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.

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>

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.

The WAHMs Toolbox - 100 Links and Resources

This site, Bootstrapper, has assembled a nice list of web resources for mompreneurs and WAHMs. They’ve organized hundreds of quality sites into sections including; ‘articles’, ‘blogs’, ‘networks’, ‘business resources for women’, ‘parenting’, ‘work at home resources and ideas’, ‘time management’ and the ever useful ‘miscellaneous’. Check it out here: The WAHMs Toolbox - 100 Links and Resources.

Earn 49 cents a day!!!

If that title got you this far I hope it’s curiosity at work and not excitement over earning 49 cents a day!

But, in the event you are looking for ways to earn a little extra like so many of us with websites here’s a little information about an advertising network that I really like:

They call themselves Project Wonderful and their system really is pretty wonderful. It’s the easiest ad network provider that I’ve ever used as a publisher (website owner) and it’s also the easiest from the advertisers perspective. It only takes a few minutes to get setup (adding their ad code to your site) and within minutes prospective advertisers will begin submitting their READY-TO-RUN banner ads to you for approval. If you’re ok with the ad you click a link and the ad will begin running almost immediately.

What’s really cool is the advertisers bid for placement on your site so as more advertisers line up the more they’ll bid. This competition is what I like the most about their business model. Of course it isn’t a get rich quick scheme, especially for those of us who have small websites, but as the sites grow in traffic and the ad network grows in popularity and numbers of registered advertisers, the bids will increase without the need to create a media kit, change pricing, or do anything other than tend to the site and approve ads.

It’s been a few days since I got started and the ads are generating 49 cents a day right now and rising all the time. It’s not much, but I really do believe in this and I’m already bringing in more then the Google ads were fetching for me.

You can find ad spots here on WAHM Blog and on these sites:

moms dot com and moms dot com directory

dads dot com and dads dot com directory

moms TV and dads TV

Check it out for yourself!

Project Wonderful Ad Network is Great!

Project Wonderful is a hot ad network that is spreading like wildfire. They allow publishers (website owners and-or webmasters) to easily offer space on their websites to the highest bidders. Advertisers can outbid a current advertiser and be on a desired website instantly. In addition to their ease of use for both advertisers and publishers they only take a 25% slice of the advertising dollars making them the lowest priced ad network I’m aware of.

You can find more about them here: Project Wonderful Ad Network

To see their system in action check out these Websites:

We just added a 468×60 banner ad slot to this site! Check out the upper right-hand side of the site.

Momz.com and the moms web directory

Momz Top Websites for Moms

Dadz.com and the dads web directory

Bold Food

WAHM Shopping Mall

WAHM Break Cafe Top 100 Websites for WAHMS

Check it out and be sure to take advantage of the free banner ad opportunities on our sites before the deeper pockets arrive and outbid you.

How Mompreneurs Use Elance to Find Clients

I’ve been familiar with Elance for years and although I’ve never utilized it I’m aware of many situations where entrepreneurs and clients have connected to do great things together. What is Elance you ask? Here’s how they describe themselves: “Elance is an online workplace where businesses find and hire people “on demand” to get work done quickly and cost effectively.”

Elance recently posted a series of 3 mom articles about mompreneurs that utilize Elance to keep business rolling in. The most recent article was about Sue Kristoff who started her business, The Kristoff Group LLC, after she had a couple of children and decided to trade in her daily commute and co-workers for her family. Her freelance technical writing business is doing well and she spends about 10 hours a week serving clients right now while her kids are young. Sounds like a great plan to me!

The other two articles offer glimpses into two other moms that have decided to take control over their time and destiny. They can be found on the Elance blog here:

Successful Recipe for Mompreneurs and How Lisa uses Elance

We salute these moms who are living the WAHM dream.

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