Staying Home and Making Money
Being able to stay at home and make money is one of the most popular dreams for millions of people. The internet faciliates turning the dream into reality.
If this isn’t your dream or you’re looking for more inspiration to pursue your goals, consider that the majority of fatal heart attacks happen at 9 am on Monday mornings. It’s true and my own grandfather fell into one of the statistics quite a few years back. This awareness is one of my first ‘lessons’ on how to live your life and earn your living. I just couldn’t take a job that was less than perfect once I’d contemplated the hours I’d have to spend at it. When the great jobs ran out and I had a child to raise, the only viable option was to stay at home doing something I love and making money to live on. Once you’ve taken this route you’d almost rather die than return to the old grind.
It is this dream that catches our hopes and aspirations when we hear of opportunities and methods to take your job and shove it, yet still make enough money to live and pay all your bills. If you’re wondering with disbelief if you could live as I and so many others around the world from home and still pay your way, I assure you if you have the right mindset (mindset, not necessarily skillset and I’ll explain fully in a moment), you can stay at home and make money too.
The business opportunities abound from home that are more than a hobby, make work program for bored housewives and a source of part-time income? No, I’m talking full time incomes with part-time hours, legitimate home based business with legal tax write offs. So if you’re wondering if you can get rich working out of your own home, or could you really trade your cubical and necktie for yoga pants and your own easy chair – the answer is yes, and you’re only bound by the amount of effort you put into it.
In fact, in the USA and Canada, home-based businesses are one of the fastest growing enterprises. Over 50 million Americans alone are operating at least some type of work out of their homes to make money and the numbers are on the rise. In 2004 the U.S. Department of Labor estimated that within the year 70 million people will be making money at home and that up to 75% of work performed could eventually be moved out of the office cubicle and into the home office, run from a dining room table or basement space.
Sadly for many the majority of home workers are not getting as rich as they’d hoped. In 2004, the average work-at-home American was earnig less than $15,000 per year. Although this may be fine for a stay at home mom working to supplement her husband’s income it doesn’t exactly feed a family nor can it be classified as a viable business.
The rise of the internet changed everything. In this article I’d like to get you started on the right path to staying home and making money by outlining the five key mindsets and rules to note before embarking on any home business venture. After all, starting your own business is more about attitude and inspiration first, and then it is onto finding the opportunity or creating the business plan to make your dream a reality.
Mindset for Stay at Home Income Earners
- Commitment: Is it any secret in America that most people detest their jobs? Study after study proves that most people simply dread going to work Monday morning, and they live for the freedom of the weekend. But even that freedom is not pure because we know that it is only temporary. It’s hard to enjoy a Sunday evening when the Monday morning alarm clock is just a few hours away.
It makes sense that people hate their jobs. Everyday, there is a lot of butt kissing that needs to be done. There are endless meetings which usually accomplish nothing. There are pointless interruptions, a lot of drifting this way and that, and lot of idiot supervisors who do nothing but waste your time and then dog you for not accomplishing your share of work. There are co-workers you hate, and who would stab you in the back in a minute if it meant a raise for them instead of you.
When you work for someone else, you live a regimented life. Your body may not want to get up at 7 a.m., but you have to be at work by 8 a.m. so you lurch out of bed with a head full of sleep.
People who choose to work at home are doing more than just escaping the yoke of their master; they have made a deep, firm, life-altering decision which says that health, happiness and prosperity depend vitally on the freedom to work for ourselves, and in doing so in the comfort of the home.
We want to really emphasize that fact that to be successful in a work-at-home situation, you have to be nothing less than a fanatic; a zealot, who is utterly committed to making work-at-home not only a successful venture, but a profound commitment for life. You must be convinced that a return to an outside office job would be the equivalent of a spiritual death sentence.
Many people hate their office jobs, but they have made an inner compromise with themselves. They have convinced themselves that their job is “not so bad,” pays the bills, and that they can stick out because they have to.
If you want to be truly successful at quitting your day job, there cannot be any room for such compromises in your soul. You have to take the attitude that to work any longer at your hateful job is akin to fouling your inner being with a spiritual cancer the will sicken and kill you.
- Making Decisions: To move our work home, however, does not mean we eliminate every single thing about the traditional American office. Rather, we should select what is useful and what is not.
It’s a mistake to quit your job and go home with a “home-office” mentality. By this we mean thinking small, and believing that you will automatically sacrifice a decent income in exchange for your freedom. Please do not think small! Working at home provides many benefits.
We can save a lot of time because we don’t need to commute and we have more control over our schedule. We can save a lot of costs because we don’t have the overhead requirements of larger businesses. We can cut our stress – and so have more energy – because we avoid many of the characteristic problems of life in the late 20th-century office. We must work these advantages to our profit.
- Finding and Respecting Space: The German philosopher Immanuel Kant said that if you sit at home alone at your empty kitchen table, eventually, the “whole world will come to you.”
Well, today you don’t need the great mind of a philosopher to make the entire world come into your living room. What you need is a phone jack, satellite, broadband or cell service. When I first started out working at home I had a minimal dial up account and lived in a very remote area of North America. If I managed and grew my business so can you. We live in a unique time in history. Satellites, fiber optics, the integrated circuit and other communications miracles means that you can be just about anywhere in the developed world and establish communication with anyone.
The telephone, the fax machine, the computer, the modem — all of these are not only affordable by any middle-class citizen; they are the key to eliminating your need to drive a hectic freeway everyday to get to a place of business outside your home. With these devices at our disposal, we should allow ourselves to “think globally.” Too often, home-based businesses focus on the narrowest market, the neighborhood, the county, the city or state. This is fine if you are providing a local service and are content with a certain moderate level of income. But if you want the big bucks, you should not think small. Also, you should not believe that, just because you are home-based, you cannot compete with the big guys.
The purpose of any business is to seek assess and seek out every possible market for its products and services, to ascertain whether these markets have the ability to buy these products/services, to determine whether there is sufficient profit in these markets to warrant approaching them, and, once positive assessment has been made, to launch a sustained marketing campaign that gets a significant percentage of this market to purchase the product or service in question.
Your home telecommunications machines will not only enable you to do this, but they can also help you overwhelm larger, more cumbersome traditional businesses that are your competition.
As a home-based entrepreneur, you will not have all of the disadvantages of your more traditional competitors: no office rent, equipment or expense; no employees to pay salaries and fringe benefits for; no time wasted on meetings, employee problems, paid sick leave, and so on. All the money your competitors spend on heating the office and buying furniture could better be spent on the actual marketing itself.
As a home-based business, you will be already positioned where the traditional business is currently struggling to move: toward the lowest possible overhead and the greatest possible concentration of dollars on products/service development and product/service marketing.
To not have the basic telecommunications toys — computer, modem, fax, and telephones is impossibly stupid. Still, even in this day and age, many of people strongly resist the one element that is undoubtedly the heart and brain of any successful home business — the computer. The computer is so important in fact, we have made it a category all itself.
And remember, learning to use a modern computer is easier than learning to drive a car, so you have no excuse not to plunge forward.
- Computer Savvy or Ability to Learn About Computers: You should pay close attention to what computers can do for you in your plans to escape your job and make your work-at-home dreams come true. People who want to run a home business usually have a very small staff – in fact, a staff of one – yourself! The rest of your needs are handled by independent contractors, depending on the kind of business you are in and the services you need.
To run a serious, truly global home business, a computer is as necessary as oxygen is to life on earth. Those who try to fool themselves into thinking they will ever make a serious go of their home-based business without a computer are sadly mistaken. Computers give you two primary advantages, they enable you to store large amounts of data and to sort by data field so that you can easily get the information you need; and they enable you to develop a pattern document for every situation you’ll ever be in in your business. To run a home-based business successfully, you must anticipate just what situation will emerge and prepare accordingly.
A business is based on a characteristic series of situations and a characteristic set of things that happen — or that do not happen. You must be prepared with the proper document for each situation. Once you have established all the protocols, and have experienced all the situations associated with your kind of business, the time will come when running your business is, in large part, a repetition of certain key tasks. Computers are all about handling repetition swiftly and efficiently.
But the computer is much more today. By connecting a computer to the phone line with a modem, your machine becomes more than a data storage system and repetitive task handler. It becomes a multi-task, multi-level communications processing center that connects you to the globe.
Such things as e-mail, on-line services, the Internet, the Web and more can’t help but revolutionize the way business is done. If you do not become a part of it today, you certainly are going to suffer for it greatly. If there is an effective way to market products on the Internet or any other on-line venue, no one has truly discovered it yet. The only people making money on Internet marketing are the people who are selling the concept of doing it. If you have a product or a service and expect to reach millions of buyers through computer screens, you are sadly mistaken.
The Internet is definitely where a lot of innovative things are happening. It’s a great place to exchange ideas, find out what hot, what’s not, and stay on the cutting edge whatever your particular business is.
- Making the Most of Your Business Hours: If you’ve been paying attention to the first four points, you’re well on your way to becoming a successful home-based business owner. Now we don’t want you to blow it by thinking you can keep banker’s hours. The global market is a 24-hour per day market, and a 365-day per year market. Let the others sleep late on Saturdays and take Sundays off. Those times could be your day to move and corner loads of customers that the others miss.
You should get up earlier and quit work later. You should be open for business on holidays and be available 24-hours a day either personally or through your answering service.
“But wait a minute, I thought that working at home was all about freedom and an end to drudgery. This sounds like a lot of work!”
Well, here’s the thing, for most of you who quit your regular jobs to go to work for yourself, you’ll discover something magical. You’ll discover that when you are working for yourself, when you are building your own business, a lot of what you does not seem like work at all. Running your own business is all about being inspired 24-hours-a-day. When you stop selling your body and soul to some company or corporation and start giving your energy to yourself, work has a way of turning into inspiration and play.
The perfect work for you is that which you don’t think of as work, yet doing it makes money and provides you with the bread and shelter of life. You’ll see what it’s like if you make a true commitment to being self employed, put all your energy into it, and stick with it for the long run.
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