The best answer is to start your own business(es) or build on a small one you already have. The next thing you need to think about is how to have multiple streams of income so if one goes away, you have other sources and the financial hit won’t be as bad. Ideally, no more than 10% of your necessary living expenses should come from a single source.

I assume that if you are reading the posts on this blog, you have some kind of home office. I’m pretty sure you didn’t set one up just to have a fancy place to write the checks and handle your personal business. Or maybe you did. No matter. It’s time to look forward and make that home office a profit center in your house.

Small businesses are the fastest growing segment of the commercial market. More jobs are created by the small business sector than in any other area, and more people now own and work for small businesses than for major corporations.

I have only one warning for you. You must work for yourself like the boss is watching you every second, because if you don’t do your work, it never gets done and the business never takes off. Owning your own business is work, but it can be work you love and a pleasure to get up to each day. You have to work much harder for yourself than you did for an employer. If it’s something you love, it doesn’t feel like hard work. And I personally love the commute…three steps from the kitchen and coffee pot to my desk! Goofing off or playing Solitaire at your computer instead of working takes away from your bottom line. If you want time off, take it, but don’t think you can act like an employee when you’re in charge.

Decide What You Want to Do

• If you want to find another job working for someone else, that is a very legitimate choice, but in the future you must be prepared to jump when the waters begin to stir instead of waiting for a wave to hit you. Find another job, but always be looking, and change jobs if there is something better on the horizon for you. The only loyalty you should have is to yourself, your family and your friends. No company will be loyal to you, and no one is ever irreplaceable or worse, the company may find they can eliminate your job altogether.

• Do you want your business to be online or offline?
• Are you or were you doing something that you can market and become a freelance consultant?
• What are you good at doing? Math? Writing? English? History? Singing? Reading construction plans? Leading others? Building furniture? Plumbing? Painting? Cutting grass? Cleaning and organizing? Websites? Design? Video games? Graphic arts?
• What do you love to do? Work with your hands? Work outside? Be the idea person? Be the implementation person? Volunteer and help others? Work with kids? Crafts? You get the idea.
• Do you know how to do something you could teach others to do?
• Is there something you have always wanted to try but didn’t have the time or energy when you were working full-time?
• Can you try it on a shoe-string budget?
• Could you start out part-time and grow it until it is earning enough to support you full-time?
• If you worked on it full-time, could you make it work to earn a great income and give yourself the freedom and control you always wanted while you were working for a boss?
• Do you need more education, a degree or a certificate so you can pursue a new career?
• Can you work at a flexible, part-time job to cover your financial responsibilities while you explore business opportunities? Pizza delivery, throwing boxes at UPS or FedEx, mentoring or tutoring etc.?

If you have no idea what you might like to do, see the resources at the bottom of this post for some books you can read to help you decide what you would be happier doing.

If You Already Have a Business

• Do you want to continue that business or do something else?
• Do you want to take your offline business and add an online component?
• Do you want to take your online business and add an offline component?
• Do you want to use the internet to add marketing resources to your offline, local business and your bottom line? There are several free things you could do right now to improve your existing business. See this resource at Affordable Local Business Internet Marketing.
• What would need to happen to make your hobby or part-time business a viable, full-time income?

It’s time to sit down with some blank paper and start doing some stream-of-consciousness writing and brainstorming. Draw pictures and diagrams if words aren’t your thing. Use butcher paper or shipping paper if you need large pieces to draw and write on. Use colored markers, pens, pencils and even paint to give your ideas the right emphasis. Let your ideas flow and don’t throw any out until you’ve done all the brainstorming you can and have found your niche.

This may take several efforts over several days. It takes each of us a different amount of time to get up and step all the way out of our boxes and open ourselves to the possibilities. If you’ve been working for someone else and were laid off, there is a good chance you were somewhat pigeon-holed and now you may feel unwanted. When we’ve been doing a job for a long time we tend to adopt a certain mindset, and we have to relearn how to think outside of that mindset again.

You may have several fits and starts, but don’t allow a project you try that doesn’t work define who you are. A project may fail because it’s not the right thing for you at the right time. Go back and start over until what you are doing feels right and works.

It took Thomas Edison thousands of tries to invent the incandescent light bulb. He looked at it by thinking and believing he discovered thousands of ways NOT to invent a light bulb. He looked at all his setbacks as lessons. We learn when we don’t succeed and we learn when we do. The important thing is to never give up.

Is having your own business worth it? Does it really pay off? Absolutely, as long as you are doing what you love, working like you want to and earning enough money to meet your needs and some of your wants. It’s even better if you can put some or all of your business on autopilot eventually. If you do something that you put a lot of work into up front that will continue to pay off for a long time, that’s even better. You may create an income source that will pay you like you’re still working while you’re retired. Or you could semi-retire early. You could even get rich if that’s your goal. Each of us defines “rich” in our own way, and not all definitions mean lots of money.

The only thing you can count on in this world is change. So why not embrace it and become your own knight in shining armor instead of continuing to be a pawn? Create your own business and your own world of work on your terms. What could be a better job than that?

If you love your job, you’ll never work a day in your life and you’ll get paid to have fun. – Wish I knew who said this…

Resources:

48 Days to the Work You Love

48 Days Workbook

No More Mondays

All by Dan Miller

Technorati Tags: be your own boss, home office, home office organization, home-based business, make home office profitable, self employed, small business

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don”t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that”s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger”s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it”s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it”s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it”s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it”s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have – your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it”s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

www.BlogMastermind.com

Technorati Tags: Blog Mastermind, Blog Profits Blueprint, discipline, mentoring, writing