There are many different ways that you can break free from a regular job and become self sufficient, but the techniques that I am using, and the methods I will talk about here, will give you a passive income, meaning that the work that you do now will continue to pay off after the work is done, the aim is to end up with a steady stream of income that continues to come in long after you have completed the work. Many people find it hard to believe that these real work at home jobs exist, as it is so ingrained in our psyche that you go to work for a week, and you get paid for the work you did that week. For this reason, many will try and convince you that this is a pipedream. After all, if it were possible, why isn’t everyone doing it?

The answer to that question is simple; it is hard work to set it up. People seem to translate the term “passive income” as meaning “getting paid for doing nothing”, and that is the ultimate goal, but there is a long road to travel before you get there. This is the reason that people fall for so called “money making ideas” that promise to hand everything to you on a silver platter just by sending them $67.95. This is good news for anyone that is serious about wanting to succeed with this type of business model. If you are persistant and put in the work, you will eventually get there, and you will be met with minimal competition (assuming you choose the right niches), because the majority of the world is lazy.

Creating this type of lifestyle online consists of five steps, each one is of critical importance. The five steps are; niche selection, property building, content creation, promotion and monetization. Your goal is to have web properties that are considered to be an authoratative source of knowledge on your chosen topic. Considered authoratative by who, I hear you ask? Well, by the search engines primarily, as it is the search engines that will direct people to your property. What’s more, it’s really just one search engine that we need to primarily concentrate our efforts on. Yep, you guessed it, Google. The Big G. Google is the place that the majority of Internet users go when they are looking for. They are so popular, that Google is now considered a verb, rather than a brand name. We’ve all done it. You want the phone number of that new pizza shop? Just Google it. Your kids thrown you a curveball with a homework question? Get them to Google it. Because of Googles popularity, it is imperative that we understand the way it works in order to succeed, and I will be discussing this in much greater depth in posts to come. Once you have an authoratative property, you will naturally get a lot of visitors, and there are many different ways that you can turn that traffic into money.

Make Money From Home – Step One – Niche Selection

So back to our five steps, and I will only be touching on these briefly today, and expanding on them in days to come. Firstly, niche selection. If you are going to create a web property with the hope of attracting visitors who will convert to money, you need to be focussed in your approach. This very first step is the place where most people slip up, and if you get this step wrong, it is going to be an uphill battle to make anything of your efforts. A personal blog that is about anything and everything may seem like the most amazing thing to you, but there is no focus, and even if people do end up on your site, they will be people who are surfing around, looking for anything and everything. They are lsort of like the people that come into the store because they’re waiting for the bus, they have no intention of buying anything, and no reason to be there, they are just killing time. If, however, you create a very focussed website about one particular topic, then the people that you will attract will be people that are interested in that topic, and it’s these people that will convert to money. Choosing a good topic (or niche, or keyword), is a delicate process. It needs to be a topic that is somewhat popular, otherwise, even if you do become an authoratative source, you are not going to get many visitors. It also needs to be a “paying” topic. This means that people must be willing to spend money on the niche that you have selected. Finally, it needs to be a topic that is not too competitive, particularly when you are just starting out. I mentioned earlier the folly of trying to get rich off this site, which is all about making money from home. The reason I said that is because the competition for this niche is fierce, and it would be a great deal of work for me to get anywhere worthwhile with it.

Make Money From Home – Step Two – Property Building

Step two is site creation, and this is all nuts and bolts stuff, which I will touch on, but I am not an expert on. There are plenty of resources available for people who want to learn how to buid there on websites, and there is blogging software available that automates a lot of the tedious work. That said, you don’t even need to build your own property from scratch. There are places where you can go that allow you to build quick and easy pages about your topic with very little technical knowledge needed. We will look at places like Hubpages and Infobarrels as well, as these are tools that can be of great benefit to the beginner, a great way to get your feet wet before venturing out on your own.

Make Money From Home – Step Three – Content Creation

Then comes content creation. This is the bane of my existance. You may be mistaken for thinking that I enjoy writing, given the length of this post, and there are topics, like this, that I can quite easily ramble on about forever. Unfortunately, the topics that you will end up writing about will quite often be boring, tedious, and even gross at times. It’s a necesary evil, however. The Internet is basically the worlds biggest library, and if you want to be a part of it, you are going to need to do some serious writing. Either that, or you are going to be spending a lot of money to get people writing for you. Either way, it’s going to cost you time or money, it’s up to you to decide which one you can afford more of. Another skill that you are going to need is the ability to research. Many of the topics you will write about, you will have no idea about, so it’s important to have a firm grasp on researching information so that you can become an authority on it. We will also be discussing this in much greater length in posts to come.

Make Money From Home – Step Four – Promotion

So, you’ve chosen your niche, you’ve built your site, and you’ve written your content, but no one is coming? That’s because you haven’t done any promotion yet, and the search engines have no idea of your importance. As far as Google is concerned, the Internet is a big popularity contest, and popularity is measured by how many links are pointing at your site. It’s not only the number of links that are important, however, it’s also the quality and relevance of those links. If you have a website on kettles, and you get a heap of links from other websites about motorbikes, those links aren’t going to be worth much, because the two sites are not relevant. If you got some links from a site about kitchen appliances, however, that would be fantastic. Google knows that your two sites are related to each other, and that link will hold a lot more weight. There are numerous ways to get links pointing back to your site. This is a huge topic of discussion, and yes, we will be going into it in depth.

Make Money From Home – Step Five – Monetization

And finally, we have monetization. Payday. You’ve put in all the hard work, and you are getting a steady stream of “customers” coming through your “door”, so now you need to decide what it is you’re going to sell them. This doesn’t mean that you have to create a product (although you could, if you were that way inclined, but it wouldn’t truly be passive income then, would it?). You can sell other peoples products, or you can simply have advertisements on your site, and get paid a small amount for every person that clicks on those ads. Once again, there are many different way to monetize a website. We will be looking at them eventually, but that is a long way down the track. We have a lot of work to do before we get there. Talk to you again soon.

Let’s say, for the sake of this discussion, that you are a huge jazz fan. You have a big record collection, you have a large list of sites bookmarked on jazz, and you know the names of all the best bands and their history. With knowledge like this, you could set up a blog that is focused on this topic and write posts on a regular basis.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, your mind starts to spin at th thought of web hosting fees, domain name registration, not to mention all the technical stuff that goes along with it. On the contrary, a blog costs absolutely nothing to set up. In fact, this whole process won’t cost you a cent, just a few hours to set up, and then 10 minutes a day to add a new post and keep your blog running smoothly. You can basically work from home make money discussing subjects that you are already passionate about. Let’s face it, the last time someone bought up the subject that you are passionate about, did you not start blabbering excitedly about it? We all do it, and now’s the chance for you to get all that passionate out in the open and let people read all about it.

So here’s how we start to work from home online. For starters, you want to use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to determine how many other people share your interest, and find out what words they are using to search for it. Using our example of jazz, I put that into the tool as a query and it gives me a list of related searches that are made for this subject. The number in the column “Global Monthly Search Volume” shows you how many people have searched for that word each month. According to this tool, the word jazz is searched for over 11 million times a month. That’s a lot of searches, but I can guarantee you that there are a lot of websites that have spent a lot of time building their site around that term, and competing with them is going to be near impossible.

Your main goal here is to get people to come to your site. To do this, you need to A) have decent content on your blog and B) show up in Google when people look for you. How is this going to help you to make money from home? Well, there are many ways to monetize a blog, but the most common (and simplest) way is to put Adsense ads on your website. The advertisements that will be shown will be related to the subject that you are writing about, and you will receive a commission for every click that is generated.

So, getting back to our list of keywords, you may not want to target the single word Jazz, because there is a LOT of competition for this word. To determine how much competition there is, go and do the search yourself and have a look at the sites that show up on the front page. You need a phrase that is still searched for a lot, but not as common. This is called a “niche”. If we drill into our list, we may look at a phrase like “jazz cd” (which still has over 90,000 people searching for it) and build our blog around that phrase. Some people take a phrase like this and use it to earn cash uploading music files or even whole albums. You need to be very careful that you don’t break any copyright laws if you are going to go this route though.

Lets say you’ve identified a skill you have. For the purposes of this example, we’ll say that your skill is fixing wooden chairs. It could be grooming the dog, it could be finding the cheapest petrol. It really doesn’t matter what your skill is, the methods we are going to outline here will allow you to use the skill to make extra money from home.

The first thing you need to do is put down on paper exactly what your skill is and how you go about doing it. Pretend that you are sitting (maybe on a wooden chair), with your hands tied behind your back, and you need to explain to someone that has never touched a wooden chair in their life, how to fix it. Now, write down in your word processor exactly what you are saying to this person. 

By the end of doing this exercise, you should have a couple of pages of in depth information on your skill. If you haven’t written at least 800 words, then you probably haven’t gone into enough depth, and your imaginary trainee is standing there looking at the chair and scratching his fictitious head. Go back and fill in some gaps until you have a decent couple of pages.

Now that you have a few pages, grab some images that match the skill that you have described and place them into the document. You can get royalty free images from sites such as Flickr, just go to advanced search and select the Creative Commons option. As long as you remember to credit the original author, you can legally use these photos however you like. Play around with their placement until it looks good and give your topic a nice title page. Once you are happy with how it all looks, you need to print the document as a PDF file. If you don’t currently have software to do this, you can download a program called CutePDF to do so. Then Voila! You have an e-book.

Of course, this technique is not limited to chair repairs. You could be teaching someone how to put on a diaper, how to fly fish, how to count cards, what to invest in, the options are only limited by your imagination and knowledge.

That’s all fine and well, you say, but how is that possibly going to make money? Well, glad you asked. What you need to do is sign up for a service like Clickbank. Sign up as a vendor and list your eBook as a product available for download for a small price (say around $5). You will be surprised at how many people will buy this information if the price is low enough. And the best part is, the way Clickbank works, other people sell the item for you. You offer them a bit of commission for their trouble, and sit back and watch the dollars trickle in. 

Now, I realise I have glossed over a lot of the details in this post, but in future posts we will be going into a lot more depth on how to set up Clickbank, how to set up a web page that will sell your eBook, and lots of other tricks to get this working for you. This is just one of many ways that you can start making money from home. Stay tuned for more ideas next time.