Overwork is one of the great problems of the home business owner… any business owner really. This is particularly true of the early stages when you’re still building things up.

Do you take time off for you?

Working the entire weekend is a very easy thing to do. I do it often enough myself. But time off to refresh yourself, to have fun with family or friends is very important.

It may not have to be the entire weekend. It may not even be on the weekend itself. There’s no law that says you must call Saturday and Sunday your weekend. You can take off whichever days suit your needs and the needs of your family.

Taking at least a day off every week can be tremendously refreshing. You may find that you work better when you are more refreshed from a break. You may have fresh ideas.

Go on, take a day for you. Do nothing more business-wise than check emails for emergencies. Once you’re clear, leave the computer alone!

Relax.

A great niche is one of the requirements for a successful online business. You aren’t going to do well if you don’t stand out in some way or if you try to market to everyone.

Researching a niche is generally frustrating, though. Pretty much any niche you can think of will have a lot of competition in it. How are you supposed to stand out? More important, how are you supposed to earn anything?

One important thing to consider right now is that very, very few niches lack for competition anymore. At least not if they’re profitable. A great number of people have been trying to or succeeding at making a living online, and many of them have come up with some great ideas.

This isn’t as bad as it may sound. If someone’s making a living at the niche you wanted, you have know there’s a market there. If no one is, either you’ve stumbled across a very rare gem or you’ve found one of the many niches where there are no buyers.

The Big Secret - They Aren’t All Serious Competitors

Just because you see a website in your niche doesn’t mean that they’re serious competition. Many people do well in a niche because there aren’t any really good competitors in it. Just think about how many times you see ebooks telling people that all they have to do is throw up a quick affiliate site and they’ll start earning the big bucks.

If that’s your main competition, you may be able to do very well by putting in more serious effort. Go over what the competition is doing, and figure out how to do it better.

Sometimes standing out is just that simple. You find a way to do it better. You might provide better information, you might keep your site more up to date, you might be more helpful on a personal level.

Heck, you might just have a generally cooler site.

Mistakes are natural when you run a home business. For most of us it’s how we learn to work better. But sometimes the mistakes you make are ones you may have already known enough to avoid, had you just thought about it a little bit more.

Mistake #1: Expecting instant results

This is a common mistake in the work at home crowd. It’s easy to make because people want to believe it, and a very, very few people do succeed just about instantly. But they are a very small exception, nothing even close to the rule.

If it were that easy, there would be a lot more rich people working online.

Mistake #2: Charging too little

This one applies primarily to people who are selling something of their own. If you can set the price it helps if you test to figure out what you are really worth. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling a service, a physical or electronic product. If you haven’t considered what your time is really worth, what your products are really worth, do so.

This can apply to affiliate marketers too. If you’re doing well selling a product, have you ever considered asking for a raise? If you have a good track record, many merchants will consider it.

Mistake #3: Treating your business no better than a hobby

Many people fail because they don’t take their business seriously enough. They let anything and everything distract them from their business. They may even let hobbies take precedence over their home business.

Running your business like a business means setting work hours. It means separating your personal and business finances. It means keeping track of your spending.

Mistake #4: Doing it all yourself

You can do a lot yourself, but odds are you aren’t an expert on everything.

Hiring any sort of help can be painful. It’s hard for many to give any part of their efforts over to someone else. It also adds up financially. But it is often the best possible decision you could make for your home business.

A good virtual assistant, for example, can handle things like routine emails and some of your marketing tasks. You may also need a lawyer and a bookkeeper. You may want to consider business insurance, and a good insurance agent can help you to figure out what you need.

Mistake #5: Taking on too much

Many people get extremely ambitious with their home businesses. You’ll see people take on multiple network marketing opportunities, or 100+ websites, or more clients than they’re ready to handle.

This problem is particularly acute if you fall for it before you’ve established yourself in one venture. Many network marketers find many opportunities interesting, and take on multiple in hopes of marketing them together. And that can work for some products.

But if you haven’t figured out the basics, haven’t figured out your niche, haven’t learned how to deal with what your customers need it’s a huge mistake. It goes similarly for running multiple websites.

If you’re offering a service a lot of clients can sound good at first. But if you take on too much you’re quickly going to have to learn to subcontract, work serious extra hours, or ruin your reputation. It pays to know how much work you can handle and what you’ll do if too many people want your time.

Mistake #6: Paying too little attention to your family

The right home business is addictive. You’ll want to spend time on it, lots of time. But you lose track of the things that should matter, such as having time for your family and friends.

This goes along with having regular work hours. While sometimes it may be necessary to work more hours, regular work hours allow you to take time off to relax. You need it and your family needs you.

Not taking this kind of time can actually limit your productivity. Your mind needs some quiet time, relaxation. Wasting your work time feeling guilty that you haven’t done anything with your family for a long time can slow you down. Failing to take your regular time off can also encourage you to take time out of your schedule, out of sheer guilt. It’s not good for you.

There are many more mistakes you can make with a home business. What other mistakes can you think of?

I don’t know how this happened, but somehow summer is almost here already. Children are getting out of school in some areas. Most others will be out within a month.

And of course, the weather is looking quite inviting in many areas. The temptation to goof off away from your home business grows.

Should You?

The answer to that question is yes, within reason. We do all need a break sometimes. Just don’t overdo it to the detriment of your home business.

If you need a vacation, go hire a virtual assistant. Going on vacation does not have to mean abandoning your business entirely.

If you blog, write some posts in advance or get some guest authors. If your blog has even a small audience you can probably find someone willing to blog on your site a little for the exposure.

Be Serious About Your Business the Rest of the Time

It’s easy to take a lot of time off your home business when summer strikes. The weather’s lovely. If you have kids, they’re home all the time, a situation not all work at home parents are used to. But you need to keep working.

If you quit working your business, summer is a great time for it to decline. All the time you’ve spent building up your business, and it can wilt away in summer’s heat if you don’t take care of it. Pay attention to it. Try to make it grow.

Planning for these distractions are a part of what it takes to be successful in a home business. Distractions happen year round; it’s just that many more tempting ones happen in the summer.

Affiliate marketing can be very interesting work, but it’s challenging too. It’s hard to sift through all the information out there and figure out what works for you.

However, one thing many people strongly recommend is redirecting your affiliate links. The logic is that many people just feel more comfortable clicking a link they can understand. Also, some have a bias against clicking a link when they think you might get a commission off of it, even though they’re no impact on their cost. Just an odd bit of human nature.

There are advantages beyond your clickthrough and sales rate to cloaking your affiliate links. I find it is simpler to remember my links. You don’t have to go looking for your link every time; just use the redirect link you created. If they’re well named you won’t have to look them up very often.

There are a number of ways to redirect your links. How you do it depends on what you’re comfortable with and what you can do on your server. You can buy a variety of solutions for this if you want link tracking, or create your own free solutions.

Free Solutions

The basic free version is to create a page and do a meta redirect. The one trouble with these is that they can be a touch slow. But all you have to do is create a plain HTML page with META HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh” CONTENT=”5; URL=html-redirect.html” in it. The 5 indicates that the redirect will take place in 5 seconds, and you can bring it to 0 if you want a fast redirect. And of course if you’re directing to a new domain you will need to include the full address.

I’m most fond of the 301 permanent redirect using my .htaccess file. You can create one of these using Notepad (not Microsoft Word or other word processing software), but before you upload it to your server, be sure there isn’t one there already, as it will mess up your site if you overwrite an existing file with a new one that doesn’t have the current information. But if you have one there already you can edit it to add the new redirects.

The code is simple: Redirect permanent /filename addressyouareredirectingto. Once again, if you’re going off site that means you will need the full address. This works only on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite module enabled.

You can also do this in PHP. Within the brackets to start and finish PHP commands, place the following code:

Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” );

There are many more ways to create redirects, and if you aren’t using them already I strongly encourage you to investigate them. They make your affiliate links look cleaner and may help with your sales. Just check that the tracking is working properly when you use them.

Paid Solutions

There are quite a number of paid ways to cloak your links. The advantage to these is that some are stronger cloaking, and may hide your affiliate link even on the merchant site. However, you do need to be careful that your cloaking does not break the merchant’s Terms of Service. It’s a pain to have to change out links and find a new merchant.

That said, I found a couple that do look interesting.

The first is specific to bloggers using Wordpress. Wordpress Link Cloak allows you to declare keywords that you want linked to particular links. It sounds good to me both as a quick way to create links in a blog and to keep you from forgetting to monetize a post, one of my own failings.

The other that caught my eye is more general purpose. It’s called Super Affiliate Link Manager. It allows you to create cloaked links so you can brand them and track them. Being able to track your links is something I feel is key when you’re using a paid solution. It’s just nice to have a way to track your links beyond what the affiliate program itself provides.

No matter whether you go free or paid, take the time to cloak your links. It might just help you to increase your earnings, and make your site look a little neater.

If you want to make money from your website, you’re going to have to monetize it. The immediate questions that come to mind are when, what type and how much?

When Do You Monetize?

There are all kinds of theories about this. Some say to wait until you have some traffic, so that your early readers aren’t scared off by the ads. Others say to do at least a little right away.

And then there are the people that go beyond whole hog. You know the sort. The ones who put nothing but banners up and forget about content of any sort. But they hardly count as they rarely make anything from it.

I’m inclined to go with monetization right from the start. Not everyone likes seeing ads, but if they object so strongly do you really need them anyhow?

What Kind of Monetization Should You Use?

Your focus should be on providing interesting content to people you hope will allow you to earn money in one form or another. That means that both your content and monetization should be attractive to your current and potential readers.

There are a few kinds of ads to consider. The 125×125 ads are very popular in blogs right now. You will often see two columns of them off to the side, or sometimes just one. They’re big enough to get the point across without taking up excessive real estate on your site.

You may also see more traditional banner ads or large square ads beneath content. The idea here is to draw the eye as the reader finishes the article.

But you should not forget to monetize from within your content. Review relevant products and include your affiliate link. Keep it honest, of course. Dishonest reviews can quickly cost you your reputation. So can sloppy reviews.

You can also just throw in links when you mention a product, without doing a full review. Do this primarily for relevant products, but if you’re writing about how cute your cat is and decide to talk about how you take photographs of your cat, a link to the kind of camera you use isn’t so bad an idea.

How Much Should You Monetize?

Everyone has an opinion on this. Some feel even one ad is an intrusion. They probably never read magazines or newspapers, as those have far more advertising than just about any website. But no matter how much some want online content to be utterly free, even free of advertising, most people aren’t running websites just for the fun of it. They want to earn some money.

You should find the balance that works for you. Speaking frankly, I would say I monetize less than I should. It’s something I ought to take the time to work on, so I can increase my income. It would probably have more of an impact on my bottom line than spending hours writing articles, which is something I do willingly.

Placement is one of the major keys to solid monetization. If all your ads are in one place, they’re easily ignored. There’s a reason why people talk about ad blindness. Spread things out so that there are more chances for readers to notice your ads.

You’ll also want to consider how much you monetize by each type. All banner ads of a single type makes for easily ignored ads. A mixture of banners and text, placed appropriately throughout the page, should provide you with better results.

What About Google AdSense?

Certainly the quickest way to monetize is through Google AdSense or similar context sensitive ads. They give you relevant ads for very little effort. But they aren’t necessarily the best way to monetize, even though I still use them extensively.

Think of it this way. Many ads will be from affiliates or sites with affiliate programs. If they’re making good money from having their ads on your site, you can probably earn more by promoting the products on your own. Not always, but you should look into it and figure out the best ways for your site to earn money.

If you start out with AdSense on your site, be careful. You want to be sure that you don’t get so comfortable with that income that you never try anything else on that site. Easy doesn’t equal smart.

Above all else, don’t be afraid to try to earn money. You’re working hard on your site. You deserve something for your efforts.

I just got back home from my son’s speech therapy. It’s a half hour of nothing to do for me, as parents have to wait outside.

Nothing, that is, but think.

While some days I talk with the other parents waiting for their kids, other times I pull out my notepad and start brainstorming. It’s a great way to come up with ideas.

Today, for example, my focus was on coming up with new blog article ideas. That’s when I decided to write this article. I also came up with 25 other ideas.

None of them are fully developed. Some will take research, while others will require mere minutes to write. Some will generate multiple articles.

All in all, that’s not a bad return for a half hour of time.

I’ve been having trouble with one of the hosting companies I use for my sites. It’s hard because this used to be my favorite company… low, low downtime, served my pages fast. But lately Site5 just hasn’t been delivering.

I don’t mean in small ways either. I’m talking 12+ hour downtimes. One ongoiong as I type, another a couple weeks ago, another one within the past 6 months. Other little downtimes that I didn’t notice at the time, but did hear about.
Livid might be a word to describe how I’m feeling. Same for climbing the walls.

I’ll admit it’s a tough situation for them. These have been hardware failure issues, rather than anything to do with the load on the server.

As you can imagine, enough is enough and I’m researching where to move the impacted sites. I loathe changing hosts, but sometimes that’s all you can do.

I went over to the Web Hosting Talk forum to see what people thought of various hosting companies. My feeling is that you get a much better feel for the quality of a web host from a forum like this because they’re not biased by affiliate pay rates.

Right now I’m thinking Host Gator. Their reviews are mostly good; any host is going to have some troubles, which is why I’ve been so patient with Site5. They offer plenty of features for the price.

I did consider going with a VPS, but I’m not quite ready to take that step yet. My husband feels it’s too expensive, although I consider it still cheap compared to what an outside the home business would run.  But of course that really isn’t the poin.

Changing servers is always a big deal. It’s hard to avoid all the potential problems. Everything has to be updated so that you don’t have compatibility issues. When I moved from my previous webhost to Site5, they had to help me change my mySQL databases to the version they were using, as the previous host had been using a different version. Made things much rougher in the changeover than I had expected.

And that’s why I’ve been so patient and am still not eager to do it again. I lost so much work time to the changeover before. But maybe things will go better this time. I like to hope so.