The Juggling Street Performer

We were in Boulder, Colorado, and a juggling street performer was about to start his show downtown. I overheard someone say that his first show was amazing. Apparently, the juggler did several shows a day at least. It does make this unusual way to make money seem more practical as an income producer.

He was excellent, as a juggler and a comedian. He involved the audience throughout the show, while balancing on his unicycle, juggling various things including flaming bowling pins (or something that looked like bowling pins anyhow), and telling jokes the whole while.

"When you grow up you can do this too," he told the ten-year-old bot who volunteered to help him. "Then you can live in a van just like me." The audience laughed, but he pointed to his colorful van parked nearby.

My wife and I were impressed, both with the juggling of things on fire while riding a unicycle that was six-feet high, and with the jokes. It was a great performance, and when he was done we threw a dollar or two in his hat. He did a hard sell to get people to open their wallets, but at least he had real show. Up and down the street there were others begging for money and offering nothing, or a song accompanied by poorly played guitar.

I am always curious about the money questions, of course, so I looked in the hat when my wife dropped our own contribution in. I saw mostly one-dollar bills, but there was at least one five in there as well. I watched as people came forward, and as near as I can tell, there was at least $50 to $60 in the hat before the performer made room for the next act (this was a well-used corner).

Three twenty-minute performances a day was probably his minimum, and this apparently could make him as much as $150 to $180. Not bad for living in a van.

It certainly buys the groceries. Weekdays probably aren't worth the effort, of course, so it is likely a weekend-only routine. That still might mean a weekly total of $400 to $500 for a few hours work Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Hmm... Juggling isn't just an unusual way to make money. It might be a decent second income for someone with a low-paying job. Pay the bills with the job, perform 20 weekends each year, and you would have $10,000 extra to invest each year. But do juggling street performers living in vans think about investing and planning for the future?

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How To Make Money - Three Principles

How To Make Money - Three Principles

When you think about how to make money, do you think about jobs, businesses or investments? There's nothing wrong with that, but all these ways have their examples of success and failure. In other words, some people fail at the same thing which other succeed at, and we have to ask why? That leads to a deeper understanding of how to make money, as suggested in the following three principles.

1. Value Trading

Late-night television "get rich quick" infomercials usually cater to people who think there is an "angle" or "secret" which makes it easy. There are tricks, tips, techniques and tools that will help, and this is why these products usually can help the right person. But in the end, making money is about trading value, meaning you need to provide something of value to others to consistently succeed.

Those who think the first question is how to separate people from their money are tempted to use any means, resulting in dissatisfied customers, less repeat business, and eventual failure in most cases. A better first question is how to provide real value. It is serving people well that makes them happy to pay you well, and this is true whether you're an employee (with the employer as your customer) or the owner of a business.

2. Do What's Necessary

Having something of value to offer isn't enough by itself, however. Doing what needs to be done is another often-ignored principle. Commit to a plan and take action, and "do" instead of "try." When we "give it a try" we often quit at the first sign of trouble or unpleasant work. See mistakes as opportunities to learn and move on. The idea isn't to keep repeating what doesn't work, but to learn as you go and keep doing something towards the goal.

Those looking for "easy money" are usually not willing to learn what is necessary. A man hears that there's good money in building, for example, which is something he knows nothing about. Instead of learning what he needs to know he hopes that taking the test for his contractors license is all he needs. A wiser (or less lazy) man might have could have worked in the field for a while to learn the basics, or asked for help to learn how to run a business, or bought a book on how to market his services.

Instead, the easy-money guy he takes the easy route - which leads to failure. Maybe you've seen this scenario played out with friends who think they want to be an actor, start a business, invest in the stock market. We need to do what needs to be done to make money, and learn what we need to learn.

3. Know Yourself

Naturally, it's tough to do what is necessary if you hate every aspect of it, so think carefully about yourself when making decisions about jobs, business and investing. A business you aren't suited to or ready for won't just make you grumpy. When you ignore your interests, skills and abilities it is easy to choose the wrong way to make money - a recipe for failure.

This is an important key to how to make money. There will always be parts of a job or business that you aren't thrilled about, but you need to have at least some interest (and ability) to sustain your commitment.

Ask yourself what you can do, what skills and abilities and work habits you have, and what activities you enjoy. Are you good working with others, and with clients? Do you have a lot of energy? Are you known to quit too easily, and what did you do that contributed to previous failures? Can this business or job or investing path keep you motivated and ready to start each day? What will you need to do, and what are you willing to learn? Are there personal changes you'll need to make? Answering questions like these as honestly as possible may be one of the surest ways to learn how to make money.

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Make Money From Home With The Internet

If you are a stay at home mom (or dad!), or perhaps for any number of reasons conventional employment is not for you, there is an economic option that is available. Yes, that's right, I'm talking about how to make money from home - using the tools available on the Internet! You will be able to work part time or full time - whichever you desire.

Since 1994, affiliate marketing has become quite a growth industry in Internet commerce. In fact, Internet commerce itself has exploded since Amazon launched its first website. Do you remember the naysayers, the ones who said that Internet or e-commerce would be a flash in the pan? You can bet those people are very sorry today that they did not jump on the e-commerce bandwagon! Think about it: they probably are the same people who, when personal computers loomed on the horizon, turned their back on the opportunity to buy stock in those companies which are now multi-billion dollar giants. Oh well!
So how to make money from home? It is is not necessarily limited to stuffing envelopes anymore or by being a telephone solicitor. With your personal computer and your Internet service provider, you can make money merely by being a freelance blog writer or building an online business. You could build websites and sell them, or you could be an affiliate marketer.

Look online for tips on how to make money from home. You will find hundreds of ideas just by entering the term 'how to make money from home' in a search engine and noting the opportunities that are listed just on the first page. Many people do set up websites through which they run an online business, and they have been very successful at this. Other people like to write advertising copy or articles that can be sold as e-books.

Whatever you are interested in, it is a safe bet that there is a way to make money from it by doing business online. Niche marketing is another growing sector of online commerce; for example there is a company that sells entirely online, and all they sell -- the only product they sell -- are zippers! Yes that's right, zippers. They sell two-way zippers, they sell metal zippers, they could make a zipper any length you want, and in any color you want. They are very successful, so take a leaf from their book and get online and make money!

Note from Steve: Want to learn how I make money from home? Just go subscribe to my Free Online Writing Course. Imagine if you could write short articles - only about things that interest you - and make money doing it? You can. Just use these lessons.

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Make Money Working From Home

Two generations ago - for that matter, just one generation ago - there were few alternatives to conventional employment. If you wanted to make money from home 20 years ago, you could do transcription, for example, but you had to deliver it when it was finished. Or you could do telephone soliciting, if you didn't mind people hanging up on you or saying rude things to you over the phone. They really weren't many alternate ways to make a buck at home.

Since the mid-1990s, however, all that has changed. The possibilities for making money from home have grown exponentially and are still growing, with no end in sight.

Let's go back to transcription as an example. There were two ways you could go about doing transcription 10-20 years ago. You could pick up dictation tapes from a client, let's say a doctor, or an insurance adjuster. You then took the tapes back to your home office, transcribed them and returned the transcription to the client. Two trips out of the house were required.

The second method wasn't in the home at all, but in an office. For example, hospitals had central location in the bulding to which they could send their dictation. This was also a virtually impossible field to get into.

Now, with digital recording technology, transcription can be sent to you via the internet. The transcribed material sent back to the client in the same way, and you never need to leave your house. But this is just one way to make money working from home.

The field of Internet marketing is a huge growth industry whether it is in affiliate marketing or direct marketing, where you are selling goods from a website, for example. Let's say that you are a small company with a niche product, or a niche service. This could be anything from custom made zippers to dog booties. Well how are you going to market your products? The least expensive way to market, and market worldwide, is the Internet.

You can make your custom zippers or your dog booties in your home, market them aggressively on the Internet, by contracting to a company that writes copy for ads online, to name just one example.

You have extended the exposure of your company well beyond the boundaries of your state or your country - you are now a global concern. And you have succeeded in showing how to make money working from home. Not only that but you are now self-supporting, and you didn't have to go to work in an office to do it!

Notes from Steve: Want to make money from home? Sign up for my Free Online Writing Course. I write short articles about things that interest me--and make money doing it. You can do the same with these lessons.

On everywaytomakemoney.com you can also found a collection of pages on how to work from your home.

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Suggestions for How to Make Money from Home

Many people want to know how to make money from home. Here are a few suggestions.

You might try several different things before you find the one that works best for you and your family. Remember that working from home requires motivation and family support. So, talk to your family first.

Telecommuting is becoming increasingly popular. Depending on what you do, you might be able to do all or most of your work from your own computer, rather than going into the office. Talk to your boss. Many executives realize the benefits of allowing their employees to telecommute.

Freelancing is another popular choice. What talents or skills do you have? Can you put them to work for you? If so, that's how to make money from home. For example, writers can work anywhere. Freelancers include computer programmers, software engineers, website designers and many others.

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Home Based Business Opportunities - Two Types

You may be looking for home based business opportunities, but are you clear about what type you want? There are businesses that can be run from home, but still require you to go out to make a sale. These include services like office cleaning and dog walking. You don’t need a separate office or storefront location, but you do have to work outside of the home.

Then there are the home based business opportunities that are not only based at home, but can actually be run without leaving the house. Let’s take a quick look at both.

Home Based Businesses

It is nice to work from home for a variety of reasons. Even if you have to go "out in the field" to provide the products or services you sell, you still get to be home more than if you had a separate storefront or office. That means more time with family, and also means lower overhead costs. Some of the businesses that are (or can be) home based include:

Window cleaning services

Carpet cleaning

Small baked-good businesses

Delivery services

Handyman services

Though there are some product sales businesses that can be run from the house, it service-based ones that are the most common.

Home Based and in the Home

The other type of home based businesses are those that can be run from home and allow you to actually stay in the house every day. The advantages of this type are obvious. Lower costs are common, time with family is a given, and even those who have physical disabilities can operate a business from the house. This type can be further divided into internet-based and offline business. The latter includes:

Daycare

Writing for magazines

Renting rooms in your house

Telephone consulting

Customer service contracting

There are many other possibilities in that category as well. But the home based business opportunities that are most exciting to myself (and many others) are those that involve the internet. The advantages are many, including no direct contact with customers, the ability to run the business from anywhere in the country (and possibly the world), and the fact that you can often choose your hours. Some examples:

Selling e-books online

Running informational websites and getting paid for the advertising

Recommending the products and services of others for a commission

Writing articles and ages for webmasters

Selling products online (there are hundreds of businesses in this category alone)

Blogging and selling advertising on your blog

The list goes on, and most of these types of home based business opportunities give you the ultimate in flexibility and freedom. This page could have been written whenever I felt like it, for example, and from an internet café in France if I wished. And yes, I do make a good living at this.

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Your Website - A Residual Income Opportunity

A classic residual income opportunity could be an investment in dividend paying stocks, or a licensing fee that you get for decades for something you invented, or royalties for a novel that you wrote. But what if you don’t have that much money to invest, you don’t have an invention to license and you are not a writer? In that case, you might want to look to the opportunities available online. Of the many out there, we will cover one here: A basic review website. But first, let’s look at a basic definition.

Residual income is essentially income that continues to come in long after the initial efforts that created it have stopped (or at least have become minimal). You work as hard as you need to in order to develop the income stream, and then it flows on its own. This is more than a nice idea - it is a real possibility more than ever thanks to the internet.

For example, my wife and I have websites that we essentially stopped any serious work on years ago, yet they still produce hundreds of dollars of income monthly. Granted, we try to update them occasionally, but the work is minimal (and optional if we want to risk a slow decline of the income stream). I might have spent five hours in the last year on one site, for example, and yet it generated at least a thousand dollars for each of those hours.

The basic idea here is to target a niche with decent search traffic. That might be anything from how to train a dog to making money with crafts. Build a site that has a dozen or more pages of high-quality information, each targeting one particular keyword or keyword phrase. For example, if there are a thousand people monthly searching "make money with crafts," you would have a page about just that. It would be optimized by mentioning the search term "make money with crafts," several times on the page, including in the title, the first paragraph and near the end of the page.

Then you would get links to your site. You can start by asking owners of other related sites to exchange links. There are dozens of other ways to get incoming links. You can learn some of them from the e-book Fifty Ways To get Traffic, a bonus that comes with You Can Make Money Writing. The process of properly optimizing a site and marketing it is beyond the scope of this page, but you can learn that as you go and some of it is covered on other pages of this site as well.

To truly automate the site, making future work as minimal as possible, you’ll want a simple affiliate product or program to promote, so you won’t have any need to directly deal with visitors or customers.

You’ll just get a commission whenever you visitors click over to the site you promote and buy something. Even simpler is using any of the pay-per-click programs that pay you for each click on an advertisement.

Finally, it helps to update a site from time to time, but this too can be very minimal in terms of time - if you prepare everything from the start. For example, you can have other write pages for you for less than $10 each, and have a file of them ready to be loaded over the years one at a time every month or two. You also can have the "Tip of the Month" change each month - again from a file that you prepare in advance. Done right, your continuing work can be as little as a few minutes per month, making this residual income opportunity one of the best.

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