People often trumpet the freedom having a home business gives you. You get the freedom to set your own hours. If you want time off, you take it.

Now, how many hours does that mean you should be working on your home business?

There really isn’t a right or wrong answer for all people at all stages of running a home business. You have to think about what your need and what your business needs.

Early On

Most home businesses early on need a lot of time and attention. They’re much like babies. Few thrive without a lot of attention.

The odds are very good that you will have to work hard to get your business really moving. That means a lot of hours. How many it takes to reach your goals is a highly variable number. But it’s going to be challenging.

But more important than the number of hours you work even early on is how you use those hours. The faster you learn to make your work hour productive and profitable, the better your business will grow.

Sometimes that means many of your work hours will be spent in learning how to run your business. You may spend hours reading and learning new tips that will help your business grow.

When Income Goals Are Reached

Sometimes you can take it easier when you’ve reached your income goals. Sometimes you still have to work really hard. It depends on your business model.

Some businesses can keep themselves going on a close to passive income level. Not all of them by a long shot, and even relatively passive income usually needs some attention to keep things going. Not to mention that most of us will change income goals over time.

Are More Hours Always the Answer?

Certainly not! Sometimes more hours is the worst thing you can do for your home business.

The trouble with working too many hours is that you burn yourself out. You get stuck. You’re less productive. You can’t see the forest for the trees. You get sucked into misusing social media and other activities that should be used a bit more carefully.

More focus is a much better answer. Focus on activities that will bring more traffic to your site. Focus on building your list. Focus on finding solutions for your customers.

Don’t Focus on the Number of Hours

The number of hours you’ve worked on your home business really isn’t a metric you should be tracking all that hard. More important is how you’ve worked on it. You should be working smart, not just hard.

Figure out what is most beneficial for your business. What’s really bringing the money in? What activities can you work on that bring that money in? That’s where you should be focusing your efforts.

The activities that need to be done but don’t really produce income? Think about hiring a virtual assistant or someone on Fiverr and have them handle it. This is especially true if you know you can work on something that will bring in more money than the virtual assistant costs. This is especially true for things like fiddling with website design and graphics that can probably be better done by someone else.

If you don’t want to pay for a virtual assistant, buy a tool to make the job faster for you. Automating certain activities with software is not cheating or spamming, so long as you use them similarly to how you would do the activity naturally. Use software like Bookmarking Demon or Miracle Traffic Bot to bookmark your best posts. Don’t bookmark the junk, just the good stuff. Programs such as Buyer Keyword Generator are good for finding keywords to use for your articles and marketing.

Any of these tools can be misused. But they’re also great for people who want to use them honestly to improve their business.

The point is to work smarter on your business. If you’re working on a lot of things that have no impact on your income and really don’t need your personal touch, try hiring them out. You might just cut down the number of hours you need to work while improving your income.

I talk sometimes here about the importance of outsourcing some of the work of your home business. It frees you up to do more important things. It adds up fast though, and with all the chatter about Fiverr.com, I thought I would take a look and share it here.

The basic principle is simple. People post what they are willing to do for $5. Anyone who is interested in that service can take them up on it. You can also post requests.

The range is simply amazing. It’s not all about helping people’s businesses. You can have someone sing to you for $5. But most of us should be interested in the practical side of getting something real accomplished for $5.

Is It Worth the Money?

Any time you have someone willing to work for cheap, you should be thinking about if it’s really worth the money. If they’re making big promises, the odds are good that the quality will be low. Something that you’re paying just $5 for should not be taking that person a couple of hours to get done.

On the other hand, I would expect many of the providers to be from places where $5 means more than it does here in the United States. That can be good if the project needs a little more time, but not so good if you pick someone whose English skills aren’t up to what you need.

Others may be college students looking for some quick cash.

Check feedback also. If someone has poor ratings, you aren’t going to want to hire them. Feedback is listed by the job, not the user, so check each job the person is offering to do to get a feeling for if he or she is good at their work.

Be very careful about the work you have done. You don’t want to risk anything that could damage your professional reputation if it is done poorly. For important things it is better to pay more and be more certain of the quality. The people at Fiverr are not likely to have a lot of experience, or they would be charging more elsewhere.

You need to be picky to protect yourself. The Fiverr Terms of Service says if a seller rejects your request, the $5 stays in your Fiverr account until you use it elsewhere in the site. You can’t just have Paypal reverse the charge or Fiverr will put your Fiverr account on hold.

What Would You Do for $5?

The flip side of this is that you can do little jobs for $5… err, $4 when you count just your share. The site takes a cut. What would you do?

Keep it simple and very much worth your time. You really shouldn’t offer to do anything that will take more than a half hour of your time at that price, ideally far less than that. Your time is valuable, even if you’re just trying to build up your skills.

You could also consider it an introduction to a service you offer or a way to build up a portfolio. Offer a basic service, and make sure clients know that you offer more extensive services if they like your work.

You’re not supposed to share your real email address with buyers or try to get paid outside of the Fiverr service.

You could offer a short article for $5 for example, and direct clients to consider your better writing services if they want more. Or you could do some basic social media marketing and have more social media work you could do for them if they like the basic.

You can also break up a service or ebook you are already selling, and sell the parts for $5 each. This could be great for selling digital products where each one doesn’t cost you much more time than what it cost to make originally. You just have to figure out what’s worth $5.

The best source for ideas is to look at what others are offering at Fiverr. There will be competition for anything you do.

Whatever you do, don’t sell your skills for less than your time is worth. You aren’t going to be happy if you work too long for so little money. There are people making Tweets and posting on Facebook pages for $5, and people are buying their services.

You can withdraw your earnings at any point. Originally you had to have earned at least $40, but they have lifted that limitation, and you can take your earnings whenever you want.

A lot of bloggers got a harsh lesson on not relying on free hosting this weekend. More than 73,000 blogs were shut down with no warning by law enforcement officials. It’s not clear what happened to cause them to shut down Blogtery, but it’s a good lesson on not trusting free hosting… or any hosting, really. You have to protect your business yourself.

If you want what details are available, try the discussion on WebHostingTalk, this story on CNet, and this one on Read Write Web.

What’s the Lesson?

The big lesson here is to always, always have backups of your site. Shut downs can happen for much less reason than law enforcement ordering them down. Free hosts can take your site down just because, if that’s what they want to do.

Sites get taken down from Blogger for spamming, DMCA violations and sometimes for reasons that are hard to understand. Sites get shut down on WordPress.com because the owner was caught using affiliate links, even when they almost never did it. These are things that can happen to you on any free host at any time.

But even with paid hosting you should be taking regular backups of your data. After all, the owners of Blogtery were paying for their hosting, then suddenly lost it, and they’re saying they don’t have it all backed up.

There’s a simple WordPress plugin that will do it for you on whatever schedule you set. You don’t have to do a thing, just tell it where to email the backup.

When your site disappears, for whatever the reason, and you don’t have backups, your work is gone. You can try to use Google’s cache to retrieve some of it, or Archive.org, but you can’t be certain of getting it all back.

Your backups are your one defense from complete disaster if something happens with your hosting.

Don’t Just Backup Your Site

So long as we’re on the subject, don’t just backup your site. Backup your computer, more than one way.

I keep an external hard drive on my desk that backs up my computer regularly. But in case of a natural disaster that really isn’t enough.

Look into offsite backup options. There are a lot out there. Find one that fits your budget. Some, such as SafeCopy Backup offer a limited amount of space for free. You can also use Amazon’s S3 service to backup your computer. MozyPro is another alternative for businesses.

Another option is to store a backup at a trusted friend or relative’s home, and update it periodically. This isn’t easy, but it’s a good option if you don’t want to trust an online company with your data.

However you do it, protect all of your data, both the online parts of your business and the data you keep at home. Minimizing the chances for trouble always makes sense.

It’s easy to let motherhood take over your entire day. There’s a lot to get done, and kids don’t take weekends off from being kids. It’s easy to skip taking a little time for ourselves, and such a help when we can manage it.

It doesn’t take a lot of time to yourself to feel better. Even a short break can work wonders at decreasing your stress level. You may not even need to leave the house to take a break… although getting out on your own feels really good!

1. Get enough sleep.

This is really hard if you have a baby who still wakes up in the night. You can’t always do anything about getting enough sleep. But try.

Don’t get caught up in making everything perfectly set up for the next morning. Prepare what must be ready before the next day, but make sure you’re giving appropriate responsibilities to your husband and to your children. Having things go smoothly in the morning helps them too!

2. Get some exercise.

This doesn’t have to be strenuous. A walk is a good excuse to get out of the house on your own, and is a nice, light form of exercise that fits in all budgets. Or you can take advantage of your gym membership if you have one.

3. Go do something you enjoy.

Once in a while, get out to do something on your own that you enjoy. Go to the spa, a movie, the library, get out with friends, just do something!

4. Read a book.

Take some time for that novel you’ve been meaning to read. A bit of time reading something you want to read just for pleasure is good for you and a good example for your kids.

5. Take a relaxing bath.

Add some bubbles to the water or your favorite bath bombs and just relax. Maybe give yourself a facial if that’s your style. This is easiest after the kids are in bed if you don’t want them pounding on the door. I make no promises as to the behavior of your husband. He’s your problem.

6. Work on your hobbies.

What do you like to do? Motherhood is no excuse to give up all of your hobbies, even if it limits the time you have available. You’re still a woman with interests outside of your beautiful, charming, fascinating children, and you should take time to indulge that side of yourself often.

7. Take a class.

You know how good it is for children to take classes on topics they love, why not do the same for yourself? Community colleges offer a good range, and most areas have a community center you can also find short class offerings for a wide range of interests.

8. Take some time with your husband.

If you’re married, making time for your husband is a part of making time for yourself. Who else makes you feel like he does? Go have fun together without the kids.

What do you think about when you think about selling something? Is it a good image? Do you picture yourself giving the information someone needs to make a decision on buying the right product or do you think stereotypical skuzzy used car sales tactics?

Truth be told, you’ll see both online. There’s the site that gives great information and makes you really want to buy, and it’s the right purchase in the end. Then there’s the site that hypes things up so much that you just have to buy from them but it turns out to be a really bad decision.

Which site would you rather be? Which kind of business would you rather be?

Hopefully, you’d rather be a trusted resource. I’ve met people who had no problems scamming others, and I have no respect for that sort. I don’t care if you’ve been scammed; that doesn’t give you the right to scam others.

Being a Good Online Salesperson

It’s not easy being a good salesperson online. People can’t look you in the eye. You have to anticipate what people need to hear from you.

It’s not like being a good salesperson in a store. You can’t pick up an item and talk about it or let the customer examine it themselves.

You don’t want to sell like a salesperson. You want to sell as a friendly authority on your niche.

I know that hype works online. You can see hyped up sales letters all over the internet. But it’s not the only thing that works, and it repels a lot of people even as it attracts others.

Choose the right niche and you won’t need hype. You can provide solid information about whatever it is you’re offering, and people will appreciate it when they find your site.

If the product is exciting, it’s fine to show your excitement about it. Just keep it honest.

Don’t be afraid to point out problems with the product. We all know that nothing is perfect. The little negatives that even a quality product has is something you can point out in a review or sales pitch. That just tells your visitors that you’re being honest.

If you’re selling a physical product, pictures are a good idea as well. People like to see what they’re shopping for.

If you really like what you’re trying to sell, it’s not going to feel like sales. It will feel like telling your friends why you love the product. That’s still sales, but it’s a type that most people are comfortable with.