Home business ideas for normal moms like you and me
I am a normal, work from home mom, who started my own homebusiness working from home. This article will show you how you,too, can be a work from home mom. After I gave birth to our first baby, Hana, I really couldn'tsee myself going back to that old job working for Mr.What's-his-name for a measly salary and leaving Hana with ababysitter. I didn't realize how deeply I would LOVE my baby. Doyou know what I mean by that? When I was pregnant, I thought,"Right. Have the baby. Find...
... a babysitter. Go back to work.Done." But I loved her so completely and so profoundly, that Ireally didn't want to leave her. Plus, she was really high-needsand I had spent the last year learning her cues and I felt thatonly I knew exactly how to comfort her. Would a babysitterreally be able to do that?So I set out to figure out what home based businessopportunities were out there. First I told my employer that Iwouldn't be coming back, but offered to work for him from home.He seemed mildly interested. So I asked for $30 an hour. I neverheard back from him. So I took that as a "No". Ha ha!Then, one of my friends offered me some work doing proofreadingand editing a magazine she was creating. That was great, exceptthat it wasn't a lot of work, and I ended up making only about$200 a month. Proofreading is a viable home business idea, andyou can do it while the kids nap, or at night after they go tobed. There are websites where you can bid on jobs, such as onecalled Elance. www.elance.comAnother thing I looked at was starting a home based daycare. Butthen I thought about all the colds and flu I'd be bringing intothe house... And I also thought I wasn't really cut out to stayhome with more than my own kids all day. I think I'd go nuts.So I started thinking about the Internet and how many peoplemake a living from it with home based business opportunities.The only problem was it was really hard to know which companiesto trust. I would estimate that I wasted about $300USD tryingout different things that turned out to be scams. I was sofrustrated! And I felt like a real idiot. One eBook I boughtwalked me through exactly how to build a one page website tosell an eBook. First I wrote the eBook, then went to all thetrouble to build the website, paying monthly fees for hosting,using their templates, etc, and then I never even got a singlevisitor to my site! So then the eBook explained how to PAY toget people to visit my site - frankly, this person was gettingrich off me and I wasn't earning a penny. The nice thing about having your own web based business is thatit can be about whatever you want it to be. Whether you are intoscrapbooking, or cooking, or home organizing, or perhaps youleft a job as a flight attendant and your website will offertravel tips to families traveling with children! Thepossibilities are endless.If you decide to build a website, you will either have to learnall about html or a wysiwyg program like Dreamweaver, or go witha company that has templates and does it for you. You will haveto attract visitors to your website (otherwise you will not makeany money) and there are a variety of ways of doing this. One isto write articles like this one. Another is to make sure thatyou build enough content-rich pages so that you get noticed byGoogle and your site shows up when people search for yourkeywords. You could pay to get traffic, but there are other freeways of getting traffic. The key to my success, I think, waschoosing the company carefully that I was going to give mybusiness to and, ultimately, trust to help me learn how to doeverything, because I really didn't know anything about theInternet when i started out.Be very careful of get-rich-quick scams. There is NO SUCH THING.Any legitimate business takes work, real hard work. There are noshortcuts, and that's all there is to it. So any legitimatebusiness will be upfront and clearly state that this is going tobe a lot of work.When you research the variety of website-building companies outthere, make sure they offer all-in-one packages, and they makeit clear what you will get for your money. Make sure there areno hidden costs or extra things you will have to pay for later.Don't pay more than $30 per month (I pay $299 per year for myprogram). At the very least, they should offer:·Domain name ·Fast, reliable hosting ·E-mail & telephonecustomer support ·Point and click page building ·UnlimitedNumber of pages & unlimited E-mail accounts ·E-mail forwarding·Page templates ·Statistics ·Credit Card Processing ·E-commerce·Blogging ·Submission to Search Engines ·Auto Re-submission toEngines ·Web site analysis for Engine compatibility ·Tracking ofSearch Engine 'Spiders' ·Search Engine Listing report ·SearchEngine Ranking Report ·Unique Keyword search reports for searchengines ·Ranking Reports for Directories ·Keyword Research tool·Fully Customizable Look & Feel ·Step-By-Step Marketing GuideAlso, what kind of customer service do they offer? Email them aquestion and see if they get back to you or not. If they don't,don't give them your money! Also, do they make it clear on theirwebsite who they are and how they can be reached? I hate thosesites with no contact information. It's like they have somethingto hide.I am so glad I took the leap and started my own website as aresult of the many home based business opportunities Iresearched. It has been a great learning experience for me. Ifound what works for me. It has made a difference in my life andI hope it can make a difference in yours too. I wish you all thebest.
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