Everyone would love to stay at home, work for themselves, and make tons of cash.  There are millions of websites promising tens of thousands of dollars a month by doing little more than sitting on your couch.  These are all scams.  What about the one you read about the other day?  Scam.  What about that one on TV?  Scam.  The one in the newspaper classifieds?  Scam.

If you seriously want to make money from home online, it’s going to take a lot of sweat and hard work.  It won’t be easy, but it can be done.

Realize What You’re Up Against

Before you decide to do this, realize what you are up against, and the challenges.  First, you are working against the millions of other people who want to work for home.  Many of them have the same ideas as you, and they are your competition.  There are millions of bloggers, eBay sellers, and candle makers.  These sound like easy to do home jobs, but if you are going to be successful, you are going to have to be better than most of them.

Long Hours

Most of us are used to working 8 hour a day, 5 day a week jobs making a decent per hour wage.  This is possible because you work for an established business with established customers.  Working from home means you don’t have an established business or customer base.  You don’t have a steady income to rely on.  Because of this, you are going to be working long hours with intermittent pay.  Some weeks, you may make more money than you ever expected.  And the next, you may make nothing at all.

When we work for an employer, we expect to have vacations, to work only one shift, health insurance, etc.  But when you work for yourself, every hour you are off is a hour that your business is closed.

I know many small business owners.  They enjoy the freedom of being their own boss, making their own decisions, and controlling the direction of their business.  But what they will also tell you is that they work longer and harder hours than they ever did at any other job.

Dangers of Many Jobs

Every job has its dangers.  Bloggers put their own personal lives out there for people to criticize.  They must worry about plagiarists, ad revenue, and popular topics.  Not all bloggers write on topics they want to write on.  While they may love knitting, there is not an extremely large market for knitting blogs.  If you want to make money as a knitting blogger, you will have to be one of the best knitting bloggers there are to make enough money to live on.

You may look at the collection of knick-knacks in your basement and think that you could make a living on eBay.  But what is your plan when the knick-knacks run out?  Can you sell every item for enough of a profit over what you paid to earn a living?  Do you know how shipping rates will affect your business?

Unemployment

One of the greatest pitfalls of working from home is the statistic that about 50% of all new businesses fail within the first 5 years.  Working from home, you will be a sole proprietorship.  Unless you are paying regular wages into unemployment insurance, you will have no safety net if your business fails.

Over-extension

You may expect that starting a home business will only cost a few thousand dollars.  This is far from the truth if you plan on switching full time immediately.  Your costs will include not just your business costs, but your own living costs.  While working at home sounds cheaper than purchasing a business with a physical location, you will find that a physical location comes with free advertising and foot traffic.  Working at home brings with it a diving into the complete obscurity of the vast Internet, something even the most hidden physical location doesn’t suffer from.

This can cause you to quickly learn that you must purchase advertising, affiliations, inventory, web design, and extra phone lines among other things.  You can quickly drain tens of thousands of dollars.  Many people are so convinced that their business will succeed, that they don’t think twice before mortgaging their homes.  They have read the stories of Wozniak and Jobs maxing out their credit cards to start Apple, that they think this is how all new businesses start.

Stress and Family

Many new home businesses are started by mothers who want to spend more time at home with their children.  What many do not realize is that they are trading in 8 hours a day away from home, to 12-14 hours a day disconnected from their family.  Running a serious home business doesn’t allow you the time to take care of a baby while working.  One will take time away from the other.  This causes increased stress and frustration.  Realize that while working from home has advantages, it is work, and does require your full attention while you are working.

Working as an eBay seller, for instance, requires you to usually be immediately available to answer questions and comments about your items.  You need to spend time researching your competition’s prices.  You need to research your purchasing demographics.  You need to purchase or make new products to sell.  You need to ship items on time to get good reviews.  Doing all this while changing diapers, and making trips to soccer and ballet practice is a juggling act.

Even jobs that don’t seem like they require 8 hours of straight work, such as being a blogger, are no piece of cake.  Bloggers, even specialists, need to keep up with current news and trends.  They have to moderate comments.  They must form affiliations such as trading “guest blogger” with other sites to help gain readership.  They must organize meticulously to scratch every bit of value out of every visitor.

Hard Work, Low Pay

You could say, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  Or you could say, nothing is free in this world.  These are both true when it comes to working for yourself online.

Let’s look at how bloggers make their money, advertising.  Prices for advertising are measured in CPM, or Cost per Thousand.

If, for instance, you are being paid a CPM of $0.25, that means you are only being paid a quarter for every 1000 page views.  In order to earn a $400 paycheck for the week, you would need 1.6 million visitors a week.  Blogging doesn’t look so easy now, does it?

Be Prepared

If you prepare yourself for all of the pitfalls of working from home, such as realizing that income may not be steady, you will not be able to play with your kids and work at the same time, and that you will probably work longer hours, you can become successful.  You just have to find your strengths, work hard, and have an entrepreneurial spirit.

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