Home Working Ideas

If you are capable of taking a half decent photograph, then you are well on your to making money with them. But, what do you need to do to make money this way?

It has to be said that the better quality your photographs are and the more imaginative that they are, the more you are likely to earn from them.

Stock photo libraries are full of standard photographs and many no longer want certain types of photographs, they have that many. But, if you can take a good photograph and use a little imagination to get a picture of something that little bit different, you could be onto a winner.

What are stock photographs?
In short, they are libraries of photographs of many different things. From events to models to items and even abstract images. These images are pooled together, categorised and made easy to search by descriptions. Then website designers, graphic designers, magazines and other people who need a photograph for whatever purpose can visit the library, find a suitable photograph, pay the relevant license for their purpose and use the picture.

It is much easier this way than heading out to take your own pictures all of the time and this is where you can come in – because each sale results in a commission payment to the photographer.

Where to sell photographs?
There are many libraries about and there is no reason for you not to sign up to every one that you can find. Some libraries do pay extra for stock photographs that are exclusive to them, but that does not mean the entire sequence has to be exclusive. As long as they are noticeably different you should be able to submit some of the sequence to different libraries.

Search for Stock Photographs and other suitable terms and browse through the collections of the sites that you find. Are they offering a quality that you can match, or better? Some libraries have very tight quality control and the slightest imperfection will disqualify the picture, whilst others are less controlling and will accept almost anything.

Is any photograph fair game?
Sorry, but there are limits and we are not just excluding adult material. If you take a picture that includes someone that is recognisable from the photograph, even if they are not famous, then you must get their written permission to sell the photograph, in the form of a model release. This makes crowd shots very difficult – you need to find an angle that excludes all faces!

Likewise certain items, logos and recognisable features are not allowed as they are subject to copyright. You need to check with the terms and conditions of the site you are using for any stipulations and other criteria before uploading photographs.

What types of photos are required?
As for the content of the photograph, anything different and well photographed can be useful to the libraries. But, some buyers, and these are those that will pay the most, might want very high resolution photographs for printing work. Some sites therefore demand at least 4mp photographs.

Does it work?
Take the photographs, upload them and sit back waiting for the commissions. Better still, head out and take some more high quality photographs. If you can take quality photographs and upload enough, then there will be a demand. You really can be making money selling stock photographs.

For many people starting out in business, an online degree makes the whole process a lot easier and a lot less frightening.

If you have been considering your own home business and worried about aspects of it, then a course at an online college could put your mind to rest and get you headed in the right direction.

Best of all, if you are starting your business on the side of an existing job, an online college degree does not need to get in the way of your current work or lifestyle.

If you are ready to go into your own serious home business, take a look at what is on offer.

You may have heard of drop selling as an alternative to affiliate selling, but what is involved in these activities and how do you do them? Is drop shipping suitable for anyone, or are you better sticking to affiliate selling?

In short, drop shipping is a mid point between affiliate selling and being a merchant yourself. Affiliate selling protects you from handling orders and stock. You do not need to handle queries and bounced payments nor do you have to find stock and set competitive prices. With affiliate selling you just find the customers and pass them to the merchant’s website.

The alternatives are not easy
But affiliate selling is by no means perfect. Repeat orders are likely to go to the merchant’s website, so the affiliate loses commission. The jump between websites can lose visitors and there are a lot of missed cross advertising opportunities.

But being a merchant is by no means easy. Carrying sufficient stock, somewhere to store it and a lot more problems come into the equation. So there is a mid point.

What is drop shipping?
With drop shipping you act like a merchant up to the point of payment for the goods. But once you collect the payment you pass the order over to the warehouse who sends the order out on your behalf. It is up to them to carry enough stock, not you. Returns are passed back to the warehouse and most good drop shippers will also either not label the goods at all, or use your logo. As far as the customer is concerned, the goods have come from you.

The problems with drop shipping
So where’s the downside? Well, you are still handling the payments. Any chargebacks hit you and you need to be ready and prepared for them. This can be quite costly, not just in the fees involved in handling chargebacks but also if the goods have been dispatched and cannot be recovered.

The advantages to drop shipping
Let’s look now at the advantages then of drop shipping. First, you take the merchant’s catalogue and load to your website whatever products from that catalogue that you want to promote. Because the customers come to your website and stay on your website to place the orders, there is the chance of cross selling.

For example, if you are selling widgets from one merchant then you could also promote to the customer a suitable cover for the widget even it it is only available from a different merchant. There is no reason why you can only use one supplier – you can combine the product catalogues of many suppliers!

Also, if you want to make use of the bounced traffic you can display third party adverts such as Google Adsense or even third party affiliate schemes. This might involve you selling travel products and showing adverts for travel insurance, a product that you cannot sell yourself.

Lastly, if you are running it as a full ecommerce website you can collect email addresses, both through orders and a newsletter, and keep mailing latest offers to this list. Suggest that visitors and those placing orders follow you on Facebook and drop them notes of weekly offers to tempt them to your site. Customers will also look at receipts and come back to your website just by remembering they have bought from you in the past.

Here is a different spin on survey taking from the free club penguin membership.

It’s a very simple system. You sign up (it promises it will only take 10 seconds!), complete a variety of surveys to earn sufficient points and then, instead of a cash payment, you are rewarded with different levels of free memberships, depending on how many surveys you completed.

For example, the rewards are: #1 Cheats Package, Unlimited Cheats/CODE Packages, FREE 1 year Membership or Unlimited Cheats/CODE Packages & FREE 1 year Membership.

Do take a look!

For 10 lucky people living in the UK there is the opportunity this September to pick up a new skill to start their own home business. And that skill is to become a Colour Coach to help people to correctly select their wardrobe and accessories to match.

Colour Coaching is all about learning how to use colours, when to use colours and why they work as they do.

What colours go together well together and why certain combinations work. What combinations should be avoided and when is it appropriate to use the different combinations.

Maybe you will be helping someone to select their Mother of the Bride outfit. In that case, you will use your new found knowledge to carefully choose an outfit that compliments the wearer’s skin and hair hues and tones.

You will also take into account what time of year the event is taking place and then be able to choose colours that best suit the event along with the host of accessories that complete the outfit.

Or maybe you could help someone going for an interview or giving an important speech. What sort of look do they want to give? Is it authoritative or well organised? From there you can talk them through the best colours of clothes to pick, the accessories to go with the outfits and hopefully help them to success in their interview or presentation.

There are a lot more uses to colours when choosing outfits and if you are one of the 10 lucky people to be accepted onto the colour coaching course there is a lot that you can learn there. From colour psychology to colour analysis to colour theory.

If you are looking for a new opportunity for your own home based business, this might be just the opportunity you are looking for. Pop over to their website and check it out.

Here’s a good idea for working at home – run your own voucher code website. It can be very easy to set up and very rewarding to run.

To run your own voucher code website you need 3 basic essentials:
1 – some voucher codes
2 – a website to display them on
3 – people to view and use them

Get these three essentials and then you can convert the website into cash. So, here’s how to get them quickly and easily.

Finding Voucher Codes
This is a lot easier than it sounds! Quite simply, go to an affiliate directory website and sign up to it then start looking for suitable merchants. Picking big name merchants is a good idea as their vouchers can attract a lot of attention, but they can also have a lot of competition. Signing up to as many as you can is probably the way forward and then just use those that are most useful.

The problem is that sometimes these affiliate schemes need you to have completed the next step before you are approved – building your website.

Build A Voucher Code Website
There’s the hard way, very hard way and an easy way. So let’s just stick to the easy way! You could code it yourself from scratch or look around for some suitable scripts, but these are too much like hard work. We want our voucher code site running today!

And it is possible and very easy! The simplest way is to go to Blogger, sign up for a blog and buy your own domain name. For more flexibility, install WordPress onto your domain name. But now is not the time to go into which is best!

Once you have your blog up and running you can quickly use it as a voucher code website. When you receive emails from your merchants about voucher codes go to your blog and create a new post. Write, in your own words, a little about the offer and give it a title that includes the merchant’s name, plus post an affiliate link.

This is important as down the line visitors will access your codes via the RSS feed and a relevant title will help them to do this. Use your categories and tags to organise your posts by types of merchants and even merchants so that visitors can quickly navigate the website.

The only problem then is removing old voucher codes. You just need to go through the posts manually and remove them as they are no longer needed. Some people also like to use click to reveal on codes, but this is unpopular, so displaying them openly is best.

Getting Visitors
Search engine optimisation, article writing, guest posting and so on are out for voucher code websites. You need to think around the problem.

Instead, sign up to money saving forums. Edit your profile to include a link to your voucher code website and if you can have a signature, that also. Load a picture to your profile so that your forum entries are recognised.

Now, when you receive a voucher code email check the forum to see that no one else has mentioned it and then mention the code in the forum. Go as far as giving the full details, without any affiliate links, so that all members of the forum can benefit.

Quickly people will notice your picture, view your profile and start to visit and follow your posts.

That’s how to set-up and run your own voucher code site!

A couple of days back I successfully migrated one blog to feedburner. Yesterday, I tested with a second blog and then moved this blog.

It’s a shame that I didn’t test this blog when I moved it – it appears that the feed has been down over night. Sorry to anyone trying to access it!

I’m working on it now, but the Feedsmith plugin just does not seem to want to accept that I’ve given it an incorrect Feedburner URL and although I keep updating it, every time it still shows the old URL.

Should have it sorted soon. I hope (I’ve plenty of other tasks to be doing!).

UPDATE: The answer to fixing it is quite simple! You just write a new post and then it all picks up again. Posting the post to say the RSS was down fixed it. Who would have guessed that!

As a self employed home worker I am often out of the house, carrying one of the laptops with me.

And this is a big risk. Carrying a laptop around anywhere and using it out and about is putting it at risk of scratches and damage through drops. Now all of these risks cannot be totally eliminated with the use of suitable laptop bags, but they certainly will help to protect the valuable equipment against some of the knocks and bangs that they receive every day.

They are also a lot neater for carrying about your laptop. You might look and feel a bit out of place standing in the motorway services with a huge laptop under your arm, but a small notebook in a neat carry bag looks far more in place.

Plus, if you are careful, a small pen and a few sheets of note paper can also be placed inside the bag, making sure that you have everything at the ready when you need it. Quite often when I am away from home I’ll do this and be writing up notes in a few quite moments of ideas to include in blogs or whatever I am working on at that moment.

One of the beauties of working for yourself from home is that you can take holidays whenever you want. But the downside is that you are leaving your business behind, which is not always so easy to do! My answer is to go to a holiday park!

And that is why quite often we end up holidaying in this country. By not going abroad, we can usually get good internet access whilst we are away and keep the business ticking over!

This summer (if you can call this weather summer!) we are off to a holiday park that is only 40 minutes’ drive from home! We’ll actually be able to go to the sea front, look across the estuary and see home!

That is certainly a big advantage of not going far afield this summer – it will only be a short trip to get there. Less than an hour after leaving home we will be settled in and splashing around in the pool or exploring the facilities. None of that sitting around in an airport lounge for 2 hours after going through security, sitting on a cramped plane (I’m tall and there is never enough leg room), waiting for your bag and so on.

A quick journey is all it will take and if the traffic is busy, we can leave it half an hour! We’re taking golf clubs, bikes and swim wear and a lot more besides.

Holidaying in this country certainly does have its advantages!

Writing your own ebook can be great fun and a very rewarding way of making money at home. Best of all, once it is finished and available for sale, you can then start on another book to increase your reach! So read on to find out what to do.

Writing an ebook is fairly easy, you just need to follow these steps:

1) Think up a great title.
2) Write the ebook that delivers on the title.
3) Convert it to a PDF file.
4) Create a website for the ebook.
5) Promote the book and cash the profits!

It sounds simple, so how do you do this?

Think up a great title
The title is a major selling point of your new ebook. Give it a boring title that fits nicely into the rest of the crowd and it will just end up hidden in the pile of other similar ebooks.

Instead, give it a title that answers a problem, provides a solution and stands above the rest. Make it clear what the ebook offers, without looking like 2,000 other similar ebooks.

Write the ebook
This is the longest part of the work and the point at which you sit down at your computer with Word open and put your thoughts down in writing.

Once it is done, read your work through and read it through again. Then ask someone else to proof read it. Only by getting the quality of the book to the highest standard will you really see a huge success.

Also, you will want to decide on what copyright you include in the ebook. Are you offering reseller rights in the hope that people share it and then wander over to your website? Or is is just a single license and the buyer cannot do anything else with the content? Make sure this is mentioned early on.

Convert it to PDF
Word is excellent, if you want something that is easily edited and modified. Instead, convert your masterpiece to a PDF file. For this I used to go to PDFOnline.com and use their free service, but I now have a copy of their premium PDF Converter installed as this is even quicker to use (one click from Word) and allows embedded links.

Create A Website
It doesn’t matter how you want to promote the ebook, a simple website is going to make the process a lot easier and is compulsory if you are using ClickBank.

Just a simple one page site will do. Either find a suitable template to work from or use a blog to create the site if you are not accomplished in this area. Don’t worry about payments or downloads, that is not part of the site!

Promote your Ebook
Now is the time to get the sales rolling in. Go to ClickBank and sign up for an account. Upload your ebook and add the details of it and your website through which the sales process starts. Decide on your price (look at other similar Ebooks and see what they charge) and the affiliate commission (again, look at the competition) and pay the initial fee.

ClickBank affiliates will send interested people to your website, who will read the sales pitch and then return to ClickBank, where the payment is taken and they can then download a copy of your ebook.

That’s the 5 steps to writing your ebook for profit. Once you complete them, go back to step 1 and start again on a new ebook and keep the money rolling in!