work from home | David M Masters

5 Steps to Turn Your Home Job into Your Own Business

Step 1: Test Your Idea

Before you begin, you will need to test your idea, the work, service, or product that you intend to provide, in the real world. In this first phase, you want to get someone to take you up on your offer. It doesn’t matter so much how much they pay for it in this early stage, but you must test the waters to see if anyone will pay you for what you are offering.

And when they do take advantage of your offer, ask them for a positive written referral or testimonial. This is proof that someone paid you, and you delivered whatever it is that you are offering, and someone was satisfied for what they received.

Step 2: Offer

In the second phase of testing, you create offers for your product or service and place small, inexpensive ads for your product to see what happens. Be sure not to overspend. The idea here is to gain some idea about how much you might have to spend on advertising to get a stranger to take advantage of your offer.

There are a great many skills that are necessary to build and run a business, many that you will not have or are not interested in doing yourself, even if you have the necessary skills. Not to worry, outsource them to someone else who can perform that function for you.

If you need help creating an ad, get someone to help you get what you need done for five dollars in fiverr.com

Step 3: Return on Investment

You are looking to track how much you spend on advertising and where the advertising is placed. The goal is to get a return on your investment (ROI). Let’s say you spent $50 on advertising on Facebook. How much revenue did you produce from placing that ad? Do the same with all of your advertising, such as newspaper, radio advertising, whatever, being sure to track everything separately. The difference between what you pay and what you receive is your ROI.

Once you have numbers and results to track, you can scale up your ad budget. As you raise what you spend in advertising, your income generated should come up as well.

Step 4: Test, Track, and Tweak

Practice the three Tees, testing, tracking, and tweaking by spending time to change your ads and offers and track their progress as well. Some offers will far outproduce others. Find out what works best for you.

You might enjoy the process of tweaking your offers, I know I do. If you can enjoy this part of the process, changing graphics, layouts, changing offers, words, visual display, colors, bold text, etcetera, you may find a degree of excitement in this part of the process, though many do not. If it is not for you, outsource it. But monitor it closely.

Step 5: Diversify

In times of the year where your potential clients are less responsive to your advertising, it might be better to take time off and understand that your business has a cyclical lifestyle. If that proves to be the case, relax your business efforts during these times and think about diversifying.

Look for another business that is cyclical, but up when your business is turning down. This is the perfect synergistic relationship between two businesses, that will keep your efforts rock-solid throughout the year.

With half of the nation’s workforce telecommuting and working from home, what is the biggest challenge? The biggest challenge for remote workers is poor working conditions at home. As much as the businesses are reveling in the ability of their workforce to work from home, cutting costs of doing business immensely, the workers are not faring as well as you might think, due to inadequacies they face attempting to work in the same place where they live.

Employers cannot just turn a blind eye to these poor working conditions at home. While this may be an acceptable condition in an emergent situation, like in response to a pandemic, in the long run, it is unsustainable unless there are changes significant enough to relieve the pressure from those who have no choice but to telecommute and work from home.

While you may have enough physical space to have an office at home, many of your telecommuting workforce does not. 42% are working at their kitchen or dining table. Some are lucky to have a desk in the corner of the bedroom or living room or have been able to convert a small closet into an office, but many are working from the sofa, coffee table, beds, and 3% can be found working in the bathroom.

Not having the adequate space to create a functional at-home office to work from is a growing concern.

While there are clearly benefits of working from home as the pandemic lingers on, the lives of these workers who have issues with their lack of adequate home office space will continue to deteriorate. Their performance numbers will wane, and your overall production will decline.

Lack of Space

77% of those working from home report that the biggest thing they struggle with is feeling as though they do not have the adequate space to maintain high production standards at home and they fear their productivity will suffer for it. This is the weakest link in the chain.

Granted, the other 23% of the workforce telecommuting are more than happy with their home offices and content to continue to do so when the COVID restrictions are lifted.

So how can we help these displaced workers relieve some of the pressure of inadequate workspace in the home?

Keep in mind that many workers often have homes with a very small footprint. There is little square footage to accommodate an effective office setup, even if the employer supplied everything they needed. Even so, there are remote workers who have managed to create effective workspaces even in the smallest accommodations.

Workers with Families

Those who suffer the most are those with families at home. Especially now, when daycare is unavailable and many schools are shut down, so parents must juggle their work with kids who are attending school from home as well. It is almost an impossible juggling act, which is even more complicated for single parents trying to manage families, their homes, and work all in the same space.

They Need Equipment or Services

Employers would gladly help out with bringing an employee’s tech up to standard so that they can work better from home. But it is up to the employee to reach out to the employer and let them know what they need at home, what would make their home-work-life more effective.

Employers would be well-advised to ask their teleworking employees if there is anything, they need that would increase their productivity at home.

Internet Access

While Internet access is not a problem for most employees, there are those who live in remote rural areas with little or no Internet access. This may be a huge challenge for these people. Satellite Internet may be available, but note that most of these services are limited.

During the lockdown, Churches are answering the call by allowing people to park in their otherwise empty parking lots to use their Wi-Fi for children to attend their schools virtually, and to allow other Internet-challenged workers to connect to their offices. And while coffee shops may be closed, many of them are continuing to provide Wi-Fi as accessible from the parking lot as well. After all, we’re all doing the best we can with what we have in these difficult times.

Consider a Coworking Space

A coworking space can help to solve the issues of poor working conditions at home, as they can provide all the technical resources necessary to conduct your work remotely. Coworking spaces can be found in most communities where members pay a reasonable membership fee to access the space and its services which include Internet access, printers, and workstations. A savvy employer would be ahead of the game by providing such a space for their telecommuters and the community if there isn’t one available.

Apartment buildings are even starting to set aside space to provide co-working space for their renters.

In any case, it is vitally important that remote workers solve any issues they have with their workspace issues to continue to survive and potentially thrive while working from home.

Remember, if you are teleworking and having a tough time of it, please do not be shy about reaching out to your employer. You might be surprised at what lengths your employer will go through to help ease your stress of working from home.