Little Steps

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

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.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

The Right Camera For Your Blog

When people ask me what was the one thing that turned my blogs around, I have to answer it was the purchase of my digital camera. What a difference it has made! I had been quoted in the magazine Hobby Farm Home and the editor had requested a photo of my wood cook stove to go with the article. I did not have a digital photo and she seemed to be perturbed with me that I did not own a digital camera. They had to get a photo from another source for their article. Right after that my husband bought me the digital camera of my choice.

The Homesteading Housewife, Dana Clover, told on Facebook about an awesome camera that she bought and she sold me on it. That was the camera I wanted. I had put it on my wish list at Amazon. It is the Canon EOS Rebel T1i Digital SLR Camera. And I love it just as much as when I bought it in 2009. This camera has always been dependable and never has let me down.

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Cafe Press Is Another Income Stream!

As everyone knows I sell online. I sell whatever I can find to sell. A few months back, I discovered on one of my blogging friends' blog a link to "My Shop" on her blog. I clicked it and found that she had a Cafe Press store with her blog name on all types of merchandise. What a fantastic idea! Her blog is The Redhead Riter and if you look at the index at the top of her blog, you will see My Shop. She also has a community on The Blogfrog and her merchandise would be of great interest in the members of The Redhead Riter Community. They may not know she has this little shop. Check out her great coffee mugs!

So I created my own cafe press store! It is another income stream. I am adding its link to all my blogs and on some of my forum signatures. It is not done yet and I will be adding more and more items to it over time. Using photos of my own to create some unique items is my goal.

If you have a Cafe Press store, please leave your link in the comments. I will add to this blog so others may check your store out too. Tell me what you sell in it. That way we can help each other.

Check out My Homesteading On The Internet Store on Cafe Press!

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Craigslist Is Disappointing

College building in Binghamton, NY

As everyone knows who comes to this blog, I am always working on my "multiple streams of income." It seems every time I start getting that extra bit of money to come in, it has to be used for some kind of major repair or problem. I had plans to start saving that money or paying down my loan or credit card. Nope. Every single time I get a payment from one of my income streams, I don't see that money in my account or on my debt.

Selling this bike trailer on craigslist!

One of my income streams (I was hoping!), was going to be craigslist. I see many people saying they bought or sold something on there. It made me think I could do it too! How silly of me! Instead I have been receiving porn pictures in my inbox from young pretty women. They all start the same: "Are you Kathleen G. Lupole? I know you are selling an item (or she names what it is) but I see you are in my area and thought we could get together and be friends." Now what is that all about? What does my selling of a child's trailer that hooks onto a bicycle have to do with these women? What makes them think I'd be interested in them? For heavens sake, I am a married women, and not into that kinky stuff at my age! So much for craigslist!

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Handling Stress

I have been feeling quite discouraged lately. That is the reason I have not been keeping up as well with my blogs. There are so things going on in my life at the moment and they are not good things. So it causes me to pull back, so to speak. I don't know if that is bad or good, but I have always done that in my life. It is my way of handling stress.

One thing I have been doing is to try to do something my mother taught me. She would tell me to make a list of all the things I could do to change the situation. Then you have an idea of where you are at. When things are tough, we have to do what we can do. If it was just me, I think I could handle it better. But having others involved makes it a bit harder for me. Worrying about others, makes choices different.

What do you do when you get stressed out? Do you have a way to handle it? Some people like stress and thrive on it. Are you one of those people? I wish I was! But I am not. Sometimes I head outside and do some garden work or hang out with my horses to try to concentrate on something else. It doesn't take the problems away, but maybe gives me a few hours of peace.

Hope to get this worked out soon and have my life back to normal.

Thursday, May 31, 2012

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.

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