So you want to take control of your life, and you’re tired of “workin’ for the man”.

Or worse yet, you’ve just been fired/laid off/forced to quit because you just can’t take it anymore, and you’re now unemployed and really not wanting to polish up your resume or take the time to go on the hunt.

A lot of people will have an initial thought that they should become a professional blogger. That’s fantastic, and definitely something to consider, but you need to spend your time on unemployment right now trying to come up with something you really can do to make serious money NOW, and let the blogging be a “side job” for the time being.

The first thing you need to do is take stock in your skills. Just make a list of all the things you know you can do well. Yes, much like you’d put on a resume, but in this case it’s for your own planning. Let’s look at an example:

• Typing 60+ WPM
• Billing/bookkeeping/accounting
• Writing - Technical or Copy
• Excel or other spreadsheet software
• Database management
• Computer networking
• Sales
• Research and planning/organization

Next you need to take a look at your hobbies, and things you enjoy doing for fun. Some examples:

• Weekly dinner parties for friends and family
• Decorating/remodeling
• Crafts (jewelry making/knitting/woodworking)
• Reading

Okay, so now you’ve got a good idea of what you can do, and what you like to do. Now all that’s left is to put them together and come up with an idea for an online business.

Let’s say you’re a great salesperson with research and planning skills. You enjoy throwing elaborate dinner parties for friends and family, and you’re really into decorating and remodeling.

Why not start an event planning business in your area?

What if you’re better with spreadsheets, bookkeeping, and planning? You’d likely be a great virtual assistant.

You could always take your crafts to the web, utilizing sites like Etsy and CafePress (in conjunction with a blog and some hefty internet marketing program) to sell your wares.

Here’s how I’d attack it:

• Check the yellow pages and see how much competition is out there.
• Contact local venues, and tell them you’d like to set up a time to meet with someone to go over their services and pricing.
• Check out competitor websites. Yes, you’re going to need to have one, and here’s where you can add “blogging” into the mix. Writing up blog entries will get your site noticed and bookmarked, and could give you room for adding some merchandising areas to the site for income opportunities.
• Make a plan. Start with what steps you need to take, like coming up with a name for your business, and what kind of contacts you’ll need to have, supplies, and a budget.
• Get your DBA (Doing Business As) certificate. Pricing varies, but it shouldn’t be more than $40 or so and gets you started so you can get a business bank account.
• Start writing up information for brochures, flyers, your website, and get some business cards. VistaPrint is a great place to go for these things, as you can get your first 150-200 cards for free!
• Get your website built. For less than $80 for domain registration and hosting for a year, and an investment in a good design, you’ll have an instant way to send people to learn more about your business.
• Tell EVERYONE you know. Email everyone on your list, letting them know what you’re doing, and make sure that all your friends and family are aware of what you’re up to. You never know who might know someone or who might be your very first client!

Yes, there’s lots more to this, especially when it comes to marketing your new venture. It’ll take some startup money too, so hopefully you’ve got some of that lying around because it’s really not THAT much you’ll need to get going. It’s more a matter of you putting in the time and energy to maximize your exposure (doing things much like the sponsors in the ProBlogger giveaway we managed recently) and really understanding ahead of time what it is you think will be a joyful and profitable business for you to manage from home!

Popularity: 17% [?]

I’ve been working from my home office since early 2004 and have learned quite a lot about what it takes to successfully do such a thing, both as an employee and as a business owner. This post is second in a series about working from home where we’ll discuss many things to benefit not only entrepreneurs and professional bloggers, but also talk about things to help business owners put telecommuting to work for their company.

Regardless of whether or not you telecommute or are running your own show, working from home can be quite difficult sometimes when it comes to distractions. Here are some tips to get you through it and get back to being productive.

• Family members breaking your boundaries?

  Take a look at your setup. Does your office have a door? Explain to the spouse and kids that when the door’s shut, that means that with the exception of a TRUE emergency (fire, injury, etc.), you are simply not to be disturbed. No knocks on the door, no little “tap-tap” and “Sorry to bug you” exceptions allowed. Explain that your door’s not ALWAYS going to be shut, but when it is, it means that you need some strong, solid solo time.

  Similarly, working from home tends to invite random visits from friends and family. While you surely don’t want to be rude and not invite them in, you simply can’t entertain even for a cup of coffee without some kind of planning. So ask that “randoms” be pre-empted with a phone call, and explain that if you’re unable to answer the call, it likely means you’re unable to accept company. That way you’re also not being distracted by 20 minute “chats” on the phone either. Turn the phone off when you need to. Which brings me to my next tip…

• Email Overload? Clients that call every 10 minutes?

  Unless you’re in the process of responding to emails, turn off your email client when you’re working on other projects. If you need it to pull info, pull that info and put it into a Word document or notepad and then shut it down. With few exceptions, it’s highly unlikely that whatever is coming into your email is urgent. If it is, they’ll likely call, and if you need to check your voicemail after the call comes in, that’s okay too. It’s definitely important to be available to your clients and coworkers, but not to the point where it’s detrimental to your productivity. Set two times a day (but no more than three) to open the email and check the voicemail. A couple hours isn’t going to really kill anyone. (Again, depending on the nature of your business, this may be untrue. In that case, set up an emergency phone number and an autoresponder for clients only.)

• Getting antsy for the outdoors?

  Part of the benefit of working at home is that you can create your own schedule. But think of it like dieting… If you deprive yourself for too long, you’re going to inhale, in one sitting, an entire double fudge chocolate cake… a la mode!

  Give yourself time to break away. If you’re in the middle of something and you find yourself frustrated and fraught with the urge to just get OUT of the house, then go for a nice 15 minute walk. Grab a cup of coffee and go sit out on the deck with the dog for a few minutes. It’s okay to take a break! Just don’t let 15 minutes turn into the rest of your day - don’t decide you’re going to go on a hike when you’ve got deadlines looming.

  Now that you’ve got that down, remember to make sure to schedule yourself some daylight fun time every week. Go have lunch with a friend every Wednesday or take the kids to the park every Thursday afternoon. Better still, simply schedule Fridays off! (Even better, do all three!) If you put in 10 hours a day for the rest of the week, you’re not hurting anyone by not working on Fridays. (Unless of course you’re telecommuting, and your boss needs you there, or you have a project that’s due. There’s always exceptions!)

• Have one huge project and a bunch of tiny ones? Don’t know where to start?

  Consider outsourcing the smaller stuff and spend one of those 15 minute coffee breaks outside with a pen and paper. Make a to-do list and just write everything out that needs doing. Prioritize them, and then figure out what you can pay someone else to do and still make profitable. Make goals for the number of things you want to be able to cross off every day, and revise the list daily. Then go back and tackle them one at a time, by priority. Reward yourself with another 15 minute walk or some play time with “Scruffy”.

• Ready for a nap at 2:00pm?

  Figure out your daily energy levels and schedule your most important tasks during high-energy times. This again, a bonus to working from home on your own - If you’re a night owl, do all your non-client contact projects at night, and schedule client meetings and phone calls for lunch or early afternoon when you’re most alert. This of course is dependent on your type of business, but all in all it’s perfectly okay to make phone calls and manage emails at 7am, work on a project until lunch, take a two hour nap (or go to a matinee with the kids even), and then work on important projects the rest of the night until it’s time for bed.

All in all, it’s most important that you give yourself the chance to make changes when necessary. Don’t spend your time playing computer games if you have a project due, but rather take that time to re-organize and think about when you can be the best you for your business.

Popularity: 19% [?]

I’ve known Darren Rowse of ProBlogger fame for almost two years now. Actually, I knew of his website for that long… I first met him and his lovely wife at a meetup in NYC at O’Connelly’s that was sponsored in part by Text Link Ads back in the early part of this year. A few months went by, and there was the Future of Online Advertising (FOOA) conference, where I got my admission into the event because I was an avid reader of ProBlogger and he had a few “tickets” to give away.

That particular weekend wound up being the first time I did anything for Darren, which was to organize another meetup in NYC (this one was sponsored by Chitika and b5media). He’d just emailed and asked that I do some research to find a place since I’m in the state, and the next thing you knew we were set up at The Speakeasy for Saturday night. What a blast!

This time around, Darren had set himself up for a doozy of a giveaway in honor of his site’s 3rd year in operation. He called it “ProBlogger’s 3rd Birthday Bash” and he had asked me if he could hire me to administrate the giveaways. I’d really never done something on this scale before, but I was up for the challenge and within 24 hours had over 120 forwarded emails with all the prizes that people had offered.

Many people have asked me to write up a few things I’ve learned to keep in mind for online giveaways in the future, so here we go:

We should have prepared for one more week before and after. I wanted to get through the emails and get the giveaway organized and planned out solid within just a couple of days. While my spreadsheet super knowledge helped a little with this (really, I’m not that knowledgeable with them, I just like them for organizing), I think that we could’ve both used another solid week to really plan this out. Darren could’ve used that time writing up extra posts for during and after (as he puts it, we both had one hell of a “hangover”), and I could’ve used it to perhaps better think of ways to manage all the prizes in a more streamlined fashion. I think that grouping them when it made sense was good, but there were so many various ones, it got to “crunching” them together to make it more manageable, which I think frustrated readers when wondering if they should enter or hold out for something they wanted more, or when there was really only one prize in a list of 12 that they wanted, and they won something else on the list. With more time, I likely would’ve selected fewer, larger prizes.

Fewer prizes would’ve benefit everyone more. Sponsors, in return for their generosity, would’ve gotten more focused exposure had we kept the list smaller. With 100+ sponsors, it was easy for them to get lost outside of their particular giveaway’s post. Readers might have been more keen on spending some quality time considering where they entered, rather than just entering every “comment here” that came up, and I would’ve had less people with whom to make sure I communicated properly (instead of 100+ sponsors, 100+ winners, and 4000+ comments).

Still in regards to prizes, I think it’s best to keep them related to the blog topic. We wanted to try to include as many prizes as possible, and really make this an enormous giveaway. In that, there’s no doubt we succeeded. There were 4 iPods, coaching programs, beauty products, vacations, and computer gear. We could’ve cut down the number of prizes by more than half had we stuck to only items that could conceivably be related to blogging and business, with a little “gadget” stuff tossed in. (I can’t imagine how many “Where are the iPods?” comments we would’ve gotten had we not included those!)

Keep it short in length, and keep it during the week. Let’s face it, people spend a lot of their work days using blogs like Darren’s to get away from their work and learn something new. On the weekends, fewer people are at their computers reading feeds and checking in. Many people spoke about how they were going to get chastised by their significant other for gluing themselves to the computer all weekend to make sure they got in their entries. While it made sense to run it as long as we did with the number of prizes we had, in the future I wouldn’t suggest any more than three days in the middle of the week. Announce it Monday, run it for three days, and close out on Friday. I think not only did Darren and I “burn out” a bit, but so did a number of his readers, and it took away from the other posts he had going on.

All in all, I think the whole thing was a really great project for both myself and Darren. I know that my readership has increased (site traffic was up 300% over the course of the giveaway and RSS subscriptions quadrupled) due to the exposure I got just for managing the show, and I learned more about Darren’s readers than a month’s worth of comment skimming could’ve done. I’m in fact thinking of adding a service to our lineup here at Anubis Marketing for managing blog contests and website giveaways. I’d love to hear more detail on what everyone else thinks about the whole event, after having read both my thoughts and Darren’s reflections on the giveaway.

It wasn’t perfect, we had a few hiccups, but what do you all think were the highlights and potholes?

Popularity: 22% [?]

I’ve been working from my home office since early 2004 and have learned quite a lot about what it takes to successfully do such a thing, both as an employee and as a business owner. This post is first in a series about working from home where we’ll discuss many things to benefit not only entrepreneurs and professional bloggers, but also talk about things to help business owners put telecommuting to work for their company.

It’s been said before…

“I could never work from home, I’d never do any work.”

It’s also been said…

“I could never hire anyone for my company and let them work from home. They’d never do any work.”

Let’s put aside independent contractors and freelancers and so on for the time being and talk about why it makes sense to work from home or have your employees work from home. Here are the pros and cons:

Employees

Pros
- Stay in your pajamas all day if you like!
- Save on gas and lunches out.
- Be a “work at home parent”.
- Less distraction from others who are trying to avoid their own work by coming over and talking to you.
- Working late doesn’t seem so daunting anymore.
- Stop having to get up at 6am to shower, dress, and drive to the office for 9am. Use those three hours to do household chores, or get started on emails and such a little early.

Cons
- Less interoffice socializing can sometimes make you feel “out of the loop”.
- At-home distractions calling your name. Laundry, kids, dishes, a dirty bathtub.
- You might tend to spend too much time working, because you get engrossed in a project and since you’re at home, you have nowhere to leave from or go to.

Employers

Pros
- Less office space needed, so you can save on your lease/rent/utilities.
- Putting trust in an employee encourages them to perform even better for you.
- You can pay a little less in wages because your employees don’t have fuel or car maintenance costs.
- VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) ensure end-to-end security between your employee’s home and your network.
- Main office network goes down? Phone lines go down? Not necessarily the case at your telecommuters’ homes.
- Employees less distracted by office politics and socializing are more productive.

Cons
- No “stopping by” a cubicle to make sure your employees aren’t playing solitaire.
- Phone calls, emails, or instant messages are the only way to reach them.
- You may have to still require them to come to the office for meetings and project evaluations.
- Lack of face to face connection between employees can make it difficult for them to relate.

As you can see, the benefits do outweigh the potential problems, and it’s not a decision that anyone should take lightly. Keep reading our Telecommuting series to help discover if telecommuting is right for you or your employees.

Can you think of any other pros or cons? Let’s have a discussion…

Popularity: 11% [?]

It’s a well-researched fact that more than half of all business startups fail within their first year. Within five years, 95% will fail. Believe it or not, it’s likely not due to a lack of opportunity or good business sense, but rather a lack of the business owner being able to draw enough pay from the business to support his or her personal living expenses.

Let’s take a look at some of the possible reasons why:

You only THINK you’re putting in 60 strong work hours a week.

It’s a given when you own a business, especially a new one, that you’re going to be really hammering away at building it up. Your family may look at you strangely when you come out of your office because you’ve grown three days worth of facial hair or the clothes you were wearing at dinner on Monday night are still on you, stained and wrinkled (and smelly), on Thursday afternoon. But what were you really doing in there all that time?

It’s so easy to get distracted when there’s a computer in the room, or when your brain is so fried and you look around you at the mess in your office and decide to “get organized”. Here’s a little tip, one I’ve recently put to use myself, and it will save you an insane amount of frustration: Pay someone else to do it. I have a friend whose son just started half-day preschool. For two hours a day, 3-4 days a week, she comes over and does “office manager” stuff for me. It’s well worth the money I pay her, and she gets out of the house and makes some extra cash. Those are merely bonuses though - it helps ME focus on the things I need to be doing, gives me the time to do the important things I need to do, and keeps me organized and well… sane.

Sure, everyone needs a mental break, but if you find yourself taking a break from writing sales letters and hopping on to your favorite game website, only to find yourself 4 hours later having done ne’er a darn thing for your business, then it’s time to really put your priorities in check.

You’re not charging enough.

Okay, so you don’t play games on the computer and your office is minimalized and spotless. You’re still working your finger muscles to the bone and cannot make ends meet on the personal side. Consider that you’re truly not charging enough for your services. Oh yes, it’s great to beat the competition in terms of cost, but if you’re already surpassing them in terms of service (they talk to you directly, you’re on top of emergencies, and you meet or beat deadlines consistently) then you deserve to charge more. You’re only worth what someone’s willing to pay for your knowledge and expertise, and if that means driving away “smaller” clients who can’t afford you, well then so be it. You’ll be making room for people who can afford what you’re worth, and using your time to make the most money you possibly can. We’ll get into “firing clients” another day…

You’re not spending your time wisely.

You’ve set your pricing at a responsible level, you’ve got a couple good clients, you’re working 60 hours a week, you despise Solitaire, and your office is something right out of the “after” shot of something on HGTV - but you’re still not paying your car insurance on time.

When you decide to spend time on marketing - what exactly are you spending your time on? If you’re cleaning up your website and buying Google ads thinking that’s gonna cut it for you, you’re wrong. That’s all great stuff to do, but it’s considered “passive marketing”. It’s making sure that in the event someone does find you, that what they see/experience while trying to learn about your company looks and sounds great. It’s making sure that you get noticed on the sidebar in Google. But it’s not proactively seeking anything.

Put it this way: When you were a kid and played “hide and seek”, if you were the seeker, you always tried to be quiet so that the hiders didn’t know you were coming. As a hider, you also kept quiet so that you weren’t found.

Marketing is the direct opposite of the silence in hide and seek. You need to put yourself out there - send emails and newsletters to people you’ve met, past clients, and people you think could use your services. You have to seek them, but you have to do it LOUDLY. Come up with creative ways to offer a discount to past clients for re-signing with you. Write articles and submit them to blogs that revolve around your topic with a polite request/offer for the blog owner to publish it with your name and a link. Heck, BLOG about your business! Whatever you do, stop focusing so much on your maximum PPC bid and start telling people what you’re all about one-on-one.

The bottom line:

You need to make changes NOW to ensure that your business will thrive enough to support your personal life. Don’t wait for the big boom of success to raise your prices, and don’t waste time on things that take away from the things you could be doing to really grow. If your business isn’t making enough to support you, your business won’t make enough to support itself, and then you’ll become just another statistic… and not a positive one!

Popularity: 9% [?]