Blog Subway

Welcome back to a blog that caters for the work at home entrepreneur or blogger looking to make a living from their writing and marketing skills. In this post, I want to take a look at the benefits of working from home and how it compares to working at a regular job.

Well, for me, the very thought of ever having to go back to work for a company is unpalatable for a variety of reasons, but I suppose the foremost of those is that once you’ve been your own boss and worked for yourself, it is very difficult to swallow your pride and go back to work for someone else.

So with that thought firmly entrenched in the back of my mind, I set myself on a trail that would lead me to self sufficiency and mean that I would never have to take that backward step in life. So what are the benefits to working at home that make it such an appealing way of life for so many people?

The first thing is, as I have already mentioned, not having to work for someone else, or not having a “boss” who can tell you what to do, how to do it and when.

Some people like the security of working for a company and even accept the ordering about from a boss because they find it easier to have their workload set out for them and to know exactly what it is they have to do, how long it should take them and how they should go about accomplishing that. That’s fine and each to their own.

Others dislike that way of working and it is those that seek out ways to change their circumstances, meaning a way to work for themselves and not to be at the beck and call of a boss, or worse, be an underling to a hierarchy of supervisors, managers, senior managers etc.

Another benefit I enjoy as I work from home is that I never need to commute to an office. That saves on time and travel costs, but to me the time saving is the crucial one. Commuting can often take an hour or more each way, lengthening your effective working day by an additional two to three hours or more. That’s an eighth of your day and over a five day week adds up to an entire waking day! So i could say that by working at home, I gain an extra day every week!

Another benefit is the flexibility of my working hours. If I oversleep, so what? I just make a point of working a little later that day to maintain my weekly hours that I need to effectively produce my income. If I were working for a company, guess how long I’d keep my job if I regularly overslept a day or more each week!

Working at home, for myself also allows me to make full use of my own creativity in the way that I do my work which ultimately results in teh way that my income is derived. For me personally, I spend a good deal of my working day building my portfolio of websites into a position where they generate income without further constant maintenance from me. In other words, the income they generate is passive and will continue to produce a relatively steady flow of cash whether I tend them or not. This is important as it means I can take a day off whenever I want to and the income from those sources will not diminish or alter because of it. Try doing that if you work for a company!

Your boss won’t be too happy if you just take the day off on a whim as the money you generate for the company will stop when you’re absent, especially if you are in manufacturing or production.

So that’s about as much as I want to write on the subject for now. I may carry this on in a future post.

Blog Subway

Welcome back to Blog Subway, where I want to take a cold hard look at one of the ways of how not to make money online. Blogging in the subway doesn’t mean I’m blogging in the, erm actual subway, if anyone is wondering! This is really just an underground look at what’s going on in the world of blogging and where people are using blogs to make money from blogging. So what’s the latest to hit the cyber streets?

Well, it may or may not surprise you to learn that Mr Problogger has created a paid forum where noobs can go and be taught a load of totally useless stuff by more noobs. They can pay $2 for the privilege, too! Ok, $2 is not going to hurt anyone’s paypal account but it will surely make a nice bit of extra income for Mr Rowse, the blog/forum’s owner.

Some of the big guns have already come out blazing about how this is such a bad idea for noobs (although a very good idea for Darren Rowse) and that it’ll just create a whole new bunch of clueless noobs doing everything wrong while they try to make money online using the hopelessly inadequate ramblings of the so-called experts who are running said forum.

On the one hand, its annoying and might even have got a similar derogatory response from yours truly, but upon reflection, the more noobs that learn all the wrong stuff from the likes of problogger, then the lower the competition for me. I’ve actually gotten to the stage where I’m not even going to give out any more information on what you really need to do in order to make money online. Why should I? I’d just be writing a whole load of stuff that you can find on one or two other blogs that tell it like it is and don’t spout the same tired old nonsense that a thousand other blogger spout day in and day out. And for what?

To teach people how to take money out of my own pocket?

You must be joking! There are still many fine ways to make money from the Internet and they still work well and don’t cause anyone to get ripped off or scammed, so I’ll keep my methods to myself and keep you all guessing. Much better, methinks!

So this was an entirely non-useful blog post for anyone wanting to know the right way to earn an income online, except for one saving grace and that is I told you how NOT to go about it.

Blog Subway

In my last post here Blog Subway, looked at some more ways to keep things clean and tidy when it comes to running one of these blog hosts. Now its the turn of the revenue generating parts of the blogs.

There is a section in the user panel called revenue share and this is where you can set up your affiliate ids for a variety of revenue generating entities, such as adsense, eBay, Kontera and now Amazon and Chikita. The last two were just added with the latest upgrade to the system and they are both useful additions to your blog’s ability to generate revenue, or more basic to make money online.

Simply fill in your affiliate or publisher ids in the relevant boxes and hit the update button and your data is saved.

Now your blogs will serve ads for adsense, kontera and chikita automatically without you having to do a single additional thing. For eBay and amazon, you need to go to the relevant tabs in your settings and update each panel to suit the ads you want to appear and follow the instructions on how to insert the ads into your posts or pages.

A note on serving affiliate ads:

With eBay and amazon ads, it is actually a better practice to serve those ads in specific “pages” rather than actual blog posts. This is because the search engines don’t much like to see a page of affiliate ad blocks on a homepage of any website or blog and may penalize your blog if it sees them on yours. That could take the form of a serps penalty, which means less traffic for you or even the sandbox which will mean next to no traffic for you!

This is why placing affiliate ads in pages is far better with a link to those pages in a sidebar widget. That way, your visitors can see where you have stuff on sale and the search engines see a home page with a legitimate post with relevant content for visitors to read.

Easy when you know how!

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Blog Subway