Make money online working from home: that's the ticket! No commute, a flexible schedule, covetous looks from my peers. A lifestyle befitting a guy like me with slothful tendencies and a desire for a frictionless method of making easy money. It would surely beat having to tolerate my boss's stale-data breath querying me on a daily basis about some report I botched.
"Hmmm. These numbers don't look right, Daryl. Did you use the APA on the 2600 and then filter the results through the GPX with the data retrieval program?"
"No, I did not. Why don't YOU DO IT YOUR STINKIN' SELF!?"
This was my favorite make money online working from home fantasy: telling the boss in no uncertain terms that I was no longer content to be a faceless corporate drone. But how would I do it? How would I get off the corporate treadmill and make the transition to self-employed entrepreneur?
Well, the internet, of course! I wanted to make money online fast and easy, and what was faster and easier than the internet? Heck, I knew how to point and click; I could surf with the best of 'em. Didn't I spend hours in the evenings surfing aimlessly from web page to web page? How hard could it be to make money on the web?
I started looking for some sort of make money online working from home program to join. There was no paucity of them. Affiliate marketing! AdSense! Start your own blog! Sell information products, sell ebooks! To my dismay I noticed that many of these programs expected me to build mini-sites, build squeeze pages, build websites overflowing with page after page of content! Learn SEO, learn html, CSS, learn social marketing, learn to write sales copy, build traffic. All this didn't sound quite as quick and easy as I expected. But I decided to give it a shot.
I spent money, more money than I should have. My Significant Other couldn't believe how much money I spent. "Another make money online working from home deal?!" became for me a familiar refrain. One time I spent $2000 on a program offered by GRN. The product was selling travel packages to vacationers. I pitched my Significant Other on how great the program was. "If I don't make a dime, we still get to take deeply discounted vacations!" was my argument. GRN didn't work for me, and we didn't go on deeply discounted vacations because I'd spend all my money buying into GRN.
Two years passed this way. Three. I'd maxed out our credit cards.
In all that time I didn't make a dime. Why? I blamed the programs I got involved with, and to tell the truth, some of them were outright scams.
Here's what I learned: finding a legitimate program, rather than a junky assemblage of feces that some "internet marketer" threw together, is the first challenge. It's difficult because of the hype, the gasping hyperbole these marketers use to sell this stuff. And there are plenty of unscrupulous types out there who will just take your money and run. The only thing you can do when trying to find a good, solid program is to spend a little time researching before you hit the "pay" button. I read reviews (not the so-called reviews of people who were selling the program they were reviewing); I did research on the marketer to see if this was someone who had a pretty good reputation, etc. etc. But I finally figured out that the other reason I was failing was me, maybe the real reason. I was the biggest obstacle to my own success.
If I did find a legitimate program or package, I wouldn't see it through. While I was in the process of learning, say, how to make money as an affiliate marketer, I would see some really alluring program that purported to teach me how to make money effortlessly using AdSense templates, and I'd be off and running. I did this over and over again, with a sort of addictive fervor. Buy one thing, get half way through it, see something else, abandon the first thing and begin the new thing. I was as undisciplined as a baby on its first day of potty training.
Another way of putting it is, I had no focus. I was all over the map. Even my computer desktop was in chaos; I couldn't find files, passwords, documents. I would sit down at the computer and instead of working on acquiring backlinks or doing keyword research, I would read emails. Then I had to have some cranberry juice. Then I would IM someone, or answer someone's IM. I'd start surfing (gotta see how this or that site is put together). My Space, Facebook. There was also the telephone. Etc., etc. At the end of the evening I had the consolation of saying to myself, "Well, you spent four hours at the computer." True, more or less. But I didn't accomplish anything.
Things didn't turn around for me until I began to realize that there were two "secrets" I needed to apply. Actually, I didn't realize it on my own; a "guru" shared this with me. The suggestions didn't come with all the bells and whistles I was used to, and they aren't very seductive. In fact, when I heard the two secrets, I thought, what a bunch of bull.
If you want to make money online working at home, I was told, start doing these two simple things:
A) Stop leapfrogging from program to program; pick one thing and see it through. No matter how tempting a new package or money-making program seemed to be, walk away from it. Find a solid, step-by-step system geared toward newbies and stick to it.
B) Sit down at my desk with a "to-do" list and a "did" list. Compose tomorrow's to-do list at the end of my evening so I know exactly what I'll be doing when I sit down at my desk the next day. The to-do list might be as simple as:
*Write article and submit to ___
*Go through Camtasia tutorial
*Start keyword keyword research
The "did" list works like this: let's say I write the article and submit it; I check that off. But before I go through my Camtasia tutorial, I spend 20 minutes reading emails. This wasn't on my "to-do" list. I add it to my "did" list, and in that way, I see how much time I spent doing non-essential things. So my "did" list ends up looking like:
-Wrote and submitted article
-Went through my queue on Netflix
-Read some emails
-Checked my Facebook and Twitter accounts
-Started Camtasia tutorial.
Believe it or not, it worked. I followed these two suggestions faithfully week after week, even though I thought the suggestions were pretty lame. Lo and behold, I began to get things done. I stopped feeling as though I didn't know where to start and wasn't accomplishing anything. And, most amazingly, I began to make money. It felt like I was running a real "business." These two simple "secrets" completely transformed by internet endeavors. Two simple secrets that allowed me to make money online working from home. No, it wasn't a million dollars. But it was enough to break the cycle of chronic failure and to point me in a brighter, better direction.
Even though those two secrets don't come with a price tag and aren't slickly packaged, give it a shot. I promise that you'll become more focused, more productive, and that your make money online working at home dreams will stand a far better chance of coming true.
