Niche Blogging For Profit

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.