How to make money on the internet with no skills?: Day 16 - Maximize Your Productivity

How to make money on the internet with no skills?: Day 16 - Maximize Your Productivity: "Have you ever found yourself in front of your computer, taking a look at the watch and not understanding how the time passed by so fast? Th..."

Day 16 - Maximize Your Productivity

Have you ever found yourself in front of your computer, taking a look at the watch and not understanding how the time passed by so fast? The internet is so full with information we find ourselves wasting valuable time on unnecessary information. By being our own bosses we also let ourselves slake a little bit, visit Facebook and Twitter, play bobbles and waist valuable time. Moreover, while working from home you can also get distracted by your surrounding – kids, pets, noises and more. It took me some time to find my way to make that separation between my time and my work time, between my personal life and my work, between useful information and wasting time.

Today I will give you a few tips about how to maximize your productivity when you work from home.

First of all, you need to understand that although you work from home and your schedule is flexible it’s still work and if you want to succeed in this you will have to treat it  like a real job, where you have to prove yourself.

Secondly, you will have to decide how much time you are willing to put into this work, if you do this part time, think of how much of your free time you are willing to put into this. If you do this full time, you will need to decide if you are going to give more time than you would usually spend on a job. In any case, you will have to understand that in the beginning and until you will be able to get the ‘work from home’ business to work you will need to spend a lot of time working. You will also need  to take to consideration the fact that you can’t over work yourself because it will tire you really fast and might make you give up. In the beginning I found myself sitting in front of the computer 14 to 18 hours strait, my mind was raising with ideas, thoughts and new information but after two weeks I woke up and just couldn’t get myself to the computer, I spent two days lying on the couch watching TV and feeling exhausted. I decided that I will work about 10 hours a day, 8 of them on the computer and 2 hours I will work offline doing job related tasks that did not require computer work. So decide how much time you are going to spend working while giving yourself enough free time to tend to your duties and relax.

Thirdly, Decide exactly what you are going to work  on, as we recommended in the check list, don’t take on more than three things at the same time. Focus yourself on the things you think you can do best and that you already have knowledge about. If you have a lot of ideas write them down,  once one of your projects are established enough and does not require more than half an hour of maintenance you can move on to another idea you had.

Fourthly, take the three tasks and think how much time each one requires, write down a schedule for your basic work-day. For example, if I decided to work for 8 hours and I have a blog, a site and immediate making money gig My work day will be as followed:

1 hour – making money gig

2 hours- writing for my blog and maintaining it.

5 hours – working on my new site.

As you can see the time is divided unevenly because I know that creating my site is the most difficult task- I need to gain more knowledge, create traffic and more.

So now you are focused, you have your time planned right, but you go to the web and you need to learn how to create a website for example. You find yourself after five hours you subscribes to three different newsletter that offered you free stuff for your website, you have a lot of great tips about how to create a successful site but you are not even a step closer to creating it.  Why? because instead of learning the basic technical stuff you need to know you got lost in all the irrelevant information. How to avoid it? Before you go online just think about what you really need to know, search for it on the web – choose one source of information and start implementing what you’ve learned, if the source of information wasn’t good just move on to the next one but no matter what don’t let yourself get distracted from the specific task you gave yourself. If you are good under pressure make a check list of tasks and give each one a dead line.

Just follow the rules in this article and each day you will get a little bit better at managing time from home!

Let's make money people! 

Yours, 

The Beginner

Day 15- General Time Managment

We all have calendars and we all write what we have to do somewhere, some of us work with cellphones, some with e-mails account and some with the classical hand written calendar. I tried working with all of these things but somehow I still didn't manage my time right, I always had to cancel meetings and appointments and all ways barely made it to the deadlines. So, I decided to create my own system based on my own needs. I've been working with this system for 3 years and it has been a life saver, I shared it with a lot of my friends who encountered the same problem and it really helped them. Today I will share this system with you.

The first step is to create a table on Excel, every row will be a day in your calendar, in the first row you will right the main categories of your activities.

For example in my table I have: Work/School | Important dead-lines | Free time| Doctors| Chores | work-out| Beauty treatments.

In everyday you will have all these categories to fill up (if you need to).

The Rules:

1. After you set up the table you will take all the activities that you do on a regular basis and you will set them up in the table.
2. Write only one task for each category in each day.
3. Create a daily table - it could be on one of the calendars you were using before.
4. Every day before you go to sleep, look at the big excel table and plan your day for tomorrow.
5. plan the tasks you have by the closest dead-line.
6. every time you get a new task or dead line insert it to the big table and plan the steps you will take in order to reach your dead-line.
7. If for some reason the day didn't go out as planed don't panic, just rearrange the big table (that's what copy paste is for).

I know it might seem like making your life a little bit over planned but I assure you, you will find the time to just chill and do nothing, if you really hate being over planed you can always choose one day of the week to not be planned.

Let's make money people!

Yours,

The beginner

Day 14 - How to Manage Time?

Hi Everyone,

Managing time is a subject which is dear to my heart, a lot of time the most talented and

able fail because they don’t know how to manage their time. I was once like

that and it almost drove me crazy.

I’m a person who either does everything or does nothing. Last year I had to keep up with so many obligations and commitments; I had to perform good at

my last year in the University and finish my B.A , I worked as a waitress and was obligated to work at list three times a week including weekends, I was an intern at the marketing department of a high-tech company, I took a 6 h

ours per week acting classes which later became a 12 and more hours a week thing, I had to take care of my household and my dog, I also had to keep company to my grandfather who just lost his wife. With all this obligation I also wanted to hung out with my friends, take advantage of my season-pass to my favorite basket-ball team games, watch NBA games and Barcelona (soccer) games,  work out and sleep. So how did I man

age to do all that and stay sane?

Well, first of all it wasn’t easy at all, but I managed to do not just my obligations but also the things I wanted to do for myself.  I created a little system for myself that helps me keep track of everything I have to do, it is kind of like keeping a diary but better! I also learned a few rules and tips that I will share with you on this site.

There is also another matter, this year after I finished my obligations I took a great vacation in Central America, when I got back I had nothing to do; No job, No school, No acting classes and No friends (not because I don’t have any but because they all found  a job while I was diving the Blue Hole in Belize). As I said I’m a ‘Do everything or do nothing’ type of person so it was pretty hard for me and I was about to sink into a “Couch Potato” state , but then I figured it wasn’t about the obligations it was about managing my time because frankly I had  a lot of pressing thins to manage like finding a job, making a lot of enquirers about future studies and later on deciding to learn how to make money online. The only difference was that this time all my obligations were to myself alone. So I started managing my time right again and truth be told it is definitely harder to keep up with your planes when you have only yourself to answer to. That is until you figure out that you can choose either to be a soft boss to yourself or a strict one.

After going into the whole making money online thing I encountered another problem – You can lose yourself  in the web and not notice it’s been 10 hours since you last ate!

So if you want to get some tips and learn how to manage your time right, how to keep up with the dead lines, and how to productively work online, follow my posts over here.

” To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.”

- Leonard Bernstein 

  

Let's make money people ! 

Yours, 

The Beginner

Day 13- Make money with Fiverr

Hey guys, 

As promised this one is about making money, and truth be told this is the first time I'm actually making money online. 

What is Fiverr?

Fiverr is a site that gives you a chance to make 4$ per order. In this site you will have to create "gigs". You write what you are willing to do for 5$ publish it and wait for people to order your service. Out of the 5$ they will pay, 1$ is a commission that the site takes. 

How does it work?

Once you have your gig up and running people will be able to order from you. You will get notification to your e-mail for every order or message you get. When you create the gig you will have to write the estimated time it will take you to complete your order. Once an order is made you will have to deliver by the deadline you wrote. If not able to do so you will have another 24 hours before the client will be able to cancel his order without your permission. Once you deliver the complete work the client will approve it and the order will be marked as complete if the client does nothing the order will be marked complete automatically after three days. Once you complete an order the money is yours and after two weeks you will be able to withdrawal it or use it to order on Fiverr. As far as cancellation goes, there are a few ways to cancel an order, if you and the client both agree to cancel the order you just do it and all is well. If you decide to cancel it alone it will cost you in your rating.

How to choose a gig?

sounds easy right? well it basically is but here is the catch: You have to come up with a gig that will be worth 5$ for the clients but won't be too time consuming for you. Think about how much you are making right now and think about how many gigs you will have to do per hour to get to that payment. then divide one hour (60 minutes) by the number of gigs and you will find out what is the maximum time you will have to dedicate to each order. For example, although right now I'm doing nothing so basically every dollar I make is worth my time, I thought  about my last job where I made about 10$ - 12$ an hour. That means I will have to complete 3 orders per hour in order to make the same amount of money. If you divide 60 by 3 you will find that every order should take me about 20 minutes. 

I recommend to go for something less time consuming and create a gig that will allow you to complete orders in less than 10 minutes. This way you will be able to make 24 $ per hour. Take into consideration that you will usually won't get more than 6-8 orders a day so this can't be your primary job or anything like that but it can definitely be  a way to make extra few bucks  everyday. 

How to get orders?

As I said before,  the gig MUST be worth 5$ or more. If not  most people won't be willing to pay you. When you create the gig make sure you describe in an attractive that will make you sound professional in the area you chose. Add a relevant picture and most important add a video, the video usually make you sound more believable and attractive. Moreover, you should make sure you put the gig in the right category and write the right key words. Just think about the people who would be interested in a gig like yours and what would be the search words they would use. Make sure the work you provide is good and that the clients are happy so that their rating will be good. Don't worry if you get a few bad comments  if most of your clients are happy it won't make a difference since the  more orders you take the less a few bad rating will effect the rating percentage.

Another thing that I haven't figured out completely yet is how to get your gig to the first page and how to get featured. From what I understand the more positive ratings you get from your customers the better your position will be, I also read somewhere that once you get to 20 positive ratings you will get featured. I don't know if it's true or not, I'm only at 15 right now. I will let you know if it's true once I will get to 20. Once I figure out how to get my gig to the first page I will let you know. But even now when my gig is only at the second page in the video section I still get about 4-5 new orders each day.

My experience: 

I created my gig 13 days ago, I already made 72$ and I have new orders in my pipeline worth 76$. Sounds nice right? The thing is , at first I put too much time in to every gig, and got so stressed about keeping my customers happy I wasn't sure if it was worth it.  another thing is that just after I created the gig and started getting orders I was shut down for about 4-5 days by my personal life. My initial deadline was 7 days, so I was left with 14 orders that I had to deliver in less than 24 hours. This time pressure made me create a more efficient system and finally I was able to deliver all the orders. After that I edited the deadline to 10 days, but I am trying to complete orders as fast as I can so I won't get into the same mess again. 

These are my gigs:

Let make money people!

Yours,
The Beginner

Day 12 - Regroup

Hey guys! 

I know I haven't written in a while, I had crazy and unpleasant two weeks and I just had to take a little time to regroup. And that is what I wanted to talk about today. 

Sometimes you need to know when to let go for a while and just "lick the wounds".  I know everybody are saying the show must go on, and that you just need to keep going, I  agree but I think all things need to be done at the right time. We are not machines we can't just keep on going no matter what happens. 

These last two weeks I decided to take everything easy, I thought pushing myself like I always do wasn't right. I still worked most of the day but I did the more simple things, the ones I didn't have to think a lot about, and the ones that made me feel comfortable. When life hits you you don't have to stop but you do have to slow down until you regain your balance. I did slow down and next week I'm planning to get back on track. 

All I'm saying is push yourself to the limit all the time but always make sure to know where the limit is, sometimes we need to get it a little bit closer. These two weeks I had a few days that I just wanted to relax and clear my head and other days that I wanted to work and distract myself a little bit. I'm glad I did all of it and didn't push myself to hard, I might have wasted a little bit of time but to me it wasn't a waist. If I wouldn't have stopped by now I would have been completely ineffective.

Another recommendation, especially if you work from home is to get away for a day, you don't have to stop working just change the atmosphere, go and stay with relatives, rent an hotel room for the night. It will clear your mind and will help you focus and your work. 

"Slow down you're doing fine

You can't be everything you want to be 

Before your time."

- Billy Joel 

I promise the next blog will be about making money ! 

Let's make money people! 

Yours, 

The Beginner