How to Get 4 Steps Closer To Landing A Telecommuting Job

You made the decision to telecommute from a home office. Now what? How do you get started?

Follow these four important steps and be prepared for what lies ahead in finding a telecommuting job:

1. Resume
A telecommuting resume is different than your regular type resume. Your resume is your “second” impression; it’s your ticket to getting a job so make it stand out and get noticed!

It is important to include a job objective because this is the first thing a telecommuting employer will see and read. This is a simple paragraph summarizing what you want in a job and what you can offer to the company. Again, add some pizzazz to it.

Highlight your independence, skills and work experience. Volunteer work also counts, so include these as well. If you’ve done telecommuting before, let them know! This will show them you are experienced and it will give them a sense of comfort. Let them know of your accomplishments and special skills. These attributes can be the deciding factor between you and someone else.

Make sure your resume looks professional, uncluttered and only contain pertinent information pertaining to the job you’re applying for. Sloppiness, incomplete and missing information directly reflects who you are. Take the time to proofread or have someone proofread your resume and cover letter for spelling errors, grammar, clarity and so forth.

2. Cover Letter
A telecommuting cover letter is just as important as a resume and it should be customized to each job you’re applying for. Generic cover letters don’t work and will never be seen by the employer.

A quality cover letter is your gateway; your first impression. Stress why you are perfect for the position and how you would be an asset to their company. You can use a particular experience related to the position you’re applying for to market yourself. If you have a stellar cover letter and is backed by a stellar resume, your chance of gaining a telecommuting job has just increased.

3. Research
Researching a company is important in deciding whether it’s a company you would like to work for. The Internet is a free research portal; as with many various work at home blogs and forums where specific companies legitimate and non-legitimate companies are sometimes discussed at great lengths.

4. Consistence, Persistence and Perseverance
Consistency, persistence and perseverance are key contributing factors in finding a telecommuting job. It won’t be easy and it will take a lot of hard work and effort.

Apply, apply, apply and then do follow ups if you haven’t received any response within two weeks or so. Pursue and research every un-researched job lead you’re interested in and don’t get discouraged. Re-evaluate your job search if you haven’t found employment within a reasonable time, but also give it time.

These four steps are crucial to your telecommuting job search so be sure to follow them to ensure the best possible outcome.

Don’t Let People Tell You What To Do or Make You Feel Like Your Way is Wrong

This is a major rant that is as a result of something that happened on the Warrior Forum just this evening. I hope you will take this advice to heart because it is really for your own good. And yes, I know it’s ironic that in an article titled “Don’t Let People Tell You What To Do” I am now going to tell you what to do, but when you read it, you’ll understand. Okay, let’s first tell the story of what happened.

I was asked at the forum to tell what my day was like. People wanted to know what I did on a daily basis to become so successful. So, I told them. I went through my whole day from morning until evening, every step of the way. I left nothing out. Yes, it’s quite a full day for me. Heck, I’m writing this post at 10:11 PM so you can imagine how hard I work at my business.

Anyway, most people replied to the thread that they were inspired by my story but one person came to the thread and essentially said to me that I must be really miserable working as hard as I do. I couldn’t believe the nerve of this person, assuming that he knows anything about my life, what I like and what I don’t like. Because my lifestyle doesn’t suit him, he assumes that I must hate what I do.

Let me make this perfectly clear. I LOVE what I do. I wouldn’t do anything else in the world but internet marketing. I love the long days. I get bored when I’m not working. I’m not the kind of person who can sit around all day watching TV. I’d go nuts. If I didn’t enjoy my life, I’d do something else… trust me on that.

Anyway, here is the point of this article. Don’t let anyone, and I mean ANYONE, make you feel like what you’re doing is wrong. It’s YOUR life and you have to live it the way you want. So please don’t let anybody tell you what to do with it. If somebody has a suggestion that might help you, listen. You can then accept it or reject it…YOUR choice.

I’ve been running MY business MY way for almost 6 years now and I am very proud of the business that I have built up. It didn’t happen overnight and yes, there have been long hours. But they have been more than worth it.

My mortgage will be paid off in 4 months from right now… which is 17 years early on my 30 year mortgage! My cars are paid off, I have no credit card debt, and I have money in the bank. How many people can say that?

Anyway, I hope this has been of some inspiration to you. And I promise… I will NEVER tell you what to do (ok well unless it is about making money online and I think it is in your best interest).

Otherwise I’ll just make some friendly suggestions.

Christmas and a Home Business

Don’t look now, but Christmas is only a few weeks away once again. It’s a time for families to get together, kids to open their presents, office workers to do lots of embarassing things at the office party…

Ok, we all know Christmas is a time of festivities and fun!

But for those of us trying to make a buck (or several) online, what does it mean for your home business? Well, it’s a pretty good time to roll out the seasonal affiliate sites, dust them off and put them to work for you. Don’t have anything suitable? Well, believe it or not there is still time to make new ones if you’re quick. But you have to act fast.

First of all you have to be able to put up a half decent site quickly, get enough original content on there with a liberal sprinkling of your keyword to satisfy the search engines that its legit, then be able to link to it fast and furiously. Then rinse and repeat with more sites.

Why more than one site?

You need to build in some redundancy as well as create an interlinking system. By building in redundancy, I mean you’ll need a few sites that all target exactly the same keyword because you’re probably going to have a fight on your hands with a certain search engine that is currently indexing and de-indexing new sites seemingly at random. Some will feature in the SERPs and some won’t. And you need search engine traffic for this to work.

Here’s how.

Say you want to target a fairly competitive seasonal keyword, such as Christmas tree decorations, Christmas gifts, artificial Christmas trees or something similar. You’ll need three or four blogs with that exact keyword in the url, the site title and the page headers as far as on-site SEO goes. Don’t waste time looking for domains, you probably won’t find any .com’s suitable. Use some of the many free blogging hosts available, but just make sure they allow you to put up affiliate ads before you start building.

Build your blogs with a simple template and write an intro post, then social bookmark them to as many places as you can. Meanwhile, find a good affiliate company that has Christmas tree decorations (or whatever your keywords are) vendors that you can sign up with. ShareASale is one pretty good one, but there are others too like CJ etc and don’t forget eBay. There is a killing to be made so spread your net as wide as possible.

Now you’ll also need some supporting sites that you control that cover topics broadly similar to your keywords, such as special occasions, gifts, or anything similar.

What, you don’t have any?

Sheesh! You want an online business but haven’t been building backup sites? What about Squidoo, Hub Pages, Blinkweb, Blogger, WordPress… the list is long and available so there is no excuse for not having the resources. They are there in abundance and if you’re not using them then don’t quit your day job just yet!

Ok, for those of you with plenty of sites, edit them all and add a link to each of your main Christmas keyword targeting sites with the keywords in your anchor text. I take it you know how to do that…

These links may or may not get counted in time, but do it anyway. The theory here is that if you throw enough mud, some of it will stick. Write some articles (also with your keyword anchored link) and submit them to a few top ezines (ezine articles etc). Get into some of the forums you are a member of and put a link in your sig to your sites and post something worthwhile. You are a member of some forums, aren’t you? Good!

The whole idea is to get your sites indexed fast and into the SERPs in the short term.

The next phase is to start writing as fast as you can. You want to hammer as many articles into your main blogs as you can. Don’t worry about them being perfect, just readable (the writer in me hates to say that, but needs must). Post as often as you can (daily or even twice a day) because the more you do it, the more often the Google bot will come visit your sites and give them the short term authority in the index that you need. Also, link the blogs to each other from within those posts. Normally this is not a good idea, but in this case in the short term you only care about creating authority fast.

In the meantime, you should have been accepted into some of the affiliate programs, so start creating pages in your blogs and fill them up with the products you want to sell.

Keep going like a mad person and some of the mud will stick. One or more of your blogs will appear in the SERPs for long enough to attract sufficient traffic to make some sales over the next few weeks. After that, Google will most likely sandbox your sites anyway, but who cares? You will have wrung out of them as much as you could while the going was good, which is all you wanted to do!

Of course, the sites will emerge from the sandbox in 6 months or so ready for an assault on next year’s festive season with the added bonus that they will have acquired more authority and will therefore do better next year!

That’s one way to make use of Christmas with your home business!

What the Heck is a Business Work from Home Computer Opportunity?

To me this seems like a pretty odd keyword phrase to search but there are, in fact, a lot of people searching for business work from home computer opportunities, so I decided to talk a little about the subject today. My guess is that anyone searching for this particular phrase is hoping to find information on one of the following:

– Work from Home Opportunity
– Home Business Opportunity
– Work from Home Business
– Home Computer Opportunity

All of those are related to each other and all are along the lines of working at home on your computer. It seems that many people just throw them together in one long search string to see what they come up with. If you are looking to find a business work from home computer opportunity then there are some things you need to remember…

1) There are plenty of work from home computer opportunities. Don’t limit yourself to the first one you find or settle for something just because it sounds good. Do your research and find the best home business or work from home opportunity for you. There are more than enough to go around so find one that fits your needs.

2) Don’t pay to work from home. You should never pay to do work for someone else, they should be paying you. Any legitimate work from home computer opportunity will not require you to pay them to get the work.

3) A home business is different than work at home job. Many people lump the two together but in reality they are two completely different opportunities. Working for a company from home on your computer is much different than running your own home business for yourself from your home computer.

Both of them have advantages and disadvantages. It just depends on what you are looking for. Personally I run my own home business and think that is much better than working from home for someone else. You may disagree. And remember you will almost always have to pay to join a home business opportunity so don’t be surprised by that. It’s the work from home jobs that you shouldn’t ever pay to get.

4) There are lots of scams. Don’t be fooled by the promises of fast wealth, overnight riches, or making money by doing nothing. None of that is true and it will never happen. Also, there are some business work from home computer opportunities that are pretty much guaranteed to be a scam. These include envelope stuffing, assembling products at home, processing emails, and medical billing. Stay away from them no matter what they say!

5) It won’t be easy. Finding a real and legitimate work from home computer opportunity is not an easy thing to do. Building a success home business isn’t easy either. You will need to be patient and persistent. Don’t expect anything to happen quickly.

You can find a real business work from home computer opportunity (or something similar that makes sense, lol) and you can become very successful in doing so. But keep the points above in mind before you get frustrated or find yourself wanting to quit.

Some Internet Marketers Need A Course In Communication

Not all internet marketers are created equal. Not everyone has the gift of personal communication skills and dealing with people on a more personal level. I do realize that. Maybe that is why some of the major players on the internet are major players. They don’t take the time to deal with individuals.

I realize I am not going to be popular for some of my statements here, but I am not your average marketer, nor am I a probably considered a “major player” even though I am relatively well-known on the internet marketing world! I do have a point though. The point being that since the internet is such an anonymous venue in many ways, the players who lose the personal touch are doing everyone a disservice.

I will relate a recent personal experience here and I hope you will see my point. I am involved in a program that I thoroughly believe in and I am confident it could help someone work from home full time that is just starting out. I also understand the importance of multiple streams of income and I have been researching businesses that I could possibly add to my income streams.

I use forums and social media mostly to research business options because this is where some of the most successful marketers “hang out” and share ideas. They are invaluable. Recently, I found a business that I thought I wanted to learn more about and sent a private message to someone on a forum who seemed the most knowledgeable. She sent me a “canned” email about the program and that was it. I never heard back from her. I knew right then and there she was not the person I would choose to have as my sponsor and in my opinion lacked something. By the way, this woman is highly successful in a couple of popular businesses.

About a month later, I was on another forum and saw a thread on the same opportunity with another person who was leading that thread and quite successful as well. I sent her a private message and it was like night and day. Not only did she give me her phone number and email address, she also sent me all the information that she could and made sure I felt free to call her to speak about the program. She has the interpersonal skills of a good educator.

Who would you choose? I think it’s obvious which one I chose!

Do you see my point? The internet business opportunity world is so crowded, it’s like a traffic jam at times, and people need to know there is a real person on the other side of that private message. Is it a canned email from someone who could do without you or a personal message from someone who may really want you to be on their team? Having someone like me — with several popular blogs and good online reputation — on her team will certainly help her make more money as well, and all it took was a personal response.

Think about it. I’ve been doing that a lot lately.