Working from home..

I don’t have a choice, about working from home, I suffer from chronic pain and fatigue which would make going out to work at a regular job impossible and you really don’t want to know the details of. However working from home and working my own hours works well for me. Nighttime is my best time, so I often work from 4pm to  5 am, which of course works in well with many of my clients from overseas.

So I have a setup at home where I work from a lazy boy chair, and with being able to recline at different positions, can work for many hours, ok sometimes I drop off to nod a little if I’m tired. However the fatigue isn’t so much sleepy tiredness but physical fatigue, think what it would be like to run a long marathon, when in fact all you had done, was gotten out of bed, and walked 15 feet to the computer.

In general, I keep myself busy on the computer and the hours soon pass by.

Staying busy on the computer is often the best pain relief there is, I certainly forget about the pain quite a lot more than, if I was just laying around, or moving around, which I can’t really do without pain relief.

The hardest part of working from home, or one the hardest parts, is the loneliness, with the type of work I do many of my peers see me as their competitor or opposition.

Then people wanting to earn the skills I have, are happy to spend endless hours, when I could be working, picking my brain.

But SEO which is the work that I do is more an intuitive skill rather than something that can be taught, of course there are several skills that can be learnt, but being good at the job of making website rank well in search engines for the sort of things customers would search for isn’t learnt from a book.

One other hard thing about working from home, is when business is slow, that makes time pass slowly, I usually write articles to fill in the time, but it’s not the same as getting your teeth into a website that need it’s SEO done, and you can work for hours and hours finding just the right words. Often I will work on one of the sites I do SEO for, just for something to do so owner of the site get’s more hours work, simply because I’m bored. I could of course just take any SEO job offered, but have a personal policy that unless I know I can make a drastic difference to the websites visitor statistics, then I won’t take the job.

The other obvious problems of working from home, is when business is slow. If money coming in isn’t regular, the bills are still regular. With the sort of work I do I often suggest people take out a yearlong contract, both because I can guarantee a monthly income, for which in return they receive far more work for their investment.

Clients often are wary of this suggestion, I do often find that people will come back after a couple of months, and say, oh yes, what you did is working we now want to get you to do a yearlong contract.

I guess they are used of being ripped off, and want to see results before committing to a contract, and I guess I can see their point, but it is hard as a self-employed person doing the work to plan, bills need to be paid every month.

I guess in a way my policy of only working with ten clients at one time has its pitfalls there, maybe I should revise that to only 10 clients with yearlong contracts, yearlong contracts are is the norm among reputable SEO firms. The fly my night company's tend to take your money for the initial work, and run, before the long term effects can be effects or benefits of the seo can be satisfactorily evaluated.

So working from home, which is my only option works for me very well, I get a lot of job satisfaction from doing the work, and get a lot of personal gratification from seeing “my” sites doing well in search engines.

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