Is It Worth The Work To Make Money From Home?
When I think of working from home I don’t think about working for someone else doing remote work. I see making money from home as a business, and I see it as a way of removing yourself from wage slavery and getting rid of having to answer to your boss. When you are doing a regular job you are going to be paid by the hour, and you will have a steady income that is based on the hours that you put in. When you are working for yourself you don’t directly get money for the things you do, and the time you spend, but instead the income will come as a result from all the efforts that you pu it – it might not be directly related to the amount of work that you do. This leaves a lot of people not making any money because they are too busy thinking what is worth the work and what is not.
What is worth it?
Making money online is not easy, and it will most likely require a lot of work before you will see the money, and in the end you can do calculations whether you got paid “enough” compared to the amount of work that you put in to it. At some point you will realize that you are more effective if you outsource specific tasks because your time is more valuabe spent otherwise, but in the beginning everything is worth it.
The most frequent questions that I see are ones that are related to obtaining backlinks. People are thinking if it is worth it to bookmark your sites to various social bookmarking sites, because those links are not as powerful as other types of links that might you might get. This results in people avoiding social bookmarking, even if it takes only a little time and you can even get some direct traffic from the bookmarking sites. It is a well known fact the links with a “no-follow” tag don’t count so much for the search engines and for that reason people are not using big SB sites like Delicious since they will not directly affect the organic rankings in the search engines. Well if avoid this completely you are missing on a couple of hundred backlinks to your site. They might not be powerful and for that reason people think that they are not worth it.
Doing article submission to different article directories is something that is commonly used amongst internet marketers as a way of obtaining correctly anchored backlinks. This will take a lot more time than doing SB because you will have to write good articles to publish, and do the submission either using a tool or doing it manually. Even so it is known that not all the directories are created equal, and something like Ezine Articles is showing to be one of the sites that the big G likes, and for that reason many marketers leave their submissions to that single directory, forgetting about the hundreds, or thousands of other sites because they simply don’t carry too much juice or have a no-follow tag. The very primal meaning of article submission is to get people using those directories to read your article, and click on your footer link to your site. Is that not targeted traffic? They used the directory to search for your keyword and found your site that way. If you are not doing article submission to all the possible sites there are, you are leaving out on a few hundred legit backlinks to your site. Once again they might not be the strongest links you’ll get but when you combine them with the SB links you are already missing out on more than five hundred links. It can take you fifteen minutes to half an hour to write an article to a database and you won’t see any money from that single article.
Directory submission is considered being one of the least effective ways to obtain rankings in the search engines. People from the make money online crowd keep telling that directories don’t help you rank. Well how about submitting your website to a hundred web directories – will that help you to make money from home? There are people using these directories to find what they are looking for, and if you are looking for targeted traffic then there you go. Some of these sites come with a no-follow tag, but it does not matter for the people who click on the link. You might spend hours doing all this and it won’t directly make you money so it is natural to think that it is not worth spending the time to do this. After all at your day job you are going to get paid by the hour, and if you can’t accomplish the same working from home, then why bother? Combine directories, with social bookmarking and submitting to all the article directories you are looking at a thousand correctly anchored backlinks to your website – is it worth the time it took for you to achieve this?
Forums are a great way to participate in conversations in your niche, and some of the forums allow you to use a footer link, or to point links from your posts to your websites. The thing is that forums are filled with links and the pages don’t usually get a good PR. If you spam the forums with just one post with your link it is not likely to stick but there is a moderator that will delete it for being spammy. How about writing quality content there and directing other people there to useful websites – your own – with a correctly anchored backlink? These people are interested in the niche and definitely targeted traffic. You could take part in multiple forums and get links from all of them to your main site, to your articles and to your possible supporting websites, but is it worth it since you won’t directly see the money rolling in?
Is it worth it make money from home?
With your own business you are always bound to do more work than you expected, and you are not likely to make as much money as you expected. If you have any hobbies you are aware of the fact that sometimes you will have to do things that won’t directly make you money and that is how you should treat your make money online experiments in the beginning. It is all about your mentality, and if you don’t do the backlinks because they won’t directly make you rank, you are making it too easy for your competition to outrank you.
Personally I believe that all the automation tools that there are, are making people more and more lazy, and people are avoiding decent links to their sites because they involve work. If you can’t get a thousand backlinks for writing one article and spinning it, then it is not worth the effort right? No. Getting all the possible backlinks to your site is what makes your site rank – sure you can get better ROI from obtaining high quality backlinks from authority sites, but who can do it at all times? Sure some of the most talented internet marketers have methods in obtaining a backlink from wherever they want, but sometimes this takes even more work than getting those hundreds of links from the article directories.
How can you make the less valuable links, be more valuable
Many people leave their links to one layer – this is quite understandable because the work involved in linking all your links. If you publish articles to a hundred of directories, and then write articles that have backlinks to all those articles it is going to be a lot of work, but it is going to make those links a lot more valuable. Even a non indexed article from some random directory can be made powerful by building a dozen backlinks to it which will get it indexed and ranked. This will carry out more juice and it will make your money site making more money because of the organic rankings it just gained.
Don’t just spam out those links but try at least to make them interesting – you can write boring articles to directories but it does not take much more effort to make them at least a little interesting and get people clicking on the footer link and visiting your site. If your site is not that interesting they might want to click on an ad to get out and that is money in your pocket – this is a method that a lot of people use to market affiliate products. Some internet marketers don’t even bother with organic rankings, but insted publish hundreds of articles to article directories and work with the referral traffic – there’s a lot of money to be made this way also. If your article is a jabbering nonsense article then no-one bothers to check your website out.
While you are doing the bookmarking for your website, why not bookmark all your articles at the same time. This will get them at least some easy backlinks and might get them indexed and worth something SEO wise.
The spirit of entrepreneurship is something that is not easy to obtain, but in the end it is all about making every dollar possible without thinking about the work involved. Sometimes you can land a $100 sale for five minutes of work, and sometimes you will have to work for two hours to get $10 but in the end it is all money to your pocket and you are making money from home, working for yourself! When you are a big shot internet marketer you can start thinking whether your time is better spent doing something else than writing articles for directories, and at that point you are not going to stop doing it but you will outsource it. Don’t spend your time thinking whether something will make you enough money to be worth it – you will never know before you do it.
What comes to my micro websites
So a while ago I started a micro website campaign : Making money from home with micro websites.
What is going on? Well I am behind schedule as usual – I got overestimated my work capacity and underestimated the time spent on each site. Currently I have about 60 websites up and about half of them are indexed and ranking. Some of them are on the second page, and some on the first page, and a small number of them are ranking lower – this means that my methods of evaluating competition and building the sites are not way off – I have not built backlinks to any of these sites yet. Some of them I know won’t make me much money, but I did not know that before I got them up and indexed. There are some unexpected money makers and with about 30 sites indexed (some of them are Adsense some Amazon and some eBay) I have had a pretty steady Adsense income of about $6-9/day. This means that in a month I have made the domain costs of those 30 sites back, and after that it is all income. It has taken almost all my free time to do this – even if I have spent a little more time with my gf than I planned to. Was it worth doing spending all that time doing this? Well I found two niches that I am going to build bigger sites around – the competition is not massive and as it turns out they get clicks quite well. So yes it was worth it! I will still continue to get at least 100 sites up with adsense, and after that I will probably continue with the bigger sites, or start doing this with Amazon. Dave from the best article directory – check it out; it’s worth it since you can use your Ad code to gain revenue from your articles – gave some great advice on how to make money with Amazon and I will most likely be doing an experiment of my own following his footsteps on that one at some point.
But right now I am suffering from wrist pain and I might have to take a few days off from writing and eat some NSAID medication for it, but after that I will be back to building the sites and making money. After all if you want to make money from home you will have to forget about the time spent and focus on making that income no matter what it takes. I am also planning on a vacation – we’ll head to India probably – but the thing is that I can’t take time off my dayjob. Making a full time income in a few months would be great and it would mean that we could take that vacation after I quit my job. Would you be ready to work a little extra to be able to take a vacation whenever you want and to work from home for yourself?
And just a remind for the CPC that keyword tools give you – a few days ago I scored a $5 click from a keyword that has a $0,9 CPC. Chew on that. And if you want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter @Phillaupher
