Help Us Choose the Official WFH Pro Logo!
Logo 1
Logo 2
Logo 3
I’ve commissioned 3 logo designs to be produced and am having a tough time picking between them for the sole representative logo for the site. I’d like to ask you to help with that process. I’ve put together a one question survey at SurveyMonkey and if you could spare 5 seconds, please go there and provide your input! I hope to incorporate the changes in the next coming weeks after my two week vacation starting on December 23rd. Thanks for your help.
online surveys - Take Our Poll
Find Out if You and Your Current Job are Suitable for Telework
Want an objective opinion on whether you and your job are good candidates for a telework arrangement?
All it takes is 3 minutes to use the Telework Exchange Online Eligibility Gizmo and it will assess and report back to you on your eligibility. It will also aid you in producing a report to present to your manager to help “sell” yourself into a teleworking arrangement.
This is primarily a government-oriented site, but it was interesting to find out my telecommuting cost savings and pollution savings per year working from home:
Commuting Costs
$6,075 - Total amount spent commuting to and from work in a year
10200 - Number of pounds of pollutants dispersed by your car in a year
5.1 - Number of tons of pollutants dispersed by your car in a year
What is Telework Exchange? In their own words:
“Telework ExchangeSM is a public-private partnership focused on demonstrating the tangible value of telework and serving the emerging educational and communication requirements of the Federal teleworker community. The organization facilitates communication among Federal teleworkers, telework managers, and IT professionals.”
Entrecard Traffic Brings 0:00 Average Time On Site
To my readers who come to my blog for my musings on the Telecommuting lifestyle, please bear with me a moment as I take a momentary diversion. I promise the next post to be back on topic.
As a means to drive new visitors to this site, I’ve added the Entrecard widget to the right column of this page. This service was created expressly for bloggers to network with one another and drive traffic to their sites. Compared to other services with a similar aim, Entrecard has shown some promise and I have seen a dramatic increase in traffic for this blog which was launched only two months ago.
I won’t go into the basics of the Entrecard model, which you can learn more about here. What I wanted to talk about for a moment is the quality of the traffic I receive from the service. Traffic for traffic’s sake should not be the goal of any website owner. You want people to find your site and make use of your content. If you are trying to make some revenue from your site, you also want them to find and click on an ad or affiliate link.
The best indicator for site visitors making use of your content is the Average Time on Site statistic (I will abbreviate it as ATS). This statistic is available via Google Analytics and can be displayed per traffic source. Here is my direct traffic (bookmarked or type-in) ATS number:
Notice that for this traffic source, the ATS is 5:28 while the site average (all traffic sources combined) is dramatically lower at 1:36. The reason for the disparity is due to the highest traffic source for my new blog - currently Entrecard. You can isolate the ATS for a particular traffic source by clicking on Traffic Sources in Analytics on the left and then by clicking on Referring Sites. After isolating the referral traffic driven from Entrecard (entrecard.s3.amazonaws.com and entrecard.com), I can see that the ATS is zero:
I’d rather it be something closer to my direct traffic ATS figures.
A lot of this phenomenon is due to the fact that at least half of the traffic comes from other Entrecard users - other site owners trying to drop their card and gain credits. What I think is happening is what I will call “Chain-dropping” and this is what leads to a zero ATS:
- Click through to my site from my Entrecard ads or from the Entrecard site
- Find my Entrecard widget on the page
- Drop the card
- Click on the ad 2mm above the drop area and move on to the next site for another card drop
Once you get a rhythm, the above process takes less than a second to perform. Since site owners buy ads (campaign) with credits gained partially from dropping cards, it is a very fast way to collect credits. Since site owners want to purchase ads on the highest profile or highest-traffic sites, it can cost a lot of credits so they need to click on a lot of ads to collect them.
I must say that I have only put the Google Analytics tracking script into the blog a few days ago so my sample size is admittedly small, but I’m confident that the trend will probably continue until something material is changed with the Entrecard model. A suggestion I would have for Entrecard would be for them to delay the clickability of the ad for several seconds after a card drop. This would force Entrecard visitors to do something while they wait - read your content. However, I think it would result in an implosion in traffic, available credits and ad costs so they probably won’t do it. I think Entrecard users are mesmerized by their newfound traffic and would lose interest if the traffic dropped substantially, regardless of the quality of that traffic.
That all being said, I am certain that I have received new regular readers via Entrecard as I have seen some comments left on my posts from other bloggers using the service. I’m keeping an open mind on Entrecard and will keep the widget on my site and bask in the newfound traffic, even if the traffic comes with an * asterisk. I welcome other thoughts on my analysis and your thoughts on Entrecard.
What is Your Reason for Wanting to Work from Home?
I wanted to share the results of this poll that is being run on WorkAtHomeArticles.net regarding the top reasons why people want to work from home. When you get a chance, stop by and participate in the voting yourself. So far, the voting results are what you see above and I thought I’d provide some personal dissection of each of these choices:
“I want financial freedom”
Personally, I don’t associate working from home with a direct path to financial freedom. I equate the lottery with financial freedom. If you did another survey of people who already worked from home asking them if they had reached the promised land of “financial freedom” or not, I would bet that the ratio would be lopsided to the latter. Simply making the switch to work from home won’t assure financial freedom. Maybe this survey choice is better associated with wanting to work for one’s self. “Self-employed people make up less than 20 percent of the workers in America but account for two-thirds of the millionaires” according to the Millionaire Next Door. Most people who work from home actually work for others.
“I hate getting up early”
I can relate to this reason, but I’m surprised it ranked so high. I personally like to work late and get up late, starting around 8:30 or 9:00 with my workday.
“I need to earn extra money to make ends meet”
I’m assuming they’re surveying people who want to take their full-time job and convert it or replace it with one that is 100% working from home. I’m also assuming that the average work from home job earns as much as one that is office-based or potentially less. With that said, I don’t see where there is an opportunity to earn extra money working from home. If you have a day job, whether you work in an office or at home, you should be focusing 100% on that job. The extra money options start at night and on the weekends. You can do that without a WFH career.
“I want more time with my family”
Makes sense - no qualms there. My wife loses about 70 minutes a day with Lizzie and I (maybe that helps with sanity?)
“I want a flexible schedule”
Working from home certainly can provide flexibility in one’s schedule. I think the give-and-take in the flexible hours is generally mutually beneficial between the employee and employer. I’ve always loved this comment about a previous employer of mine made by one of it’s previous employees:
“I spent 12 years at [Company X]. The whole “homeworking” idea was a sham. Largest part-time workforce I’ve ever seen. If I had a nickel for every conference call I was on where someone flushed the toilet, was standing over a putt or was about to finish that third martini on a Wednesday afternoon, I’d be retired!” He goes on to say, “My favorite was this guy knew who moved to Cabo to open a strip club and “work from home”..yeah..right…”
Personally, I think that it all comes out in the wash. It is normal for employees to be working crunch nights around-the-clock on a deadline, flying out Sunday so that they can meet a customer first thing Monday morning, or delaying a vacation due to a critical project.
“There are limited job opportunities where I live”
This is one of the top reasons that Telecommuting is a wonderful arrangement. Another variation of this reason is that “There are unlimited places where I can live“. I like knowing that I can pack up the house and relocate seven states away if I wish to, and still keep the same job.
“I hate my boss/co-workers”
I think this line of reasoning has more to do with wishful thinking. If you hate your boss and co-workers then you should be quitting. Working from home won’t solve that problem. Working with them remotely only means that you don’t need to look at them.
“I’m basically a lazy person and dislike being told what to do”
Working from home certainly will reduce the ability for management to provide constant oversight, but if you’re lazy, that condition will eventually hurt you wherever you are working. You need to win the lottery or inherit a lot of money to remedy that.
SimplyHired Job Board
I’ve put up a job board on the site powered by SimplyHired and would like your feedback on the quality of the service that they provide.
The job board provides hiring managers the ability to post jobs for a fee of $5 and they will get priority display on this site. As a job seeker you can click on the “View all jobs” button to generate a free job search that will display only telecommuting jobs from around the nation. You also can bookmark the search so that you can conveniently check back in the future as new jobs are posted. That link is here.
I have run a few tests and it appears that all jobs displayed are indeed telecommute-flexible, so take it for a test spin if you are in the market.
Entrecard
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