The other day, a friend’s girlfriend asked me what I did for a living and when I told her, she said:
“That sounds great. It must be so much easier working from home.”
And that set off a carefully measured response—one of those almost political diatribes about how it was great to be your own boss, but at the same time how there were a whole new set of parameters that you couldn’t see coming unless you’ve worked in cyberspace for any length of time. I’m sure I wound up babbling and looking like some kind of geeky whiner, so it’s better if I write it all down and tell her to read this column.
Scheduling is the first one that might get overlooked when someone is looking from the outside in at working on the Internet, and there’s a whole new level you need to juggle. I’ve got a BlackBerry with a great calendar, three different sized dry erase boards with six different colors of suitable markers and, just because I get nostalgic for paper and pens every once in awhile, a Day Planner. All because I’m afraid I’ll miss something and (more to the point) because I will if I don’t write it down in at least three places.
It would have been hard to explain to my friend’s better half that I filter all my working days through that little black box called a laptop and I’m quite often dealing with requests—and yes even demands—from far reaching parts of the globe. It’s all sort of like trying to strain lake water through a garden hose some days and equally hard to explain.
Motivation needs to be realigned too. Used to be I needed to allot my time for getting ready for work, getting to work and then working until the corresponding breaks and lunches rolled around. Weekends, of course, were the end goal. With my online business, I think about what I need to do twenty-four seven and have worked every day for the last five years. At first, those hours were to get the business up and running, but now they’re needed to keep the wheels spinning.
To answer that well meaning girl’s question, it is easier to work from home in some ways and much more demanding in others. There’s no cutting corners when you start your own business just because the orders and clients are coming from inside that little black box on your desk in your home office, but there’s no other feeling like being your own boss either.
No matter how awesome an e-book you have written, the introduction is the very first thing to catch the eyes of readers. In fact, an e-book introduction is like an appetizer, which helps to stimulate the appetite of the diner and begin the meal on a positive note. It leaves you wanting more.
A large number of businesses affiliated with online merchants have been created in order to make purchasing goods online easier and even more convenient. One example of a new form of online payment options is online wallets. The concept is quite simple. These are money deposit accounts that hold deposited money (usually from a debit card while some online wallets provide an online credit “shopping” card) specifically for the function of paying for goods online. Skrill is one example of a digital wallet that is used throughout the world. According to The Sunday Times, in 2010 Skrill was the number one fastest growing, equity-backed company in the UK based on profits alone.
Some retail businesses become so successful in selling the goods of other companies that they are able to create their own products as well. Amazon.com is a prime example of a company that has a very powerful brand name. The Amazon Kindle was introduced as a portable tablet reader that was exclusive to Amazon in the sense that all reading material for the item could only be purchased through Amazon’s online retailer. Not only does the website generate income by providing customers with a wide selection of retail goods from other companies, it also provides eBooks that can only be bought from one place. The same website also distributes their tablet through other vendors.
I’m very excited to see this new WordPress XML & CSV Import plugin because it’s going to make the process of creating a niche affiliate store very easy. I’ve always wanted to play around with these types of sites, but always got fed up with the complexities of messing with XML and CVS files. I currently have a successful site in the pet food niche and am going to take a look at the different partners I can find on the networks mentioned above and will build out a section of the site to promote their product. I will provide an update on this in a future post.