Many of us decide to work at home to circumvent the many difficulties associated with the typical 9-5 job – things like an unreasonable supervisor, too much to do and/or unworkable cut off dates.

Nonetheless, we may rapidly learn that working at home brings its own stressors.  So, how can we cope with these brand-new difficulties?

1.  Create A Efficient Workspace

Make sure you have a private workspace, with all the mandatory equipment such as telephone, computer, printer, fax, etc . You’ll need a cosy chair and a good desk.  You can make your home office more welcoming by making sure that you have plenty of space, lots of light – and, if you are a feng shui afficienado, have someone come in and feng shui your office!

2.  Drop Needless Activities

Go thru your “To-Do” List and eliminate anything that really doesn’t belong on the list, or anything that doesn’t positively need to be done.  Be determined in your decisions – remove as much unnecessary effort as you can.  Editing your list will not only save you the time you would spend attempting to perform those tasks – it will also save you the stress and mental problems related to worrying about those nonessential tasks.

3.  Acquire Necessary Tools

The proper tools make any task much less complicated.  Invest the funds to get the basic tools and equipment you need to do your work.  And, if your situation permits, spend some extra money to get the equipment that ( while not totally mandatory ) will simplify your work and make your life typically much less stressed.

Invest in a reliable, computerized marketing management system and let technology handle lead management and order accomplishment chores for you.

4. Employ a Administrative Assistant ( s )

Determine tasks that are established, repeated and not among your critical processes.  Think about outsourcing them to a personal assistant (which is much more reasonable than you could think).  Candidates for outsourcing include article promotion, site design, SEO, backlinking, lead follow-ups, etc.

5.  Create a Support Group

Working from home can become a very lonely activity.  Create a robust support community – this should be a group of colleagues with whom you work together thru the web (e.g, forums, chat rooms ) or a local group in your community or church.  The important thing is to keep in regular contact with folks who are vital to you – and who can appreciate what you are going through as an entrepreneur.

One superb place to start for gaining all the understanding about internet marketing that you’ll need to be successful is to enroll in the Online Success for Beginners course.

6.  Control Your Expectations

Don’t expect miracles or overnite success.  Build a relationship with a coach or friend who can help you set pragmatic objectives and expectations – and help you stay inspired when things don’t go quite the way you need them to go. An online, or work at home business, is simply that – a business.  As such it requires a continuing supply of customers and products and vendors, etc.  Every one of those presents another opening for an issue to happen, skyrocketing your daily levels of stress – like the characteristic nine-to-five job.

7. “Chunk-It”

Your great and ambitious ideas may appear impressive, but taken in total, they can be extremely overpowering and scary ( e.g., “I want to be a millionaire” or “I wish to retire in 5 years”).  The smartest thing to do with such optimistic goals is to “chunk them,” i.e, break them down into far littler, more manageable parcel and then create a plan to achieve each of those subordinate goals.

8.  Eat Well

Eat a healthy, balanced diet rich in fruits and vegetables.  Cut down on caffeine ( coffee, black and green tea, cola drinks, and chocolate ).

9.  Workout

Exercise alleviates tension, pushes oxygen to the brain, and provides a recess from intense work-related activities.

10.  Rest & Relax

Try to plan time as a normal part of your day to breathe and do anything that you enjoy, even if it is just for a couple of minutes.

One of the biggest advantages of a based work-at-home} business is that you are now your own chief – but that’s also one of the biggest causes of stress in your life.  You are now the one individual who needs to choose what jobs need to be done, when and by whom.

As a further step in reducing your overall stress levels, request the FREE MaxPro Report and Audio that will share the ancient secrets of getting rich and show you additional ways you can reduce the strain related to running your web organization.

The intent of leverage is to return the best advantage with the lowest effort.  Specifically, for internet businesses, that means most profit with minimum personal involvement, and we can accomplish this via outsourcing.

Preceding articles discussed increasing leverage by 1) re-using, and 2) re-purposing content.  In this article, we’ll address developing leverage by outsourcing routine, or non-value-add work, and any work that simply isn’t a match with our individual skills, experience and/or character.

Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman have reported some interesting findings from more than 25 years of research by the Gallup organization – initially in their book, First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, and then elaborating on those findings in several subsequent books.  Two of their most important findings for internet marketers and home-based business owners are these:  1) Improve your strengths, not your negatives, and 2) Acquire staff for talent.

Affiliate business has a rather large learning curve and requires many diverse skills.  But, few people are personally skilled in all of them – and even those who multi-skilled, probably are not applying their available effort and other skills should they focus on their weaknesses.

William of Occam, noted for “Occam’s Razor,” has noted:  “It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.” As affiliate business owners, Occam’s Razor has a big lesson for us in terms of our own time management.

Tim Ferriss, who wrote “The 4-Hour Workweek” is a terrific proponent of the use of virtual assistants to handle recurrent, low prioritiy tasks or those for which he does not have either the time or inclination to perform.

Contrary to popular opinion, outsourcing is not restricted to large corporations, but given the low cost of international VAs, even small, home business organizations can afford to delegate many activities to virtual assistants.

One task that many internet marketers choose to outsource is writing articles.  Many see the importance of writing articles, but either can’t write well, or simply don’t want to write, so they turn over article authoring to ghost-writers. 

Another task you might consider outsourcing to a virtual assistant (or call center) is the telephone and email follow-up required for lead generation and sales closings.

If you improve your areas of strength, you gain the benefits of leverage and multiply your results, whereas, focusing on improving areas of weakness will, at best, result in only an incremental improvement in results. 

Which would you rather do – multiply your results, or simply see incremental improvements?

If you would like to learn how to leverage your efforts, sign up for the Online Success for Beginners course.

Serial Entrepreneur & Ultravagabond

Timothy Ferriss, author of the 4 Hour Work Week, is a self-described “serial entrepreneur and ultravagabond” who lives a lifestyle that most of us could only dream about — until now.

Ferriss presents a step-by-step guide to his free-wheeling lifestyle, allowing us to follow in his footsteps and realize lifelong dreams. Ferriss has been called “Indiana Jones for the digital age”.

This interesting book has been number one on three different best seller lists: Wall Street Journal, NY Times and BusinessWeek.

Replace Obsolete Assumptions

His basic premise is that we need to adopt the “Rules of the New Rich” and let them bring power and choice into our lives.

Online Businesses need to replace limiting assumptions and their owners need to learn how to enjoy life now. We’d like to be able to manage our businesses, and our lives, from anywhere, anytime.

Ferriss encourages us to abandon deferring a luxurious lifestyle and instead, build the life we want right now, using the currency of freed-up time and increased mobility.

Rules of the New Rich

According to Ferris, the “Rules of the New Rich” include the following:

• Retirement is Worst-Case Scenario Insurance
• Interest and Energy are Cyclical
• Less is Not Laziness
• The Timing Is Never Right
• Ask for Forgiveness, Not Permission
• Emphasize Strengths, Don’t Fix Weaknesses
• Things in Excess Become the Opposite
• Money Alone is Not the Solution
• Relative Income is More Important than Absolute Income
• Distress is Bad, Eustress is Good

The 4HWW Model

His model provides us with a roadmap for realizing our own lifelong dreams. He shows us how to:

• Live like a millionaire
• Free time and automate income
• Outsource our lives to overseas virtual assistants for $5/hour
• Travel the world without quitting our jobs
• Eliminate 50% of our work in 48 hours
• Trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and mini-retirements

He uses the DEAL acronym to describe his model, where:

• D = Definition
• E = Elimination
• A = Automation
• L = Liberation

He encourages us to use “Dreamlining” to design our own luxurious lifestyles. His recommendations rely heavily upon elimination, simplification, and outsourcing to virtual assistants.

Both art and science contribute to Ferriss’ Lifestyle Design (LD). Lifestyle Design (LD) relies heavily upon automation, i.e., building systems and processes that remove ourselves as bottlenecks. But never automate anything that can be eliminated, and never delegate anything that can be automated or simplified.

Carpe Diem!

Use this book as a roadmap taking you on a journey to opportunities that others will never see. Having choice; i.e., the ability to choose is powerful.

This is a very compelling book and presents a plan that is easy to understand and apply.

Following Ferriss’ lead, I plan to aggressively pursue my lifelong dreams.  I plan to implement many of his ideas into my own life.

One superb starting point for gathering all the  knowledge about internet marketing that you’ll need to be successful is to sign up for the Online Success for Beginners classes.