Working From Home And Making A Great Living

Working from home and making a great living. Doesn't that sound good? If, like me, you hate driving to work in heavy traffic, you hate having to 'be there' at whatever time suits your boss, you hate the office politics, the coffee from a machine and the general lousiness of being a wage slave, working from home sounds great.

It sounded great to me, so I jacked in work for a life of wealth earned from a computer and an Internet connection. They told me it was easy. They told me I could write my own salary slips.

It isn't like they told me.

When you run your own business, home-based or bricks and mortar, you have to learn how to market your product. The world may have access to your website but if they never visit, they ain't going to buy what you're selling.

What you sell doesn't really matter. It may be an electronic hebetude, a wireless faineance or even a steam-powered procrastinator. Don't worry, somebody will want to buy it. But they won't buy it if they don't know it's for sale.

In the end, it all comes down to visits to your website. You've got to get the hits happening. You've got to galvanize Google, you've got to... Well, I've got to stop alliterating but you get the idea.

Getting rich from the net can't be all that difficult, can it? Yes, it can. You know that, you've tried it too. Amazing, isn't it? All those clueless fools making a fortune from their computers and smart guys like you and me can't crack it on day one. What's gone wrong?

It took me a while to figure it out but, when you consider it, the answer is staring us all in the face. We're using bricks and mortar tactics in a clicks and mortarless world. Think about it. Most businesses in the real world (you know, out there where the strange people go) are small to medium in size. So, that's how most of us start off, with a small to medium-sized business. Probably inclining more to the small-sized through lack of finance.

It doesn't work, does it? Yes, it can work if the Internet is just another sales channel for your real-world operation but relying on a website isn't going to put a chicken in the pot when you first start out with your small (or medium) business. The big boys with their big bucks and their big businesses (I'm doing it again) will usually make it, though.

So, does that mean that the little fellow is doomed to failure? No, it doesn't. The little man can do just great, only he has to get even littler first.

Allow me to explain. Remember how easy it was to become self-employed when you were still at school? A couple of rags and a bucket and you had a business washing cars. You could mow lawns, clear snow, sweep drives and even, if you could fight, sell newspapers on a street corner.

You didn't have a small business back then. You had a micro business. Of course, you can't make much of a living from one micro business so put away your bucket and sit down. What you need are a dozen micro businesses, a hundred, two hundred, maybe even a thou... No, let's stick to the hundreds for now.

The Internet gives just about any man the chance to run a hundred micro businesses. You see, that's why you didn't get rich as a kid. You only had one or two micro businesses on the go at any time. Now's your chance to run lots of them. You'll also have the great advantage that if one or two of your businesses fail or falter, the others will pick up the slack and you'll still have pork chops on the table tonight. Perhaps just a little gravy too.