Some days you’ll sit at your desk and wonder what to do next. You’ve got a stack of paperwork covering every square inch of that desk and it seems like a million things to do. The rest of the office is probably not much better with lever arch files competing with jackets, kids toys and stuff put there just until you figure out what to do with it.

Switch off your computer. Unplug your phone and start tidying and organising.

Clearing your home office and making it a pleasant place to work can really do good things for your head. Removing the clutter and getting a bit of organisation will actually make you more efficient.

First off, get rid of the junk from everywhere except your desk. Old magazines, tools, boxes, toys etc. If it’s stayed there long enough to get spiders web on it then it could probably go to the skip without anyone noticing it. Clear a bit of space an make sure you can walk to your desk from the door. Be ruthless though, simply moving stuff around probably isn’t enough to change things and the mess will reappear quickly.

Next is your desk. How can you concentrate on one task at a time when you’ve got a hundred bits of paper, post-it notes CD’s and other junk littering your desk. Take one piece of paper and a pen. Go through the pile of stuff on the desk and make a note of what needs done. Bin everything else and put all the required papers etc in a drawer. Then you’ll just have one bit of paper which, if you’re ultra organised you’ll even input that to-do list into your computer.

Right, now it’s tidy take a look around. What would improve your quality of life in your home office. Try some new pictures on the wall, maybe a moving feature like a water feature or a windmill outside the window. And plants - I know they just site there and suck your water, but they are good for the mind, and being organised enough to keep a plant alive might just keep your head in the right place for keeping your business ticking over efficiently too.

Now you’ve done all that, go make a coffee, come back to your desk and get started on that list. You’ll get through it much faster.

This really does sound dull as dishwater but in the UK if you run a home business and have anyone working for you, you are obliged to have employers liability insurance. It doesn’t matter whether you have a team of builders working on a site or someone helping you stuff envelopes in your back room. If you are employing them then you need the insurance. It covers claims made for all manner of things, but for example if an employee trips over your kids toy and breaks their leg, employers liability insurance will cover the compensation they can claim.
You don’t of course require employers liability insurance if it’s only yourself that works at home. Unless you are clumsy and feel like suing yourself for it.

Jeremy Shoemaker, aka Shoemoney is well know amongst internet forums but has recently started a radio show on webmasterradio.FM.

This week’s show is about making money from forums and social networking sites. I’d guess there will be a bit about monetising through advertising, which can be difficult enough as forum users are not distracted from the forum content that easily. Hopefully he’ll also talk a bit about doing business through forums, forming business relationships and maybe buying and selling websites etc.

I listened to last week’s show and it is well worth your time to listed to this guy.

If you work at home and you have done so for some time, you might find, like me that you get into a routine. That’s great. Working at home can mean you have so many distractions that it can be hard to get focused on your work to start with. Eventually though you’ll have realised that you need to buckle down and get work done and the easiest way to do that for me was to find my routine:

• Try and have all child stuff out the way and be ready to work for 9AM.
• Then work for the rest of the morning.
• Get out for a run or a bike around 12, at least a couple of days a week
• Have lunch and be working again by 2 at the latest.
• Knock off at the same time each night.

That’s pretty much the way I work but sometimes it’s just not efficient. Some days I’m just not firing on all cylinders and the amount of work I’m getting through is pitiful for the amount of time I’m spending in front of the screen. At this point it’s time to shake up the routine. Here’s some of the things you can do:

• Get out. Switch off the computer and try doing something different for an hour
• Take the kids to the park
• Go for a haircut
• Go to the post office
• Go buy some groceries
• Go for a bike ride or a run

Chances are that by doing this you’ll energise your brain, feel better about the work and be more productive when you get back to your desk. 1 hour at full productivity is probably worth 3 when you are just messing about at your computer. Sometimes when you work at home it pays to slack off now and again in order to get more work done. Is that enough of an excuse to get out in the sun?

I have to give a big link to Business Gateway for the amount of advice on starting and growing a business on their website. It’s a great resource for all startup businesses. not just home businesses and is worth an hour of anyone’s time, especially if you live in the UK.

http://www.bgateway.com/

I’m probably posting these home business insurance items all the wrong way around, but for a home business that operates without customers coming to the house, or employees, the next insurance one would naturally think of is protecting the equipment and stock that you keep in your home.

Some home business owners assume that this stock and contents insurance will be taken care of by their home insurance. This unfortunately is often not the case. It is advisable to check to see if you need to buy separate contents and stock insurance for your home business. That way you are covering your potential to make an income. Imagine if all your stock got nicked, went up in flames or your computer was stolen? What then? Shut the business down in most cases. Not having home business stock and contents insurance is a big gamble to take when it’s your livelyhood on the line.

Of course in some people’s cases all they have is a computer at home and they can provide their own insurance by backing up all the data that’s on it regularly and storing it elsewhere, preferably not in the same house. With the advent of high-speed broadband, online data storage is an option that more and more people can take to insure their main home business asset - their data.

So, if your home business means you keep stock or equipment at home, check your home policy, assess the risk to your business and look into buying home business stock and contents insurance if the risk is great enough. This is one insurance product that could be worth the money.

Running a home business can be a way to avoid business premises and rates but there are plenty pitfalls to get you and one of those is the tricky issue of insurance. Generally your main home insurance policy will not cover any of your business activities, assets or stock so you will want to make alternative arrangements for home business insurance if you feel the risk justifies it.
Home business insurance policies cover many different aspects depending on just how your business operates from home. Public Liability, Stock Insurance, Loss of Earnings Insurance and loads more are all available to you.

Over the next few posts I’m going to look into these types of insurance and see what seems sensible and which types are maybe just for the extra cautious.

At the very heart of how you promote your shiny new website online is the issue of links.

A couple of years ago the question of links was easily answered - just get more links than your competitors pointing at your website (assuming your website has reasonable content) and you’d get higher than them in the search engines. You could do link swaps, sitewide links and links on completely unrelated sites and it would get you the result you wanted.

All that is changing now though.

For a start, affiliate links (link swapping) no longer hold any clout with regards to how your site ranks in Google. It has been abused by the spammers and Google in particular does not give it the same emphasis that it used to.

Links from unrelated directories and spams sites similarly hold no clout. Usually your link is placed on a page with no pagerank and a hundred other links going who knows where. Save your energy and don’t bother with these either.

Sitewide links still hold a bit of clout in Yahoo, but not in Google. So, if you are buying a link from a website save your money and just buy a link on one page. Buying a link on every page might not bring the same rewards.

So how do you get good links?

First you’ve got to identify pages within sites that rank highly for the search term you want your site to rank for. This just takes research.

Next you have to contact the owner of that site with a personal email asking if they’d consider giving you a link from said page. Webmasters of popular sites get loads of these emails every day, so you need to make your request attractive. Try and find out the name of the person you are requesting the link from. Praise their site. Say something to let them know you’ve actually looked at their site. Then make your request. But you need to offer something in return.

So what can you offer in return for a link?

1. Cold hard cash. This is often the simplest option and generates lots of results, but doesn’t work in all cases. Anywhere from $10-$50 is average.
2.  Offer a discount voucher on your products. If you are selling online, offer a decent, one time discount voucher. Who knows, they might never use it but at least it will get you the link.

3. Offer a discount on services. Same as above.

4. Offer a free trial of your service, software, subscription etc. This is a great way to get links and spread buzz about your service.

If you don’t get a result, don’t despair and move onto the next site. Perseverance will pay off.

All in all, it is much harder to get links these days, and will cost you more, but keep to high quality related pages and a few links will pay you back much more than the 8,500 links you had listed in Yahoo in the bad old days.

A few mornings a week we send our kid to nursery. He loves it loads and indeed runs into the place once he gets to the door. No backward glances.

Sometimes though I can’t help feeling guilty that I’m dropping him off and then returning home unfettered to get on with some work. I know I shouldn’t because he loves nursery and the social interaction is really important. Also, I get on with loads more work at home when the house is quiet.

So why do I feel guilty? I guess it’s because this is his home too and I guess I feel like I’m pushing him out the door so that I can use it for work without interuption.

I needn’t worry though, it’s a daft notion that passes quickly. Before I know it it will be time to pick him up and the smile on his face will show he’s had a great time.

Anyone who’s visited this site before might notice it’s changed around a bit. I’ve moved the whole thing over to use the software Wordpress. Why? Well because it allows me to update the site a lot quicker, provides a stable platform and allows a bit of reader interaction. You can comment on any of the posts I put on the site, or ping them by linking to them from your own blog. So from today Daddy Works at Home goes Web 2.0 - whoda thought it?