Making Money from Home – First Steps

The site is all about making money from home from hobbies, activities and the things you enjoy. It is based on practical experience, and will help you avoid pitfalls and problems along the way. This “sticky” post covers the first important step to separate your personal finances from those of your new businesses – create a Limited Liability Company in your state or country. Why? Because you want to create a separate tax identity so that you can set various expenses against your income, and you also want to protect your own assets from any problems your new activities may cause. Check with a lawyer to be sure, but you can read a lot about creating an LLC on the web.

In my state, this was as easy as completing an application for a Federal Tax ID (on-line) and then creating the LLC via the State Registrar’s web site. In Virginia, this costs $50 per year, but is well worthwhile. This site can help with more information on the formalities of forming a partnership or limited liability company.

You will use the Federal Tax ID and company name when you sign up for various money making ventures.

There are a number of ways to earn money from a web site, but the easiest is asking Google to pay you. This is easy to do by signing up for Google Ad-sense. With this program, you can create a web site, add some interesting content (more on this below), and then place the code for Google’s Ads into the page. From that point on, Google will scan the rest of the site, and display appropriate ads alongside the text. There are various styles of banners you can choose, from graphical ones that run across the page, through to vertical ads running down the sides of the page. As an example of a site that earns money for me, check out this link.

Be careful to follow Google’s rules about placing ads on pages that have relevant content, and don’t be tempted to click on the ads on your own pages – they have ways of checking who is clicking on the ads!