Niche Blogging For Profit

There are many different ways to market your home business whether online or off. Most important to remember is not to limit yourself to marketing Internet businesses to online marketing and “real world” business to “real world” advertising.

While many brick and mortar businesses know enough to have websites and possibly online shopping carts, few online businesses expand their marketing plan to include offline advertising.

 Business cards are easy and inexpensive to create. VistaPrints offers cards free of cost – you pay only for shipping. Pass these cards out to people you meet at parties, gatherings, work related events and to people you meet throughout your regularly scheduled day.

Brochures (services) or Catalogs (products) – Depending on what your blogs/sites sell you can display brochures or catalogs in local stores.

Flyers – Similar to brochures except flyers are usually one sheet and contain less information than brochures. You can pass out flyers or leave them in doorways to get people to visit your sites/blogs.

Magnetic Signs – Several business supply stores offer custom signs and letters that are magnetized and can be stuck right to the sides or back of your vehicle. You should keep the wording simple and short but that takes advantage of the most space for your money.

As an Internet Marketer you have to take advantage of every traffic source available. Don’t make the mistake of thinking your customer base ends at your desktop.

When working at home it is important to not let routine tasks suck up too much of your valuable time. Niche  bloggers need to focus as much time on writing and marketing as possible. Answering emails, surfing, commenting on other blogs and networking should be of secondary priority. While those activities are necessary for success, the majority of your time should be devoted to the most important tasks for niche blogging success.

Email – Set aside 15-30 minutes once a day to deal with email. Resist the urge to check email and shut off any automatic email notification.

Surfing - Also known as research. You’ll probably need an hour or so each day but you really should need much more research than that.

Networking- Sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Warrior Forum, while helpful for building a reputation, are also major time-suckers. Update or post only when you have something worth saying of when introducing a new niche blog.

While working at home can be freeing it can also be distracting and tiring. It can also be frustrating to friends and family who think you’ve disappeared because you’re working 10-12 hours a day. There are some things you can do (and some that you can avoid) to keep the good parts of working from home and reduce the bad parts.

1. Schedule one time for personal phone calls. There were many days when I couldn’t get anything done all day because it would seem like every friend and relative would pick that day to call me. If someone calls outside your “phone time” politely explain that you are working and will have to call them back.
2. Don’t over obligate yourself. When people hear ‘work-at-home’ what they really hear is ‘home all day’. So expect to get tons of calls asking you to volunteer, babysit, go out shopping, supervise field trips, etc.,etc. Teach yourself to say no- just like you would if you worked outside the home. Your office hours are your prosperity.
3. Don’t be too rigidly set in your schedule. Things will come up, especially if you are also a parent. Repairmen will need to come fix things, appointments may interfere, kids will surely cause distractions. It happens. Don’t be too hard on yourself and consider it a sick day.
4. Not keeping good business and financial files. Records are essential to knowing how your business is doing and make tax time much less stressful.
5. Spend the day in your pajamas. While this might be an attractive proposition to some, I guarantee you will be more productive if you get up and get dressed as if you were working outside the home.
6. Not setting up “work hours” or at least a stop time to avoid overwhelming yourself. When a company is all yours the pull to work on it as much as possible can be irresistible. Unfortunately you end up neglecting everyone and everything else. And eventually you will end up burning out.
7. Investing money you don’t have. Again it can be tempting to sink as much money as possible into your “baby”. Always work to find frugal ways to accomplish your goals without risking the quality of your work or company.

When you spend eight (or more) hours writing, searching, surfing and networking on your computer it doesn’t take long for that computer to get gunked up. Cookies, cache files, temporary documents, files you downloaded and never looked at or had no use for, ebooks that you’re read or that weren’t any good – all these load up our computer and affect its performance.

That’s why it is so important to perform regular maintenance on your computer. Here’s a list of simple tasks to perform on a routine basis.

Disk Cleanup – This should be done about once a month. You’ll find this task by clicking on your computer, then right click on the disk drive you use most and select properties. A small window will open with a pie graph and a button that says disk cleanup. Disk cleanup will get rid of all the unnecessary files on your hard drive. Your recycle bin, temporary files, etc. will be recommended for deletion. Choose the files you no longer want and hit delete.

Defragment – As you put little bits of information on your computer, they get stored but not always in the most efficient space. “Defraging” reorganizes these files for maximum space efficiency

Clean cookies – Under Internet options on your browser toolbar (at least in Internet Explorer) you’ll find ways to clean your history, cookies and cached files.

Antivirus/Antispyware – You should scan your computer for viruses and harmful spyware weekly at least. Of you have one program that does both great, but if your antivirus doesn’t also scan for spyware you will need to get a separate program.

Add and Remove Programs – If you’re anything like me, you are constantly downloading trial versions of new things to try out. It’s a good idea once a month to go through the programs installed on your computer and uninstall any that you don’t want or that are no longer useful.

Additionally you should schedule some time every three or four months to go through your emails, ebooks, old articles, draft posts, and other tidbit trash taking up space on your computer.

This post assumes that not only do you work from home but that you are also responsible for household tasks and errands and possibly a family.

Working from home is a lot harder than most people assume. When you work outside the home your work time and your home time are clearly defined. However when you work from home sometimes it is hard to know if your next post or the dirty dishes should come first. And sometimes, no matter how many times you tell them not to, children can be distracting and demanding.

So how can you schedule work, home, and play in one day and still get everything done? Beats me, but I have come up with a method that works pretty well.

First I got smart and didn’t even try to schedule work when I knew my kids would be creating chaos. So I clean up, cook, play with the kids and do laundry while the kids are at their most active. This allows me to work on my computer one and off most of the morning while I work on brainstorming and non-computer tasks during the evening when my older children are on the computer and my younger child is in bed.

I also try to simplify my life by assigning certain tasks to certain days. For example I go grocery shopping on Fridays, I do my best to schedule doctor and other appointments on Mondays, and I call my mom every Saturday, etc.

Finally, don’t allow yourself to be too hard on you. Everything isn’t always going to get done, things will be forgotten, deadlines broken.

And the world (and you) will go on just fine.