Business Plans Can Be Helpful

Business plans may be overkill in certain situations where your plan is to build a small business to supplement your family income. But, if you find yourself wanting to take it to the next step a business plan can help to raise funds from family, friends, banks, or angel investors. More importantly, the process of putting together a business plan truly helps clear out the cobwebs and fantasies by forcing you to piece together a sensible plan for how you’re going to succeed in your business despite the many obstacles, which you’ll have to contemplate while writing your plan AND include in your plan.

Personally I’d rather go to see the dentist then write a business plan but, it truthfully is a worthwhile exercise for any entrepreneur seeking to do more then simply earn an extra few hundred dollars a month.Thanks to the internet there are more resources to help you out then ever before. Simply do a search on Yahoo! or Google using something like ‘pet sitting business plan’ or something similar and you’ll begin discovering useful resources to guide you along. Two sites worth sharing with you cover both the no-budget do-it-yourselfers to the more serious entrepreneurs that know just how difficult and time consuming it is to put together a quality business plan.

The first is MoreBusiness.com that has been offering hundreds of free business plans for years. Even if you don’t find the perfect fit for your unique business you can learn a lot from reviewing plans for similar and even the not-so-similar businesses.

The second site is Masterplans.com that that creates quality business plans for their clients. While I hate spending money as much as the next gal I believe this service is worth considering if the business you’re contemplating is going to be of significant importance to your family’s finances. Their fees range from $1650 to $5000 for most business plans. It takes several weeks from start to finish and I believe you’d end up with a plan good enough to convince those who need convincing that you’re competent AND that your business has a good shot at succeeding.

Is Working from Home Really Possible?

Submitted by: Barbara Murtaugh

I never thought of myself as a stay-at-home mom. I liked the direction my career was going and always thought that I would work outside the home, even after my children were born. And that’s exactly what happened . . . until my son Sean was 3 years old. That’s when little sister Melissa joined her big brother Sean.
After the birth of Melissa, my husband and I decided that with the stress of both of us working full time, never spending any time with our children, and the rising cost of daycare, it was time for me to come home. The question was, “Is working from home really a viable option?” Would it be possible for me to be a stay-at-home mom to my children, and have an income from a job that I enjoy and that is beneficial to our family, both personally and financially?

And so I began my search. We’ve all seen offers promising us loads of easy money with minimal investments of time and capital. Unfortunately, we don’t as often seem to personally know anyone who has succeeded at these schemes. No, the fact is, that you really can’t get something for nothing. However, that doesn’t mean that working from home will not work. In fact, we’re seeing trends of more and more people choosing to work from home.

The benefits of working from home are clear: ability to have quality family time, to be available for your children and spouse, the flexibility to arrange and re-arrange schedules, not to mention commuting and daycare cost savings. There are many benefits of having your own business, the key is to find something that you are passionate about. I have found a company that I believe in and stand behind.

So how do people do this successfully? According to a 2004 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics*, there are nearly seven million people in the United States who are currently self-employed and are successfully working from home. What is their secret? The answer is setting goals and being disciplined.

Working from home has its challenges. When you work for yourself, the term “self-motivation” takes on a whole new meaning. Suddenly you are both boss and employee. There is no supervisor handing out projects or offering reviews. It is up to you to see the work, and to make sure it gets finished. On the other hand, you never leave your office. The computer and the phone are always right there, calling you to just finish “one more thing.” The trick is to find balance. For many people, that means setting up “office hours” and sticking to them. If you decide you will work from 8am until noon, Monday through Friday, that means that you sit down and begin work at 8am and when the clock strikes noon, you stop, knowing that you will continue again tomorrow at 8am. For other people a less rigid schedule may be a better choice, where they discipline themselves to work a set number of hours each day, but are not as concerned about when they work those hours. The common denominator is that in each case, a successful work-at-home story begins with work. Just like a traditional job, you must work to be successful.

And, working from home offers its own challenges to office hours as well. You have other family commitments that require attention. Children need lunches, help with projects, etc. Not to mention friends and family who see you at home so think you will always be available for them. It takes discipline to continue to work the hours necessary.

The other secret of success…….setting goals. It is extremely important to have a specific, realistic, measurable goal, and then work to achieve it. In some industries, these goals take the form of deadlines, in others it’s sales quotas. Sometimes, it comes down to a personal goal you are working to achieve. The important thing is to continue to work toward that goal and keep going until you achieve it. This is not the time for New Year’s Resolutions that are tossed aside within a few weeks. Your goal must be something specific you are working toward, and there must be a reward for achieving it. Sometimes that reward is money (payment), other times it might be as simple as splurging on something special or taking a day off.

Soon you’ll find the benefits of being able to integrate both personal and professional goals while working from home. For example, after the birth of my children, I was determined to lose the weight I gained during pregnancy. While I worked a 9-5 job, I did not have the time or energy to focus on this goal. However, within the last six months, I have reached my objective. Working from home gave me both the motivation, and the time to achieve what I set out to do. I’ve learned both discipline in time management as well as enjoying the flexibility and extra free time provided by working from home to work out and focus on our eating habits as a family.

Of course, the most important key to being a success is making the commitment and then taking the next step to just do it. It is always scary to take the first step on a new adventure, but the rewards can far outweigh the risks. And, before long you’ll find that you really are making money from home. You have time for your children and their needs, while still bringing in a paycheck. And, you are growing and developing both personally and professionally as you continue to grow a business where you are the boss.

Since starting my own business, my family’s lives have changed. We spend quality time together as a family, and my husband and I are growing our relationship because of the time that we spend together as a couple. We are focused on our health and are teaching our children the importance of a healthy diet and exercise. And, I have the ability to show other career-oriented moms that they can have a professional career where they can not only contribute financially, but also be home with their children and enjoy the important things in life. It is not always about money, but building relationships and helping others. So the answer is an unqualified, yes. Working from home is a very realistic and viable option, and could be the secret to improving the quality of your life along with the lives of those around you.

* “Work at Home in 2004” released by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. http://www.bls.gov/cps

Authored by: Barbara Murtaugh. Barbara is an independent consultant with Work at Home United where she is dedicated to improving the lives of those around her by teaching them about non-toxic (green) products and mentoring others who want to work from home. She can be reached through her website at Loving Work From Home.

On-Demand Hiring Will Continue to Flourish

If the names Guru.com and Elance.com are unfamiliar to you then listen up. These are two of many sites that connect businesses in need of help with businesses that provide the type of help needed. Of course, many of these businesses are one-person companies like some of us. Called “on-demand hiring” by some, this method of hiring and paying for help only when needed was made viable with the rise of the internet. Finding qualified help is as easy as buying a book on Amazon.com now.

Two sites I recommend you visit whether you’re on the buy-side or the sell-side are Guru.com and Elance.com. They’ve both been operating for years and have enough critical mass (i.e. a lot of people buying and selling) to make it worthwhile to join. If you’ve been looking for extra income without the hassle of a “job” then visit these sites and explore the various types of skill sets that are marketable by the hour on these sites. Everything from administrative assistance, typing, or writing to strategic consulting, business plan writing, and telemarketing is being sought and offered.

Finally, if you do decide to register as a provider of a service don’t try to be everything to everyone. Stake out a specialty and focus on establishing yourself in that niche. If the businesses looking for skills wanted a generalist they’d create one of the “jobs” to fill their need. There’s a good post on Elance worth reading on this topic: ‘Developing Skills Pays Off‘.

How to Setup an Affiliate Link That Looks Normal

Ready to become a WAHM Geek?

Have you ever hovered over a banner ad or link only to shy away from clicking on it because the link looked like code written by some pimply faced hacker?

Chances are the link was a tracking link used to record where you were when you clicked. This is how affiliate programs are tracked so the right people get credit for sending traffic and paid.

Here are two examples of typical affiliate links:

https://www.e-junkie.com/ecom/gb.php?ii=68188&c=ib&aff=18667&ev=af7a1c01e8

or like this if they’re trying their best to not scare you out of clicking :

http://tinyurl.com/yqe3jz

They’ll work if and when people click on them. Here’s how you can setup affiliate links that are much cleaner looking and should help your overall results:

We love the ‘Revolution theme‘ our site is built on and they offer an affiliate program to help them find new customers. So the example below shows how we created a cleaner link. We also built in room to handle new links in the future as we find products worthy of our recommending them too.

With those two goals in mind we setup our redirect link for the Revolution Theme like this:

http://www.wahmbreakcafe.com/shop/revolution

To this we went into our hosting file manager and created a new FOLDER we named ’shop’ in our base hosting FOLDER (which is almost always ‘public_html’). We opened that new FOLDER and added another FOLDER and named it ‘revolution’. These folder names are what makeup the visible URL.

Next we created a FILE (selected html as type of file) and created a single blank page in that folder and name it ‘index.htm’. Then we opened the index.htm FILE and made sure it was empty. Then we cut and pasted the following code into that page:

<html> <head><meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=Your Unique Affiliate URL“> </head> <body> </body> </html>

Then we replaced the bold Your Unique Affiliate URL with the affiliate link we were given to work with. It’s always sandwiched between quotes “aff-link”

Once we finished that we entered: http://www.wahmbreakcafe.com/shop/revolutiontheme into the browser just to be sure we didn’t make a mistake. It works!

Yes, it takes about 10-15 minutes, but once it’s setup you can reuse it everywhere you want to market that program, product, or service using the easy-to-remember URL you created from scratch.

Alternative method many people prefer: If you would like your redirect link to look like this: http://www.wahmbreakcafe.com/revolution.htm

Create a FILE (single blank page) in your public_html FOLDER and
paste the following code in that page: (add your affiliate URL)

<html> <head><meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=Your Unique Affiliate URL“> </head> <body> </body> </html>

Our First Advertiser!

A big thank you to Matisse and Jacks for taking the plunge and becoming an advertiser on a Mom Ad Network I joined just a couple of days ago!

They offer healthy, nutritious, natural and junk-free, bake-at-home snacks. No doubt they’re scrumptious!

I’d link to them, but it’s better if you click one of their ads (over that way —>>>) so they know we love them for supporting Moms and WAHMs!

Great Ad Network for Owners of Niche Websites

I came across this ad network a couple of days ago and am impressed by how easy it is to get setup and in position to accept banner ads from larger advertisers without lifting a finger. What’s really nice is my Google ads will keep running up until the time I, or a community I’m connected with, get an advertisers to place an ad in the preset ad spot. Only upside.

Larger advertisers have a tough time reaching niches that are perfect for their products. That’s because most niches are made of small- and medium-sized websites and it’s very efficient for them to establish manage individual relationships with each of them.

This ad network solve this problem by letting Website publishers combine ad inventory through a social network-style matching system to “roll-up” their ad space into highly targeted packages that advertisers can buy across. By grouping your ad space together with a community of sites like yours, you give advertisers a way to find your site and other relevant publishers (with similar audiences) that they might not otherwise have discovered. More importantly, these advertisers can easily establish campaigns across all of these smaller sites encouraging them to do so.

The ad network is Adroll and I encourage you to check it out starting with the short video clip below. I’d also appreciate if you would check out 3 communities I’ve setup for moms and WAHMs.

The Mother Hood - Momz - WAHMs

Bloom Your Blog

Unless you blog to avoid having to spend money on therapy then you probably want more readers then you currently have. I’m no pro so I’ve been surfing around looking at other successful blogs and trying to grab some ideas.

I found some great info over at the Internet Marketing Sweetie Blog by Alice Seba. I’d summarize here, but she did such a nice job cutting to the chase it would be just as fast to give her blog a quick visit. How to Get Blog Traffic - 11 Steps to Growing Readership
You’ll also find some invaluable advise on affiliate marketing that can go a long way towards making your addiction to blogging pay for itself or perhaps even some extra gas money (albeit not much).

Affiliate Marketing Sweetie

Blog on!

Directory Submissions will Help Your Site

Directory submissions are a great way to get your Website moving up in the search engines. Here’s why:

Google, Yahoo!, MSN and other search engines use the number of links to your Website they find across the net to determine how popular your site is. It’s far from the only thing they look at, but it is an important factor. The more links pointing to your site, the more popular it must be, right? This popularity as determined by these search engines in turn helps determine where your site is shown in search results. If your site is popular and one of your important key words is “children” your site will show up higher in the results then a less popular site everything else being equal.

So links in quality Web directories let the search engines know that your site is a “contender” with links to it from other quality sites out there. The video below is a good place to start if you’re new to SEO or Web directories. Check it out.

The directories we like the most are: Moms and Big Internet Guide. And yes, we are very biased. : ) Both of these directories offer permanent links for $10 or less and they are both growing in page strength and traffic.

Top 10 Reasons Women Start a Home Business

This article was contributed by: Bizy Moms (Bizy Moms is a world leader serving work at home moms by helping them to be independent via starting and managing their own businesses.)

It’s a big decision to stay home with your family, rather than continue in a traditional job outside the home. But did you know that there are many choices if you decide to do so?The first step before starting a work from home business is to forget about the business all together. Don’t think about what kind of business you want or what you want from it or anything like that. Next, write down your life. What have you accomplished in your lifetime so far? What things have you not done that you thought you would have done by now. What things would you like to accomplish or do in the years to come?

Look at your answers and write down goals for yourself. What would you like to achieve and by when would you like to achieve them. What will it take to achieve these goals? Are you in a position now that you will be able to achieve your goals? If not, why not?

These answers and goals should be your motivation for whatever you decide to do. So now you hopefully know what you want out of life!

Getting what you want in life usually involves knowing what you want first. If you get what you want before you even know you wanted it, consider yourself lucky, and don’t throw it away before you realize its value.

There are several advantages to working from your home including flexible working hours, low overhead, and more available time to work while other people are commuting to their jobs. Obviously the appeal of one or more of these can be more than enough for many of us to give working from home a try.

And who knows, maybe a few minutes, hours, or days later, you’ll land a big sale or be rewarded for your efforts like never before. And then you’ll be reminded that, YES! You are doing the right thing! That the “crazy” idea of starting your own home-based business was actually the BEST decision you’ve ever made.

Here are the Top 10 reasons for moms to start a home business

1- Save on Day Care costs
2 - No commuting
3 - More flexibility
4 - Spend more time with your family
5 - Save on office attire and lunches
6 - Helps you to do something you like
7 - To be able to say ‘I own a business’
8 - You don’t have to execute your boss’s ideas
9 - Satisfied with your own achievements
10 - Your time is invested for your betterment

As you can see the benefits are numerous. Take some time today to see if starting a home business is the right choice for you. List the costs of commuting and working outside of your home. List the perks to being home for your children everyday, list the “downers” too. Also make a list of the space, equipment and skills you already possess that will aid you in starting a home based business. And finally, make a list of the possible businesses you could start with the equipment and skill set you just listed. Writing down your thoughts and assets is a great way to see the whole picture as it pertains to you and your family. You may be very surprised where your lists lead you. Give it a try!

The Best Thing About Running Your Own Business

Perhaps the best thing about running your own business is the effect it might have on how your children view how things work in this world. I recently received an email from a WAHM that was moving and will help drive this point home. It’s not all about money.

Nicole Pauling is a “muralist” and she paints murals in York PA and the surrounding area. Her business, Artistic Expression Murals, brightens up rooms, swimming pools (one of only two in the U.S.!), offices, businesses, and windows. Nicole is a mom and entrepreneur and like most of us stays very busy day-to-day.

One day her 5 year old daughter, Katrina, came home with a box of rocks and asked her to sell them for her so that she could buy food for those who needed it. Nicole said, “Honey, no one will buy plain rocks.” Katrina replied, “That’s ok. Then I’ll paint them.” And that’s what she did. Since then she has collected almost $150 and 300 food items to donate locally in York, PA!

Read that again!

This little girl had learned that if you want to raise money for something that you can do so by creating something and selling it to people who wanted what you created. She also has learned that the oft-heard “that won’t work” shouldn’t deter you from trying! When Nicole said no one would buy plain rocks, she didn’t take it as a reason to give up, but rather as a reason to think of what she had to do to make it work! She painted them!!

This lil’ entrepreneur and world-changer has raised hundreds of dollars to buy food for people who can’t afford to feed themselves enough. She’s a shining star that can teach all of us some lessons.

For more information about this lil’ superstar check out this article in their local newspaper, The York Daily Record: Kindergarten girl paints rocks to feed the hungry

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