My daughter’s school is having a fundraiser right now. It’s more educational than most, so I like it a little better. Rather than selling candy, wrapping paper and all that stuff that we quickly get too much of, they’re having people sponsor the kids in a Spell-A-Thon. Sponsors choose flat rate or an amount per word, knowing that the entire word list is 100 words. Easy to figure out what you can afford.

Watching my daughter trying to sell people on sponsoring her was fun. She didn’t ask many people, so I only got to see so many techniques from her, but it was cute.

Know What Your Customer Can Afford

My daughter’s first attempt at getting a sponsor was a complete failure. She asked her 5 year old brother to sponsor her at the rate of $1 per word.

She of course hadn’t given any thought to how much money that would be in the event that she gets all the words right, and given that these are spelling words from throughout the school year that she’s already learned, there are good odds that she would get all of them right.

I was quick to point out that her brother doesn’t have that much money, and even if he did, that would be an unreasonable amount for a 5 year old to give.

We discussed what was appropriate and that a brother does not have to sponsor his sister if he doesn’t want to spend the money. We came to the agreement that a penny a word was okay to ask for. He still declined.

If you don’t know what your market is willing to pay for whatever you’re selling and ask too high at first, you’ll get them into a “no” mood. Think about what is reasonable for your market and start testing offers.

Ask for the Stars

My daughter was ambitious in what she asked for. While that didn’t work so well with her younger brother, she had better luck elsewhere.

The goal for each child is to reach $15, so they can get an entry into a drawing for prizes. My daughter went right for it. She told her grandmother that she wanted to be sponsored at the $15 level. She explained that grandma could also sponsor her per word, but that a flat rate was simpler to deal with, as Grandma was visiting from out of town and would not be around at the time money needed to be collected.

The tactic worked. Grandma had to laugh when she realized that she had agreed to handle the entire amount my daughter needed to make. It had sounded reasonable at the time, and so my daughter got it.

Know that Some People Will Buy No Matter What You Do

There was someone my daughter forgot to ask for money when she was doing her fundraising. It didn’t matter – some people will buy from you just because there’s that much trust.

She forgot to ask me.

I’m her mother. Of course I’m going to contribute to her school fundraiser. But I found it quite amusing that she forgot to ask me.

It didn’t matter, of course. She’s getting her money from me too.

If you have gained a great deal of trust, you can have customers like that too. You don’t have to tell them about the product, they’re interested because it comes from you. That takes some work on your part, but it’s a wonderful thing to have happen. And you probably won’t even need to be related by blood for it to happen if you do it right.

And she’d better do well on that Spell-A-Thon!

Having some extra money around for emergencies can very suddenly become important. That’s why it’s called an emergency fund, after all. It’s not something you expect to need all the time. But if you keep waiting to build one up, the emergency might come before you’re ready.

This is especially important when you’re an at home parent and the budget is already tight. It may be hard to save up for an emergency fund, but if you need it someday, you’ll probably really, really need it.

So where can the money come from?

Pocket Change

Pocket change can quickly add
up to create your emergency fund.

Many people find dropping their pocket change into a jar the easiest way to save money. You probably won’t feel as though you’re depriving yourself. Yet it adds up surprising fast for many people.

Put a Small Amount Aside Each Month

It may be easier for you to just put a little bit of money aside each and every month. It can just be a few dollars if that’s all you can spare, but the more you can put in the quicker you’ll have an emergency fund capable of dealing with the cost of any sudden and necessary expenses you encounter. Don’t be too relaxed about putting money aside.

Cut Your Spending on Treats

What’s your special little treat you get for yourself? Coffee from a coffee shop? A bit of candy when you go grocery shopping? Meals away from home?

Whatever you’ve been allowing yourself for treats, try putting that into the emergency fund instead. It’s a bit of a pain going without the fun stuff, but the more dedicated you are to putting that in your emergency fund until it reaches your goal, the sooner you can get your treats back if you still want them. You might get used to doing without.

Earn a Little Extra Money

You don’t need to get fancy and start a home business for this. I mean, you could, but if you just need a one-off to earn some extra money for a rainy day, try something simple such as having a garage sale and putting all proceeds toward your emergency fund.

A garage sale is
a quick way to bring in cash for an emergency fund.

You certainly can do more if you want to build a really great emergency fund, but remember that it is very easy to find ways to spend all the income you make at any level. Find a way to keep the extra as extra for as long as possible and make your emergency fund really healthy. Then save or invest the rest.

I have more basic ways to earn money from home listed at How to Earn Money at Home When You Can’t Find a Work at Home Job .

Don’t Spend Bonuses or Overtime Pay

When your spouse brings home a little extra in the paycheck, put it aside rather than splurging on a treat. Paying down bills is of course another good use if that’s what you need. The point is to make sure that you are more financially secure before you start doing fun things with extra pay.

Keep Working at It

Building a cash emergency fund may not be fun if you’re already on a tight budget. But if you have one when you need it, you’ll be grateful that you didn’t have to pull out the credit cards and add to your bills to make things work out. You can deal with the expense and rebuild your emergency fund once again.

I’m going to work up a series here over the next couple of weeks on how to start a few different businesses. Home businesses are generally cheap to get started, but figuring out where to go at first can be a bit challenging.

Free? Really?

There’s a lot you can do  to get things going online without spending a single penny, not even for hosting or domain names. There are a lot of disadvantages too.

There are many disadvantages to running a free online business.

The big thing to remember about starting for free is that you will lack a lot of control over what happens to your website. Make a wrong move and you can lose all the content you’ve built up on a free website. The rules can suddenly change on free sites and your hard work all vanishes.

I consider free to be a stepping stone. Don’t rely on it forever. When you have the money, start looking at ways to spend money that will help you grow your online business faster and with more control over what happens.

Start a Free Website

Having your own website is a huge help. It’s a place where you can direct companies to look when they’re considering whether or not to accept you as an affiliate. Depending on where you start your free website, you may or may not be allowed to market on your site, as well as the kinds of topics you can write about on your site. Pay attention to the Terms of Service and Content Policies when you sign up.

Google’s Blogger, for example, has long been a popular free blogging option. If you start a blog there on gambling, they’re likely to delete your blog. The same goes for other topics where there may be legal issues or there is a strong tendency for the blog to be spam.

That doesn’t mean you can’t start a blog there and run a successful business linking to affiliate products through it. It just means that you need to be careful. Your blog should be useful to visitors on its own, not just product promotion. Read their Content Policy before you get started.

Squidoo is also fairly restrictive. They’ve noticed a lot of problems with people promote products to excess, or promote products that are scams. Adult topics and the like are also not permitted.

But if you do Squidoo right, you can create a number of lenses on the topics that interest you, sprinkle affiliate links appropriately and you’ll be fine. Just don’t overdo the number of links to any one domain. They have rules about that too.

Here are a few places where you can start a free website. Check their policies to be certain that you can do what you are planning on these sites. I can’t vouch for any of their policies, which can of course change at any time. You may not be allowed to post affiliate links on all free websites.

Blogger
Squidoo
HubPages
Weebly

You do not need to limit yourself to just one of these in the long run. I would suggest starting with just one to get your feet wet, but as you get more comfortable you should be expanding your efforts.

Start Writing

Running an online business takes a lot of writing. You cannot just throw up an affiliate banner and expect people to click on it. People and search engines need a reason to visit your site. From there you can worry about getting people to click links that might just result in you earning some money.

You should try to post on your website at least a few times a week.

You should try to post on your website at least a few times a week. Daily is good if you can produce interesting content relevant to your niche that often. Don’t post every piece of nonsense that comes into your head. Try to develop your ideas so that people will find your site to be an interesting and relevant resource.

You need to get a good amount of content posted on your site before you even think about monetizing it or doing any serious promotion. Many sites vanish after a month or two, or even less, because their owners lost interest. No one is going to be very impressed by a site that shows no sign of life.

There can be exceptions, especially if you aren’t doing a blog style site. Some people can draw visitors to click on their affiliate links with a very small website. It can be harder however, to get free traffic from search engines and other sources if your site is very small. There aren’t that many pages to bring people in.

Write Articles to Promote Your Website

Article marketing is one of the great ways to bring links to your website without spending money. You can handle all the submissions by hand in the early days, but remember for later that article submission software can really speed things up for you.

There aren’t many great ways to speed up article writing, especially if you are doing article marketing. While some article sites will post just about anything, many others are a touch picky about what they accept. You also can’t expect great results and an article that spreads far and wide if you don’t make it interesting.

Guest Post

In addition to article marketing, take the time to write some really great articles to use as guest posts on other websites. Find some of the bigger blogs relevant to your niche and submit unique articles to any that accept guest posts. You may always contact the blog owner and ask if they would consider a blog post from you if they don’t have the possibility clearly listed.

Guest posts need to be of excellent quality. The blog owner is going to read it, and they don’t want to post something that you haven’t put any effort into or really doesn’t share anything of interest to his or her readers.

Social Bookmarking

Using social bookmarking websites can really bring in backlinks, but you have to be careful. If you look as though you’re just posting links to your own website, many services will ban you.

A simple solution to this is to post links to many other interesting pages and only occasionally one of your own. This gets time consuming, especially if you do a lot of social bookmarking. Plus there’s the chance that you will get interested and start reading what others have linked to.

Most work best if you start making friends on them. Find people with similar interests and promote their links too. Some will reciprocate, some won’t, but it makes for a more genuine profile.

Taking so much time may sound like a drag, but if you go the quick route and only promote your own links, your effort is likely to be completely wasted when your account gets deleted. The big social sites in particular dislike spam.

There are ways to speed this up for free, as well as paid methods. Today being about free, I’ll tell you that Social Marker can help you speed things up pretty nicely when you want to submit to the services they support. You’ll have to go through each site, but Social Marker does its best to fill in the forms with the information you provide so that you may only need to hit submit on each site. It doesn’t do that perfectly, however.

Blog Commenting

Most bloggers love getting comments on their blogs. Not all of them, but the ones who don’t want it are often smart enough to turn off commenting.

What they hate is people who post spam comments.

Spam comments take many forms. If you fill the “Name” field out with keyword heavy text, even a good comment is likely to be seen as spam. Many sites will let you get away with your name and website name, but others really just want names in that field.

Make your blog comments interesting and relevant to the post.

If the website you put in the URL field is spammy, your comment may also be poorly viewed. Many bloggers do check.

If all you post as a comment is “Great post” or other generic dreck, your comment will almost certainly be viewed as spam.

Take a little time with your blog commenting. Find relevant blogs and say something interesting about the posts you comment on. Do not flood a particular blog with comments all at the same time. Comment on maybe one or two posts on any given day for most blogs, especially if they post less often than that. If the blog has a lot of daily posts, you may be able to comment more.

Come back regularly to comment on the best blogs you find. This can help you to build a relationship with the blogger. They may start commenting on your blog.

Regular commenting can also draw the attention of other readers of the blog. Do a good job and you may be seen as an expert too.

But don’t expect a ton of traffic from blog commenting. That almost never happens. But the backlinks it generates can be nice, and sometimes you do get that extra little bit of traffic.

Monetize

Be careful as you monetize your free websites. There are often rules about what you can and cannot do.

AdSense is the easiest to put on when it’s allowed. Apply, and if your site looks good enough you can get approved easily. Going through Blogger to get approved for AdSense may be the easiest way.

Clickbank is the next easiest way. Find ebooks that are relevant to your niche and start promoting them. You don’t have to be too obvious, just mention the ones that are good, or do a full blown review. You can also put ads in your sidebar or at the top or bottom of posts if you have that kind of control over your template.

Consider Paid Options as You Earn

As you start to earn money with your free efforts, make sure you think about when to start your own website with your own domain name, all paid for. Free is nice, but paid means you have a better chance of controlling what happens with your business.

Also consider spending a bit on tips to really help you grow your business. You may want to consider picking up Squidoo Queen 2.1, which is quite affordable, $27 as of this writing (prices can change). You’ll learn a lot of free marketing tactics, which combine well with having your own site later on. From the title, obviously Squidoo lenses are a big part of it, and they can be quite useful in my own experience. You can make money there if you work at it.

It amazes me how fast a house can get messy. We clean the house up for company to come over, and shortly thereafter it’s a mess again.

Mostly that’s due to having three young children. Kids just love to play, and that means messes happen. It just takes a moment to forget to ask that they clean up after themselves and the mess just increases from there.

Keeping the house clean is one of the challenges work at home moms deal with. They’re at home, and that means that right or wrong there’s this expectation that they have the time for housework too, and so their house should be nearly spotless. If only it were that simple!

I don’t keep a perfect house. Matter of fact sometimes the mess comes close to driving me crazy because no one cleans without me reminding them, or so it seems much of the time. But I do have some tips to keep things up at least somewhat respectably.

1. Don’t Stress the Mess

Some mess isn’t so bad. If the house is clean enough that you won’t be too embarrassed to let the kids have a friend over, it’s probably not that bad. Depending on how easily you embarrass about house clutter and chaos, that is.

So often my oldest has had a friend over and I’ll feel a bit bad about how the house looks, but their mom comments that her house is about the same or doesn’t say anything. That many people don’t keep a perfect house is something you can learn by visiting your children’s friend’s parents when the kids go to play.

You want things clean enough to be healthy and safe. That doesn’t take perfect, dust free surfaces and constant scrubbing.

2. Get the Kids Cleaning

Kids can start cleaning pretty young. My oldest two are regularly assigned to empty the dishwasher, clear the table, sweep and mop the kitchen floor, clean two of the bathrooms and their own rooms. Plus toy general pickup, of course. Laundry assistance will soon be added to the oldest’s list

It takes time to teach kids to do a new chore correctly, and it’s harder than doing it yourself. I often have to help them get the sweeping or mopping done correctly, but they improve over time and eventually they won’t need help at all.

All other adults living in the home should be helping to clean as well.

3. Quick Cleaning Spurts

You may not have time to really get into the details of cleaning your home every day, but you can probably spare 5-15 minutes here and there to get some work done. That’s time enough to load and unload the dishwasher. Time to sweep or vacuum one room. Time to pick up some clutter.

4. Declutter

One of the biggest sources of messy homes after children is clutter. If you have a lot of stuff, it’s harder to keep it all clean. Simple as that. Take some time and get rid of the stuff you don’t need, and organize the rest.

5. Decide If You Can Afford a Cleaning Service

A cleaning service can work wonders for getting all the cleaning done that is so hard to get to. You still have to have your house generally tidy for them, but they’ll take care of cleaning surfaces, sweeping, mopping, dusting, vacuuming, stuff like that. It can be really nice to have someone else scrub down your bathroom for you.

You don’t need to keep your home absolutely perfect. Most of us don’t manage that. Clean enough to be healthy, messy enough to be happy is more fun than perfection.

Lots of people try to earn money from home. It sounds so easy. But as with any other kind of business, most don’t make enough to keep going. With the low costs of running most home businesses, why is that?

Unrealistic Expectations

This is the big reason. Many people start working from home and have big dreams because the ads they’ve seen about working at home are all about making big money. They make it sound so easy.

Simply put, it’s not.

There’s a lot that goes into running any successful business. You can’t start out expecting a life of wealthy leisure. That’s not the reality of any normal business.

You might make big money someday. You might not make big money ever. That’s reality.

Failure to Take Consistent Action

This often combines with unrealistic expectations. You get the information about how to start what sounds like a really amazing, easy home business online, but then you don’t do anything with the information.

Alternatively, you start to do something with the information, but get distracted by the next shiny new product release or business opportunity and never follow up on anything.

It takes significant, consistent effort to have a chance to succeed in any business. Doing things halfheartedly isn’t going to get you anywhere. Be determined. Work hard. Give the business you’ve started a fair chance before getting distracted by anything else.

Lack of Focus

This goes along with failure to take consistent action. Many people start more than one home business. That’s fine, it’s good to not have all your eggs in one basket, but only once you know what you’re doing with the first one.

It’s incredibly easy to have multiple websites or home businesses. They cost so little to start up that it seems like nothing to start a new one. What people forget is that all businesses have a high cost in time and in education.

If you don’t understand how to make your first business profitable, how are you going to do that with the second one, or the third? If you don’t know how to get people to buy from your first business, once again, how will you know how to get them to do that for your second or third?

It can be hard to know which idea of yours will take off as a viable business, but you need to give each one some time to see what you can make of it. You’ll learn much more quickly even if you decide to drop that one later.

The same can be said for how you market your business. While eventually multiple marketing techniques are a must, start out with just one. Really learn how to work it before adding in more.

Failing to Understand What People Want

You may love shiny orange widgets. You may think you make the best ones or that you’ve found the perfect source for them to recommend to people. But if not many other people love shiny orange widgets, your business probably won’t go anywhere.

You can argue that there’s a niche for everything, and you’d probably be right. Only problem is that not all niches are profitable. There are many products that don’t have enough people interested in them for you to run a viable business.

Worse yet is if you pick a target market but have no understanding of what it is they want from you. If you aren’t offering something that the people who visit your website want, you’re never going to make any money. Do your research and find out what attracts people to your niche, then figure out what you can sell to them.

Refusing to Spend Any Money on Your Business

A home business is much cheaper to run than a brick and mortar business. You don’t have many utterly vital expenses. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t spend anything at all to grow your home business.

That’s what many people do. They get a free website. They only do free forms of marketing. And they wonder why things are taking so long.

You can build your home business successfully while spending very little, but it’s likely to take much longer for you to succeed. That’s just the way it is.

It comes down to a choice. Would you rather spend more time or more money in building your business?

If you don’t have the money to spend, it’s going to take a lot more time for most people to succeed in any business. Have more money and you can start things off stronger and test out marketing strategies faster. You can hire help for the things that don’t need your personal touch.

Wisely spent money is a huge advantage for a home business. You can spend on carefully selected information to build your business, hire a virtual assistant to help move things along, spend on good website design, and so forth.

If you’re only spending time, you’ll have to learn to handle all these things yourself. Getting up to even a basic level can take months longer. That means you’re more likely to give up on the whole process.

What’s great about home businesses in general is that even if you’ve been making a mistake you may be able to switch things around and make it better. That’s why you need to network with other work at home moms and home business owners and learn from each other. There’s a lot to learn out there, from tips on how to get your business moving to just the right information to buy to keep your business growing.