Guest post: 3 Ways to Create an Extra income Stream from Home

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(Photo by Upsplash)

Want to earn an income but don’t know how or where to get started? Your home can be a money-making machine. Here are a few ways you can add to your finances by taking advantage of your own house…

Sell Items Online or in Yard Sales

If something’s just gathering dust in your house, consider selling it. You could have a cabinet or a couch you no longer need — sell them online! A yard sale is also an excellent idea if you have more items you need to dispose of that are in good condition. In addition, yard sales are visible and advertise themselves, which is an advantage over indoor sales. Make sure you check your local zoning laws and homeowner association restrictions to avoid issues.

Make Renovations and Share the Steps

Equity is the percentage of your home that’s already been paid off. If your home is worth significantly more than what you still owe on your home loan, you may be able to use that equity to pay for home enhancements or renovations. It’s a smart way to finance a renovation project. You may even enjoy tax deductions (if you use the money to enhance your home substantially) and low interest rates (because the property is used as collateral for the loan). Additionally, you can expect a healthy ROI with the right renovations, as well as sell the house quickly and for more money, if that’s something you’re considering.

Start a Blog or a YouTube Channel

Blogging is a smart way to make extra cash. If you like sprucing things up regularly in your home, create a website or a YouTube channel to share your home improvements, DIY projects, flips, and more. You can create an additional income stream by placing ads on your website and earning sponsorships (in time). Post often, research the best times to upload content, make your home enhancements compelling, and really provide valuable information — more people will like and share your videos and content this way, helping you earn more.

Affiliate marketing is another excellent way to make money when you run a home improvement blog. You could simply recommend products or items you like or personally use in your projects. Each time a client uses your link to purchase, you’ll earn a commission. Of course, you’ll need to reach and build up an audience for your platform to take off. Promote your posts and videos on social media accounts by sharing before and after images of your projects.

Making cash off your home is relatively easy as you have more options than you might realize. Whether through selling stuff you no longer need, starting a blog or vlog to document home renovation tips, use your home as the starting place to get your message across and get visitors coming back for more.

 

Today’s guest post was contributed by Seth Murphy.  Seth first dabbled in DIY projects because that was cost-effective. Now Seth hopes his blog, Papa DIY, will encourage readers to take a chance at tackling their own hands-on projects… check out Seth’s blog at https://papadiy.com/about-me/ 

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Blogging a Surround Sound Effect

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The Guy Raz book, How I Built This is all about starting and building a successful venture, with insights and inspiration from the world’s top entrepreneurs. In one of my favorite chapters, Raz talks about creating what he calls a “surround sound effect”.

In actual surround sound, one or more channels are added to the side or behind the listeners to make it seem as if the sound is coming at that listener from all directions. Translated into marketing, Raz explains, the secret is to give the impression that you are “everywhere”, when in reality you’re getting your name out in the handful of places where your core customers spend their time.

To market successfully, Business News explains, “your customer can’t be everyone.” Instead, you need a targeted marketing strategy, the authors stress, to succeed. You must define your niche and target those specific customers.

In fact, Spider Graham writes in bizjournals.com, “the whole goal of all marketing is to get the right message to the right person at the right time”. Of course, Graham adds, we must make sure to do this at the best price possible. If you try to be everything to everyone, your message becomes less impactful, he emphasizes.

Learning about your target customers includes gathering intelligence about:

  • their gender
  • their average age
  • their marital status
  • their educational level
  • their employment
  • their outlook on life
  • where they get their news

OK, OK. But how can marketers help entrepreneurs achieve that “surround sound” effect while still carefully targeting their customers? For our content writers at Say It For You, the challenge is using blogs to inform, educate, and persuade. Where does the “surround sound” come from?

Just as your target market can’t be “everyone”, a blog isn’t –and cannot be – an all-purpose, Swiss-army-knife solution for all your marketing needs. In fact, blogging is just one piece of the general strategy you work on with your team (which might well include a blog copy writer, but which also might include the web designer, the business manager, the employees, loyal fans, even, sometimes, a franchisor).

All the pieces used to promote your business or practice must mesh – social media, traditional advertising, event planning, word of mouth marketing, community involvement. Together all those pieces create the “surround sound effect”.

 

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Briefs for Blog Posts and Blog Posts as Briefs

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Leafing through the Harvard Business Review Special Issue on digital intelligence, I noticed a very helpful formatting detail – in the corner of each first page of an article, there was a box titled “Idea in Brief”. There were three bullet points for each article summary:

  • the problem
  • the root cause
  • the solution

The magazine editors explain that they’ve provided those summaries to “help busy leaders quickly absorb and apply the concepts”.

That little “grid” is made-to-order for business blogging! People are online searching for answers to questions they have or for solutions for dilemmas they’re facing.  But my experience has shown me that defining a problem, even when offering statistics about that problem, isn’t enough to galvanize prospects into action. But showing you not only understand the root causes of a problem, but have experience providing solutions to very that problem can help drive the marketing process forward. Still, searchers are unlikely to follow you into a “deep subject dive” unless they can anticipate that a “solution” to their problem will be forthcoming. For that reason, a “brief-in-a-box” is actually a visual could prove highly useful in longer content blog posts.

In corporate blogging for business, it’s important to offer enough information in each post to convincingly cover the one key theme of the post. At the same time, it can be very effective to compose a long, comprehensive article and then turn that material into several different blog posts relating to that one issue or problem. Ways to accomplish this vary:

– busting one common myth or misconception relative to the problem
– describing one possible solution to the problem
– updating readers on one new piece of research of one new industry development
– offering a unique opinion or slant on best practices

Inserting “Ideas in Brief” in blog posts is a great idea, but in a way, blog posts themselves are a form of “ideas in brief”!

 

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Analogies Help Information Resonate With Readers

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Matching our writing to our intended audience is part of the challenge we business blog content writers face. After all, we’re not in this to entertain ourselves – we’re out to retain the clients and customers we serve and bring in new ones, so we try to use words and sentences to which our target readers can relate.

There are four ways to make information resonate with an audience, advises climate scientist Lissa Ocko (who often addresses non-scientists on scientific topics):

  1. strip down to the essentials
  2. craft a story
  3. provide context
  4. use analogies

Using an analogy to link an unfamiliar concept to something that is familiar can help the reader better comprehend what you’re trying to say. It’s also a catchy and clever way to help get a point across, MasterClass.com points out.

At Say It For You, our content writers often use analogies as teaching tools in business blog posts:

Analogy: Parhelions and blogs posts
A parhelion is an atmospheric optical illusion consisting of “halos” of light around the sun. Just as parhelions showcase, rather than obliterate the sun, blogging allows content writers to approach the same topic in different ways to appeal to different audiences, still highlighting the central message.

Analogy: Suitcases and blog posts
Packing light has always been one of the better tips for savvy travelers. Pack your blog post with just enough materials to show searchers they’re on track to find the services or information they need.

Analogy: Cows being milked at night and blog posts
Cows were often milked in their barns at night, making that task one of the last ones on a farmer’s list. The expression “Till the cows come home” could be used in a message about a provider’s prompt service.

In blogging for business, using an analogy to link an unfamiliar concept to something familiar can help the reader better comprehend what you’re trying to say.

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In Blogging – the Devil is in the Details

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“Whether you’re measuring engagement in terms of blog comments, social media interaction, or a combination of metrics,” James Parson opines in contentpowered.com, “ there’s one universal constant. You want more engagement.”

Engagement facts, Parson thinks, are some of the most interesting, because analytics reveal that details as seemingly insignificant as the placement of a punctuation mark can make a big difference.

“Devilish details” include these:

  • Including a hyphen or a colon in the middle of a blog post title can increase search engine click-through by as much as 9%. (Notice what I did in the title of this post?)
  • 54% of blog posts that rank well include an image or video.
  • Best time of week to bring a blog post “live”? Tuesdays and Wednesdays (What day is it today, again?). What time? 9:30-10AM Eastern.
  • “Listicles” beginning with an odd number outperform lists beginning with an even number by 20% (Who knew?)
  • Blog headlines with only 8 words do better than those with a different word count. (Words in my title – count them!).

Entertaining and, to an extent, enlightening info, to be sure. Can’t help thinking about what Neil Patel had to say about “over-optimizing” a website or blog, which is “Too much of a good thing is a bad thing.”

Main thing is, as we teach at Say It For You, content is meant to be written for people. Sure, you want good ranking so more people see your blog link, but first and foremost, you’re writing blog content to solve problems and appeal to customers, clients, and prospects. So, yes to the listicles, the short headlines, and the images, and certainly yes to providing “snippets” to give web searchers snippets a preview of your content.

With those “devilish” details in mind, still it pays to never lose sight of the essence of content marketing: creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content.

 

 

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