Everyone and their dog now appears to be using Twitter!  It’s currently the 15th most visited site on the internet according to Alexa Top 500 Global Sites list and growing rapidly.

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that allows you to tweet your message to your followers and the world.  If you are a Facebook user it might be easier to understand Twitter if you liken the service to Facebook status updates.  A tweet is simply a message of up to 140 characters, just a sentence or two to convey your message.

Twitter allows anyone to broadcast to the world, and more specifically their followers, updates on their business, website or life.  Take a look at the following video for a basic, plain english description:

Once you have an understanding of how easy Twitter is to use you can begin to see the power of the microblogging platform. 

One of the keys to harnessing Twitters power is interaction.  Follow users who follow you (if you find their tweets interesting), answer peoples questions and re-tweet interesting messages.  Growing your follower-base is essentially growing your customer base and to make Twitter an effective business tool you need to build the trust of your followers.

Follow me @ twitter.com/lyndonwatkins

The Better Business Bureau has just posted a new job scheme alert about a growing scam based about an opportunity based around posting on Twitter.

Apparently many sites are offering “easy money” using your twitter account, with some offering 7-day free trials for the “job information” then hammering your credit card once the 7 days are up.

Amazon has also recent waded into the fray stating that they will not pay commissions on any sales originating from Twitter  - The following is from their TOS

“Your site” means any site that you will link to the Amazon Site (and which you will identify in your Program application)

Whilst Twitter may be a great networking and lead generation tool, caution and due dilligence must be used to make sure you are not caught out.

More on Twitter in a later post….

I love working from home, I love the flexibility of being able to spend time cooking in the kitchen with a laptop on the dining table, tweeting, stirring, blogging and chopping!  However there are definately times when the work part of the work life balance spills over into my private life when I wish it wouldn’t. 

To counter this, I also have a workspace setup in the corner of my bedroom with a PC and a phone.  Not an ideal solution but better than constantly working from my dining table.  The most ideal solution could be a seperate room where I could close the door and work with some peace (I have 3 children), however some may argue that this would defeat the object of working from home.  The most important thing to my mind is to create the perfect work life balance and this is where setting aside a perfect workspace for you is important.

Notice that I said setting aside a perfect workspace for you, what works for me may not work for you.  As I have said, sometimes working from my kitchen table is the perfect solution for me, whilst other times I need to shut myself away in my bedroom office to get a bit of quiet time.  But what is apparent is that to effectively work from home you need to designate a workspace.  It need not be the most regal of offices, but simply somewhere to switch off from home life and focus on the work life.

If you’re anything like me then you probably make lists on pieces of paper, or even in a notebook.  However this method of organisation is inherently flawed.  It is, in my opinion, the best method of generating ideas as a kind of brainstorm, whereby the best ideas can be easily highlighted and the worst scribbled out!  But pieces of paper and notebooks can easily become lost or damaged or even left behind at a critical time.  So ideas ideally need transferring to a more flexible medium, enter my latest favourite tool, Ta-da Lists.

By it’s own admission Ta-da lists is the easiest to-do list tool available online.  It’s free to sign-up and only takes 10 seconds to get going.  You can create multiple lists for anything you need (see a selection of random lists) and once you complete an item you simply ‘tick’ it off!

Sharing lists amongst friends and colleagues is also as easy a 1-2-3.  And accessing the list from anywhere is also just as easy with a wide range of browser support. 

With a free and simple sign-up process it makes sense to take a look.  What have you got to loose?

I’d love for it to pay for a brand new Audi A3!

I’m not expecting to earn nearly £20,000 this year though, but to be able to consistently earn £200-300 a month would certainly help pay towards my goal.

Even a jump from almost £0 a month to £200 a month is a massive leap, in terms of percentage anyway!  However if I were to set a shorter term goal of, say, £30 a month with 3 months that would seem more achievable.

But why not just stick with the Audi as my goal?  Why complicate matters by setting the much smaller goal of £1 a day?

Because it is more achievable and therefore much quicker to attain.

Most people, myself included, give up far too easily when a goal seems out of reach – and is EXACTLY why this blog has not been updated more often.  Right now this blog has around 20 RSS subscribers (hello to you loyal bunch!) and averages between 120-150 visitors a day which is good for the effort I have put in to date, however if I had posted regularly I should have had at least 10 times these numbers by now (and probably my Audi too!)

So by setting smaller, more achievable targets, I can make the end goal seem more realistic.  £1 a day,  £2.50 a day,  £5 a day and before I know it I’m half way there!

I’ve been a member of Facebook for a while now and have amased the completely average total of around 250 friends.  Not bad for a 30-something guy, but not great either.  But these 250 (real-life) friends helped me achieve something that all of my online marketing nouse couldn’t…  Allow me to explain.

For a while now the wife and I have made a little extra income from making custom cakes and a while ago I hit upon the idea that we could generate more business by making a simple website with a small gallery.  This coupled with a Google Adsense account, geo-targeted to our local area seemed like a winner of an idea.  Unfortunately this idea proved fruitless and left us over £250 out of pocket, which was about the same as we currently charge for around 5 cakes!  OUCH!

Fast forward a few months and I realised that for some reason I had neglected to put any cake photos onto Facebook.  I just assumed that friends knew we made cakes, but as the famous saying goes “Assumption is the mother of all mistakes”.  I simply added a few of my favourite cake photos to my profile and thought no more of it.

Within hours of posting 3 photos, I had received 5 firm orders for cakes along with 2 possibles and an enquiry as to whether we could cater for a buffet for 600 people.

The moral of this story is never underestimate the power of your own personal friend base, or network and never ever be afraid to show off.

Thanks to facebook we have now recouped the cost of the failed Adsense campaign and have learned to keep updating my profile with new cake and food pics as they are created.

But that is exactly my point…  Why has it been so long since my last post?  Because my motivation for blogging was non-existent.  It came second place to everything else going on in my life.  I can honestly say that everthing else was more important than this blog – it must have been otherwise I would have posted more often.

In my last blog post I stated that I was working on a series of posts.  This was totally true and they are still partially completed and saved here as drafts to remind me of what I should have done!

Thinking about why this became a big blog FAIL for me, I realise that these “series of posts” was too big a milestone for a baby blog like this (and a newb blogger like me) – I was trying to be too formal in my approach to writing and this simply didn’t suit me – so I just buried my head in the sand and just wrote it off as another failed project.  I also work full-time and have three wonderful children so making the time for blogging appeared difficult and the income from my day job removed some of the urgency from my goal of working from home for myself.

As I have said, these draft series of posts are still around and will remain in their draft status for for some time.  The articles will be re-written and published, just not as part of a regimented series.

But back to the title of the post – Keeping Motivated!  I’ve a new personal motivation for blogging, this isn’t to say that I wasn’t motivated before (initially anyway), but in laying down what I want and how, in small steps, I want to achieve this has helped me find new motivation for blogging and in turn, making money from working from home.

Just because you fail the first time, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try again – just take a good long hard look at why you failed the first time and work towards making sure that it doesn’t happen again!

It is undergoing a bit of a facelift at the moment, so things are going to get better – improvements like ad revenue sharing with members, an integrated blog platform and more are planned…  I’ve also got a competition lined up for the summer with (hopefully) a brand new Sony Vaio laptop amongst the prizes, so what are you waiting for – pop along and signup now before all the good usernames are taken

If you were looking to break out of the 9-5 job which of these work from home blogs might you be tempted to look at? I’d probably take a look at the first two or three but to be honest Mommy Enterprises wouldn’t really interest me, where as my wife would probably ignore the first three chose and plough ahead with Mommy Enterprises.

These blogs all have different target markets and demographics and that’s a good thing as far as getting relevant information is concerned for the reader, but in the case of the “Working at Home” niche there is more of a cross-over than perhaps any other industry. They have information relevant to their niche, but much of the content could be interchangeable.

So, whichever niche you put yourself into, why not take ten minutes to take a look to see what the other half is doing, you never know what you might learn.

What is a work based support network? And why do I need one?

When your working for someone else and you’re having a bad day there would usually be someone that you can turn to either for help or to blow off a little steam, but when your working from home, alone, who do you turn to?

Again, working from home, alone is, as the name suggests lonely – there is no social interaction with other co-workers, no leaving parties, Christmas parties etc.. – so if this website is here to promote working from home, why am I being so negative??

The answer is that I’m not, I’m here to try to help anyone who feels that way from time to time. I’m sure that we’ve all felt a little lonely or frustrated occasionally and the answer is as simple as if you were working in an office with 100 other people. Whether people are sat at the next cubicle or at the opposite end of the planet they can still make a big difference to your day and there’s plenty of ways to find them as well.

The first obvious choice would be to find a forum specific to your niche, i.e. if your a webdesigner then somewhere like DesignersTalk would be perfect, if you make scale models to resell then somewhere like Scale-Models might be a good place to start, you get the idea! Failing niche forums you could find yourself a nice general Work From Home Forum!

Also don’t overlook local support – almost every part of every developed nation now has business clubs, Chambers of Commerce, small business assistance groups all of which are excellent places to make new industry friends and contacts, go to as many events as you can – be sure to have loads of high quality business cards to give out and make sure to get as many back in return as you can – you never know where that next big sale will come from!