The ability to work at home is a great goal to have, but it can be a bit of a trap too. You can feel like you have to find a work at home opportunity that will allow you to replace your current income before you can make the jump.

Ever think that making the move in stages might make more sense?

Lots of people do it that way. It’s rough, and eats horrendously into family time, but the sacrifice can be worth it. It’s a chance to get things going without the worry that your family will suffer financially.

The Good Part About Starting When You Already Have a Job

There’s good and bad to getting a slow start to working at home. The good is that you have less financial pressure to succeed. Your current job is hopefully enough to keep your family going, even if you aren’t entirely satisfied with the lifestyle.

That cuts a lot of pressure out, giving you more time to really think about what you want to do and to do your due diligence before spending any money or sharing any information.

It also gives you time to build up an income. If you choose a home business, this is likely vital. Most home businesses are not successful right at the start. If your family needs the money from your current work you may be best off not gambling on your ability to build a stable income from home quickly.

You will also enjoy the added time to educate yourself. You can read up on the work you’ll be doing.

You can make connections and network with other work at home parents, both within your industry and who do other kinds of work. A good network will help you to build your business and help you with many challenges. LinkedIn is a good place to start for online professional networking; your local Chamber of Commerce is good for professional networking in person.

The Bad Part

Perhaps the worst part of starting to work at home while still holding down a regular job is the pressure. You have to do your best at both. You lose time with your family.

The amount of time it takes can be difficult. It’s not uncommon to need several months, a year or more to build a decent work at home income.

Combining working outside the home with working at home is also likely to slow down your progress in whatever you do at home. It’s tough to work a regular job, raise a family and start a home business or other work at home job. There’s only so much time in the day and you do have to sleep sometime.

However you get started it’s a big decision, and there will be a lot of difficult decisions and risks to take. But the path is likely to be worth it.

While this site is not a SiteBuildIt site, I’ve always been a fan of their philosophy. When my dad wanted to start a website that was the service I recommended, and what he continues to use.

If SBI is something you’ve been considering buying, now’s the time. You can get two SBI sites for $399 rather than one for $299 from now until October 31, 2009.

SBI is a great tool if you don’t know how to build a website or even if you do. It’s not just hosting. It’s lessons on how to start your site successfully. It’s site building tools if you need them. It’s research tools.

It’s useful.

SBI is best for people who expect to work to build a successful website. It’s not about doing it the lazy way. It’s about building a business with the intent to succeed and keep going with that business.

You don’t have to use the second site yourself. You can give it to someone else. Or just save it until you’re ready, so long as you start the second subscription within 9 months of the purchase.

That’s pretty useful when you don’t want to overwhelm yourself with things to do just so you aren’t wasting time on your subscription. Get one site, started, then get the next going when you have things moving.

Either way, you’ll want to hurry. October 31 is not that far away. Check it out and order today.

Get the box of chalk out and start drawing on the sidewalk with the kids. You don’t have to be a great artist to do this one. The kids sure won’t care. You can always sweep it away if you don’t like how your work turned out.

If you’re in an area without sidewalks, you may have a driveway or walkway up to your home that can be used.

You could also just try drawing a game on the ground. Kids love hopscotch, and what’s more classic than a chalk hopscotch game?

I hear from a lot of people worried about being scammed while looking for a work at home job. It’s tough to know which companies to trust, even when they aren’t asking for money upfront.

If you can stand it, sometimes the best solution is to create your own opportunity. That’s right, start a home business. You’ll have ups and downs with a business, and have to deal with clients who are reluctant to pay you, but at least you’re in charge.

It’s not for everyone, of course. There’s stress involved. It can take a long time to earn anything. But if it’s taking ages to find a legitimate work at home job you really aren’t losing out by starting a business. You might even earn more than you would have from a work at home job.

Here are some that you may want to consider:

Affiliate Marketing

I’m rather fond of this one. Affiliate marketing earns me some pretty good money some months. Lousy income other months. There’s quite a bit of range in there.

There are scams possible in this one, so it’s important to remember that you should never pay to become an affiliate. The merchant should be making their profit off selling to the customers you refer to them, not from you.

One of the keys to succeeding as an affiliate is finding an interesting niche, nothing too broad at least for your early efforts.

SiteBuildIt’s Affiliate Masters Course is a free resource on running your own affiliate websites. They’ll walk you through many of the steps you’ll need. It’s still up to you to make it work.

Errand Running Service

If you don’t mind being out and about a lot, running other people’s errands can be a good business. You can focus on helping out the elderly, people whose jobs keep them too busy to run their own errands, that kind of thing.

Virtual Assistant

This is a popular choice if you’ve been looking at all the data entry and customer service positions, although it’s not exactly the same thing. You may be doing some of those jobs as a virtual assistant, but if you have the skills you could also be working on a website, managing ads, writing and submitting articles, answering emails and so forth.

Writer

Another popular choice. There are plenty of freelance opportunities for writers. A lot of them don’t pay a lot, but as you get experience you can do better. You might be writing website copy, articles for websites, articles for magazines and so forth.

Blogging

Just another form of being a writer in many ways, but you can do it on your own. If you want to make a business of blogging, I strongly recommend getting a domain name and paid hosting rather than going with the free stuff. It looks better as you grow. Blogging to the Bank is one resource to help you learn how to make blogging pay off.

Other Home Businesses

There are tons of other home business ideas out there. The one thing I can promise you about them is that there are no guarantees. More home businesses will fail than succeed. That’s just life.

Have you ever wondered what some of the more common phrases in work at home ads really mean? If you took most of them literally, you’d expect the entire world to be rich, just from the sheer lack of effort made in various home businesses.

Here are some common phrases and their probable true meanings… or at least my own interpretation of them.

No selling required!

It’s not selling if you just tell everyone you meet that it’s a great product, right? Your family, friends, acquaintances, coworkers, random people you meet on the street, kids, neighbor’s dog and so forth should be grateful that you take the time to tell them about these wonderful products. They will beat a path to your door if you do so.

No experience required

That’s right, no experience required, and you’re not going to get much in the way of experience here. Unless you count the life experience of losing money to a scam. That’s worth something, right?

Free money making website

Free website that we sell to all our suckers… err, members. Hope you don’t mind that it looks like every other member’s website.

Earn money in your sleep

Not going to happen until you’ve put in a ton of effort. You might even lose some sleep over it.

Free trial

Just give us your credit card information. Your trial will be up before you get the information you’re asking for in the mail. E-mail isn’t good enough for our information.

Get paid to type

All you have to do is type in ads to convince other people to fall for the same scam! It’s easy and you deserve to make the money you lost to us back somehow right? Bueller? Bueller?

Act now! Only x y slots open!

We don’t care that we can allow as many people as we want to download our electronic product. Matter of fact, we’ve done that already. But if you think we’re limiting our sales you might forget to do your due diligence. So hurry up, will ya?

Earn money on autopilot

Rather like earning money while you sleep. It can happen, but it’s not going to be as fast or as easy for most people as the ad claims… and it might not happen at all.

(Google) (Twitter) (other popular site) will pay you $x,xxx per month!

If you follow our instructions, you might manage to waste a lot of time, lose some money advertising, not to mention paying us, and have next to nothing for it. Sometimes we don’t even know who we’re pretending will be paying you. We trust you not to notice the mixups.

As seen on…

We bought an ad there once. We’re not exactly welcome back.