To be able to work from home over the Internet is a dream for many people, for others it is a necessity because, due to age or other reasons, after becoming unemployed, the labor market, with the cruelty that characterizes it, has closed its doors forever. However, we are very lucky because we live in a time when the rules of the game have changed.
The Internet has matured and a new economy created parallel to the traditional one in which working from home and over the Internet is now feasible. In addition, more and more people are going this way professionally. The emergence of WordPress, affordable web-hosting (like for example the one you can get with a discount coupon from SiteGround) and:
- YouTube
- Social networks
- Facebook Ads
Plus hundreds of other online tools have created the necessary infrastructure to make this possible.
In this way, individuals and small professionals can work directly with each other, which led to the creation of profitable small digital businesses, some of which are even very profitable. We can see this reflected in data such as that, in the USA, for example, which always anticipates trends that later also end up arriving in Europe and Latin America. According to Forbes, the number of “solopreneurs” (as small one-man entrepreneurs are called there) will skyrocket in the next 10 years.
And I’m not talking about YouTubers and fashion bloggers.
No, I mean “serious” business in all kinds of professions, both traditional and new.
I am talking about all kinds of creators (designers, programmers, broadcasters…) of authors of books, courses, content writers, lawyers, consultants, administrative managers, etc…
These will increasingly be exercised from home, as the Internet has the means to create a profitable business from scratch and get customers from day one.
Can You Earn Extra Money From Home Quickly?
Anyway, if you have entered this post from Google, looking for something like “work from home over the Internet.” You may possibly be thinking of more immediate formulas to generate income from the Internet. Therefore, we will talk first about these formulas and my opinion of them.
You can do more and more jobs from home as a freelance.
I have made a selection of works that is only a small fraction of those that exist. Some require a very concrete formation, but others hardly require a specific preparation:
- Virtual Assistant
- Virtual Call Center Employee (i.e. operating from home)
- Content Writer
- Transcription of contents
- Community Manager
- Evaluation of web pages (their usability, etc.)
- Freelance designer
- Creation of webs
- Software programming
These can be found in two types of portals: horizontal (not specialized) and vertical (specialized in certain activities).
On the horizontal side, you have sites like UpWork, Freelancer, the freelancer portal of Infojobs, etc.
On the specialized side you have, for example, TextBroker for content creation or UserTesting to evaluate user interfaces. Some of these portals are in Spanish, others only in English.
All the examples I have given you are serious examples, portals with a good reputation. However, do not expect large incomes from them. They are simply options that you can at least trust and that can alleviate a complicated situation in which you have no other income.
Take TextBroker, for example. Here you can create custom content. It has the great advantage of an option accessible to many people (it only requires that you have reasonable writing skills), but it is not realistic to think that you can earn much more than 10€ for a content of 1,000 words (you can find the rates on their website).
Easy Method to Make a Living
If you are good at writing, custom content creation is a relatively easy way to earn money working from home.
In my personal experience, the vast majority of people will find it very hard to produce more than 4000 – 5000 words in an 8-hour day. If you do the calculations, with 10€/1000 words on average, that would be 200-250€ per week maximum. Moreover, I am counting on a portfolio full of assignments, which is very unlikely to be the case.
Something similar you will find in any of the “easy” formulas, I would even say that TextBroker is one of the best options you can find.
For that reason, I would never consider this route as a medium or long-term professional projection; I would only consider it as a way to get out of the way.
How To Work From Home Over The Internet Profitably
With these previous examples, I want to make you see two very clear facts:
- First, if you settle for the easy way to get jobs on portals, etc., you are going to be earning a pittance the rest of your life.
- Secondly, this does not mean that you can’t make money online and from home. A lot can be done if you do it right. Now, if you want your business to be profitable, you have to be entrepreneurial, independent and have your own brand.
I mean, you need to become someone with a wide audience and a good reputation like the one we have on our Dutch website Thuiswerken-Inpakwerk.
It will cost you time and effort, but it has the enormous advantage that, thanks to the Internet, it hardly requires an economic investment and that you can combine it with an existing job.
Why Is It Like This?
This is so for so many reasons. One obvious is that by removing intermediaries (portals, employers, etc.), you remove factors that reduce the income you receive.
But far more important than this factor, the factor he wants you to pay the most attention to, is the psychology of brands, including personal brands.
By this I mean that, for the same job, a well-known person with a high reputation can charge more, much more.
To refer to the example above: the value of the same content, created by an unknown person or created by an author with a reputation is multiplied by authors of freelance content with a sufficient reputation do not charge 10€ for 1000 words, they charge 50€ or more.
And that’s the crux of the matter, if you’re willing to do the necessary work, the Internet makes it possible for you to create that brand of yours that doesn’t mean much more than making yourself known and creating a good reputation.
And best of all: it doesn’t require just money and you don’t have to leave your job. You can start little by little, without risks, but slower and sacrificing your free time, of course. But the reward can also be very great.
Therefore, stay with a very clear vision: the key to everything else is to build your personal brand (or brand of your digital business). If you get this, the rest will be a simple consequence of having a good brand.
What Steps Need To Create A Profitable Internet Business?
Now let’s see how to do it in a very condensed way. In reality, they are not very difficult things, but each one has its depth, you would need a course or at least many posts to address this, as it deserves.
Therefore, take what follows this as a map with the keys of each thing, with this hand you can continue to delve into each of them on your own, looking for more specific information on each of the concepts that I am showing you.
Study business models on the Internet
We are talking about creating an online business just like we from www.ThuiswerkenInpakwerk.nl, not a hobby. Therefore, you have to think like an entrepreneur and before deciding what to do; you have to know reasonably well how money is made on the Internet and how the different formulas could be applied to your idea(s).
Among the business models on the Internet that exist, I’ll briefly talk about five of the most common, suitable for creating an Internet business from scratch:
Online Advertising
Are the online ads that you find on many websites and whose publication in their contents the authors of those websites receive income. It is a super-easy and quick formula to implement, usually unprofitable (except for experts), but, the effort is also minimal.
Affiliate Marketing
Third party product recommendations. If your readers buy the product through your links, you receive a commission for it. It can be very profitable if you know how to do it well. Amazon.com and Clickbank are two of the most popular options for finding products to promote as an affiliate.
Sponsorships
A specific price is negotiated for talking about one or more products, mentioning the brand, etc. Similar to lifetime sponsorships.
Sell Services
Use your visibility on the net to attract customers to whom you offer your services. Be careful that the time dedicated to services does not end up truncating the development of your website. It can be a death trap in which you stay doing unprofitable services the rest of your life for not having developed enough strength of your brand first.
Sell Digital Knowledge Products
Very universal, the number of sectors in which knowledge products such as eBooks, online courses, etc. have a place is almost infinite. If you also do well the marketing part (launches, etc.), it can be enormously profitable. In the Netherlands we are already seeing “solopreneurs” launches that generate hundreds of thousands of euros and, outside Holland even, 7 digits.
And a very important comment: these models are not mutually exclusive, you can combine them perfectly, for example, selling your own info products, while promoting as an affiliate related and interesting products of other authors.
In my opinion, affiliate marketing deserves a special mention because it is very easy to get started with, it’s quite profitable and fits a lot of topics.
But that said: I recommend that you continue researching on your own because they are all interesting models.
Decide What to Do
The next step is to decide what kind of business you want to create.
Keep in mind the business models you have studied before, because not all niches work with all business models.
Besides, I’m gonna give you two clues to get your idea right:
It has to be something that motivates you: you’re going to have to lay down many hours before you see the first results. It is quite possible that you will make it through the year, before you have significant income. Without deep motivation, it’s hard to get through this stage.
It has to be something useful, something that people demand: many people make the mistake of the “happy idea”, that is, they have an idea that they consider brilliant, so brilliant that they don’t make sure it’s something that people actually demand. Don’t make that mistake, SEO tools like Keysearch or SEMrush, for example, allow you to analyze very well what people are looking for on the Internet what is excellent information to find and evaluate your ideas.
You can go deeper into this topic by looking for specific posts that talk to you about how to find good ideas for a blog or an online business and posts that explain how to validate them before making the final decision.
Create Your Presence On The Internet
Now it’s time for the more technical part. Here let me give you some advice that is absolutely critical: many people (even people who later get a lot of success) make the serious mistake of not having their own platform on the Internet.
What’s the problem with this?
That the greatest asset of your business, the relationship with its followers, is not yours, it is the platform.
I mean, on YouTube, your followers have YouTube, not you. They decide to what extent your new content reaches them, etc., but you don’t really know who they are, nor can you contact them directly (with an email, for example).
Therefore, you must always have two things, use the platforms you use:
- A website with its own hosting (typically a WordPress blog).
- A mailing list in which you should recruit the highest possible % of your followers.
As a general rule, I recommend you to base your website on WordPress. It’s easy to install and manage, thanks to WordPress themes (or templates) you have an infinite range of high-quality “prefabricated” designs, especially if you use the best premium WordPress themes.
On the other hand, for the hosting you have it easy, if you consult opinions on hostings in the network, you will see that this same site, Siteground is one of the best options that exist.
And finally, for your mailing list you also have it very easy: in Europe we are lucky enough to have Mailrelay, which lets you create and manage free lists with no less than 15,000 (!) subscribers.
The disadvantage of Mailrelay is that it is a limited tool for advanced things like automations. But you won’t need it for a long time, and by the time you need it, you’ll probably be generating income and won’t mind migrating to payment alternatives that have that functionality.
Gain Visibility and Build An Audience
Now comes one of the most difficult parts: getting people to see you on the Internet and with those visits coming in, gradually build a loyal and quality audience.
Here, again, one could write books (in fact, they have been written…), but I will also limit myself to give you the keys to the subject.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Normally, of all traffic sources, positioning your content for relevant Google searches (the rest of the search engines you can practically ignore) is the most important: it is the one that allows the most traffic to be brought in. Plus, it’s free and it’ll bring you that traffic for years, every day.
Keysearch website
SEO tools such as Keysearch are essential to orient your content to what people really want and analyze for which specific searches you can compete better or worse with other websites already positioned.
Therefore, my recommendation is that you learn SEO from day 1. Only then will you really get the full potential out of your content. Search Google for “basic SEO” and you’ll find posts with great introductions to this topic.
Guest Posts
SEO gives wonderful results, but it also has a big problem: to be really effective, you need your website to gain authority over Google, and for that you need time and links.
At the beginning, you will only be able to compete with other websites in very specific searches, not very competitive, with very little volume. Getting to just a few dozen visits a day is going to cost you the first few months.
Therefore, we have the problem of the hen and the egg: at this rate, how can we get a web with authority without an eternity passing by?
The Answer is…
You have to speed up this process in other ways. One of the most effective and, moreover, free ways, are guest posts on blogs. There is a great culture of guest posts among bloggers and quite a few bloggers with visibility where you can get a guest post if you really work it out.
You may be surprised by this generosity, but not everything is altruism: a blog gains a lot of visibility, the tasks and opportunities accumulate for the author of the blog. It is, therefore, becoming increasingly difficult for you to publish new content on a regular basis. In that situation, guest posts can come in handy.
Publishing on a blog with a lot of visibility to you means the opportunity to get a small wave of traffic to your website while it is a great opportunity to get a few quality links that are worth their weight in gold on a young website.
Three Key Tips
Grow a relationship, either via social networks or quality comments on their blog. I highly recommend the latter as it is highly valued. If you’ve made 5-10 good comments on the blog, you’ll be on their safe radar and the willingness to let you publish will multiply.
Try to have a critical mass of content in yours first. When you propose a guest post, when the blogger in question sees your blog and I see that you have published only 4 posts to date, it will get a bad impression. I would tell you to at least post about 20 of your own posts on your own blog before asking for guest posts.
Make the most of the occasion. Publishing in well-known blogs means the opportunity to take a “quantum leap” in the evolution of yours. So work hard to really get the most out of it with the highest quality content and think of ways to capture readers for yours as well. You can propose to the blogger, for example, to offer his audience a free download of yours created to measure for the occasion and to obtain it they have to register on your mailing list.
And one last thing: be patient. You can’t expect that a month after starting your blog you’re doing guest posts everywhere. Things have to mature.
But when you do, at 4 or 5 months of age you can start getting a guest post. The moment you get a few, if you have made good use of them and offer quality, the snowball will start rolling.
Social Networks and Facebook Ads
Reinforce this initial momentum to get visibility and a loyal audience with constant work on social networks taking full advantage of the support you can give your personal contacts.
On the other hand, online ads on Facebook Ads can bring you a lot of traffic to your website for reasonable prices. Visits can be obtained at a cost of around 1-10 cents per visit.
At 5 cents on average click, for example, would be 2,000 visits per 100€. If you invest 500€, 10.000 visits.
If you get a 1% subscription rate to your mailing list (you can get a lot more if you work on it), we would be talking about 100 subscribers. Or what is the same: a “cost per lead” (cost per subscriber) of 5€.
In very specialized niches, a list of 1000 subscribers can generate a small salary. So look at the value those subscribers have.
Now, this has a “but”: it’s very easy to lose money on Facebook Ads. I mean, this only works if you follow the right strategies. Therefore, if you decide to bet on this way, form up first with an online course of Facebook Ads and on your own in specialized posts.
Choose The Best Monetization Formulas
Maybe now you will tell me: “But we already talked about choosing business models in step 1”.
That’s right. But, now that you have published dozens of contents, you have interacted with your readers, time has passed and you have gained experience, almost certainly, you will see everything quite different.
Besides, you’ll have a lot more judgment. And that, among other things, will make your vision of which are the best business models for your case or how to apply them in your thing probably quite nuanced with respect to your initial ideas. And it’s okay, it’s normal.
Therefore, review again, which the best business formulas for your project are and how to implement them.
Optimize your business and test new things constantly
Two things are two truths like cathedrals in a new business:
It is never optimized at first.
The margin for improvement in initial revenues is enormous. Many times, it is a multiple of the initial situation.
Therefore, constantly try to change things that may be affecting your business and listen to the demands of your audience.
For example, test different claims (lead magnets) for the high in your mailing list, test with different claims according to the content, make surveys to your audience (with Google forms, for example), and so on.
The results may surprise you a lot.
Conclusions
I have had the luck and misfortune at the same time of starting a traditional business for the first time, misfortune for what I have suffered and luck for what I have learned.
My second entrepreneurship project has been an online business and the difference between one project and another, the difficulties and risks, cannot be greater.
Therefore, seeing what is now possible to do on the Internet if you want to undertake seems to me to be a gift, an opportunity that is within everyone’s reach and that it would be a crime not to try, at least, to seize.
Continue reading: Top 15 Stunning Architectural Wonders in India
