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Ok, hopefully I haven’t scared too many of you off with the LOLcat picture and title. I’ll behave now. Maybe.

Parenting is a tough job. We all know that. Everyone’s an expert and no one knows what they’re doing. Maybe that’s a contradiction, but I think it describes parenthood rather well. Especially motherhood. I think it safe to say I know rather less about fatherhood.

Moms working outside the home are criticized for not spending enough time raising their own kids.

Stay at home moms are criticized for being lazy.

Work at home moms are criticized for not maintaining the exact right balance of work and parenting.

Now, I’m a big fan of having at least one parent home with the kids. I say parent because I know some fathers who do quite well at it. I don’t care which parent is at home, which is the breadwinner or if the parent at home also works.

I also really don’t worry about it when both parents work. That’s often necessary, either for financial reasons or personal ones.

For the most part, no matter which way you parent, you’re getting it right.

It doesn’t matter if you breastfeed or formula feed. It doesn’t matter if you vaccinate or not. It doesn’t matter if you put your kids in a good daycare or stay home with them yourself.

What does matter is that you love your children and do your best by them. That you give them consistency. That your children are not abused. That you encourage them to be independent in appropriate ways at appropriate ages.

Yes, all parents make mistakes. We’re human. We get tired, stressed, impatient, angry, frustrated, etc. We make decisions for the wrong reasons sometimes.

But most of the things we do that seem like they will traumatize our kids forever probably won’t.

Voiceovers are the kind of work I keep telling my husband he needs to try to get into. He always gets people commenting on what a great voice he has. He did radio in college. Maybe one of these days he really will check it out and give it a try. It strikes me as a nice potential side income.

Skills Required

The big thing you need is a great voice. Something that people want to listen to. You also need to speak clearly.

You can come from a variety of backgrounds and do well in voiceover work. Your best way to get started may well be to simply try. However, there may also be classes or coaching available in your area to help you get started right. How you get things going can depend on how professional you want to start out. If you’re aiming at television, movie or radio voiceovers, you can expect to be dealing with people who require a higher degree of professionalism than if you do voiceovers for people who are working from their own homes. That doesn’t mean you can sound bad, of course.

You will need to create sample voiceovers for potential employers so that they know if yours is the voice for their project.

Depending on the kind of work you want to do, you may want to consider joining a union. This is not at all a requirement, and many voiceover actors are not members of any union. This type of work is primarily freelance.

Voiceover actors may work on commercials, read for audio books, television, movies, podcasts, video games – anything that requires just your voice. You may have to sound like a particular person, sound cheerful, talk quickly yet clearly, and so forth.

Common Expenses

To get started you may just get some basic equipment to record with at home, such as a voiceover microphone, then improve your home voiceover studio as you go. You may need software to edit the MP3 files you produce or the client may prefer to do that themselves.

Possible Income Streams

Voiceover work at home may be found through sites such as:

Voices.com
Voice123

You will need to consider how you charge for your work. Flat rate or by how widely your work will be used? Would you charge the same to do a television commercial as you would for a multimedia presentation? Will you be doing post production work?

Related Scams

The basic voiceover scam is rather like the standard modeling scam. You find an ad saying that you can get voiceover work without experience. You respond, only to find that you need to buy the equipment they recommend and pay for the production and distribution of demo tapes. They won’t really work with you on practicing before you record a demo, or anything like that.

A good rule of thumb is to not pay up front for anything. A legitimate agent won’t charge you upfront.

Recommended Reading

Voice for Hire: Launch and Maintain a Lucrative Career in Voice-Overs
Step Up to the Mic: A Positive Approach to Succeeding in Voice-Overs
The Art of Voice Acting, Third Edition: The Craft and Business of Performing for Voice-Over

Taking surveys isn’t likely to earn you much at all, but a lot of people like to give it a try. It can be good for just a little extra cash. Generally speaking, the best pay is in focus groups, rather than just answering multiple choice and short answer questions. It’s also not really a job, but it’s so strongly associated with what some people think of for working at home that I felt I should include it.

Qualifications/Training Needed?

You will often have to fill out a questionnaire to see if your demographics match what the survey company is looking for.

Job Duties

Answer questions about the topic honestly. Questions may be about things you’ve done, commercials you’ve seen, your opinion on a product, etc. Note that some companies will pay in points toward a drawing, rather than cash. You will need to sign up with a lot of companies to make much at all.

Equipment Needed

A computer and internet connection. You may also want to have an email address that you use only for surveys and a PayPal account for those that pay that way.

Where to Search for Jobs

Be prepared to not get a lot of work. Online survey taking in many ways is more of a hobby than a job, especially if you’re going for cash rather than points.

To be honest, it’s not one of my favorite work at home ideas, as most won’t pay you enough for your time, but so many people want to try it that I feel it’s worth putting the information out for those who want to try it, and to help them avoid scams.

You have to be quick to respond to survey offers, as they fill up fast with most companies.

Yahoo! User research
American Consumer Opinion
Opinion Outpost
HCD Surveys
Ipsos
Columbia University
Qualitative Insights
Buzzback
Harris Poll Online
Lightspeed
Pinecone Research
and many others. Gets opinions from trusted sources before signing up with unfamiliar companies.

Related Scams

You should first be aware that you do not need to pay for a survey list. You can find legitimate lists for free very easily. Online survey company lists for sale aren’t so much a scam as a bad deal on the whole.

You should also understand the difference between online surveys and “get paid to” (GPT) sites. If you have to finish a bunch of tasks, which often include making online purchases or subscribing to a trial offer, in order to get paid, that’s not a survey. A survey asks questions that you need to answer. You should never have to buy anything or provide information to anyone other than the survey company. Legitimate surveys are about market research. If you have to input your credit card number, it’s not a survey.

This is a great way to teach younger kids about recycling. Save up some cans or water bottles and use them to make musical instruments. If you use a side can opener it is pretty easy to tape the lid back on, and there won’t be any sharp edges to worry about.

Put beans or rice in the cans or bottles and close them back up. Fill water or soda bottles to different levels and teach the kids to blow across them and compare the sounds.

If you have art supplies you can also have the kids decorate them before filling them up.

Don’t forget the classic wooden spoon banging on a pot or pan. There’s a reason why that’s a classic, and it’s not the headache you get if it goes on for too long. It’s not so bad if you’re just playing.

It’s not easy to get some kids to eat right.

Come to think of it, it’s not easy to get some parents to eat right. We’re the ones who start it a lot of the time, aren’t we?

When you’re at home with the kids all day there’s a lot of pressure to feed them right. You just don’t have the excuse of having been at work outside the house all day for why you’re too tired to cook. Plus you’re there to see what they eat for every meal.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t always make it easy to teach good eating habits. Some kids are pretty resistant to the idea right from the start.

Start Them Off Right

Once you’re past the baby food stage, resist the urge to get a lot of prepackaged foods. It’s more work for you, but if you can cook most foods from scratch or something close to scratch you will have much better control over what your kids eat.

You’ll also be teaching them to appreciate more flavors, as most prepared and prepackaged foods are relatively bland, designed to appeal to the widest possible range of palates. They may also contain artificial colors and various types of sugar, such as high fructose corn syrup, that you are best off trying to minimize in your children’s diets.

Get the Kids Involved in Food Preparation

Most young children love helping in the kitchen. It’s something they can do with you, or at least watch what you do. Make sure you let them help as appropriate.

Kids can tear lettuce for salads, throw chopped vegetables into the bowl, help you measure ingredients and watch you do the actual cooking from a few feet away.

If you have the time, space and inclination, a garden is also a great way to get children interesting in healthy foods. Kids are more likely to enjoy vegetables that they have helped to grow, not to mention the great taste of produce fresh from your own garden.

Make Healthy Fun

Not all healthy food is boring. A common favorite is the fruit smoothie. You throw a variety of fruits, some juice and ice, maybe some honey for sweetener, into a blender and start mixing. Tastes great, very healthy.

You can make it more healthy by adding some vegetables into the mix. Carrot goes well in many cases, as do some leafy greens such as spinach. Just make sure there’s enough fruit to appeal to the kids.

I like to use frozen fruit in my smoothies, as it cuts out the need for ice.

The great thing about smoothies is that you can experiment with them. Berries of all sorts go very well as a general rule, and can easily be bought frozen for much cheaper than they are fresh much of the year. Bananas work very well. And if you want some dairy in there, yogurt adds a wonderful flavor.

What If They Just Don’t Like Healthy Foods?

Not all kids make their parents’ lives so easy, naturally. Some will express distaste for every healthy food you try to offer them.

Some say to disguise the vegetables. Books such as Deceptively Delicious and other titles provide recipes so that you can work vegetables into a wide variety of foods.

That’s not my own favorite method. You aren’t teaching your kids to appreciate vegetables and other healthy foods for their own sakes when you do that. However, if you need to work them in and nothing else is working, it’s a reasonable enough measure to take until you can get something better going.

Some home business ideas are made much simpler if you use software to pull in offerings for your customers. That doesn’t mean you should just slap up dozens of sites with no effort to make your sites unique, but it can be a faster way to build a site that can pull in some affiliate income.

Build a Niche Store (BANS) is a solution that I’ve had some good luck with. It’s a tool to build sites that feature eBay auctions. The program costs $97 and is fairly easy to use. Customizing your template can take some work, as can researching good niches to build a site around.

The biggest challenge with BANS is making a decent quality site. Yes, you can just throw up a site and not add anything of your own to it. I do not recommend that. They don’t last.

The disadvantage to a BANS site is that they can be deindexed by the search engines for poor quality even if you have put some effort into them. I haven’t had that happen, but others have. To me that makes it not necessarily an ideal home business, but not the worst one either. The few BANS sites I run have paid for the software at least 10 times over. That’s not much really, but considering what I do with the sites after I set it up, not too bad either.

Skills Required

Your first step with a BANS site is to research the niche you want to use. You want to find things that sell well through eBay. Tight niches are a good thing. “Jewelry” is too broad. Antique jewelry of a particular era or Middle Eastern jewelry would be better. eBay has a Popular Products section that can make for some interesting reading.

You will also need to know how to customize the templates. The BANS software separates things out and offers you a few extremely basic templates to start things out. If you have the skills to do more than change the header, it’s a good idea to really work with your template. Change the colors, work with the layout, keep the site from looking like an out of the box BANS site.

You should also have some skills at writing copy. Even for the pages BANS generates automatically for the categories you choose you should be adding a good amount of your own copy. This is a big part of how you keep your site from being thrown out of the search engines.

You’ll probably also want to do article writing. The software makes it easy for you to post your articles to your site.

Common Expenses

The BANS software is the big upfront expense, of course. But you will also need a domain name for each site and hosting. Fortunately a good hosting account will let you host quite a number of BANS sites, so that cost should not increase too much with each site built.

Note that it may take you several tries to come up with a niche that will pay well. I have a couple BANS sites that hardly do anything at all. Two make up the bulk of what I have earned. I mentioned that this isn’t a completely easy home business solution, right?

Possible Income Streams

eBay commissions are not your only source of income on a BANS site. You can add in AdSense and other affiliate links. The templates make it very easy to put banner ads in.

Recommended Reading

Read in the BANS forums after purchase. You’ll get a link and be allowed to join once you’ve bought it. Lots of great tips from active users.

We’ve been having a couple of really hot days around here lately. It broke 100 degrees F here yesterday. My daughter was quick to ask after school if she could stay inside rather than be sent out to play. That got me thinking about how I’m going to be coping with the kids this summer.

It helps to plan in advance.

Much as this kind of heat is miserable to deal with, it was a great reminder that I need to get ready to deal with summer. Bored kids, high heat, and probable water regulations to cope with the drought in our area. There are two areas to consider. What are you doing, and what are the kids doing?

What Are You Doing?

When will you work when the kids are off school? Your current schedule may or may not be right for the summer.

Many work at home parents end up needing to cut back when summer hits because they need the family time more. It’s a part of why you’re at home, after all.

However, it’s always good to remember that you are not and should not be your children’s sole source of entertainment. If you need more time to work, encourage them to play on their own.

If you need more work time than comes easily, consider hiring a mother’s helper or trading times with a fellow at home parent. I’ve had a great deal of luck with sending my kids to play with friends, and taking their friends in to play at our house in return.

Make sure you also plan for family outings. They don’t have to be anything fancy, but heading out to a beach, lake or park gives you a nice break from working and is likely to be fun for all concerned.

What Are the Kids Doing?

Summer is a great time for enrolling the kids in classes, but don’t overdo it. Mine will absolutely have swimming lessons, for example, just for their safety at the various pools they sometimes have access to.

I’m no fan of overscheduling kids, no matter the time of year, so I am certainly not recommending you fill their days too full. Kids of all ages need time to be kids and to do their own thing.

Take them to the library too. If there’s assigned reading from school, make sure that gets done, but otherwise let your kids go by their own interests. I truly believe that it doesn’t matter so much what a child reads, so long as he or she reads. Some exceptions for inappropriate material, of course.

If your children are old enough, encourage them to help you with your business or try endeavors of their own. It can be as simple as the traditional lemonade stand or a more challenging project you work on together. Entrepreneurship is a great skill to encourage!

Of course, you have to be prepared for the arguments, especially if you have more than one child. They’ll argue because they’re bored. Because they don’t want to share. Because one doesn’t want to play with another. Because they’re siblings. Because they don’t need any reason at all to argue sometimes.

I like to keep a balance between letting my kids hash it out themselves and helping them get along better. Sometimes parents need to put a stop to things for their own sanity or the ability to get some work done without a pounding headache.

Make sure you get the kids involved with chores around the house. They’re home more, they can help more. If you have a regular schedule, work their assistance into it, even when having the kids help means it takes longer to get things done. Add in the occasional fun chore such as baking or making popsicles or ice cream.

If you’re used to your kids being at school during the day, yes it is much harder to get work done during the summer. The more you plan ahead, however, the better off you will probably be.

Mystery shopping is a work from home job that has been around for a long time. It takes an eye for detail and a willingness to keep a sharp eye out for shops in your area.

Qualifications/Training Needed?

No training as such is required in advance. You will need to learn how to write up the required reports after each shop.

Job Duties

You will follow the instructions provided for each shop. Sometimes you will have to make a purchase within a certain budget, for which you should later be reimbursed. You may be told to go to the shop location within a particular time frame.

You of course do not want to be identified as a mystery shopper. While you will need to create a report on your experience, you should not be taking notes during the shop.

Shops can be done at all kinds of stores, apartment leasing offices and even on cruise ships… although that last is generally reserved for highly experienced mystery shoppers.

Pay can be fairly low for the time involved when you include travel time, especially in the early days. But you can get the better paying shops as you build experience and a reputation with your employer as someone who hands in detailed and accurate reports.

Equipment Needed

Transportation to get to the shops in your area. A computer and the necessary software to send in your reports. Odds are you won’t need to buy anything new for this job.

Where to Search for Jobs

Mystery Shopping Work at Home Jobs at Home with the Kids
Mom! Mom!
Volition

Related Scams

There are two current mystery shopping scams I know of. The more recent one is where a company sends you a check or money order for a few thousand dollars, and instructions on how to do your mystery shop, cashing the check and sending the money to a designated recipient. You get to keep a few hundred.

The check is fraudulent, and you end up paying the charges.

The other scam happens when sites offer lists of companies that are looking for mystery shoppers. All you have to do is buy it.

However, most of the lists are useless. They may not list legitimate opportunities, or may only list stores that might use a mystery shopper. The above resources are probably better ways to find companies to hire you.

In just about any community, you can find free athletic events and games to watch. They might be at the local high school, or you might know which local parks have kids playing regularly.

The school events, of course, are most set up for people to watch in most cases. You also have the best chance of being able to find out what the schedule is and to be able to follow a particular team.

There’s quite a storm of posts out there right now on how the FTC is taking a look at viral marketing as it is performed online. Overall, it’s a good thing too. But it also means you need to be very careful in what you say about products you recommend on your site if you’re getting anything in return for the recommendation.

If you do any paid blogging or affiliate marketing on your site, a disclosure policy is a generally good idea anyhow. I got one when the whole Pay Per Post storm hit and they realized it made sense.

The most basic thing you need to think about this is that you shouldn’t be making claims you can’t prove. You also need to be upfront about if a particular experience is not the usual. That’s just good marketing even if there aren’t legal consequences to consider.

The big areas of concern are probably areas such as make money online and diet claims, as those are quite prone to exaggerated claims or excessive focus on atypical results. But don’t start exaggerating results in other areas. You could get in trouble anywhere.

Some good reading:
FTC To Clamp Down On Social Media Marketing
FTC and Viral Marketers May Square Off