Paid Work From Home – How to Achieve a Sustainable Work From Home Career
Would you like to do paid work from home? Quit the 9 to 5 and have a flexible work from home career? I am a work from home Dad and have been doing so for over a year. I get to take my kids to school and see them grow up. What’s more, I am now my own boss, I earn more than I used to and I work when I want.Let me tell you my story. Around two years ago, I lost my job. It was not unexpected with the poor economy, but it was unsettling not to know when your next pay check will be. I had a family to support and I wanted to keep things as normal as possible. A friend of mine had been looking into paid work from home opportunities and I thought that with little hiring going on, I must also get involved.We considered many types of online offers purporting to be a work from home career: data entry jobs, filling surveys, telemarketing, freelance work etc. While there is income to be had here, I felt that my paid work from home must be sustainable and less time intensive. Don’t get me wrong, I am a hard-working guy, but I felt that this was not really the best use of my time in relation to the income I generated. Also, I wanted something more mentally stimulating.I stumbled onto affiliate marketing by chance whilst online. I was sceptical at first, being acutely aware of the scams there were and people getting burnt. But it was genuinely interesting.Affiliate marketing is a proper paid work from home career using the Internet. You don’t need to spend money to start either, unlike some paid work from home business start-ups. In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is where you promote a product on behalf of someone and you get paid a commission for any sales made. Now I didn’t like the idea of telemarketing, however, no hard selling is needed here. I do a lot of writing online and for the type of affiliate marketing I do, there’s no contact with clients either!What you need to do is be able to drive traffic (or visitors or potential buyers) to the relevant product web page. You don’t even need your own website to start although you may want to develop this later as your online business builds up.There are plenty of free resources to help get you started. I joined various affiliate marketing networks with products I could promote (such as ClickBank). As I started to see sales come in (it was slow at first), the impact of how powerful affiliate marketing really hit me. So long as I could drive traffic to a product page, my written articles remained on the web continuing to work for me, but with little maintenance needed. I realised that this was really a sustainable work from home career.I decided to learn more and get better at it, and I joined Wealthy Affiliate University (where I am still a member). This is an online internet marketing community offering all the training, research tools and resources necessary for a successful work from home career in affiliate marketing. A one-stop shop effectively. Furthermore, the forum within is a great source of help where experts (such as the founders) are able to provide direct mentoring if needed.