Working From Home – The Challenges & Benefits
Sure, working from home has its perks, but it also is not for everyone. After I graduated college, I worked from home on my own websites for a little over a year. Then I started to go stir crazy because I pretty much did the exact same thing every day, which was sit on my couch with my laptop and update websites all day by myself. Oftentimes, I did not leave the house for several days at a time and had very limited social interaction with, you know, actual real-life human beings. So I started looking around for possible side jobs for an excuse to get out of the house. I scoured Craigslist for random gigs and seriously considered being a neighborhood dog walker for 6 dogs three times a week, but just as I was about to accept that position, I came across an opening at a local online marketing company, which was right up my alley so I jumped on it. That was all fine and dandy for the first few weeks, but then I realized that the company was gradually going out of business and bouncing my paychecks. They eventually were acquired by some other company and offered me a job to stay on board, but I declined and I am glad I did.
Since I wasn’t expecting to only be at the job for six months, I didn’t really have a back up plan in place. I had neglected the websites I had previously worked on everyday from home and as a result, they weren’t bringing in as much dough as they did when I updated them 7 days a week. So I started looking for other jobs. Just by chance, I fell into a position as a web developer for a small local web design company. This was actually my ideal job and I couldn’t have asked for anything more. While the office was in a sweet location in the heart of downtown, I eventually started to get tired of having to wake up early, take a shower, dress in clothes other than pajamas, and drive 15 minutes downtown every day. You know, like what everyone else does that has a job. So I started to work from home once a week and then go into the office the other days. I would gradually work more and more from home and then eventually I just made the switch to work entirely from home once again (except for random meetings with clients, etc.), which I have been doing for the past 10 months or so. For the most part, I prefer working from home versus working in an office.
However, there are some challenges for working from home:
1. The biggest one is that anyone who doesn’t work from home assumes that everyone who does work from home “doesn’t have a real job.” Which somehow means you should always be available to run and pick up their dry cleaning at a moment’s notice or just hang out whenever they want to hang out. Because, I mean, what else are you gonna do?
The way to solve this is by clearly explaining to them that you do have a real job with real tasks and real responsibilities. Then ask them if they would like it if you just came and visited them at their office and hung out in their cubicle for three hours. Obviously, they would say that is a ridiculous question and it is. But explaining it that way somehow gets through to them that they should acknowledge that you have a job just like everyone else, regardless of whether you work from home or in an office.
If they still don’t get it, then just don’t talk to them during business hours. Don’t answer their calls or respond to their texts and emails. Eventually they’ll get the hint.
2. Once you’ve conveyed to your friends and family that you in fact do actually have a job and that they shouldn’t ask you to babysit their twins on Tuesday for three hours while they go to the mall, the next hardest challenge is dealing with yourself. I am talking about self discipline. When you work in an office in a cube farm where there are mid-level managers constantly walking around to make sure everyone is doing what they are supposed to be doing, it is a lot easier to stay on task. When you are working from home and/or being your own boss, it is entirely up to you to get things done.
At first, you love your new found freedom. You can work in pajamas, eat anytime you want, play the radio or TV as loud as you want, keep the thermostat exactly where you want it, etc. etc. However, this excitement will eventually subside when the novelty wears off and you realize that no matter how comfortable your pajamas and your recliner are, you still have to get work done. This can be challenging because you figure, “Oh, I can do a load of laundry while I’m working from home” which may eventually turn into “multiple loads of laundry, and a quick trip to the post office and maybe catch a movie while I’m out” if you do not have really strict self discipline.
What I have found to help A LOT is to set aside a designated room or area of your house that you use ONLY as an office or for work related activities. Previously, while I was enjoying working from the couch, I could feel that my productivity was starting to slip, so I converted a small extra bedroom into my office that I only use during the workweek. This works for several reasons, two of which I will include here. First, you can keep all of your work related supplies and materials all in one place so you don’t need to worry about whether or not your wife threw out your latest invoice that was sitting on the coffee table. Second, you have a specific place that you can focus on only working and being in a work mindset, which gives you the rest of the house to enjoy and relax in. This is critical to success working from home, which I will explain more about in my next point.
3. Another challenge for work-at-homers is keeping your work and home life separate. To people who do not work from home, they actually have a physical distance separating the office from their homes. It may not sound like a big deal if you have never worked from home, but keeping the two separate is paramount to success.
Otherwise, once you start blending the two by doing something like answering work related email after business hours while you’re supposed to be watching a movie with your kids or pulling all-nighters to work on a project just because you can in the comfort of your own home, then you start getting into trouble. The biggest effect is that you will eventually be in a constant working mindset, which means you will never be able to truly relax since you are always thinking about work. Not only is that just unnecessary stress that can take its toll on your emotional and physical well-being, you are not able to enjoy the things you should be enjoying. Which means your relationships with everyone you care about may start to suffer, which can cause huge problems with your spouse and/or kids. Obviously, this is not ideal!
So the old adage still rings true – “Don’t bring your work home” especially if you work from home. 
These three points I made above are what I think are the primary challenges. If you can handle all three of those, then you should have no problem successfully working from home. Here are a few other challenges that I consider less important -
4. Exercise! – When you work from home, you can roll out of bed and walk downstairs to your home office and remain there for the rest of the day, effectively burning about a total of six calories all day. Unless you actively make a choice to do some kind of physical exercise and/or watch what you eat, it is almost certain that you will put on some pounds. The movements that non-home-workers take for granted such as walking to your car, walking down the steps in the parking deck to your office, walking around the office throughout the day, walking to and from lunch, walking back to your car at the end of the day all add up and burn calories without even realizing it. So in order to simply be on par with the rest of the normal workforce, you must actually move around. Whether its walking around the block or doing 50 pushups, you need to make sure you do some kind of physical activity every day. I recently purchased a FitBit, which has helped me keep track of the amount of, or lack thereof, physical activity needed to burn enough calories to not get really fat. Doing so is not only beneficial for not getting really obese and physical unhealthy, but it is also critical for keeping your mental health in check, which I will explain in my next point.
5. Working from home every day usually means you don’t have to leave the house unless you really need to. This means you can go days without leaving the house and if you live alone or have a spouse or roommate and you only see them whenever they are home, you can go days without ever actually seeing another human being in real life. Even if you prefer to work by yourself, like many computer geeks like myself usually do prefer, going too many days without seeing and interacting with other people can really take its toll. Believe it or not, human beings are social animals and NEED this human interaction to survive. Otherwise, you can gradually lose your ability to act normal in social situations, thus leading to anxiety and paranoia and possibly even depression, resulting in an awful downward spiral that will eventually lead to your death! Okay, just kidding, that was a little extreme, but I definitely have experienced anxiety interacting even with some of my closest friends after having not seen anyone else for several days in a row.
Now that I am married, we actually make it a point to hang out with friends or go out to dinner or play on random sports teams so it’s no longer really a problem for me. But if I was still a single bachelor living alone and working from home, I could easily see myself still going days on end without interacting with other people and probably turning into a social retard.
6. If you have a job that requires you to interact and meet with clients, then more often than not, your home office is not an option for an appropriate meeting place. Luckily, I have access to an office downtown to meet with clients whenever I need to, but for others, this may be a problem. The lack of a “real office” may also limit your ability to attract new clients since a lot of people and businesses still don’t consider working from home to be a “real job.”
Also, real offices usually have all of the resources and tools necessary for running everyday operations, such as always having enough printer paper or a fax machine. If you don’t have a fax machine in your home office, like I don’t, and your job requires you to use one often then you need to either get access to one or sign up for an online faxing service, which usually does whatever you need to do anyways. But my point is that it is up to you to make sure your home office is fully equipped for whatever you need to complete your job, otherwise you will need to go out and buy them or somehow get access to whatever you need.
Along the same lines, if you work from home and not in a “real office”, then you will have the distractions that come with the home. That means when you are on a conference call, the neighbor’s dog starts barking or the UPS guy keeps ringing the doorbell. Obviously, this is less than ideal and doesn’t exactly convey “professional” to whomever you are talking to on the phone.
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That covers all of the main challenges and benefits of working from home that I can think of. Let me know if you have any other suggestions or comments.
WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast vs. All in One SEO Pack Plugin
I have been using the All-in-one SEO Pack plugin for all of my WordPress websites and it has worked for the past few years just fine. Now I just came across Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin which does so much more. I didn’t even realize what I was missing. Not only does it do everything that All-in-One SEO plugin does, but it handles a lot of advance stuff such as custom snippets, canonical tags and sitemap generation.
For the most part, Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin has worked flawlessly. However, he is careful to note that the plugin is still in Beta so there may be some unexpected bugs that still need to be worked out. Unfortunately, I encountered one of those bugs tonight when trying to rebuild the XML sitemap. For some reason, when I try to rebuild the sitemap, it says that the sitemap was created successfully, but when I try to view the sitemap, it doesn’t exist on the server. I have a feeling this may be a memory limit issue, because it was working fine yesterday. However, I have imported a ton of old posts from my client’s old website to the new one which may be the culprit. However, I am not seeing any error messages at all so I could be wrong. Anybody have any ideas?
Call Tracking & Privacy Issues with Google Voice
I have several online marketing clients and most of them are brick and mortar businesses looking to increase traffic to their websites and ultimately generate more sales, leads, appointments, etc. The beauty of online marketing is that it’s the most trackable form of advertising since you can track where your visitors came from, how long they were on the site, what keyword they used on a search engine, and so on with web analytics tools like Google Analytics. However, what happens if the ultimate goal is to get the user to actually visit the store or place of business to complete the transaction? It’s not exactly cut and dry when it comes to tracking those users.
One of the first “next” steps of tracking offline customers is tracking phone calls generated through your website or online advertising campaigns. For example, all of the visitors that came to your website from a banner ad on another website will see a specific number, and all visitors that came from the Google AdWords campaign will see a different phone number. We can easily track that the first phone number generated 5 phone calls and the second phone number generated 25 phone calls. You can also narrow it down to having a different phone number for every keyword in the Google AdWords campaign, but I’ll keep it simple for the purpose of this post.
One of my clients is a specialty law firm who wanted to know more about exactly where the phone calls were coming from. I suggested setting up call tracking by purchasing multiple phone numbers. The person I work with asked about using Google Voice numbers, which are extremely cheap and easily tie in with other Google products like AdWords, GMail, Google Analytics, etc. However, she brought up a good point – What about Privacy concerns? And not just concerns about the fear of customers finding out their phone calls are being recorded and tracked, but what exactly is Google planning to do with the phone call data? This could be a serious problem in terms of actually violating privacy laws for businesses that deal with sensitive information like law firms and doctors offices.
It is no secret that Google provides the free services that it does in exchange for tracking usage to better target advertising to the users of the service. And for the most part, most users are willing to sacrifice a little privacy to use free products like GMail, Google Analytics, Google Docs, YouTube, etc. But for businesses like law firms, doctors offices, health insurance companies, and even government agencies, they may want to take some extra time to really consider the pros and cons of using Google’s free services, including Google Voice, especially if the risk is that they could end up violating privacy laws in their respective industries.
I have done a little research on Google Voice and privacy concerns, but I haven’t had much luck for the most part. Does anyone have any insight about using Google Voice for a law firm, or if there are any other call tracking solutions that have a better policy for managing privacy concerns?
Yahoo is Shutting Down Delicious, MyBlogLog and Other Sites
Yahoo is shutting down the popular social bookmarking website Delicious (del.icio.us) and the blog networking service MyBlogLog among other sites so they can focus on their core services, which is apparently display advertising. Yahoo has already abandoned their efforts in search and search advertising since now both the organic search results and the pay per click ads beside the SERPs are powered by Bing. They also shut down Geocities earlier this year, essentially wasting millions or billions of dollars in potential revenue since they simply shut it down and served up 404 errors.
I don’t understand why Yahoo and other companies buy popular websites only to neglect them and shut them down completely. I understand businesses need to cut their losses on unprofitable services, but I can’t be the only one who thinks paying millions of dollars for websites only to shut them down a couple years later makes absolutely zero sense at all. Why don’t they just sell them? Considering Delicious is still one of the top 300 websites in the entire world, they would be sure to find a buyer willing to pay at least SOMETHING. If they can’t find a buyer, at least redirect the old sites to relevant new sites to preserve the years of link equity and search engine rankings.
The only service Yahoo is good at anymore is Fantasy Sports. I’ve used ESPN, CBS Sportsline and SI.com for various fantasy leagues throughout the years and Yahoo is so much better than any of them. However, knowing Yahoo, they’ll neglect fantasy sports eventually and shut them down as well. Ugh.
Yahoo is dying. And my prediction is that Yahoo will either be completely out of business or acquired by another company within 2 years.
Facebook Photo Viewer Pop Up Window Sucks
It looks like Facebook updated their photo viewer interface. Now instead of easily navigating between photos in a seamless transition in the native Facebook interface, now there’s a stupid pop up shadow box modal window thing that is ugly, slow and way too cramped. What’s with the black background? The photo sizes have been resized so they are much smaller than before. I’m hoping it’s just a little buggy since it’s brand new, and I am hoping they will work out the kinks. Yeah, yeah, everyone hates any kind of change that Facebook does and then they get used to it and end up liking it more than before. However, this change is currently downright awful. Why mess with a good thing?
Database.com from SalesForce – The Enterprise Database for the Cloud
Today SalesForce launched Database.com, which is going to be an enterprise level database that lives in the cloud. That means it does not matter what server platform such as Linux or Windows you are using or what programming language you are using such as PHP, ASP.NET, Java, Ruby, etc. to interact with the database. All of the database programming I have worked with before required me to pick a specific type of server such as a Linux box, which means I would be limited to only the databases that are available on Linux such as MySQL and most of the time meant I had to pick and stick with a specific programming language such as PHP. It’s not really an option to use ASP.NET with a Linux server and a MySQL database, so I have a feeling that Database.com is going to be HUGE. The interface is much slicker and prettier than something like phpMyAdmin. You can also manage all of your databases from one nice looking dashboard. And perhaps most importantly, Database.com promises to be fully scalable and elastic automatically so you don’t need to worry about exceeding a memory limit or maxing out the number of simultaneous connections causing your database and web application to crash and burn. Again, I think this is going to be freaking huge! Check out the video below:
Grandma’s Boy Computer Desk Picture
I’m looking for a picture or screenshot of the computer desk chair set up that the nerd JP uses in the movie Grandma’s Boy because I’m writing a blog post for a client on awesome computer desk setups. And the computer set up in Grandma’s Boy is simply amazing and I may or may not want one for my own office. I searched Google and Google Images but can’t seem to find a picture anywhere. I can’t even find a video clip on YouTube to make my own screenshot! There’s no way that I could possibly be the only person in the entire world to look for a picture of this, so can somebody out there please send me one??? Or leave a URL in the comments below?
Google Places SEO Tips
I do a lot of SEO consulting for local businesses and as search engines are placing more and more importance on their respective local products and integrating them into the SERPs, it is critical to rank in the local listings, such as in Google Places. I attended an SEOmoz mozinar today about tips for ranking well in Google Places, and here is a list of some tips for optimizing and ranking well in Google Places:
1. Quantity of reviews more important than best reviews. When it comes to getting your business listed in the top results on Google Places, it is better to have 10 3-star reviews than 4 5-star reviews.
2. Optimize business names and titles. This means if your business name is called “New York Physical Training”, use that as your Google Places listing name rather than “NY PT, LLC”
3. Customize and complete every detail on your Google Places listing. For example, make sure to include your hours of operation, locations, phone numbers, etc.
4. Get Listed Everywhere! – The more places your site is listed for user reviews and ratings, the better. Here is a great link for places to get listed on – http://getlisted.org/resources/local-search-data-providers.aspx.
5. Be Consistent – Make sure you use the same exact business name, mailing address, phone number, and category on every single site you get listed on. This not only helps eliminate confusion for users, but it helps Google Places determine that all of your listings are actually the same business.
6. Subtly encourage user reviews – And perhaps more importantly, make sure they are actual honest reviews from real customers. You will be found out for posting fake reviews on websites and the negative backlash will be severe!
7. Use your local phone number instead of a toll free 1-800 number. It’s fine if you have a 1-800 number, but for ranking in Google Places, use your local number because after all, you are trying to rank in the local listings.
Mystery Missile Launch California Video – Launched Off Coast Near Los Angeles
Mystery Missile Launch California Video – So have you heard about this story? Apparently a freaking missile was launched off the coast of California last night and nobody knows where it came from. The Pentagon said they have no idea where it came from, but they don’t appear to be too concerned by it. This would normally be extremely disturbing but it leads me to believe they DO know where it came from and they just don’t want to talk about it just yet. Either a top secret mission or an embarrassing mistake or failure. It’s obvious that it came from off the coast, so it was either launched by a military submarine or some guy just happens to have a big enough yacht to support his massive model rocket hobby. This isn’t just a tiny little missile, but clearly a huge rocket! Check out the video below:
Low Search Volume Keywords in Google AdWords
Google AdWords will not let you bid on specific keywords that they deem to have “low search volume” and it really pisses me off. I have a few clients that are in very specialized niche industries that are insanely profitable if they are found by the right customers. And the best way to find these customers is to bid on specific keyword phrases, such as a product model number. For example, let’s say a company makes specialized machinery for use in industrial mines. Some of these machines can go for literally hundreds of thousands of dollars, but since 99.9% of the general public knows nothing about such specialized machinery, they do not search for the highly targeted phrases the company is looking for. Even if the search is made 3 times in an entire month, those 3 searches are insanely valuable for the company if they come up as the only AdWords text ad. I’m willing to bet that companies would be willing to spend thousands of dollars PER CLICK if they were allowed to bid on extremely targeted keywords with low search volume.
So Google should get rid of the “low search volume” restriction and let companies bid on whatever keywords they want, no matter how many times they are searched. It makes sense for Google since they will make more money from their advertisers and it makes sense for advertisers because they will finally be able to target the keywords they want to bid on!