There’s an old saying about it taking money to make money. Even with all the free ways to run a business online there’s some truth to that saying, but there’s something more important to your ability to make money.

Knowledge.

If you don’t know how you’re going to make money, if you don’t know where the money is going to come from, you aren’t going to get anywhere.

Build It, and They’ll Pretty Much Ignore You

It would sure be nice if all it took to succeed with a home business was to start one. The real world isn’t that simple, and there’s lots of competition in most niches.

If you sell in person, you’re going to have to talk to people about your business and your product. If you sell online, you have to drive traffic to your website. Without some sort of effort, you aren’t going to get anywhere.

How Do You Get the Knowledge You Need?

There aren’t many of us who are naturals at running a home business of any sort. You usually need a mentor, a few good reference books or ebooks, and/or a lot of time to read up on the skills needed to build your type of business.

Don’t expect the perfect business plan to be handed to you. Everything you read, everything anyone tells you worked for them, it’s all tips for you to consider but you have to figure out which ones work for you. It’s rarely as simple as people make it sound after they’ve succeeded for themselves.

Suggested Reading for Affiliates:

The Affiliate Code
AdWords Guide

Suggested Reading for Network Marketers:

Renegade Network Marketer

You Need Skills, Too

Knowing what has worked for others is an important step. That knowledge won’t get you anywhere until you build up your skills relating to your business.

That means you have to take action.

This is where a lot of people fail with their businesses. They buy ebook after ebook, and either fail to read them or don’t take action because the next hot ebook just caught their attention. Then they wonder why they aren’t earning money when all these products promised them it would be so easy.

Taking action will help you to improve the skills you need to succeed. It won’t guarantee your success, but even if the actions you take fail, you’ll have learned something that might help you to succeed the next time, even if it’s “that doesn’t work for me.”

There’s nothing wrong with having a business fail. Most business owners will experience that. You haven’t completely failed until you give up on having a business at all.

Take time with your skills. Work on improving them. Learn from your mistakes. And most important, be patient. It takes time to learn what it takes to be successful in any business venture.

It’s about a week and a half until my daughter’s homeschool program officially starts. To be accurate, it’s an independent study course through an online public school. CAVA provides us with a teacher to contact, and classes to attend on Tuesdays so there’s some in person interaction with fellow students and the teacher.

This is going to be a huge impact on my routine. It’s going to be interesting, and that’s why I’ve started the changes now, before things get started.

My goals in changing the routine now aren’t just about me. They’re about getting my daughter into a bit of a school routine before she has to be on it. We’re doing math and a bit of writing, mostly, at this point. Next week I’ll be having her learn how to use the online programs for her homeschool so that we’ll be completely set when attendance starts to matter.

Our day starts just as though she were still attending the local public school. I have to walk my son to kindergarten anyhow, which gets all of us moving bright and early. No point to dawdling the morning away.

I give her some math problems – addition, subtraction, multiplication. Caught her early on not paying attention to the signs on the problems, but now she pays better attention and shows her work, which is really improving her accuracy. Very useful for when she’s doing regular school work.

We’re figuring out how to deal with my youngest, who loves her big sister and wants to be a distraction. My oldest is quite capable of distracting herself from her school work, and really doesn’t need help from her siblings.

I’ve warned my daughter that she owns her homeschool time. If she doesn’t work, she’ll be stuck at her desk until it’s done. I’m still reminding her some that she needs to focus when she starts goofing off, but the goal is for her to manage her time without a lot of nagging from me. I know she can do it.

Besides, often enough I’ll be involved directly enough in the process that she’d better be paying attention.

I also figure on using Sunday evenings to plan out the week ahead. That’s a tip I got from some of the moms on the K12 site, and it makes a lot of sense. Have plans so that I know what I need to be ready for the week ahead.

A big thing is being stricter with myself on the times I have available for work. They need to be more productive. I do some work by my daughter’s side when my youngest is napping, and I’m getting better about grabbing the laptop when the kids are playing together and don’t need me. Can’t sneak off to my desktop… that’s just begging for trouble. Perfect bait for a still breastfeeding toddler to come up, want to nurse, pound on the keyboard and mess with whatever she can reach on the desktop.

She does the same often enough for the laptop, but it takes only a moment to close it and protect whatever I was doing.

I don’t expect to have this all solved before we officially get started; in fact, I don’t expect to have this all solved within the first few months. But I figure I can have things in some sort of order, and work from there.

It’s true that the little things in life make a big difference. It’s often true in business too, which is why you hear about 20% of your efforts bringing in 80% of the reward. It’s also true that a small percentage of what you do probably causes the largest part of the headache of running a business.

In life and business, you need to know which little things are worth the effort, and which are causing most of your problems.

The Little Things in Life

Just think about the little things you do that make your life pleasant. It can be as simple as a bit of quiet time to read a book, or a quick game of tag with the kids. These are things that don’t take much of your time or money, but add tremendously to how satisfied you are with your life.

Little things can make your life more difficult even when they’re little pleasures. There’s the classic example of the cost of going to the coffee shop rather than making coffee at home. For many, getting a coffee at a shop feels much better than making it at home, but it takes a larger piece out of your budget to buy that coffee. When a budget is tight that matters, even if you don’t notice the pinch at that moment.

Other little things in life add up too, for good and ill. Pay attention and you might figure out which little things need to be cut, and which you need to enjoy more.

The Little Things in Business

When you have a home business, a lot of little things add up to either success or failure. There are many things you need to get done, and many ways to do them.

Some little things are absolutely important to get done, but you don’t need to do them yourself. It’s better for your business to outsource them so that you can focus on the things that need your attention. This is a way to give yourself more time for the more important things in your business and life.

You really want to know which little things do the most for your business, so that you don’t neglect them.

Sometimes you’ll find that the little thing that does the most for you isn’t the thing you most enjoy working on. Other times it will be a favorite. No matter how you feel about it, when a detail is important to your business, you need to know it and work with it.

Do your best to limit the things that take up the time you can’t afford to spend on them. If you have customers, sometimes that means firing the customer. If you blog and there’s a type of post you write that doesn’t get the right response, rethink writing that kind of post. If there’s a product you love to offer but no one buys, it’s either not worth the trouble or you aren’t offering it in the right way or to the right audience.

Details matter in business. It’s up to you to find the ones that matter in the best ways and the worst ways and handle them appropriately.

I’ve often found defining a productive day with my business a bit challenging. A few years ago, I could write seven articles in one day, and that was what counted as a productive day. These days, it’s rare for me to write more than four, maybe five if I have very few distractions that day. Other days I struggle to write even one complete article.

I felt bad about that for a while. I know I have more distractions than I used to, in particular a sweet young toddler who is very good at getting into the middle of things, but I still felt as though I should be doing more.

I gave it some thought, though, and realized that I don’t need to feel bad about it. It’s not that I’m slower with my writing. It’s that I’m more careful about it.

When I wrote more articles, they were less informative. That’s not always a bad thing, as some of them were pretty fun to write, but many of them didn’t serve much of a purpose. They didn’t take much thought on my part, and so didn’t give much to think about to my readers.

I came to understand that it’s not all about quantity. Quality matters too.

Quantity Has Advantages

I’m not saying that producing a large quantity of articles a bad thing for all websites. If you’re trying to be informative it’s usually not the best thing, as you probably aren’t really digging into your topics.

Quantity is much more popular for low quality websites. That’s why so many people love article spinners. They can write one article and come up with dozens or hundreds of variations on that article. They may not all make sense, depending on the quality of the spinner, but that’s not their main goal. They just want to produce a ton of articles.

It’s ugly, but it can work for driving ad clicks and affiliate sales.

The Advantages of Quality

Fewer but higher quality articles has advantages if you’re looking to build a longer term relationship with readers. If you want a reputation as a good resource in whatever niche you’re working in, you need to provide quality. That’s probably going to cut down on the volume of articles you write.

Quality doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all 1000+ word articles. You can provide solid information in a much smaller space. Quality simply means you’re focused on providing a good resource, no matter how many words you use to create it.

Quality can come quickly when you’re writing about something you know well. It doesn’t hurt to do research even on topics you know well. Something you might not have thought of on your own can come up.

There’s a good read over on Daily Blog Tips called You’ll Never Get Everything Done, and That’s Ok which points out that no matter how hard you work, you’re never going to get everything done for your business. I quite enjoyed that post because I was already thinking on this article, and several of the points made really resonated with my thoughts for this article.

It’s not always easy to make sales when you focus on quality. You have to balance providing quality information with earning a living, if earning money is your goal.

On the plus side, when you build visitor trust through providing quality information, and then recommend a product, you’re well trusted by your visitors. That helps with sales.

What’s Productive?

These days I consider a productive day to be one in which I spent a good amount of time working on my business and using the time well. It may not always show in terms of articles written or pages updated, but I will know what I’ve gotten it done.

You can’t get it all done. It doesn’t matter if you’re focused on quality or quantity. There’s always more to do, and more you wish you could do.

You can be more productive and feel better about what you get done if you prioritize your work. Get the things done first that will most benefit your business. You can switch that out sometimes to the parts you enjoy most, but make your focus the things that will help to grow your online business.

Get your priorities taken care of, and you’ll feel better about whatever else you accomplish during the day. Leave your priorities undone, and they’ll keep hanging over your head and leaving you feeling as though you haven’t accomplished enough.

Mental Blocks

Some days you’re going to have a mental block on the things you want to prioritize. Some days writing isn’t going to work out for you no matter how hard you try to come up with ideas. Some days link building isn’t going to work out for you.

If you’re dealing with a block on these things, find something else to work on for a time. If you can come back to your priorities later in the day, so much the better. The point is to not let a mental block keep you from being productive at all. Find something you can accomplish.

No matter how your days go on the whole, be proud of what you do accomplish. Running any sort of business at home is challenging with all of the distractions. You’re accomplishing more than many other people do just by working at it, and potentially building a business that will improve your family’s lifestyle.

Since I posted the other day about being told I work too much, today I thought I would share my favorite distractions, in order of how distracting they are.

Distraction #1

Looks so sweet and innocent, doesn’t she? She’s also great at keeping productivity a long ways away, any time she’s awake and sometimes when she’s supposed to be asleep.

I have to make an effort to keep her away from my desk, or she will rearrange my desktop rather thoroughly. I mean both the top of my physical desk and the desktop of my computer monitor, of course. Keyboard and mouse have to be pushed out of her reach and my chair, well…

That’s the only thing that works, turning the chair on it’s side. I can push it into another room and she will push it back to the computer desk, get on it and start playing.

Distractions 2 & 3

This pair ties because they kind of know when to leave me alone to work… kind of. That and they’re wonderful at playing together for long periods without too many arguments that need to be broken up.

Distraction #4

Yeah, my husband’s a troublemaker, all right. You may not be able to tell, but in the picture that’s a little gopher snake he caught in our backyard recently. He caught it after our oldest spotted it and we needed to be sure that it wasn’t a rattlesnake. After a few pics, we let it go. May it enjoy a long life and catch many gophers and other pests.

So my dear husband has some good points. I don’t mind nonpoisonous snakes, but better him than me in checking to see which is wandering around out there.

Actually, his distractions are usually pretty good too.

Fortunately for all these guys, I know how to let them distract me. It’s frustrating to be distracted at times, but I wouldn’t be doing this if it weren’t for them.