Update on my work at home project: The Thirty Day Challenge!

Photo by Scootie

I’m on Day 10 of my work at home project, the Thirty Day Challenge. I have identified one niche for internet marketing and am now writing three articles for it. I need another niche and fast! With our move to Canada one week away, just keeping up with the challenge is proving to be a challenge in itself. However, I have managed to join a team so I’m trudging along. Perhaps, as for others, it will be more like the Sixty Day Challenge for me.

So far, I have learned how to do market research on possible niche topics using Freewordtracker, Google and Google Trends. The techniques that Ed Dale and his colleagues teach are so simple but unintuitive that they’re so cool! And then Mike Stenhouse and Mike Mindel put these together in an amazing tool — Wordtracker GTrends.

The “golden nuggets” technique is used to “mine” for the ideal niche — one that has a lot of demand but little competition. You’ll have to go through the challenge yourself to fully appreciate what I’m talking about.

I got a bit sidetracked because I had misunderstood the bit about measuring the amount competition for a particular niche. Fortunately, I found some clarification in the Thirty Day Challenge forums, so I think I’m back on track to finding one more niche.

Just got an E-mail today from Ed saying that the Thirty Day Challenge has just produced another millionaire. Now that’s encouraging!

Watch out for my next article: How to avoid work at home scams, part 3. In case you missed the earlier installments, here are the links:

How to avoid work at home scams, Part 1: Do your research

How to avoid work at home scams, Part 2: Use only legitimate job leads

How I overcame work at home information overload

Photo by Chaparral [Kendra]

Last week, I found myself unable to empty my email in-boxes (despite what I had learned from Getting Things Done). I couldn’t focus on anything; I would flit from one blog or website to the next and then to an E-book. I wasn’t making progress on my to-list. What was happening to me?

I found the answer after my mind had cleared and I sat down in a quiet corner with my copy of Yaro Starak’s Blog Profits Blueprint. I had the plague also known as “information overload”. I had gotten seduced by the idea of having passive income through a work at home internet business. I wanted to learn everything right now. But as Yaro said, information overload makes you lose direction, forget your purpose, and keep you from working towards your goals. Continue reading »

NEW: E-mail subscription to My Life Shift

Thanks to my friends, Viviane and Veronica, I just now learned how to enable you, my readers, to subscribe to my blog posts.

I’ve signed up with Feedblitz. Now, by entering your email address in the subscription form on the right, you can receive all news posts on My Life Shift through your email. My account is a free one, so the updates will have ads. I hope that will change in the future. Continue reading »

How to prepare financially for your home business

Photo: Piggy Bank by annia316 ?

I’ve been uneasy about my earlier post about preparing to leave my office job, because I think I glossed over the financial part of the preparations. I only mentioned that I was learning about frugal living because I didn’t expect to replace my office income with a home business right away.

But that is only half of the story.

The other half is making sure that I have money set aside to tide my family over while I’m still building up my home businesses. Continue reading »

Having second thoughts: Is working at home right for me?

Photo: Snow Wall by Ezzz

In the six days since I began this blog, I’ve felt like quitting three times.

The first time was when I discovered that it took so much time to blog. I had a long list of topics for blog posts, but no time to finish even one. I could only write during my baby’s naps and at night after all the kids were asleep. I was surprised at the amount of time I needed to properly research topics and then craft some high-quality posts.

The second time was when I was installing a Facebook application to try and increase the traffic to this blog and I couldn’t get it to work. It was frustrating and, again, consumed a lot of time. Continue reading »