What I do for a Living Working From Home in South Africa

(and how you could also work from home in South Africa, starting with only a computer and Internet) – I’ve been working from home since February 2008, so almost 4 years now. Tony and I both work from home. Not sure if you would call it self-employed or unemployed

In this article, I want to speak about only what we do from home to make a living, so if you first need a little more background as to who we are and how we got to the point of having to start working from home, then these following 4 pages should give you that background:

On our aftermatric.co.za site:
What I did after matric

On this blogsite:
A letter I had published in the South African ZA Difference magazine (“Inspiration from a desperate mother”)

On our ineastlondon.co.za site:
About

On the contact/about/FAQ page of our workfromhomeideas.co.za site (the site that this blogsite Work From Home South Africa is on)
- also get some tips on this page about how you can also work from home:
Contact/About/FAQ

We live in the same house as my parents, for now, and have been for the past 4 years, along with my two sons. Some months we still struggle to pay our monthly bills, but the most important fact is that we are surviving, working from home.

If you are struggling to find a job in South Africa (as we were 4 years ago) or if you need to earn some extra income, and you don’t have money to join income opportunties or buy the materials needed to start your own business, but you at least have a computer and Internet connection, we suggest that you try some of the things we do for a living.

These are the ways in which we make our living working from home in South Africa:

1 )
Web Design

“Oooh, I can’t do that!” ? – Nonsense! – if you can read, take down notes, and can practice what you learn, you can design websites.

Look for free html templates to download on the Internet, look at the coding as a notepad text file, change some things in the coding, save as whatevername.html, view and see what happened, note what you did to make the change happen, practice, repeat, alter until you have your own unique webpage design.

On our freewebsitetemplates.co.za site we have a free html website template for you that you could start fiddling with and experimenting with, that also has some tips and guidelines to get you started.

One idea is to design your own website, get a domain registered for it, get hosting for it, and once your site is live on the Internet, start offering a service of designing websites for other people too – your own site could even be all about the web designing services you offer.

We taught ourselves how to design websites (from scratch, handcoded, in notepad, not using any programs that do some of the work for you, to enable us to fully understand the process, and to adapt from there) and we design html websites for local clients in East London and South Africa, and also for International clients by getting the work through an online freelance job site oDesk

2 )
Setting people up with WordPress sites

Set yourself up with a free-theme WordPress site yourself first – there are over 1 000 free themes to choose from on wordpress.org

- then get used to using your own WordPress site, read all there is to know about WordPress, by Googling your queries, by reading free WordPress lessons, or by visiting the WordPress support forums, then practice what you learn – on your own site, and then start offering the service of setting other people up with WordPress sites too.

On this site, we also give steps on how to set yourself up with a free theme WordPress site

We set ourselves up with a WordPress site, learned the ropes of managing it, then started offering a service of setting people up with WordPress sites. On the “steps on how to set yourself up with a free theme WordPress site” page we link to in the previous paragraph, we also list some of the clients we have helped get a WordPress site, as well as list some of our own WordPress sites.

3 )
Customizing and editing the look of WordPress sites

Before attempting this, it would be best to first do the 1) and 2) points above (design websites and set up WordPress sites) This is what we did first.

If you know quite a bit about editing and managing your own WordPress site, you can offer those services to people who have WordPress sites – those people may often be the people you have set up with a WordPress site.

4 )
Design WordPress themes

If you know quite a bit about html design, you can get into the style sheets of WordPress sites, and further customize the look, and even change the functionality of the sites, in their theme files.

After mastering points 1), 2) and 3) you can start attempting to design WordPress themes yourself. You start with html coding (source code), and work with the php code (programming code) that the free themes come with.

Since most free theme WordPress templates come with a GPL licence, you can greatly modify them, retaining the GPL licence, and charge for the time you have spent working on somebody’s WordPress theme. So, in fact, you can offer a custom WordPress theme service, but charge only for the time spent working, not charge for the actual theme.

5 )
SEO – Search Engine Optimization

We include a basic SEO service in our html website design prices, but also offer it as a separate service. You can offer SEO services without actually designing any sites.

During the process of leaning how to design our own websites, we also learned about Search Engine Optimization. I’m particularly fascinated by the topic, and have gotten Google page one search results for many of the pages on our sites, as well as for many pages of our client’s sites, for a wide variety of search terms.

Learn more about the SEO services we offer, and also why we prefer natural SEO methods of website marketing to PPC (Adwords advertising) methods of website marketing.

6 )
Writing

There are quite a few different ways in which we earn money from writing, or have earned money from writing in the past:

Reporting on what we have found after doing Internet Research for clients – related to Keyword Research, Article Topic Research, and Competitor Website Analysis. Often presented in Xcel spreadsheets.

Creating lists of sites or website pages for clients – eg a list of sites that all speak about the same topic, or a list of news sites that deal with a topic category the client is interested in, or a list of sites that offer free photos etc

Article Writing – SEO articles for clients for their websites, articles for our own sites, and articles for online writing sites.

Articles for clients’ websites are written with the purpose of attracting natural search engine traffic due to the words in the title and content of the articles, that people use on search engines like Google when they are looking for information about something. If the clients get more people visiting their sites, the amount of times they are contacted for their services or products increases.

The above reason is the same reason we write articles for our own sites, but we have two other main reasons for writing SEO articles for our own sites too: because we monetize our sites with Adsense, and because we like to offer helpful information to the people of South Africa – especially when jobs are so scarce.

Writing articles for online writing sites has a few different avantages for us: We can share in the site’s Adsense earnings, their pageview earnings (ad revenue share), or we can sell articles on some online writing sites. Writing on online writing sites also gets us and our services exposure – a method of displaying what we know, and an opportunity to leave links to our sites. Being active on online writing sites, and reading other writers’ articles on these sites, like on HubPages, also helps teach us more about working at home, the Internet, and making money online.

Copywriting
We have helped people with the wording of their adverts, website header banner wording, website content wording, and even with what to say in their YouTube videos.

English/Afrikaans writing translation
We’re too busy with other projects to market this more, or bother to find out how to be able to do certified true translations which may increase the amount of translation work we get to do, but we have on occasion done English/Afrikaans writing translation work for clients – once an entire book translated from Afrikaans to English, in one month.

7 )
Photography and Photo Editing

Although I’ve won 3 local East London photography competitions over the last few years, and although photography is mostly just a hobby of mine, and although I’m quite happy using just my small 5meg digital camera, Tony and I have occasionally been needed to take photos for web design clients too – mostly for East London bed and breakfast or accommodation establishment websites – this has come in handy as a way to earn some extra income related to our web design service.

We also charge for any editing of photos supplied by clients for their website content, if needed.

Whether you design websites or not, if you have a camera you could offer a photography service, or photo editing service – there are some free photo editing programs you can download off the Internet. We recommend IrfanView for mostly resizing images (IrfanView is a free photo editing program). You can also try selling some of your photos on stock photo sites.

8 )
Graphic Design

Although our main services are web design, SEO, and writing, we have also occasionally been required to design a logo, brochure, website header banner, website ad banner, website navigation tab buttons, background for a website page, ebook cover, email template, email newsletter template – if you don’t have PhotoShop, download a free imaging editing program, like perhaps The Gimp.

Things we still want to do, or have started but need to find the time to give more attention to:

Selling our own custom WordPress themes;

Buying and selling domains;

Creating websites and reselling them, content and all;

Monetizing our sites more: ClickBank and Amazon, rent advertising space;

Selling designs on sites where the members sell their logo designs, brochure designs, website header banner designs, website navigation tab button designs etc etc

Why we like that we started with web design:

Through designing websites we starting learning more about what else it is that websites require, and we also started learning more about the Internet, and as we gained knowledge about these other services that we could also offer to our web design clients, we started offering these services too.

We’ve become a one stop place for people wanting a website and website related services.

Our suggestion to you if you would also like to start working from home offering similar services:

1)
Set yourself up with a WordPress site (wordpress.org not wordpress.com) or design your own html website;

2)
Use a search engine like Google and explore and study information about each of the different services we offer – or even explore and study completely different services;

3)
Offer these services on the website or WordPress site you own;

4)
Market your site like crazy.
View a list of 42 free ways to advertise your website

Note: It can take quite a while to learn about how to also offer these kinds of services that we offer, especially if not attending lectures about these subjects, or not doing a course on them, but it is possible. There is so much helpful free information on the Internet. Just search for it, study it, take notes, practice, apply it, and start making money working from home in South Africa. It’s how we did it. We do not have a degree and haven’t done a course in web design, graphic design or SEO – yet we have many happy clients now.

Do both Tony and I do the same work?
Yes and no. We love it how all the different aspects of the services we offer blend together, but here is a bit of a breakdown as to who does what:

Designing websites:
Although I can design a basic html website, and have done one or two of our own sites, and have edited and added to all of our own sites, as well as have edited and added to clients’ sites, Tony is way better at coding than I am, and he does the coding of the html websites we design for clients.

Registering domains and ordering hosting:
Both able, but I do it

Uploading an html site to its host server:
Both able, mostly done by Tony

Setting up a WordPress site
Both able, mostly done by Tony

Balance and look of a website:
I assist Tony with suggested alterations and he does the changes in the coding

Responding to web design quote email queries:
Both able, both do

Speaking on the phone to new clients:
I’m not too comfortable, mostly Tony does

Photography:
I’m just a bit more able than Tony, and it is me that takes photographs for clients

Photo-editing:
Both able, both do

Logo design, header banner design
Both able, both do

Search Engine Optimization and SEO Writing
I am a bit more able than Tony, and I do the SEO work

Managing WordPress sites:
Both able, both do

Customizing WordPress sites:
I am only a little able, Tony is good at customizing WordPress sites

Copywriting:
Both able, both do

Online writing sites:
Both able, I do considerably more writing for online writing sites than Tony does

Writing for our own sites:
Both able, but I do it a lot more than Tony does

Internet Research:
Both able, I do a lot more research for clients than Tony does

Learning:
Both able, both do, and so you are able, and can do

© copyright Teresa Schultz 2011