Working and living in the same space can be difficult, it can sometimes appear that you are always “at work”.  Whilst there are certain benefits of working from home, there are also as many drawbacks.

I love working from home, I love the flexibility of being able to spend time cooking in the kitchen with a laptop on the dining table, tweeting, stirring, blogging and chopping!  However there are definately times when the work part of the work life balance spills over into my private life when I wish it wouldn’t. 

To counter this, I also have a workspace setup in the corner of my bedroom with a PC and a phone.  Not an ideal solution but better than constantly working from my dining table.  The most ideal solution could be a seperate room where I could close the door and work with some peace (I have 3 children), however some may argue that this would defeat the object of working from home.  The most important thing to my mind is to create the perfect work life balance and this is where setting aside a perfect workspace for you is important.

Notice that I said setting aside a perfect workspace for you, what works for me may not work for you.  As I have said, sometimes working from my kitchen table is the perfect solution for me, whilst other times I need to shut myself away in my bedroom office to get a bit of quiet time.  But what is apparent is that to effectively work from home you need to designate a workspace.  It need not be the most regal of offices, but simply somewhere to switch off from home life and focus on the work life.

When starting a new venture it can be difficult to keep track of the 1,001 things that need doing. 

If you’re anything like me then you probably make lists on pieces of paper, or even in a notebook.  However this method of organisation is inherently flawed.  It is, in my opinion, the best method of generating ideas as a kind of brainstorm, whereby the best ideas can be easily highlighted and the worst scribbled out!  But pieces of paper and notebooks can easily become lost or damaged or even left behind at a critical time.  So ideas ideally need transferring to a more flexible medium, enter my latest favourite tool, Ta-da Lists.

By it’s own admission Ta-da lists is the easiest to-do list tool available online.  It’s free to sign-up and only takes 10 seconds to get going.  You can create multiple lists for anything you need (see a selection of random lists) and once you complete an item you simply ‘tick’ it off!

Sharing lists amongst friends and colleagues is also as easy a 1-2-3.  And accessing the list from anywhere is also just as easy with a wide range of browser support. 

With a free and simple sign-up process it makes sense to take a look.  What have you got to loose?

Do you know what I’d love?  What my target is for this blog?

I’d love for it to pay for a brand new Audi A3!

I’m not expecting to earn nearly £20,000 this year though, but to be able to consistently earn £200-300 a month would certainly help pay towards my goal.

Even a jump from almost £0 a month to £200 a month is a massive leap, in terms of percentage anyway!  However if I were to set a shorter term goal of, say, £30 a month with 3 months that would seem more achievable.

But why not just stick with the Audi as my goal?  Why complicate matters by setting the much smaller goal of £1 a day?

Because it is more achievable and therefore much quicker to attain.

Most people, myself included, give up far too easily when a goal seems out of reach – and is EXACTLY why this blog has not been updated more often.  Right now this blog has around 20 RSS subscribers (hello to you loyal bunch!) and averages between 120-150 visitors a day which is good for the effort I have put in to date, however if I had posted regularly I should have had at least 10 times these numbers by now (and probably my Audi too!)

So by setting smaller, more achievable targets, I can make the end goal seem more realistic.  £1 a day,  £2.50 a day,  £5 a day and before I know it I’m half way there!

OK, I bet the post title grabbed your attention.  And now I have your attention I’ll explain how just 2 minutes of my time netted more sales than a £250 targetted Google Adsense campaign.

I’ve been a member of Facebook for a while now and have amased the completely average total of around 250 friends.  Not bad for a 30-something guy, but not great either.  But these 250 (real-life) friends helped me achieve something that all of my online marketing nouse couldn’t…  Allow me to explain.

For a while now the wife and I have made a little extra income from making custom cakes and a while ago I hit upon the idea that we could generate more business by making a simple website with a small gallery.  This coupled with a Google Adsense account, geo-targeted to our local area seemed like a winner of an idea.  Unfortunately this idea proved fruitless and left us over £250 out of pocket, which was about the same as we currently charge for around 5 cakes!  OUCH!

Fast forward a few months and I realised that for some reason I had neglected to put any cake photos onto Facebook.  I just assumed that friends knew we made cakes, but as the famous saying goes “Assumption is the mother of all mistakes”.  I simply added a few of my favourite cake photos to my profile and thought no more of it.

Within hours of posting 3 photos, I had received 5 firm orders for cakes along with 2 possibles and an enquiry as to whether we could cater for a buffet for 600 people.

The moral of this story is never underestimate the power of your own personal friend base, or network and never ever be afraid to show off.

Thanks to facebook we have now recouped the cost of the failed Adsense campaign and have learned to keep updating my profile with new cake and food pics as they are created.

Great topic to post about when the last post was a lifetime ago!

But that is exactly my point…  Why has it been so long since my last post?  Because my motivation for blogging was non-existent.  It came second place to everything else going on in my life.  I can honestly say that everthing else was more important than this blog – it must have been otherwise I would have posted more often.

In my last blog post I stated that I was working on a series of posts.  This was totally true and they are still partially completed and saved here as drafts to remind me of what I should have done!

Thinking about why this became a big blog FAIL for me, I realise that these “series of posts” was too big a milestone for a baby blog like this (and a newb blogger like me) – I was trying to be too formal in my approach to writing and this simply didn’t suit me – so I just buried my head in the sand and just wrote it off as another failed project.  I also work full-time and have three wonderful children so making the time for blogging appeared difficult and the income from my day job removed some of the urgency from my goal of working from home for myself.

As I have said, these draft series of posts are still around and will remain in their draft status for for some time.  The articles will be re-written and published, just not as part of a regimented series.

But back to the title of the post – Keeping Motivated!  I’ve a new personal motivation for blogging, this isn’t to say that I wasn’t motivated before (initially anyway), but in laying down what I want and how, in small steps, I want to achieve this has helped me find new motivation for blogging and in turn, making money from working from home.

Just because you fail the first time, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try again – just take a good long hard look at why you failed the first time and work towards making sure that it doesn’t happen again!