All About Working from home- Small Business Training
I have been working from home for 30 years, and while I have had some serious ups and downs, I have always gained the best of the work from home lifestyle.
Being a very creative person I attack life with a creative energy that is not always a good thing.
While I do not want to bore you with a long personal story of my life, I wanted to show you what I have been doing and how my path to this point in time unraveled.
This post is straight from my heart – written without revision and told like it is!
I designed kitchens and furniture for years, I was continually doing art and craft things like pottery courses etc while doing all the serious furniture design and decorating stuff.
Eventually the crafter in me took control and for 15 years I was making different products and selling them on the craft markets, flea markets and chopped and changed products whenever I got bored with whatever I was doing at the time. While this was great fun, a lot of the products were unprofitable and because they were time-users had to go, and I would move on to another new (and fun) idea.
However all along I have had a very serious love for marketing and this was probably 50% of the reason I was doing crafts on the flea markets. It became a challenge for me to take an idea that was never likely to make me a millionaire and at the very least earn a living from that specific idea. Some were hugely successful and others were complete disasters.
4 Years ago I took the step to become a real “full-time-artist”, and knowing that while I am very creative I will never be a Rembrandt, I was not worried and dived in to it head on.
It actually was working out really great and to be honest a little better than I expected, BUT a massive disaster was looming – The 2008 world financial collapse.
When That happened I had only just started to get very nice art commissions and was a little horrified to find all my new commissions canceled.
Now we get to where I am Today
I decided to go online to sell my art and the hammock chairs that I still manufactured and discovered a fantastic new world. I never realized until I started to do online marketing how brilliant the Internet really is.
You can literally target the exact people that you would like to communicate with and this realization got me very excited.
It is now 34 months later – and I am still excited, still amazed and now have the skills to do almost anything that I like online. This is not an entirely good thing as I went a little berserk jumping from product to product, building websites and joining every forum, e mailing list, buying up every new training product and a whole lot more.
In between I have been earning enough to still be here, but had to try my best to stop being like an excited child at a toy sale.
I did a quick calculation and see that I have been sitting in front of this computer for something like 12200 hours. WOW! Now the really funny side to all this is that I wish that I had more time to be online.
About 5 months ago I decided to stop trying to grow all my websites at once and to target the niches that I knew very well, and was able to really help people achieve their dreams.
This meant that I had to focus on my past experience with the crafter industry, the marketing side of small home businesses and my new found skills as an online marketer. However I was still trying to do it all the long hard way and was not using laser targeted methods to go straight for the money. Now don’t get me wrong – I like money as much as the next guy – but it has never been a burning ambition of mine to just go for riches, I have always wanted to have fun along the way.
Having spent hundreds of thousands of rands (I am South African) learning almost everything that can be found out on how to do the different methods of Internet marketing I sat down and planned a few strategies that I thought would suite my interests.
The research that I applied led me to 3 or 4 systems that I knew would easily be successful as a nice style of marketing and would still earn great money.
I did not plan to share any of these secrets with anyone. I had found out that those that do not know about Internet marketing at all think that it is some sort of scam or multi-level marketing system and would suddenly go deaf on me when I tried to explain to them that they had the opportunity to leave the nasty rat race and do exactly the things that they love and actually get great pay from the Internet.
Even worse – those that were already online and new quite a bit about how to use the Internet as a means to personal wealth and happiness – had become jaded and sick and tired of all the rubbish that was being thrown at them for silly amounts of money all day online. Personally I had also become very good at spotting the liars from the real deal.
What I now do for myself online
I still have my original hammock chair website running, perhaps partly for my ego, but also because my customers were very serious about doing bodily harm to me if I stopped making the hammocks. I also admit that it is great to occasionally get a day outside in the sun putting together a hammock or chair for someone.
I even still have some of the art that I produced back in 2008 – so occasionally someone who knows about it will come and buy a painting from me.
I have over 100 websites which I have already admitted is way too many, and plan to let most of those lapse when they come up for renewal. (update added here – They did come and a lot lapsed as they needed attention, and I sold others for a nice profit and at time of revising I now have less that 40 websites in total) Some I am not sure about – like the 4 that I have on e mail marketing, because I know that the commissions from Aweber are residual, but I have not even asked you for your e mail address here. If you look at the banners that I have on the side of this website you will see that they do not even ask for your email address. My opinion is this – if you like what I offer, and want more you will come to me, I should not need to bribe you and continually harass you for your trust and subsequent business.
Having said that I am aware that the richest online marketers all have very large e mail lists and do get the bulk of their income from that e mailing list. In any training that I do, I probably will tell you that you need a good list or at the very least a well visited fan page on Face-book!
I do a lot of product creation and I have been doing more targeted marketing with methods like writing my own books for publication on Amazon and locally here in South Africa on Kalahari.
I also have a few selected clients that I do the SEO and social marketing for their websites and their businesses.
I have partnerships in websites and have at least 10 incomplete products at any time. I still love what I do and have an insatiable thirst for knowledge about how this all works online.
So why have I gone to all this trouble to write all this down?
I admit that I have a need to help people, I get a thrill from seeing someone that I have helped like no other thrill from all the things that I do. ( my wife says that it is an illness – LOL)
Mostly I find myself helping my friends and family that are either unhappy with what they do, or are unemployed and looking for something to keep them alive.
I decided only yesterday that I really should stop being sneaky about keeping my hard earned methods to myself, put them down in writing and offer them to a select few people that really want to do something online.
These methods are not brand new, nor unique, but they are ones that I know that if you sat down and did properly, without deviating and checking your e mails every ten minutes, you will make a nice living for yourself.
I often say that I wish I had known how to do this 2 years ago, but it wouldn’t have helped me then as I did not know how to do a lot of what I now will teach you how.
Now while this might seem like you have finally got to the sales pitch – it is not really true, as I do not actually have the time to spare to suddenly start to spend days on end training newcomers. So I have decided to limit the numbers, and limit the time that I spend doing the mentoring. Hell I have been doing it anyway – why not get a little back for the time and knowledge that I have learned the hard way?
I have made a product and will add it here as a link below in this post.
This offer is to you if you are serious about wanting to stop going about it the hard way and would like to know a couple of really targeted methods that will over time make you a very nice living.
I do not promise that you will start to earn a fortune within days, and to be honest it will still take you a few weeks before you see any return for your efforts at all.
So if you want to know more about this business opportunity click on the link below.
Finally, for those of you who would prefer to find out all about internet marketing the free way, I have a lot of e books and will keep adding them to the same website, so you are welcome to go and see what those are all about.
REVISION – To see any of my latest offers – simply click on any banners on the home page.
Rob
ADDED COMMENT – The Importance of a good business plan
