Tips for Working From Home
If you work in internet marketing or run any kind of ecommerce site than you are probably working from home so you already know about the benefits and problems that can arise from the situation. My biggest problem is that working from home seems like a license for some people to bother me at any time they want. I'll be working away when someone will drop by to chat for a few minutes, something they definitely wouldn't be doing if I was working in an office. During the summer if someone has the day off they'll call me up to go golfing, so I have to keep a pretty strike schedule of silencing the phone during my working hours and keeping the door shut to the room in my house I use as the office.
At least the stigma of working from home seems to be going away. Back in 2002 when I started my online business it seemed that everyone thought I was just goofing off all day, and some even asked if I was ever going to get a real job. Of course I thought I was working a real job, I just happened to love sleeping in, staying up late, and taking an afternoon nap. I wasn't working any less than any of my 9-to-5 friends, in fact I was probably putting in close to double the hours they were, but just at different times of the day.
Here are a few tips I have for those of you who either work at home or are thinking abou it:
1. Know Your Style - If you have problems staying motivated on your own, then why do you think it's a good idea to work from home? You have to be self-motivated since nobody will be monitoring you.
2. Create a Work Space - Don't work in your bedroom or at the kitchen table. You need to have a room set aside in your home that you use specifically for work, one in which you can close the door to the outside world as a signal to everyone else that you can't be bothered.
3. Find Your Daily Schedule - I rarely get up before 7 AM and I like to get in a morning workout and shower before starting my day. This means you'll frequently find me on the computer around 8:30. I'll work for about three hours and then take a lunch at 11:30, come back and work for an hour or two before taking a short nap. Then I'll get after it again for a few hours before dinner and some social time with the wife. Most nights I'll log a few extra hours in late at night before hitting the sack after midnight. This is what works for me and I don't think I could function in an 8-to-5 environment (I tried, it didn't go so well).
4. Interact - One problem I have with working at home is the lack of human interaction some days. I'm just working away at home with nobody else around and it can get kind of lonely and boring. I tend to go out to eat more than I probably should and go out with friends for quite awhile on the weekends. You should probably try to find people to go to lunch with or do activities with to fill up your evenings, otherwise you'll turn into a hermit.
Identifying the Top Blogs in Your Niche
Why Do You Want to Identify Top Blogs in Your Niche?
If you plan on entering a market or are just interested in learning about or studying a certain market then you will want to know where the top sites are located. This is the fastest and most effective way to gather the resources needed to learn about your industry. From current events, who are the top advertisers, the size of the market, and how tough it will be to enter the market, understanding your competition is a key to your future success. It is also a great way to drive traffic to an existing site by interacting with a top blog by either commenting on popular posts to networking with the blog owner for nurturing a business relationship.
How To Identify the Top Blogs
Technorati
The Technorati blog directory has a pretty good list of the top blogs sorted for you by topic. I say "pretty good" because tagging your blog on Technorati used to be considered an essential step into getting yourself established, but now that just isn't the case. Many top bloggers don't even bother adding themselves to the directory anymore, but still, I would say most top blogs are listed here and it's a good place to start your search.
Ask Blog Search
Ask has a pretty nice search engine for looking at blogs that have the keywords that are contained in your niche. You won't see very much spam in the Ask.com index and Ask built their reputation on being able to find clusters, or groups of related sites that supposedly gave a better indication of authority. The problem with Ask is that you are still going to see some strange feeds showing up in your results congesting the page.
Google Blog Search
The leading search engine on the web also does a pretty good job of helping you find related blogs with their specialized blog search. The start page allows you to click through to very general categories and here you will see massive blogs that are very generalized. When you do a search you will get a related blogs list that shows you blogs that have your keywords in their title, plus you will see the search results bringing up certain blog posts that are related to your keyword. I personally use the google blog search quite a bit to find posts to comment on that are related to something I just wrote. The problem here though is that you also get a lot of forum posts, which aren't really blogs but for some reason are included in this index.
As you can see there isn't an all-encompassing tool that will work perfectly to help you find all of the top blogs in your niche, but if you use the three sites above you can start to get a pretty good feel on what's out there.
How to Find a Successful Niche
The key to making money online these days is to find a successful niche to market to. You aren't going to be the giants out there like Wal-Mart and Best Buy so why are you trying?
The first thing for you to figure out is what exactly a niche market is. Let's use the example of music. Most of the giant department stores like Wal-Mart only carry a small percentage of artists, and even though only a limited selection of albums from those artists. A niche would be insound.com, which carries more alternative or lesser known artists.
So how do you find your niche to be successful in? Well here are a few tips for niche research that I have to help you come up with some ideas.
What's in the News?
Find out what is going on in the world and which current events are getting a lot of attention. Pay attention to morning shows on network television which have several different segments on books, movies, and new products hitting the market. These shows do not put items on the air that they do not think their viewers would be interested in hearing about, so you can let them do the market research for you!
Make a List of Things You Are Interested In
It's going to be much tougher to succeed in a market you do not care anything about. I have found that the best way to get traffic to my sites is to write content. That can take many shapes and forms, but knowing about a topic and writing about it is the single most important thing you can do to grow your site. How tough is it to write about something you aren't interested in? I've done it, and my work suffered from it. Make it easy on yourself and only get into a niche that you are interested in.
Do Keyword Research
You can't go after general keywords, so get specific and then see if there is anything related to the keyword you can use. You also want to check the traffic numbers because if nobody is searching for your term, how many people are actually interested in it? Not many.
I personally recommend the SEO Book tool and using Google's keyword tool.
Now you have three simple steps to help you find a successful niche to make money online. If you have any other tips and tricks you've used in the past to discover a niche market to sell in then I would love to hear about them in the comments.