Posts Tagged ‘Blogging’

People young and old can earn money while working from home. Usually your experience determines your amount of income made. Ask yourself what services you can provide. Working from home can be as successful, if not more than punching the time clock from 9-5. One example of a successful work from home job is writing articles from the comfort of your home office.

Article writing is probably one of the fastest growing at home job. Being a Freelance writer you have the opportunity to write articles for magazines, online blogs, and for news paper columns. Work at home freelance articles are used for many purposes. Many freelance column editors do most of their work from the comfort of their own home. Then they send it via email when finished. When magazine companies hire writers they have the opportunity to hire from all over the world. This way they have views from other cultures, views and ideas.

Online blogging has become very popular among men and women who work at home. With the interest of blogging on the rise, many of the blog host look for people who blog from home. Keeping in mind that people who blog from home are not paid highly. This technique is based on people who want to be exposed of their writing ability. In fact many writers blog for free to get their writing noticed.


There are many advantages to working from home and more pros than cons. For one, which is a big issue in this day’s economy, is saving money on gas expenses driving to and from work. Whatever the job may be. If someone has to drive to work to make their profession available then a work at home job just might work as well.

Below are some tips that you may find useful when working from home.

Budget:
First: Figure out your client’s budget. When you initially talk to clients, very few will volunteer a budget because they want to hire you for the least amount possible. Imagine yourself in their position. You’d want to do the same thing. It’s good business. To try to find out more you can try using a preliminary worksheet. Have this worksheet ask questions regarding the goals of their projects, time-frame, and budget. When being more straight-forward many clients will tend to be more straight-forward with you as well.
It’s as simple as developing a rapport.

Proposal:
Spend as much time as necessary on your job proposal. As nice and agreeable as a potential client may seem in your communications, you still need to create a proposal. Always put in enough time to cover everything. Don’t start without it, even if the client seems to be hurried. A lot of clients with give you a dead-line just to see if you can meet it at first. It’s a great way for them to learn your capabilities. Make sure your proposal covers both client and contractor responsibilities, requirements, expectations, payment agreement and terms for all charges that may fall outside your proposal. Include anything else you can think of that you feel applies to the job. Clients as often as not have a much larger scope in mind than they communicate. Spend a couple hours on this and it could save you many more later.

Hourly Rates & Charges:
It’s always a good idea to charge by the hour. Rather than providing a fixed price for your project, and finding out later that you misquoted which will cost you time and money, you need only tie your quote to an estimated rate and time-frame (i.e.: 20 hr for 30 hours). Not only does this make the quoting process much easier, but clients understand that they are buying your time- enough to finish the project. Thus the chances are increased that your client will be more lenient if you need more hours. You’ll be able to show them what you’ve accomplished, explain what you’d like to do next, and find out how they’d like you to move forward. You can up your estimated cost by ten-percent if you like. When starting out as a free-lancer, it is natural to want to impress your client with a rosy scenario and quote that are lower than your competitors. But you never want to be put in a position where you have to cut corners- producing a bad effort- in order to achieve a quote that you give without giving it proper thought.

Not only that but there is time that you’ll spend communicating, collection assets, and in administration-duties. This doesn’t include snags and problems that may incur outside your control. Therefore, do yourself a huge favor and be deliberate in the quoting and estimation process so that you produce realistic expectations. That doesn’t mean you won’t still be on the lower end of what your client typically receives from other buyers. Keep in mind they also care as much as results as quotes.

Expectations:
Set and manage expectations. If you’re quoting by project, let them know the cost and time-frame for additional changes. If you are quoting by the hour and giving them a total time estimate, let them know when you’re getting close to that quoted total time and whether you will be able to hit it. It may be helpful to have a clause that says if your total time is within 10% of your time quote, you will not charge more (this gives you extra money for finishing quicker and saves them money if you take a bit longer). Clients don’t like surprises: keep them informed on your current time status and let them know at proposal time the possibility of “run-over” and charges associated with extra changes.

Collecting Up Front:
Collecting up front of often a good idea. Aside from recurring maintenance work/costs for smaller projects (projects whose totals are under one ro two thousand), it can be a good idea to collect a portion up front. This will show your client that you are serious and far less likely to bail on them- leaving the process uncompleted. You should not have an issue being given 50% up front on most projects. If the project is large- exceeding over 1000 dollars- you may want to lower the percentage you collect up front so that it doesn’t scare the buyer off. Then at another milestone you can collect more. Use this process only when you feel it is absolutely necessary and the money will be going back into the job. Otherwise it isn’t needed and your clients will know this immediately and- chances are- find a more reasonable buyer.

Milestones:
FINALLY- set a last payment milestone that will get you through to the completion of the job. For instances, if your job is to create websites you’ll need to invoice the final payment the moment the site is complete and 100% live. For a print job: invoice when the goods are delivered. These particular invoices the client will know are coming. Use shorter payment terms as well. If you are not precise and have a proper business-like manner in regards to your payment schedule, most- if not all- clients will ride up as much debt as you’ll allow them. While most are reputable, it’s not a good business practice to let this happen.

Many home business owners spend a good deal of their time working on the content of their website/blog/internet marketing efforts. Whatever your niche having a strong internet presence is essential and in the world of Web 2.0 that often means a blog, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, Ezines articles, and the list goes on.

Whatever online trends come and go original, engaging content that informs, entertains and educates your potential  customers is essential. But how do you do that when you’re already slammed trying to  run a home business? There are ways to create a lot of good internet content with far less effort than you might imagine. Here are some ways you take a single article or blog post and make it work extra hard to promote your home business:

Youtube it – There are two ways you can turn a single article into a promotional video to upload to YouTube and other video sites. First if you are comfortable being the star of the show invest in one of the new FLIP video cameras and record yourself reading your article. These little wonders are practically idiot proof and uploading your final product takes just a few minutes.

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As blogs and article marketing have become essential for home business marketing many people who haven’t really put pen to paper since high school find themselves faced with writing fresh and engaging content on a daily basis. If you are one such person there are a few easy steps you can follow in order to become a better writer, whether you are writing a daily blog post or just trying to come up with 140 engaging characters on Twitter:

Step 1 Just Write! – Many people get stuck because as they are trying to write a creative and intelligent set of sentences they get bogged down, by editing each line as they go along. When you first sit down to write, do just that. Don’t worry for the time being about spelling or comma placement, get your ideas down first.

Step 2 Edit – After you have all your thoughts down and your draft is completed is the time to begin editing in earnest. Read your piece through once and immediately make note of any required changes that are glaringly obvious. Consider your initial choice of words too, could the prose be better, does what you have written actually make sense?

If you rely on a spellchecker to catch your errors be careful. The average program will catch most of them but if you wrote “your” when you really meant “you’re” it won’t correct you, the word is spelt right and this a computer, not a literature professor.

Step 3 Read it Out Loud – Read your piece out loud, either to yourself or to a friend. This will help you catch what you may have not by just visually reading the piece through, especially when it comes to proper punctuation. If you are not under a huge deadline put your work aside for an hour or so and then go back and read it through again. Does it still sound as good as you thought it did?

Follow these simple guidelines and you should find that writing for marketing purposes becomes easier every day, until one day you wake up and its almost second nature.

Many home business owners maintain a blog as part of their overall business efforts, and for many affiliate marketers it is the lifeblood of their business. A number of successful bloggers are also now being sent dozens of products to review on their sights or are paid for their opinions.
New rules (not laws yet) that the Fair Trade Commission intend to implement on December 1st 2009 may change the face of the blogging business for good. According to the new rules a blogger must state clearly in their posts if they are being paid for their opinions or if they have received goods or services for free for review purposes. The penalty for non compliance with these rules could be a fine of up $11,000 per infraction.

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Starting a blog is a great way to work from home. Most bloggers these days use a platform called Wordpress. If you’re not sure what platform you’ve picked out yet, take a look over here and see if Wordpress is right for you.

If you do pick Wordpress, then you’ll want a good theme.

There are plenty of high quality, free Wordpress themes available for download. I’ve compiled a list of some of the best resources for good themes.

• 100 Excellent Free Wordpress Themes
• Wordpress Magazine-Themes
• 83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes You Probably Haven’t Seen
• Beautiful free Wordpress themes
• 60+ Unusual WP Blog Designs
• ThemeHybrid