What is a Real Work at Home Opportunity?

When most people start looking for a way to work at home online they don’t really know what they are looking for, even if they think they do. The phrase “work at home” is actually very general and several different things fall under it. You are most likely looking for one of these three things: A work at home opportunity, a work at home job, or a home business. They all have quite a few similarities but they also have some very big differences in many cases.

Below is an explanation of the three types of “work at home” so you can see the similarities and differences. There is a lot of natural overlap between them so it’s almost impossible to perfectly categorize them, but I have done it as closely as possible.

A work at home opportunity is somewhere in between a work at home job and a home business. It’s a way for you to make money at home without actually working for someone else, but you aren’t really in business for yourself either. You can sometimes earn pretty good money this way but you’ll never become wealthy doing it. Your pay will mostly depend on how much time you can put into performing tasks and you obviously only have so much time in a day so it limits your income potential.

Your typical work at home opportunity will consist of taking paid surveys, completing free offers for money, paid forum posting, getting paid to blog, and other “get paid to” or GPT programs. You might also do some freelance work or some sort of data entry. Although those are more “work at home jobs” than anything.

A work at home job is where you work for someone else performing a certain task (job) or a number of tasks for them but you do it from home. It’s basically the same as a regular job that you do offline but you are doing it from home instead. These jobs can pretty much involve anything but often times it will be technical support, customer service, telemarketing, transcription, data entry, and other similar jobs.

The thing you have to remember is that you are working for someone else when you have a work at home job. Even though you are working at home, you will still not have the freedom you might think and you will never get paid very much money this way. If all you really need to do is make a little extra money for whatever reason but want to do it from home, then finding a work at home job would be ideal. The best part is that you know exactly what you have to do to make money and exactly how much you will be paid for doing it.

Starting a home business is the best way to work at home, in my opinion. You have the freedom to work when you want and make money from home doing something you choose and enjoy. There are virtually unlimited things you can do to build a home business and this is the only way you can actually create complete financial freedom for you and your family. Some of these include; MLM, affiliate marketing, SEO for local businesses, running your own blog, selling things online, and other ideas along those lines.

The only downside to a home business, compared the other two ways of working at home discussed above, is that you don’t have the security of knowing just how much money you are going to make and when you will be paid. But you do have the luxury of knowing that your income depends solely on your efforts and has almost no limitations. Use your time wisely doing the right things and you can eventually be making money like it’s nothing.

I hope you now have a much better understanding of the differences between work at home opportunities, work at home jobs, and home businesses. They are similar but they are certainly not the same things. The differences should not be ignored because they can have a significant impact on what you do to make money and how much you can make.

When you are looking for a work at home opportunity you need to be sure you know what you are specifically looking to do so you can find the right system for you.

How to Start a Home Business for Moms

There are thousands of moms who make money working at home with a “moms home business” on a full time basis or just part time to earn a little extra income. Often times it starts out as a way to make money from home while still being able to stay with the kids, but in many cases it eventually turns into a full time income for the entire family.

For single moms, as well as wives with husbands who have lost their jobs, found themselves in need of another income, or whatever other situation — the need to be a work at home mom can be urgent and necessary.

How do moms start a home business?

You need to be careful when you are looking for ways to make money at home. You will see a lot of ads online, as well as offline, and it can be hard to distinguish the genuine home business opportunities from the scams.

First, remember that legitimate home business opportunities do not use spam or any illegal marketing methods. If you receive an ad in an email from a name you don’t recognize or a list that you did not sign up for, you should delete it right away without giving it a second thought. Of course sometimes it is hard to remember what lists you signed up for and what you didn’t, but if it looks or reads strangely or doesn’t have a physical postal address and a way to unsubscribe automatically, it is probably spam.

If you are old enough then you probably remember the scams that used to run as “job” ads in the newspapers that would tell you they had work available but you had to pay a fee to get the instructions or equipment. People would send the money and wouldn’t receive anything, or if they did it would be useless. These kinds of scams do still exist offline but for the most part they have moved online. Never pay for a work at home job, and if you are paying to join a home business opportunity, always be sure that you are getting something for your money.

One of the benefits of the internet is that it is easy to research a company or business opportunity before you join. There are many online forums and blogs where you can find feedback from people who have joined and will tell whether it worked for them or not. Of course with any opportunity there are some people who will like it and some who will not, but with a real scam just about all of the feedback will be negative. So spend a few minutes checking that before you spend your time or money on a moms work at home business opportunity.

One of the easiest ways for moms to get started with a home business is to look for a network marketing opportunity, sometimes called multi-level marketing (MLM). There are many of these in almost every imaginable market. As a mom, you probably know a lot of people who might be interested in stuff for babies, household goods, health care products, nutritional products, beauty products, etc… You can find a home business opportunity selling any of those. Search online for “network marketing beauty products” or “MLM health” or whatever interests you.

Many opportunities will tell you to start out by selling to your warm market which is just another term for your family and friends. I advise against that because it is not usually easy to sell to people you know. Close family and friends may buy from you once just to help you out but you may feel bad about it. They also may not like that you are using the relationship to try to make money. Instead of asking your friends to buy your products it is often better to ask them to help out by hosting a get together where you can demonstrate the products to other moms that they know.

However, there is a way for moms to succeed in a network marketing home business without doing any of this. It is called attraction marketing.

“Attraction marketing” has become the buzzword of MLM recently. It involves building up your presence so that people start to hear about you and approach you. This beats the discouraging experience of trying to push your products onto everybody you meet. So you should look for a company that will train you in attraction marketing and internet marketing methods rather than expecting you to find all of your customers from among your personal friends, peers, and contacts.

The internet can be a great place to use attraction marketing. You can set up blogs and websites, social medial accounts, and so much more and gradually build up a following on them or get them ranked highly in the search engines by learning how to make money online with SEO. Then people will find you when they are searching for information on the types of products that you sell.

It’s also a lot easier to bring in other members this way to build your personal “sales force” of affiliates or “downline” team as it is typically called in network marketing. Don’t worry if you aren’t sure how to do this right now. It’s easier than you think and there is plenty of information and resources online that you can learn from. You will likely need some help along the way, so look for a mom’s home business that understands the importance of training you in how to use internet marketing to build your business.

3 Simple Internet Business Ideas You Can Start Today

When it comes to making money online, there’s a virtually unlimited supply of internet business ideas and opportunities to choose from. Having so many choices is often the problem for many people because they get overwhelmed and can’t figure out where to start.

If you’re going to really make money online, it’s important to take action on each new thing you learn rather than getting caught up in simply reading about what you should be doing. If you just learn and never do anything, you will go into information overload and won’t ever make money.

I believe one of the most important aspects of making money online is taking action (and most internet marketers will agree with me). You can’t just sit back and wait for the money to come to you because that’s never going to happen. Trust me, I wish it would!

Below I am going to list a few of the most popular and fairly simple internet business ideas. You can do these as a part time internet business or a full time work at home based business. The time you put into your business is totally up to you, but you do need to make sure you devote some time each day or you won’t earn any money.

1) Become an Affiliate Marketer

Affiliate marketing involves promoting products and services online with a special link that is given to you when you sign up for the affiliate program. Typically this involves building websites around specific niches that contain affiliate links to the products and services you are promoting in that niche.

These can be informational sites, content sites, product reviews sites, social media, or blogs that link to products that you think your visitors would be interested in. You then receive a percentage of the profits for each sale made through your affiliate link. The basics of affiliate marketing are really very simple, however actually making money as an affiliate marketer isn’t as easy as it sounds.

2) Provide an Online Business Service

Are you good at niche research, web design, copywriting, graphic design, content writing, SEO, or something else? There is high demand for these skills and many more, so if you can offer one of these services, consider signing up at a freelance site like upwork where you can hire yourself out for pay. This is a fantastic way to make money online from home as there are literally thousands of people online looking to hire people to perform these services for them.

3) Make Money Online with Adsense

You can build niche websites, use SEO to get them ranked in search engines to bring in targeted traffic, put Adsense on them, and earn money every time your visitors click on the ads. This does require some learning and practice to figure out how to do niche research, SEO, and Adsense placement. However, it can be done by almost anyone and it’s one of the best internet business ideas.

These are just a few simple internet business ideas to get you started making money from your own online business. You can do them individually or combine them into one business. As you get more experience you will also figure out other ways to make money online.

Work at Home: Truths

When you first make the decision to work at home, it’s not a decision that should ever be taken lightly. Rushing in headlong without due consideration can and almost always does end up in the person regretting it deeply. The saying, “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread” is so very poignant when related to this industry. So here are some truths about working at home.

Plenty of thought and preparation should go into it if you already have a regular job that you want to get out of for whatever reason. Of course, if you are facing imminent redundancy or have just been given the sack from your job, your options are considerably fewer and you may see working at home on your computer as a financial lifeline. But beware, things are not always what they appear to be.

First you have to consider whether you want to be working at home as a job, where you will take on work from other people for which you (hopefully) will be paid, or whether you want to run your own business, where you will sell your own, or other people’s product(s) via a website or blog.

Even then, you are faced with a sea full of sharks that are waiting to eat you as soon as you dip your toe in.

Learning to sift through the mountain of scam artists and out & out thieves that exist online is no mean feat and it often takes being burned at least once or twice before many people get the message. Few get through unscathed, although when they realize that the road they have embarked upon is very long and very hard, many fall by the wayside.

Having said that, working from home is not all doom and gloom. There are opportunities that exist online where you can earn a decent living if you’re prepared to put in the hours and the work, although you’ll wonder where the day goes after many hours at the computer. There are several tried and tested methods of making money online that you can try, but be warned that if you need money fast, being a newbie on the internet is not the way to do it. You will starve before you make any money.

That’s a harsh truth to hear, but you need to hear it all the same.

Never fall into the trap of trying out any of the hyped up ads that promise you’ll make several thousand dollars in a few weeks from the start. They are lies. Don’t waste your money buying this or that ebook or course that tries to tell you how to make money online. The vast majority of them will not help you and just about all of the information can be found for free online with some research and tenacity.

Which leads me onto the last of the home truths about working at home. To succeed, you need certain qualities of character that will help you along the way.

  1. The first is intelligence, for without this, you will easily get buried under the mountain of knowledge that you will need to accumulate to understand what you’re doing.
  2. The second is belief in yourself and a good helping of stubbornness when nobody else will believe in you.
  3. The third is the ability to work long and hard without which you will crumple under the weight of the relentless workload.
  4. The last is tenacity, because even if you possess none of the above qualities, dogged, bloody-minded persistence brings success to more people than any other characteristic!

Good luck, because you’ll need it!

How to Make Money Selling Advertising on Your Website or Blog

If you own a website or blog, run an internet marketing business, or work at home online, then you probably know what advertising options such as Google Adsense are and how they are basically an easy way to sell advertising space on your site/blog. You also might know that it can be put on just about any website or blog and that it is one of the most popular ways for website owners to make money online. It’s no secret that selling advertising on a website or blog is a great way to make money online, but many people don’t fully understand how to do it.

One of the best ways to make money online is by selling direct advertising on your website or blog. This goes far beyond Adsense ads. If you have built up a popular site then it’s pretty easy to find people who will pay you big money to advertise on it. I make thousands of dollars per month from people buying advertising on my blogs/sites.

Part of the allure of selling advertising is that the income is relatively passive and residual. You pretty much know how much you are going to make each month (barring any cancellations) and you don’t always have to be hoping for affiliate sales, Adsense clicks or other ways you make money from your website via your visitors performing an action. Sure you will probably have some advertisers cancel every once in a while, and have to find new ones to replace them, but for the most part income from selling advertising is pretty consistent.

There are services out there that will help find advertisers for you but they will take a percentage of the earnings. These services can be good because they make it a lot easier to find advertisers. However, I don’t use them because I like to get all the money from advertisers on my sites and I want to be in control of who is advertising on my sites. I like to find the advertisers myself so I don’t have to worry about losing any of the revenue or having the possibility of links being placed on my site to websites that I don’t want on there. This is more work because once you find them you have to take the payments, put up their ads, and keep track of them. But it’s not very hard if you get a good system in place.

So, how do you sell advertising for your website?

Let’s dig in…

There Are 2 Major Ways to Sell Advertising on Your Website

1) Revenue Share Advertising

Revenue share advertising is a very popular way that website owners can earn money with ads. Google Adsense is an example of revenue share advertising. These are sites that find the advertisers for you and then, when somebody clicks on the links that are displayed on your site, they give you a share of the revenue created by the click. The amount of money per click varies depending on the deal made between the revenue share company and the advertiser. This is information you usually don’t get to know.

Revenue share programs are great because they are very easy to set up. Basically all you do is sign up for the program, insert some code into your website template and the ads will show up. Not much extra work is needed on your part.

Of course, revenue share programs also have their disadvantages. For instance, Google Adsense has some very strict rules about what you are allowed to do with your ads. Make sure that you read and understand the terms of service before you click the “I agree” button. It is very easy to inadvertently commit “click fraud” with Adsense and once your account gets suspended, you won’t ever be allowed to reinstate it.

Another disadvantage of revenue share advertising is that you don’t get all the money from the ads on your site. They company usually takes just as much (or more) than you get. It’s the price you pay for the ease of use and them finding the advertisers for you.

One thing to remember with revenue share programs is that no matter what one you choose, make sure that you understand what they expect from you and what you are allowed to do and not allowed to do with your ads.

2) Direct Advertising

Direct advertising is fairly self-explanatory. You find the advertisers, display their ads on your site and collect the money. This is the best way to make money through advertising if you want to keep 100% of the profit from the ads. Of course, the disadvantage of direct advertising is that it’s not nearly as easy to implement as revenue share and you have to find your own advertisers for your site.

Before you start hunting down direct advertisers, you will want to decide which kinds of ads you want to run. Do some research and see what kind of ads work well on other sites similar to yours. You only want to run ads that are at least somewhat related to the content of your site.

Then make sure that you understand how to implement the ads into your website or blog template. You will need to know a little bit about coding to make your advertising look professional. Finally, you will need to know about the business side of advertising. You will need contracts and invoices and a way to keep track of individual clients. While direct advertising usually brings in more profit, it is far more time consuming and harder to keep track of than revenue sharing advertising.

Whichever advertising method you choose to make money online, be sure you understand the advantages, disadvantages, and limitations of each method as well as expectations of everyone involved. Advertisers can be very fickle and so can your readers. Some readers don’t respond well to sites that are covered in ads, so you will want to make sure that you strike a balance between content and ads. This is important because, if you lose readers, you’ll lose advertisers and income.

Revenue share advertising and direct advertising are both very good ways to make money online and are simple enough for just about anyone to implement. Remember that if one method doesn’t work for you, you can simply try the other. I actually recommend utilizing both so you can make even more money and spread it out a little between multiple income streams.

How to Find Blog Advertisers

Here are some ways to find advertisers for your blog so you can make more money from it…

1. Google your main keyword phrase and a few of your secondary keyword phrases. Now, take a look at the Adwords ads at the top of the search results. These ads are from businesses and entrepreneurs who are promoting websites in your niche to make money, and they are paying for traffic. You already know they are willing to spend money advertising for your keywords, so why not try to contact them and see if they want to advertise on your blog? They could buy a banner or text link on your blog for a set dollar amount per month.

2. Find other sites/blogs in the same niche, or similar niches, as yours that sell advertising and contact the people advertising on them to let them know you also sell ads on your site. You could even ask the blog owner where he gets his advertisers. Most bloggers are very helpful and would be happy to give you some information.

3. Go to the sections of forums or facebook groups in your niche where you can post that you are selling advertising. That should get you quite a few new advertisers. You could also post a special offer for ads spots on your blog.

4. Check out various affiliate networks and see if you can find affiliates who might be interested in advertising on your site.

5. Take a look at offline advertisers. This one is a little more complicated because you are dealing with people who are not usually as internet savvy as those above. However, if you look in newspapers and magazines in your local area, you might find businesses in your niche that would be interested in advertising on your blog. You’ll probably have to educate them a little so preparing a short report with screen shots of traffic and keywords would be a good idea. Don’t talk down to these folks because they aren’t stupid, but realize that terms you consider to be common (like RSS) might be a foreign language to them.

That is about all you really need to find advertisers so you can make money from your blog. There are plenty of other ways to make money blogging but selling advertising is definitely one of the best, and it’s relatively easy to do. Go find a few new advertisers right now using the methods above and before you know it, you will be a master at it, and making bank!

Tips for Selling Advertising

Here are some tips I have learned about how to make money online selling advertising since I started doing it:

* Be specific on what your advertising options and prices are. A confused advertiser will either not pay you to advertise on your site or they will complain later because they didn’t get what they thought they were paying for. If you look at any of my advertising pages you will see that I always lay out exactly what they get and how much it will cost.

* Offer a lot of options. Again if you look at any of my home business advertising pages you will see that I typically offer 10+ advertising options. Having more options increases the chances that you have an option that will fit the needs of most potential advertisers. You can’t make money selling advertising if you don’t have options that people want.

* Set the right price. It’s difficult to know exactly how much you should be charging but you want to get it close because if you overcharge you will lose advertisers and if you undercharge you won’t be maximizing your earnings. Take a look at what other sites in your niche with similar traffic as yours are charging and go from there.

* Only accept certain ads. You don’t want to have ads and links on your site to other sites that aren’t even remotely related to yours. You also don’t want bad neighborhood or banned sites linked from yours. Be sure to state on your advertising page what sites you will and won’t accept. And check each new advertiser’s site before accepting the ad. Deny them and refund their money if you need to.

* Don’t be sneaky. You must give your advertisers what they pay for. Don’t cut their ad time short, or hide it, or do anything else sneaky and unethical. You will lose advertisers very quickly if you do this. You can’t make money if your advertisers are mad.

* Keep track of the ads. You don’t want to accidentally remove an ad that shouldn’t be deleted or keep an ad up long after they have cancelled. Make sure you know which ads are supposed to be up and which need to be taken down.

* Put the ads up quickly. When an advertisers pays for a spot on your site you should get the ad up very quickly. They have already paid for the spot for a specified amount of time and you are wasting their money if you don’t put it up right away.

* Promote your advertising. You can’t make money selling advertising if nobody knows they can buy ads on your site. You should actively promote that you allow advertising on your site/blog. Get keyword anchored inbound links to your advertising page so you can rank higher in search engines, tell other site owners in your niche, put links to it in forum signatures and blog posts, etc… Any way you can to get the word out.

That’s basically all there is to it. Now you know how to make money online selling advertising. It’s one of the best ways to earn money from your website or blog and I highly recommend it as an additional source of income.