There’s a lot to think about with your home business, but one factor often gets overlooked. What happens if you get sick?

I mean seriously, can’t get to the computer sick. Not just “I have a cold” sick.

This is something that is going to happen to pretty much everyone at some point. And it’s not just you getting sick that can be a problem It could be a family crisis that keeps you away. A natural disaster could knock you down. What do you do?

One of the nice things about running a website is that your earnings are often not tied directly to the work you do. If you freelance or sell things that you need to ship this can be another matter entirely.

You should always have somebody you can rely upon to do at least a basic takeover if you need them to. It could be your spouse or other family member, but if you’re seriously ill they may be distracted by this as well.

One good option is to have a virtual assistant who can help you out. You may not feel the need to have one regularly, but if you have a file ready and a virtual assistant who would be willing to take you on as a client, you have a start.

Work up a list of the vital functions that someone would need to take care of if you weren’t able to. This can include dealing with customers (even if they can’t do your job themselves, someone else can at least explain to customers what the situation is), responding to emails and doing basic updates to your site.

Your file should include all basic logins needed for this.

One thing I keep on one of my sites is a page that has a list of all my sites and resources. I use this on a daily basis rather than having all my login pages bookmarked. This also means that if someone needs to access my sites for me, they will have a fairly easy time finding them. All they’ll need is the login information for that page, and for the pages they’d need to access.

Since we’re including a consideration for natural disasters as a problem, you may want to have your virtual assistant be in a different area so that you probably won’t both be knocked out by the same situation.

If you blog, you’ll want some basic posts ready so that the blog can keep going, or at least allow someone to post that you’ll be back when things get better. You don’t want your readers to think you’ve jumped ship on them. You can also put out the call for guest bloggers.

Similarly you’ll want someone able to handle any forums you may run. A good forum will keep itself running, but will need a moderator to control the spam and any issues that may arise between users.

It’s never too soon to start thinking about “what if” so that you can keep your home business running. A little planning now can save you a lot of stress later.

People in online business can go back and forth about whether or not freebie marketing is a good tactic. It has some advantages; people like free things, but also some disadvantages. That would be that freebie seekers are often not buyers, and therefore nearly worthless in terms of earning an income.

But freebie marketing isn’t just for online marketers. It can be done in the real world. Just think about the free samples you can get wandering a grocery store or Costco on the right days.

And yes, they give away a lot of free products to people who don’t buy that particular product that day.

And then there’s my daughter’s recent karate class. We went to a local street fair (free) and the studio was offering a free month of karate classes plus a free uniform. It was something we’d been considering for our daughter anyhow, the other studios were offering only a single day free, and so my husband and I signed her up.

Really I think they did a brilliant job. My daughter now really wants to continue in karate. She wants to earn a Black Belt someday. Potentially this could get them years of payments from us.

They did a really good sales job by offering those free classes. I very much regret that we can’t take them up on continuing them at the moment. No budget for it. But when things improve, they’re on the list. It’s the first activity my daughter has taken that has made her consider a long term goal with it.

That’s the kind of thing you need with your freebies. You need something that will give your visitors a taste of what they could get by paying. A good freebie makes the customer want your product even more.

This isn’t something that is always easy to achieve. Many paid things don’t translate well to free. If you cut features too much you can lose the power of what you’re offering and decrease interest. But too good a freebie makes people look for ways to keep it free if you go for a full trial version.

How you resolve this depends on what you’re offering. If you’re offering a trial version of something, find a way to balance what you offer for free with what it will take to make people want to pay for more.

If you’re trying to sell something else, offer a freebie that will help them to see why they need it.

Freebies should have a goal of making you money. Just giving something away isn’t going to do you a lot of good. Plan out the path you want your customers to take, from accepting the freebie to buying whatever product or products you’re selling.

You may recall that I recently had some trouble with a once reliable hosting company. I’ve moved away from them now (they were hosting other sites of mine, not this one), but they did get me thinking.

How much downtime should you put up with?

What if the host has been reliable for years?

Do you really want to go through the inconvenience?

Trust me, it is a major inconvenience to change hosting companies. DNS updates much faster than it used to; a matter of hours rather than a couple days as it once was, so you have less time to lose activity on your site if you have a forum or something, but there’s a lot to get done before you risk it.

In my case it took a long time to decide to leave my prior host. They had been reliable for a couple years. I liked the service. But when the server I was on started having major downtime due to server hardware issues that kept happening over and over, I had to give up.

I do believe in taking past performance into account. If I didn’t I would have left them with the first big downtime, which was several painful hours.

The decision must be based upon your own tolerances. All servers will go down at some point, but a good hosting company will know how to handle it. Most downtimes are a matter of minutes, and you won’t even notice.

A good hosting company will also have a way for you to check on what’s happening during a server outage without contacting support. Don’t expect them to contact you; I’ve found that to be quite rare indeed. But there should be a status page, blog page or forum where they will share what they know. Make sure you know how to get that information so you can get a quicker answer than you would by contacting support.

Even if you’ve just had a bad downtime, take the time to really research your options. I did, and that was what helped me to settle on Host Gator. Settle is perhaps the wrong word, since I’m really pleased with their service. They helped move my main site over, so I didn’t have to figure it all out myself. The little changes between servers can make things quite challenging, and they handled that for me.

I’ll admit that in some ways I’m sentimental for my old hosting company. There were good and I still think of them as a mostly good company. They just couldn’t handle the extreme issues that my server threw them (hardware, not software) quickly enough and when they had constant problems I had to make the tough decision. I’m still unhappy that they couldn’t handle the problems well, and I won’t go back, but there’s that sentimental bit from when I raved about their otherwise excellent service.

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.