So You Want To Work From Home?

I've got good news and bad news.

The good news: you absolutely can work at home and make a very good income. You don't need anything more than a grade school education, some focus, and persistance.

The bad news: you need to be OK with failing at the first few things you try. Yup. That's pretty bad news, but I want to give it to you straight. That's the reality. Even if you do your research and are smart and do all the right things, what worked great for someone else may not work for you.

This risk of failure is not limited to work at home jobs, or home-based businesses. Its a fundamental principle that just about every millionaire has learned. And relearned. Failure is part of success. If you really, really, really want to work at home, and not just work at home to make ends meet, but work at home doing something you love that pays well, you'll need to see each failure as a little experiment. Each experiment can teach you something. Thomas Edison, creator of the lightbulb, had to test TENS OF THOUSANDS of different materials for the filament of the lightbulb before he found one that worked. But he never complained. He said instead, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

Fortunately, you're not going to have to try anywhere near 10,000 jobs or businesses out before you find the right one for you. Actually, there's a really valuable clue in that last paragraph - what works for other people may not work for you. You've got a good shot at actually succeeding at working from home in your first try if you can be relentlessly honest with yourself about what you are good at, and what you are not good at. You can make Edison look like a dolt.

When you evaluate any work at home model, business, whatever - see them through this lens: what will work for you. Work at home success depends not just on finding a great work at home job or a great work at home business (though that's critical), it depends on finding someone that works great for YOU. Even if you find the best business model in the world, if it doesn't fit your strengths AND your weaknesses, its not going to work.

I'm telling you this from my own experience. My own mistakes and successes. I made $96,000 working from home last year. It took me three years to get there. The first year I actually had a $16,000 loss (per my tax return). The second year I made $37,000. To be honest, I didn't do it with any of the standard work at home ideas (I'm a pay per click marketer and copywriter by trade), but working at home taught me some profound lessons that absolutely apply to working for yourself, getting a business off the ground, and ultimately working at home successfully.

Here are the three things I've learned that made the difference:

1) Specialize.
Don't try to be all things to all people. Find something you're really good at, then get even better at it. One caveat here: do be sure to pick a niche that has enough work to keep you and an assistant busy. For example, my mechanic services only Toyotas. As a result, he's the best darn mechanic I've ever had, and my old Toyota truck runs like a dream at 187,000 miles. I will never leave him.

Another example. My first year, when I lost $16,000, I was doing freelance internet marketing. I did email newsletters, SEO, link building, pay per click and marketing plans. I was pretty good at all those things, but not really good enough to ask for the hourly rate I really needed to survive: $50 a hour. My second year in my work at home journey, I just decided I was going to do nothing but pay per click, because that was the work I liked, that I did get $50 an hour for, and that I really helped people with. Year two of working at home, I made money.

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