Homestead Income Coming From Your Blog

Make A Living From Wherever You Live!

Many times I have people email me asking how they can make money on their homestead. Besides selling food products, selling soap, honey or a million other things from the production of livestock, there are many other ways too. As you know, if you read my blogs regularly, I sell online, write eBooks and make money from affiliate ads on my blogs. For me, this is the best way. I can't do the hard physical work entailed with raising the animals or harvesting a big crop. There are other ways of course. I will touch on them in some future posts. This post I'd like to recommend some ways I know for sure.

The number one best way is to write posts for a store or a particular product. You can contact some of the stores in your area to get started. I write for a local restaurant supply store in our area. I like doing it and really enjoy that type of work. These posts are not all about the store, but more about what you can do with the products you buy in their store. I learned a lot when I started writing these posts. It helped me to increase my affiliate income as an Amazon associate affiliate. I now earn more money every month from Amazon!

First sign up as an affiliate of a site that sells products you use and like. Then you can share with your readers the reasons why you like the products and how you use it. Put some photos up of how you use it or at least something that is related to it. If you are a homesteader, you can write a blog about homesteading and include affiliate links to homesteading products. It is not hard once you just start doing it.

When you write your blog posts though, don't make it sound like an advertisement. I write some posts for Blogsvertise and some of the companies want you to sound that way when they ask you to write about their company. Others are quite content with your own content that includes a link to their site. Those posts are always the best ones and get the most traffic. Your readers are not stupid! They know when you are trying to sell them.

Which brings me to some of the blogs I read that are like an advertisement all the way through. They say they are making money that way. Maybe they are. I never read their whole post because I don't care to read an ad. Do you? Would that turn you off to their blog? It does me. If one or two post is written that way, that is one thing. But not every single post! That is overkill and you can lose your readers, as well as their respect.

Copyright © 2012 Kathleen G. Lupole

All Photographs Copyright © 2012  Kathleen G. Lupole

Creating Products That Are Needed

I recently read on a forum how someone felt it was a scam that the manufacturing companies started marketing that women need to shave their arm pits in order to sell women's razors and shaving lotion, creating a whole industry. I can think of a huge number of products that came about due to that very thing. Creating the idea that  a certain niche market needed this product or it would make their life easier in some way.

In fact, some of us, who grew up in the fifties and before, can remember when not every home had a telephone, a television, a clothes dryer or especially.........two cars! On a post sometime ago, on my Homesteading on the Internet blog, I wrote this:

"When the electric grid was in the early years everyone just wanted it for lights. General Electric manufactured appliances that were hardly selling. Light bulbs were their hottest sellers. Everyone wanted electric lights and that is how they initially got into our homes! I know my mother-in-law used to say that her father loved his electric lights. I am sure he did. So GE kept trying to figure out how to reach the housewives to get them to want the refrigerators, electric stoves and washing machines. They campaigned long and hard figuring out how to make her not only WANT these appliances but how to NEED them. They did it too."

If you come up with a product that people not only want, but need, then you would do well. To make it even better you need to come up with a product that you can make and nobody else has. I think you need to really think about it, study and talk about to others who have an interest in creating products too. That is how all the big companies got started to begin with. 

Copyright © 2012 Kathleen G. Lupole

All Photographs Copyright © 2012  Kathleen G. Lupole