- Start with Money Expectations and Needs ➞
- Decide on a Niche that Excites You ➞
- Figure Out What Business Model You’ll Excel At ➞
- Set Up Your Home on the ‘Net ➞
- Map Out Your Content and Products ➞
- See What Social Sites Can Generate Traffic for You ➞
(Photo by Bench Accounting/Unsplash)
When the new year is on the horizon, people begin thinking of everything they want to change. We all want a fresh start – a day to take a new path that puts us one step closer to our dreams.
Each of us has different priorities and wishes. Some may be focused on earning more, while others wish they had to work less so they could enjoy more free time. Whatever your goals and wants are right now, you can make it happen by embarking on a work at home career.
Not one where you frantically try to find a company who allows you to work from a distance. We’re talking about one where you are the boss. You run the show. You make the decisions.
You decide what you’ll be working on, how often, when, and from where. Want to take a couple weeks off to visit family or explore new vistas? There’s no upper management to get permission from.
Is your child sick and you need to keep them home for a day or two and go into caretaker mode? No problem. You will instantly eliminate a lot of tedious and unrealistic stress simply by making the commitment to work for yourself and build a business you can be proud of.
There are many scammers that people worry about with online marketing, but most strategies are solid and you don’t have to align yourself with any particular person or company – you can create everything yourself and choose only reputable brands to mention if you want to.
But if we’re going to be honest, here – we have to agree that many corporate jobs are scams, too. Maybe they pay you a paycheck, but there have been many times when someone interviews for a job and then discovers they’re being burdened with far more tasks than they agreed to, or forced to work overtime without pay.
Start with Money Expectations and Needs
Let’s get this one out of the way. Everyone wants to know what money can be made with a work at home career. The truth is, it’s whatever you want it to be that you are willing to put the work in to achieve. There are some people who slack off and can’t make $5 a day, and others who earn seven figures a month.
Yes, a month. It all depends on how much you work, what niche, which business model, how much you hone your skills, if you put yourself out there and have confidence, etc.
If you want to be realistic about it, you’ll understand that this career is one that snowballs. You may start off earning less at first, but then the more you put into it, the more you build up your reputation and offerings, the more recognition you receive, and the more you start bringing in.
Plus, you may start off with a single business model or niche, and then expand it into more over time. You never want to start this business in a desperate state of mind. If you are currently working a 9-5 corporate job to pay the bills, then you’ll want to either save up enough to have 2-3 months’ worth of expenses before getting started, or begin your work at home career during your off hours.
You can work for an hour in the evenings or a few hours on the weekends and start building your online business to a place where your income replaces that of your 9-5 job, allowing you to quit working for others and turn your work at home gig into a full-time career.
When you work from a place of desperation, you tend to make poor, panicked decisions. You might jump at the chance to buy a course that makes too-good-to-be-true promises, or promote something shady just to get a quick commission, ruining your reputation in the process.
Decide on a Niche That Excites You
Once you understand your money needs and make a plan to work offline until you can safely cover your expenses, you’ll be ready to launch your work at home career. Every online marketer needs a niche.
Your niche is the topic or industry you intend to become a leader in. Don’t get intimidated by the word leader. No one has to have a lengthy list of TV appearances or PhDs to be considered a leader.
You simply have to have a passion for a topic, and increase your knowledge in it so that you can share it with others over time. Your readers will be turning to you for solutions, so you need to find a niche where you enjoy helping people.
Traditionally, marketers used to tap into three primary niches, among others. The top three were health, wealth, and relationships. Things have changed a bit, and while those are still hot niche markets, you might want to consider other niches, such as stress management and self-sufficiency.
These niches are thriving due to the state of the world, and they’re both very lucrative. But equally important as money is your ability to remain consistent in guiding your target audience.
If the niche topic bores you, or makes you feel any emotion that brings you down, you’ll start avoiding work. You want to be able to energetically discuss it with your people, so that might be a niche like golf, arts and crafts, organization, cooking, and more.
Figure Out What Business Model You’ll Excel At
There’s only one business model where niches don’t matter – service providers. If you want to offer services, such as ghostwriting, graphics creation, customer service, virtual administrative assistance, etc., then it won’t matter about what niche your clients are in.
You’ll simply be providing a service that other marketers don’t have the time or talent to handle on their own. If you’re ghostwriting, you can charge by the page and write about a wide variety of niche topics.
If you’re creating graphics, you might be making sales copy graphics, ones for info product designs, or even fiction eCovers if that’s something you are talented in. There’s great money in this field, but you are limited by the hours you have available to exchange for money.
That means, you’ll eventually cap out on what you can earn. You may be able to raise rates steadily, but there’s a ceiling for what consumers and clients will pay for services. Plus, if you only have eight hours a day to work, that may hinder your unlimited income abilities, too.
Another wonderful business model you’ll want to consider is that of an affiliate marketer. As an affiliate, you don’t have to create products – you’ll simply be connecting consumers with the brands and products that will serve as the solutions they’re seeking.
Affiliates typically have a blog as their home on the ‘net. They review products, talk about potential solutions for problems, and can make money recommending both tangible and digital items to consumers.
If you have a knack for teaching people, then you can consider becoming a digital info product creator. You can make products that are in eBook format or video modules and help people learn the things they want to know.
For example, you might want to create a series of diet info products, or ones for survival prepping, stress relief, and more. You can always add affiliate marketing as an extension of this business model, recommending other products that you may not have a course for.
If you’re great at writing or creating videos, but don’t want to be a niche expert yourself, then you can still tap into those talents and sell your content as private label rights (PLR) for other marketers to use as their own.
This way, you’re not working as a service provider, but still helping others. Instead of charging more for ghostwritten content, you’ll charge less, but earn more because multiple people will be buying your content over time.
You do the work once and profit from it again and again. You can make a surge of quick money having a discount launch for a week or less when the content is ready – and then put the PLR on your store for people to buy at full-price down the road.
It’s possible that non-fiction isn’t even something that interests you. Did you know that many of the bestselling New York Times and USA Today authors are self-published? Many got their start self-publishing on Amazon Kindle and then expanded out to other platforms easily.
You can write your own fiction books, from short 10-minute stories to full-length novels, and publish them for free on Amazon. You’ll earn either 30 or 70% of the sale, depending on how you price it, and you get paid monthly for the sales and page reads.
You can publish under a pen name, so no one will even know who you are if you don’t want them to. And you’ll have the ability to write in any genre(s) you want – crime thrillers, mysteries, romance, sci-fi, and more.
Set Up Your Home on the ‘Net
Whenever you start working for yourself from home, you’ll obviously want a space to work in your house. But you’ll also need a home for people to visit online. You won’t have a typical storefront as you would in an offline environment.
Start by selecting a domain. It might be your own name, if you want to brand yourself as a niche leader. Or, you can go with something keyword-related. Make sure you get a dot-com domain, because most consumers naturally type that in.
You’ll also need hosting for your website. Go with a small plan at first. There’s no need to buy the biggest hosting package when you’re starting with a single blog and website. If you ever do discover that you need more, they will happily allow you to select a bigger package.
Install your WordPress blog once your domain and hosting are connected, and make sure you have a lead magnet page set up if you want to begin building a list of subscribers.
For that purpose, you’ll need an email autoresponder system, such as Aweber or GetResponse. There are many different autoresponder tools, but go with one that has longevity and is proven to be reputable.
You don’t need to buy anything fancy for your site’s appearance in the beginning. You can use a free WordPress theme and match the design to whatever color palette or images you want.
You can even use free tools like Canva to create headers and sidebar images for your blog – or hire someone on Fiverr to make something professional for you if you need help doing that.
Map Out Your Content and Products
Regardless of what business model you’re pursuing, you’ll want to develop some content for your target audience to consume. If you’re publishing fiction, then you might want to create a free story they can download to get on your list, post blog articles about your upcoming books, etc.
If you’re an affiliate, you’ll primarily be creating product reviews, but you can also have a list-building lead magnet. You’ll also want to make social networking posts to drive traffic to your site.
As a vendor of info products, you’ll need to map out your product line and you may also create blog posts to showcase your expertise and a lead magnet to get prospective customers on your list.
You can make plans for an entire month or year’s worth of content so that you don’t have to constantly sit and think of topics along the way. You can have a blog publishing schedule and also announce the planned launch dates for your info products on other sites or social media groups dedicated to your niche.
See What Social Sites Can Generate Traffic for You
One part of online success is pulling and pushing traffic to your site. Pulling it can be done using SEO (search engine optimization) and creative and strategic blog content that ranks well in the SERPs (search engine results pages).
Pushing traffic can be done from elsewhere. Sometimes it’s a paid solo ad or someone else mentioning you. But you can evaluate various social sites to see if there’s a heavy presence for your niche topic there, and then build a profile on it to start creating a buzz.
Make sure your social media profiles link to your website, either to a lead magnet page or to your products directly. Look at sites like Facebook for groups, Pinterest and Instagram for image-worthy niches like cooking, Tik Tok and YouTube for strategic process niches like cleaning, gardening, and so on.
Become consistent with your content creation on these sites and in every piece of content you publish, make sure you’re branding your URL to help drive new people to your domain.
Becoming your own boss and being able to work from home can sometimes feel daunting. But really, it’s a freeing decision that you won’t regret if you’re the kind of person who believes in yourself and who will hunker down and focus on the work that needs to be done to achieve success.