Classic JobShuk

Growing up in the U.S., we hear about the stresses that people encounter during certain holiday seasons – Xmas, New Years, Valentine’s Day. People experience social anxiety from dysfunctional family relationships or loneliness.

But in an adult Jew’s life, the month of Tishrei, laden with Holidays and fasts, immerses us into a G-d conscious existence, and strips us away from our everyday lives. In college, this was particularly stressful because of missed classes, exams, and homework. In the working world, deadlines and lost time can mean unhappy clients or dwindling bank accounts.

How should we deal with all this?

1. Communicate
   Be up-front with your clients. Make sure they’re prepared for a work slowdown, and assure them that their business is important to you, and you’ll do the best you can when you have the time.
   If you’re experiencing a financial crunch, talk to your friends and family – they’ll be happy to help, or at least be supportive.
2. Prepare
   Squeeze in as much as you can before the Chagim (Holidays) begin, push yourself just a little bit more to get ahead of schedule, so you can breeze easier during the festivities.
3. Let Go
   When you can’t be working, it’s important to stop thinking about money or work. If you’re in the synagogue, pray for assistance, but don’t feel pressure, because there’s nothing you can do now.

Use this time for re-establishing your relationship with G-d and believe that He will take care of you, and turn the hard times into hope and opportunity.

An interested JobShuker is struggling with selling his products and just can’t get visitors beyond the HERE I AM phase.
He writes:

My question to you – if you can help – is how does one move from people reading your article to actually making them contact one? I find that people are reading the articles. It’s really the same with my main blog. Many people read it. I am registered with a number of main blog sites as well where people have the opportunity to rate my articles, which they do. Some give 5 out of 5, others 4 and yet other 3. I’ve posted sales postings where I’ll display the images I sell or other items, and people will vote 5! But after this nobody actually comes through to buy anything. I’d rather have the money (thanks!) The voting and reading is fantastic, but it’s time to move from having people interested in reading the articles to actually doing something about it!

My response:

Your question is how to turn an anonymous lead, or a mild to moderate interest, into a sale.
I’m sure there is a lot written about it online. Some basic ideas are as follows:

1. Give a clear call to action. If your title (first words someone sees) and/or your last paragraph doesn’t use a bold action verb as to how to proceed, people won’t feel pushed to proceed down any particular path.
2. Narrow your focus. If you try to speak to everyone, then everyone will assume you’re speaking to someone else. Have a clear idea of who you are talking to and what they do. Then target your pitch so that the reader feels you’re singling him out because he meets a specific criteria.
3. Actively sell. Publishing articles would fall under what I would call marketing. This gets people aware of who you are, but a small percentage of people will actually make the effort to contact you, even if they’re fairly interested. Sales, on the other hand, gets people’s attention, and then addresses each of their concerns, answers their questions, and closes the deal. The dream of passive income is great, but as the old adage goes, if you want it done (right) you have to do it yourself.

Do you have any questions you’d like to have answered? E-mail zv*@*****uk.com

 

Taken from http://www.motherearthnews.com/Modern-Homesteading/1978-11-01/Mother-Types-at-Home.aspx

Marsha’s Home Typing Service enables her to spend time with her family (and save babysitting fees!) as she earns a living doing clerical work.

You, too, can be a successful mother, wife, businesswoman, and breadwinner … without ever leaving your home!

-MARSHA K. STRONG –

If you’re a young mother who’s struggling to make ends meet by holding down an outside office job, I have news for you: There’s a better way to go.

Anyone who can type well enough to get a job in an office can type well enough to do the same work right in her own home. Where-if that’s you-you’ll have more time, more peace of mind, and far more control of your frazzled life. And even though you may earn less in your own business, especially at first, you’ll keep much more of what you earn . . . and thus come out way ahead in dollars, too.

My experience proves it. By transplanting my skills from an outside job to my own desk, I’ve multiplied my "keep-home pay" by seven times in less than two years!

If that sounds too good to be true, I suggest you start where I did: by taking a cold, logical look at what you’re actually earning at that outside job.

A couple of years ago my husband and I had reached the point where his typical paycheck just wasn’t enough to support our typical family. So, like millions of other women, I tried to help by leaving our two preschool children in the care of a babysitter while I took a full-time job as a clerk typist.

That wasn’t a good idea. Even with the assistance of a capable sitter plus housekeeping help a few hours a week, I felt split down the middle and never stopped running. Worse, despite the fact that I was grossing $640 a month, my salary didn’t seem to be doing very much to ease our financial pinch. Finally I sat down and figured out why.

Here, I soon discovered, is the amount of money it was costing me every month to earn that $540:
Taxes and other off-the-top deductions $110
Babysitter $180
Housekeeper $80
Transportation (gas, car wear-and-tear) $60
Lunches (modest) $26
Office-type clothes (modest) $16

TOTAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $420
So much for the two-income myth. For $640 minus $420-an ego-shattering $120 per month-I was knocking myself out 44 hours a week. In short, I was selling my services (and buying full-time misery) for the magnificent rate of 70 cents an hour, $6.35 a day!

With those figures in front of us, my husband and I came to the conclusion that the outside job just had to go. But the basic problem remained. We still needed extra money.

Okay, I had a marketable skill. I was a fast, accurate typist and owned a good portable electric typewriter. So I bought about $30 worth of materials, put a $4.60 ad in the local paper, and went into business. I had done a little home typing before, but now I was determined to make it pay. And I did.

Remember that 70 cents an hour I was clearing on the job? Well, here’s how the economics have worked out at home.

I charge competitive rates. In my area, that’s 86 cents for a typical page of typing ( see table for details). My out-of-pocket coat for producing each one of those pages is about five cents . . . which, of course, leaves me a net of 80 cents. When I started, I was typing approximately eight pages per hour (for an hourly net of $8.40). And, at first, I averaged only about 15 hours of work per week (giving me a monthly in" come of roughly $415).

Now I’ll admit that-in my, first year of business the money worked out to leas than the gross from my outside job. But take a look at what has happened to all those other coats:

[1] There are no off-the-top deductions from what I earn. Further, my income taxes are minimal because I get all the tax breaks of a home-based business. (For a rundown on those very substantial benefits, ask your local IRS to send you Publication 587, Business Use of Your Home.)

[2] I’m home with my children. They’re happy about it and I’m happy about it. Babysitter cost: zero.

[3] I no longer need a regular housekeeper. If work piles up unexpectedly, I call one in. Cost since I switched to a home business: $15 total.

[4] I pick up and deliver for some customers, but it’s nothing like commuting. Cost: about $3 a month, tax deductible.

[5] Lunches are always at home. Extra cost: zero.

[6] Cost of special clothes: zero. My customers often see me barefoot and blue-jeaned. Nobody minds.

[7] And nobody docks me when I need to spend time with my family. Sometimes I work nights and sometimes days . . . but the choice is always mine. Not long ago, for instance, I gave birth to my third child and I can breast-feed her and do clerical work at the same time (no easy trick at an eight-to-five job).

In short, the cost of working at home is near zero. So even at $415 per month that first year, I was way ahead: My keep home pay had more than tripled! And now, in my second year, the numbers are even better. My typing speed is up to 10 pages an hour and business has increased to an average of 25 hours per week. Which means I’m earning $8 an hour-about $875 per month-practically all of it "keepin’ money". That’s seven times what I cleared on the outside job, for about half the working hours!

Clearly, fellow mothers, the rewards are there. If you can type, why not work for yourself instead of for Uncle Sam and the sitters? And if you do decide to give it a try, these tips from my own experience in home typing should help you get off to a good start:

USE ONLY THE BEST MATERIALS. Many customers are glad to provide their own paper. If it has a special letter-head or logo, I let them. Otherwise, I provide the stationery . . . not because I have to, but because I want to. Why? Because by using top-quality paper that erases without a trace, I can produce a perfect, fully professional product with minimum time and effort. I buy the best 20-weight erasable bond in boxes of 520 sheets. It costs $14.50 (compared to maybe $7 for ordinary typing paper), but it’s worth every penny. In everything you use, go for quality: It saves time and makes money in the long run.

LEARN TO SPECIALIZE IN THE WORK MOST AVAILABLE IN YOUR AREA. If you live in the city, you could specialize in business, legal, or industrial typing . . . while-in the affluent suburbs-it’s hard to go wrong with medical work. I live in a relatively rural area … so though I type a lot of address labels for business mailings, most of my work isn’t from business firms.

The jobs I get range from do-it-yourself divorce papers to the transcription of dream sequences for a local psychologist. But authors are unusually plentiful in this area, so manuscripts make up at least 75 percent of my work. And to take best advantage of the situation, I’ve trained myself to correct, edit and even "critique" rough manuscripts. Which brings us to the next tip:

CHARGE EXTRA FOR EXTRA WORK. The first two times I edited book manuscripts I tossed the service in for the price of the typing. In other words, I did it free. That was a mistake. First, because the work is time-consuming and, second, because work isn’t appreciated when you give it away. When I started charging for the service, I made more money and the customers realized it was valuable, too. The moral: charge for any extra work beyond straight typing.

AVOID QUOTING PRICES OVER THE PHONE. When you quote 85 cents a page (for a standard page), some customers expect the same price for legalsized pages. Others expect you to transcribe from illegible, chicken-track handwriting at your standard rates and you can’t afford to do that. Try to see the work before you name a price.

ADVERTISE IN THE YELLOW PAGES. I’m embarrassed to say that this didn’t occur to me until recently. The new phone book (the first one I’ve tried) has only been out for six weeks, and my tiny $14 ad has already drawn $100 worth of business . . . with the promise of $600 more! I also invested $13 in 1000 business cards recently and I’m sure that will pay off too.

CHECK LOCAL LAWS. A home typing business seldom causes problems with zoning officials, but it pays to check all the legal details. When I placed my Yellow Pages ad, for example, I needed a business name and chose "Home Typing Service" off the top of my head. Then I found that, in my county, any business name that doesn’t include your own name is regarded as "fictitious" and that you have to pay to get your "fictitious name statement" published in a local newspaper. If I’d checked in advance, I would have used "Strong’s Home Typing Service" instead, and avoided the cost and inconvenience.

FINALLY, BE PREPARED TO HANDLE SUCCESS. The fact is that it’s actually pretty easy for a good typist to succeed in the typing business. When you’re working at home, with no expensive overhead, it’s no trick to charge competitively and no trick to get repeat and word-of-mouth business. The trick is to keep the whole thing under your control.

Recently, for instance, I’ve started getting more business than I can handle by myself, and I’ve had to decide whether or not to hire employees. For now, my decision is no. Instead, I farm my excess work out to other typists who-like me-work as independent contractors, in business for themselves. That way I don’t have to deal with their withholding taxes and all the other paper work involved in hiring regular employees. The simpler the paper work, in short, the simpler the business . . . and the simpler your life will be.

And that, of course, is what I set out to do in the first place: simplify my life while making some decent money. So far, I’ve succeeded . . . and I believe you can too.

 

Do you know who Nobel, of the Nobel Prize, is? Well I didn’t. Until I came across this article Doing good can lead to rewards you never considered.

It’s an interesting article, but I don’t think it even touches the surface of the subject. I hope to make a few points to illustrate how you can apply this concept to your life.

1. Friendships
   Do you treat your contacts like friends? Do you offer to help them out, whether it’s making a recommendation for business, setting them up on a date, offering to help them move? These small gestures endear us to others, and instill in them a gratitude which wants to be converted into reciprocation. Of course, you’re no friend if your actions are backed with strategy and ulterior motives, but know that turning strangers into friends can have positive effects down the road.
2. Innocent Bystanders
   Ease of communication these days means that our actions can be "heard ’round the world" in ways never before imaginable. If your behavior is irreverent, people will hear about it. And if you do good, you will build a reputation amongst people you’ve never met as an upstanding, responsible citizen. And that’s the kind of person others want to do business with.
3. Creativity
   In the Information Age, information is cheap, usually free. That means that we have to recognize the trends occurring around us, and adapt to the changes. If you believe you have some information or other product which is useful, don’t be stingy with it. If you haven’t already proven yourself, give it all away, and then be creative with your techniques on capitalizing on that information. Invest in your brand before you shake down your clients for their change.

Do you have any other illustrations of how doing good can lead to personal or professional rewards?

There are times is an entrepreneur’s life when the emotions build up. His waking and sleeping hours are full of anxiety, stress, desperation, doubt, fear, and so on. Of course, these emotions under control can be useful to motivate the entrepreneur to succeed. But when they take over, it becomes hard to both focus on details and see the big picture, causing a downward spiral towards ultimate failure.

Anxiety and stress are usually lumped together, but can be easily understood as separate but related concepts. Stress is the emotional burden laying on our shoulders due to present circumstances. Our own or loved ones’ health, financial, or social situations are common causes of stress. Relieving stress is often successful when taking the burden from our shoulders into our own hands, and trying to change the situation, or tossing it off our shoulders, absolving ourselves of this responsibility. In either case, talking with someone, even G-d, is a healthy way of deciding what action to take, or to support our decision.

Anxiety, on the other hand, refers to the fears we experience when contemplating future conditions. These can be rational fears based on analytical data, or irrational fears, based on any number of known or uncertain circumstances. When we cannot identify the cause of our anxiety, it is often helpful to write down some of your fears, and then consider the effects if those fears were to come true. You may be surprised to discover what you’re really afraid of, down the road. I even found that one of my fears was the fear of forgetting my action plans and to do list, causing me to go over everything in my mind constantly. Writing it down took away the stress of remembering and the fear of forgetting.

Once you’ve identified the causes, it’s good to plan an attack to confront or circumvent your fears. Having a plan and sticking to it will help you relax, knowing that you’re on a path to escaping your fears. Talking with someone who’s experienced a similar situation can provide the advice and support to get you through it.

Desperation is a difficult emotion, particularly regarding money and other tangible items because we can count and calculate our fates. As with dating, desperation brings out the worst in people, and is often ignored by all but the most charitable types. We consider anything too available as undesirable, and prejudicially stay clear of it. Counting your blessings, and focusing on the positive things we have in life is a good way to chase away our own desperation. And when that fails, acting and putting on a confident face can put you in a positive, desirable light.

What have you found helped you through the hard times?