Working from home is a dream for a good majority of the population. Most want to experience the freedom that working from home entails and others just want the opportunity to spend more time with their family and friends. But working from home isn’t for everyone. It requires dedication and drive and the ability to work even when you feel that you might want to ‘take the day off’.

I love working from home and it suits me perfectly. I remember when I decided to repeat my last year of school. As with most teens you tend to slack off in the last year and this is what happened to me. I passed but not very well and couldn’t get into university with the grades I received. So the next year I did the whole thing again but this time by correspondence. This meant I had to be really dedicated to get the work done. My parents weren’t going to push me – I had chosen to repeat myself so it wasn’t their job to tell me what to do. To cut a long story short I managed to do so much better working at home than I did at school and received good enough grades to get me into university.

This is how it is for me with my affiliate business – I can sit at my computer working away all day without a problem. Some people can’t do this. They get the opportunity to work from home but blow it by taking advantage of the situation and spending more time than they should slacking off than working.

The benefits of working from home are that you can do what you want when you want but there are limitations – if you want your business to run smoothly, then you need to set consistent time to work on your it and do that without getting sidetracked.

So what does it take to work from home effectively?

You have to love what you are doing

This to me is at the top of the list because if you don’t love what you are doing, you just won’t do well at it. You will find every excuse under the sun not to do the work and you will get sidetracked easily. Make sure that before you take the leap to working from home that you really love the job. This doesn’t mean that you have to enjoy every single task you do but in general you need to enjoy the work. This will make it easy for you to get up in the morning and to get to work.

You need to be able to work without getting distracted by family and friends

For some reason when you start working from home what happens is that family and friends start to think that this means you can get up and go at a moments notice. Friends might call you to chat or pop over and stay for hours without a thought that it may be cutting into your working day. Your family might expect you to be at their beck and call and interrupt you constantly with requests or trivial matters.

It’s important to let both your family and friends know from the start that this is a business and this means that when you are working you are not to be disturbed. Let your family know that if the office door is shut then you are working and not to be interrupted unless it is urgent. Of course this will depend on the age of your children and whether your spouse or partner is home to look after them – you don’t want to leave your little ones wandering around the house unattended.

You need to be able to set up a plan and stick to it.

A plan is vital. I am big on plans. To me it gets it clear in mind head as to exactly what I need to do for the week or the month. I don’t really set up a schedule with set start and finish times. Although this may work for some I find it quite restricting. The point of being at home to me is that my day can just flow without me having to check what time it is.

And finally…

Although it’s important to stay focused on your business it is also important to take time out to enjoy it all. The whole point of working from home is that you have the freedom to do the things you couldn’t normally do at work. But you need to ensure that you spend enough time on your business that it doesn’t suffer. If you can get the balance right then you will have a successful work from home business

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Twitter has been something that I have had a hard time getting my head around. I dabbled with it in the past but never really got into it enough to see whether it had any real value. But lately I have been testing it out with one of my niche websites and have noticed quite a bit of traffic coming in from it.

I didn’t want to spend too much time on there however so what I did was just automate it so that the blog posts would automatically be posted to Twitter. This reduced the amount of time I needed to be on Twitter but also added regular content to it.

Now just adding blog posts is probably not going to be as successful as getting in there and being part of the Twitter community. But at the moment, for that particular niche blog, I don’t have much time to be socializing too much. I’d rather do that for the blog you are reading now.

I had created a Twitter account for Affiliate Blog Online some time ago but had not done much else. I thought that the time was right to get in there and so something with it. So today I logged into Twitter and updated the profile and also added the blog to Twitter Feed so that the posts would automatically be added.

So for those who want to do the same this is how it is done:

1. If you haven’t already done so, head over to Twitter and create an account.

2. The next step involves logging into Twitter Feed. If you already have an Open Id then you will be able to just log in but if not you will have to spend some time creating an id. This Open Id system is, my opinion, the worst system ever invented – they’ve taken a simple process of logging in and made it as long winded as possible. It takes three pages to actually login to Twitter Feed…but I digress!

3. Once logged in to Twitter Feed you’ll get a screen with a link to create a new Twitter feed. Just click on that to get to the Feeds page.

4. Click on the Create New Feed link. You should now be on the Create New Twitter Feed page.

5. Complete the fields on this page as per the following:

• Username – Enter your Twitter username
• Password - Enter your Twitter password
• RSS Feed URL – Enter the RSS Feed URL for your blog. If you’re not sure what that is just head over to your blog and look for an RSS image. It will look something like this . Just click on that and you will be taken to your RSS feed. Just copy the URL for that page  and paste it into this field. (To test it just click on the ‘test rss feed’ link next to the field.)
• Update Frequency – This depends on how often you update your blog. One of our blogs is updated every 7 hours so I just leave it at every hour. If you update your blog once a day then you might select every 24 hours.
• Include Item Link – I leave this one checked.
• Shorten Link Through – I leave this one as TinyURL.
• Post New Items Based On – I have this one set at pubDate.
• Prefix Each Tweet With – I haven’t tried this but assume it means you can add some text that will automatically be inserted at the beginning of each Tweet. This might be useful if you want to let your readers know that this is a blog post so you might add “Today’s Blog Post” to the beginning of each Tweet.
• Filter by Keywords – This is handy if you only want specific posts to go up on Twitter. So you can add keywords that will ensure that only posts with those keywords will be displayed.
• Active – Obviously you will want to leave this one checked.

6. Once you have completed each of the fields click the CREATE button and you are done. Your blog posts should automatically start posting to Twitter.

Now if you’ve read my previous post you are probably thinking that this relates in some way to that but actually it is a completely different issue – it’s a totally different website for one thing but also a totally different problem. Today I woke up and went into this blog to update a blog post. For some reason I couldn’t do it and it kept saving as the previous version.

Thinking it was just a glitch I went and did other things and came back a couple of hours later to find that all of our blog posts had disappeared completely from the blog. It was showing zero blog posts on the WordPress Dashboard and when I looked at the site in my browser the site was there but no posts were showing up.

I went in to the online chat with my hosting company and they said they could see the site and the posts. So I rang Wanda to get her to check and she could see it too. So thinking it was just me I went and tried using the Firefox browser and sure enough the blog posts were there when I viewed the site. But when I logged into wp-admin using Firefox it showed no blog posts. So I refreshed the browser to view the site again and the posts were no longer showing. So it was obviously a caching thing that was allowing others to see the posts….but they were definitely gone.

So back on to my hosting company to see if they could restore the site. Yes they could but it would cost $15. Fair enough, I was silly enough not to back it up so I should pay the price.

In the process of filling out the online form for Hostgator to get it restored I had to find out the actual files I wanted restored. Since I don’t know too much about where posts are stored in WordPress I had to do a bit of research and I also thought that maybe I could figure out what the problem was first before having to hand over $15.

Eventually I found that WordPress posts are stored in a separate database which you can find in your hosting companies admin area which in my case is CPanel on Hostgator. So in I went and found the area called MySQL Databases where the databases are held. That was easy but once in there I couldn’t figure out which database related to this blog. There are about 10-15 databases in there and all named something obscure which in no way resemble the name of this blog. So again I had to go and figure out how to find out which of those databases belonged to this blog.

I eventually found the answer on a forum post where someone had the same problem. So what I had to do was go into the blog files and find wp-config.php using Filezilla (which is the software I use to transfer files from my computer to the internet and vice versa). I had to transfer that file over to my computer and then open it up in Notepad so I could read the contents. At the top of the file it told me the name of the database.

Okay, so I was getting closer to figuring this out so I continued researching. I found another site that spoke about PhPMyAdmin in relation to WordPress databases. I had no idea what that was but there was an icon called PHPMyAdmin on my CPanel so I clicked on that and on the page that opened up was an item listed called ‘Databases’ so I clicked on that and up came my list of databases.

I clicked on the one for my blog and on the next page was a list of tables one of which was called wp_posts. Aha, I thought…this has to be where the blog posts are stored. So I clicked on that and lo and behold I got an error message saying that it had crashed.

So back to Hostgator I went and told them about the error message. They told me I simply needed to select ‘Repair’ from the drop-down box and the database would be fixed. I did just that and sure enough it brought all of the blog posts back.

Woohoo!! So today I have been lucky but I am not going to take any chances in the future and have downloaded and installed a WordPress database plugin that will backup the WordPress database and allow for restores if required.