The high unemployment rate is spurring many people to start home businesses. This is an actually a positive side effect of the economic crash of '09. Most American innovation and success comes from individual entrepreneurs who have a new idea and the opportunity to act on them.
My strategy is to supplement my income through the business of blogging. I treat my 3 blogs as my personal home business. I also do freelance writing through Textbroker, which doesn't pay very well, but at least is something. I've even made a few pennies here and there trying out Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, which allows you to sign up for repetitive tasks for a small amount of money each.
I treat my blogging as work. Every day I check the Google Trends page and see if there are any hot topics I want to blog about. Then I check SlickDeals.net and Fatwallet.com for any deals or freebies I think my readers need to know about. For my health themed blog, about Crohn's Disease, I check the medical news each day.
I check my favorite Sci Fi sites, like sfsignal.com and see what goodies they are talking about. I go to my local library, Goodwill book department, and used bookstore to pick up Sci Fi and Fantasy books to read and review here. I am sure to put an Amazon affiliate link in my review post so if someone wants to buy the book I can make 4% to 6% affillate commission on the sale. I was able to buy my 6 year old's birthday presents with Amazon affiliate payments this month!
Over the past year and half since I decided to monetize my blogs I have made a bit of money, and had a lot of fun. Up next - optimizing my sites for Google Adsense.
