorial on completing your life coaching certification and launching a lucrative coaching practice out of your own home, visit the Becoming A Life Coach website.

Written by guest author and web business expert David Godot.

Choosing a WordPress theme is not an easy matter. There are way too many to choose from! But one of the most basic decisions you need to make is paid or free.

There are literally thousands and thousands of free themes available for WordPress – and you might indeed wonder why anyone would pay for a Theme? One simple answer – support. Some free themes do have reasonable support but they tend to be the exception not the rule. The other risk with free themes is that they may be some undesirable links and other “malware” in the code – check it out before using it on your site – look for “odd” code in particularly the footer.php.

If you don’t know what to look for in the code stick with well known and popular themes.

If you are in the market for a paid theme then you again have a ton of different options to look at. One big decision is – do you want just one specific theme for single site and how customized do you want the look and design of the site to be? If so there are plenty of themes which you can buy for less than $50 or $70 which will give you some limited customization options.

If however you need something more sophisticated – for example the ability to make a blog which doesn’t look like a blog at all but more like a normal website. Or you have a lot of different websites all of which you want to look a little different from each other – then you will be better off with what has become known as a framework theme.

With a framework theme out of the box the site will look very dull and boring. The concept behind a framework is very powerful though – basically it allows you to customize everything about the site: how many sidebars, where they are, the header, the footer, style of pages, fonts, colours absolutely everything. The trick is to find a framework that is relatively easy to use and suits your level of expertise. I’ve used a couple and at the moment I am really excited about what the Frugal Theme can do – you might want to check out my Frugal Theme Review for more details.

Written by our passive income expert, Lis Sowerbutts.

Darren Rowse and Brian Clark’s Third Tribe Marketing has just hit the airwaves of the Internet. The question in this post is… Is it any good?  This is my short review of Third Tribe Marketing – it’s a waste of money even at the “special” low price of $27/month – soon to go to $47/month. One thing Brian Clark particularly, inventor of Teaching Sells, is not afraid of is charging a lot for his expertise.

So if you sign up for Third Tribe Marketing what do you get – well the promise is – unclear at best. You will get lots of great information from people who have made quite a lot of money mainly by selling stuff to naive beginners in the work at home business world. In some ways its like a paid online networking forum with little defined purpose except to make you feel like one of the cool kids. Most of us were never cool kids at school – and I really dislike the assumption that if you hang around the rich and successful blogging founders of Third Tribe Marketing you will somehow become successful too. It’s hardly going to happen when you look at the facts. Darren Rowse started Problogger long before there was any competition, Brian Clark was a successful off-line sales guy before he went online – do you see the pattern? If you currently don’t have a commercial skill and the selling skills of a successful consultant – this model probably won’t work for you.

Membership sites can be useful – but I pay for just one with an ongoing subscription – I talk about it in my follow up Third Tribe Review which compares the site to the Keyword Academy. The keyword academy has no fluff at all – and very little networking. This is not the place to hang out and compare blogs – instead its a step by step guide for how to make money online using basic keyword selection and SEO.

The beauty of niche marketing is that it really doesn’t matter who you are – whether you are a great writer or an all around personable guy. What colour your skin is or where you live never comes into it. Whether you are on an invalid’s pension in a council flat – or a backpacker at an Internet cafe in Thailand – it doesn’t matter – if you have the skills to pick the right keywords and develop sites and backlinks you can make money. Hell you can even outsource the whole operation if that’s what you want to do.

This is a guest post by passive income expert, Lis Sowerbutts.

If you’re not already an expert, you probably have no concept where to start when considering setting up an email newsletter. And even though there are actually a number of mad geniuses out there, any person prepared to be thoughtful and strategic when it comes to their target market can easily be successful. In your industry, there must be no one better qualified than you. This article is intended to help increase your self-confidence as an email marketer by offering you each of the essential resources you need to master email marketing.

Newcomers to email marketing frequently will say how the process seems impenetrable or maybe magical to them. People get the impression that email marketing is something that only hired gun copywriters with four-figure hourly fees can comprehend. It may be that there is just a little bit of magic involved, but no more so than in any other form of marketing. If you take the time to analyze your market thoroughly, you find yourself making smart decisions, planning your email marketing campaign intelligently, and reaching success faster than you would have guessed.

A good starting point is to look at your campaign’s overarching purpose. What is it for? When people receive your messages, what do you hope will happen as a result? This part is easy if you’re building a list in order to promote a single product. But in other case you may want to consider the long term. Sending out regular messages over a long period of time can be a lot of work. In order to do that, you’d better make sure you know who your audience is.

No matter what you do, the first step is always going to be researching your market. You need to develop a clear assessment of what your market is, what demographics you’re a good fit for, and what specific needs you’re able to meet. But of course no matter how much research you do, you’ll find that things are different in practice than they are in theory. Even within specific geographic areas, populations are increasingly diverse. Over time, you’ll see different segments of readers emerge on the same mailing list. All you have to do is use software such as Active Campaign Email Marketing software to send unique, targeted content to each one of these segments.

Another important factor is the way your message looks. The design elements that you use in your messages should be consistent with the ways that you want your readers to interact with it. For example, in many cases you will want your readers to click through the links in your message and arrive at your web site. In this case, you’ll generally want your email template to be a pretty good match for the design of the actual web site. If they look the same, the reader will automatically know they’ve found the right place.

Next, you’ll want to consider what type of content will be appropriate for your email campaign. For example, let’s say you want to send out an informative newsletter every week. After you’ve done that for a while, you don’t want to just toss out an advertisement to a list like that. It won’t convert. By working your sales pitch into the existing informational format, you make it more familiar and more believable to your long-time subscribers.

Finally, you need to think about how you can get most of your recipients to open up and read the messages you send to them. There’s a little bit of a “secret sauce” factor that goes into this. A lot of things come into play. Any copywriter will tell you that the headline is one of the most important elements of marketing, no matter which medium you choose. The headline sells the message, while the message sells whatever you are selling.

But many people don’t realize that the first line of your message can be equally important. If you go into your email reader and look at the list of new incoming messages, you’ll probably notice that you can see a little snippet from the top of each message. If the teaser snippet is not compelling, many readers will assume the message is not worth their time, no matter what the headline may have promised. Another thing you may want to take into account is the hours that your particular subscribers will be most open to receiving your messages.

One thing you should never hesitate to do with your email campaign is to try new things. The more you do, the more you’ll develop an understanding of what works and what doesn’t. Once you’ve been doing this for a while, you’ll be amazed by the way you become so in tune with your market that you naturally understand what will or won’t work. It’s like magic.

Guest post by email marketing expert, David Godot.

We have our house for sale – its actually perfectly setup for someone who works at home as I do – but we are selling because we want to downsize our mortgage and spend less time fighting the garden.

But it got me thinking – what makes for the perfect home if you are looking for the houses for sale in Khandallah – or anywhere else? What does the work from home professional need in their home? Well, I have quite a long list having been renting for a few years – here’s some of them.

Requirements for a “Work At Home” House

• Must have a good sized separate room which I can call an office. Having separate office which you can close the door on is not only helpful psychologically – it also means that you will probably get a better tax deduction (check with an accountant or tax professional for the details on this).
• I need a view and natural light, and I need warmth because I live in a cold climate. You may need cooling if you live somewhere warmer.
• Must have sufficient power points and phone line connections – a quality and fast internet connection goes without saying. Improved wireless networking means that its no longer necessary to physically attach printers and modems to your computer – but they all still need power – so if you have the choice – you can never have enough power points!
• If you employ staff or have clients visit you at home its probably important to have a separate entrance to your work at home office. You don’t need the kids answering the door to the client! Equally you probably don’t want employees encroaching on your family space – so therefore you will probably need an office with a kitchenette and separate toilet too.

As my work at home business is entirely online based I don’t need to deal with clients or employees in my home – so rather than looking for a self-contained home office I want a room with a view, and good insulation.  What I might do is take the largest bedroom and use it for an office. In Wellington anything that is advertised as an “office” by a real estate agent really means “tiny cupboard” or large landing!  The key thing for me is to get a property that has an excellent broadband connection -this is not as simple as you may think – in new suburbs there are often not enough broadband connections to go around!

So whether you are looking for your next home or your first, whether you work at home or in a more traditional job, take a moment to sit down and really think about what you want from your next home, before you hit the streets checking out houses for sale!

Written by our guest author and work at home expert, Lis Sowerbutts.