What’s Best For You, Work at Home Job Versus Business
Working from home is a dream for many men and women. For others, it’s a sheer necessity. You might have no other option de to a forced layoff or an illness in the family.
Whatever the reason for your decision, you’ll be looking for secure employment online – and what you decide to do for work will be based on your definition of security in the workforce.
Two Paths You Can Take as a WAH Individual
You can continue the traditional work arrangement and become employed by someone else – where the only difference between this and your old job is location (and perhaps job title) – or you can take the reins and build your own business online the way you want it.
Neither offers a 100{495e61a8be0728ba5e4172c16a68a1b05f8df91b32cf783b0a6ac5a97f0ba813} guarantee in life (nothing does), but with the option to build your own business, you are more in control than if you receive a paycheck from another business entity.
When we talk about working from home, some people will instantly see in their minds the common positions they’re used to considering, such as:
- Customer service
- Tech support
- Virtual assistant
- Data entry
- Envelope stuffing
- Assembly
- Accounting
- Dispatcher
- Education
- Game tester
- Transcriptionist
These are the kinds of jobs usually listed in advertisements in the back of consumer magazines. Some are scams where the advertiser is just out to get your money (because you have to pay to learn how to do it) and others are legitimate.
All of them make it sound so easy – and everyone wants easy money. But while data entry might be mind-numbingly easy, it’s by far a rewarding career that you wake up excited about on a regular basis.
Those with an entrepreneurial spirit don’t think of the above job listings when you mention “working at home” to them. Instead, these people instantly conjure up images of the following types of careers:
- Ghostwriter
- Web designer
- Graphics creator
- Virtual coach
- Affiliate marketer
- Self published author
- Blogger
Those are careers where the person launching it is working from home, but building a business based on their personal talents and interests. Some still have you working to provide services for others, but that’s drastically different from being employed by someone else.
Which WAH Career Feels More Secure to You?
For many people, the typical arrangement where you seek out employment, get hired and are guaranteed a steady paycheck feels much more secure. But in today’s economy, you can’t be certain you’ll wake up with a job tomorrow.
Not only that, but many of these jobs are based on need – so you might not get paid consistently if the company doesn’t have enough work for you. In many cases, the career requires you to fork over an investment up front just to learn how to do it, without any guarantee that you’ll even get hired anywhere.
With a career where you build your own work at home business, it’s true that you might not begin making a steady income right off the bat. It can take a little time to educate yourself about the business models, get them set up and help them flourish online.
But if you can afford to take this path, you will be able to enjoy a nice mix of profits and personal satisfaction because you can go into any niche you want – and have no ceiling for your earning potential.
Even in online sakes, you can’t feel 100{495e61a8be0728ba5e4172c16a68a1b05f8df91b32cf783b0a6ac5a97f0ba813} secure – because you might see your business model suffer at the hands of Google or for some other reason. But the great thing about online marketing is that you can create what’s commonly known as multiple streams of income.
This allows you to set up several business models, so that your eggs are never all in one basket. This is the best form of security you can have. In order to achieve that with regular employment, you’d have to work 2-3 jobs, and would exhaust yourself trying to maintain financial security.
Let’s take a look at how the multiple streams of income works to provide you with peace of mind:
First, you choose a niche (or even a few niches) that you’re enthusiastic about. It might be parenting, golfing, health, relationships – or a host of other possibilities.
Next, you think about what type of business model you would like to learn. For example, let’s say you have a talent for writing conversationally – at an 8th grade level.
You could feasibly do the following:
- Sign up at a freelance writing site to launch a ghostwriting business
- Launch your own blog about a niche topic of your choice, where you promote items as an affiliate (such as eBooks and tangible items on Amazon)
- Create a membership site where you educate consumers about a topic of your choice – they pay monthly to access your content and possibly interact with you, getting advice and input on their problems. You could do the same with coaching!
- Develop a content site known as PLR (private label rights) where you create content once and it sells to multiple buyers so they can use it on their own websites.
That’s a total of four income streams just based on one talent of writing well. What happens when you create different business models is that you never feel terrified if one isn’t performing as well one month.
For example, you might notice that your blog traffic goes down and you stop making as many affiliate sales one month after Google releases a new algorithm change.
It won’t phase you. You might be a little disappointed, but in the meantime, you’ll know that you’ve got it covered with your ghostwriting, membership site, and PLR store.
This peace of mind gives you time to calmly and efficiently work on repairing the damage that was done to one business model for whatever reason. And if you choose to let it go, you won’t be in a financial mess – and you can work on replacing it with another online earning strategy.
Do You Love to Learn?
Learning as a child seems tedious. We’re forced to sit in a classroom studying facts that we really don’t care about at the time. But learning as an adult is a different type of task.
Suddenly, we’re considering our potential and when we learn something new, we feel pride and excitement to put it to good use. This is in addition to the fact that continual learning helps stave off memory issues in our later years of life.
When you sign up with an agency for a work at home job, you’ll be educated about a simple process with organized steps and rules you have to follow. Break the rules or forget the steps, and your job is in jeopardy.
However, it’s fairly brainless work. Someone has done all of the testing and research – you just have to implement whatever tasks they’ve given you and you get paid for it.
With a work at home business that you build from scratch, you’re going to be a lot of learning and testing and tweaking to see how you like certain things, how they perform for you, and how you can take it to the next level of success.
For example, you might need to know how to write a product review for a GPS gadget on Amazon. You start out looking for advice online that teaches you some good product review writing strategies – and you consume that advice before you give it a try yourself.
Once you put your own review up, you look at your traffic statistics and sales and see if anyone’s buying based on what you have to say. If they are, great! You know you have what it takes and you can repeat the formula and profit even more.
If your review is getting traffic and not converting for you, then you’ll dig in and see why. Maybe you’ll ask your online friends in a marketing forum to help you analyze why it’s not working – and they’ll tell you it’s your lack of personalization.
So you try that tip and it works! You’ll be doing this testing, tracking and tweaking all of the time – and to some it might sound tedious – but for the true entrepreneur, it’s an exciting process.
You get to wake up, log in and check statistics. There’s nothing more rewarding that seeing your efforts pan out for you in a hefty sum of profits! And all while working from home – that’s gratifying.
How Do You Get Started?
If you’re going to find a work at home job, protect yourself by looking for opportunities that don’t require you to pay someone for the chance to work for them. Those are most likely scams.
If you feel the entrepreneurial tug, then you’ll want to first sit down and brainstorm the niches you like. It might be cars, decorating, kids’ toys, dieting, saving marriages – whatever interests you in a way where you feel like you can be helpful with advice or by being a liaison between a consumer and the item they’re shopping for.
Next, research the various business models that are out there for you to test. Don’t beat yourself up if you try one and realize you don’t like it or aren’t good at it – there are dozens of things you can try and some will hit, and some won’t.
When you find something you think you’d be good at, find out how to succeed either by searching online for free or investing in a course that helps you learn the ropes.
This is different than paying someone to work for them. This is you educating yourself as a business owner – just as you would invest in tools and tutorials if you bought a franchise to run.
The best to get started is to jump in. You will make mistakes. Everyone does. The great thing about online marketing is that you can always change course and fix anything you have online in an instant.
Working from home is a blessing that few people have the chance to pursue. If you’ve been forced into this, change your outlook from dread to the pursuit of your dreams. You have unlimited potential for personal happiness and financial peace right now – so go for it without hesitation and enjoy the rewards that you reap.