Life is good

Hey there I'm Robert MacEwan the author of Ideal Absolutes. If you're new to macewan.org, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed.

Is working from home working if what you do is really more of a hobby than work? Since 1995 my passion has been websites, Internet technologies and online advertising. Then in 1998 I picked up Linux, Apache, mySQL & PHP; collectively known as L.A.M.P. Ask anyone in my family and they’ll tell you how passionate  I am about LAMP and web tech I am.

“O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.” – Henry David Thoreau

For many people, the lure of working from home is too strong to resists. Being able to set up your own hours, your own schedule and your own your speed is an extremely attractive way of living to most people. Putting in the hours isn’t the hard part - converting them into profitable per hour payment can be difficult. Luckly my job at BCDC provided the training in this area.

But the thought of setting up your own web-based business can be a huge hassle if you’re not a geek. There are however the lucky few that have “Blog Coaches” to ease the learning curve. Which route do you take? There are literally thousand of differing ways to make a buck or fifty four hundred. You have to have a web design, a product and then you have to sell it, ship it and handle customers. Yuck, been there done that. A much easier way to work from home and run a web-based business is called affiliate marketing and this boys and girls is where the crazy cash is to be found.

Don’t get me wrong blogging for bucks is profitable on a month to month basis. My $2,800 or John Chow’s $27,000 a month is nothing to sneeze at. *Cough - I also work a full-time job* I’m not giving up my different blogs. I’m adding to the group by setting up a site that works as an affiliate marketing site. There are tons of different web-page building programs out there that walk you through every step of the process. Once you have a functional web site, you need to come up with a list of companies that will pay you to link to them. Many major websites like Amazon have an affiliate program that you can join and then get paid for simply linking to their website. It’s quite freaky logging into the different accounts and seeing $58 here $68 there -  $122 here $100 there. It’s a jaw dropping experience.

But if you really want to cash in, you don’t want a webpage with just a list of links on it. This may earn you a buck or two, but when most web surfers stumble upon these kinds of pages after a Google search, they tend to get frustrated and leave. The best route for you to go is to provide interesting web content that relates to the company you’re linking to. Value their time by providing value!

If you can’t write interesting web content yourself, there are many companies that will do it for you for a very reasonable price. Once you’ve got your content, you can weave your links throughout it. People will find your web page on search engines like Google, Yahoo and Ask.com and when they see the well-written content, they will hang around and read what’s on your site. Mayhaps they’ll kind enough to Stumble the page. They will, in most cases, click on the links provided and you’ll be counting the cash in no time flat.

While there is no guarantee that affiliate marketing will turn into a cash cow, with enough hard work, the odds are in your favor. When you combine a kickbutt site design with quality content and a good mix of interesting links, you are bound to get a good number of hits that will quickly translate into dollars for you. Give it a try, you might be surprised at how well it works!