I haven’t been terribly productive these past few days lately. It’s one of the times of year that I kind of enjoy a lack of productivity. Preparing for Halloween around here is always fun.

The big distraction has been making my son’s costume. He wants to be a spider-monkey. The hyphen is deliberate, not a typo. He likes Ben 10, and I told him I couldn’t match the character, but I could do something with the idea. The costume will pretty much make him look like a spider with a tail, since I haven’t figured out any monkey ears yet, and the costume is in shades of blue, and not at all furry, save for the tail. But he loves the work I’ve done, and how the costume looks.

My daughters’ costumes are easier. Merely a little time consuming finding all the right accessories. Fairies are simple costumes to handle, even when they aren’t entirely off the shelf.

Now I just have the decorating, and of course all the activities for Halloween itself to get through. Good thing I enjoy this holiday, or that I’m not getting my usual work done would be driving me more crazy than it is.

The flexibility that often comes with working at home is great. You can really be there for your kids when they need you.

The only problem is that sometimes other parents want you to be there for their kids too much. A little is one thing but too much interferes with your work schedule and can feel like a burden. It’s really hard to say no once the habit is built, but sometimes you have to.

Then there are your own family and friends who can expect that you’ll be able to help them out whenever they need it. This can be incredibly disruptive to your daily routine, but when they know your schedule is flexible, they don’t like to take no for an answer.

When to Say No

We all like to help our family and friends when they need us. The problem is defining when they need our help versus times that they need to find another solution because it’s taking too much of our own time. You have to know it’s okay for you to speak up when you can’t help out because it doesn’t fit in your own schedule.

Watching someone else’s kids is one of the most common issues for work at home moms, and whether it works for you or not depends on the situation. Watching a baby takes a lot more care than watching an 8 year old who plays well with your own 8 year old, and that’s a very different situation from watching an 8 year old who doesn’t get along with your own 8 year old.

The main point to remember is that if you don’t take your at home job or home business seriously, no one else will. If watching someone’s child or children interferes with your ability to earn a living, that’s a problem. You can’t watch their child, or at least not without appropriate compensation, and if you earn enough from your work, there may not be reasonable compensation that can be paid for the loss of work hours. Not that you can’t be there for emergencies, but when daily or even weekly visits don’t work out, speak up!

Even if you aren’t earning much, your ability to work and eventually create an income makes your work time worth something. Don’t treat your business as less than serious just because the income isn’t there yet, and don’t let anyone tell you it’s less just because the income isn’t there. The income won’t be there until you make your business work. That takes serious, focused work time. You can’t be doing too many things for others when you need to do your own work, just as you wouldn’t if you were working a job outside the home.

In fact, that’s not a bad criteria in a lot of cases. If you wouldn’t be taking time off work to help from an outside the home job, is it a situation where you should be taking time off your at home work? You should be treating your at home work just as seriously.

When to Say Yes

Sometimes you’re going to say yes when people ask you for help. Hopefully it’s something that fits into your work schedule, so you can still get the work done while helping someone who needs it. Other times, it’s just that the need is that great.

When it comes to watching someone else’s kids, sometimes it’s to your benefit to agree to help. That would be when having another child or children over means your own will need you less, and so you can work more. That usually doesn’t work out if done on a daily basis, in my experience, but occasional friends over have given me some wonderfully quiet days with my older kids. They’re having too much fun with friends to be trying for my attention. Better yet, friends often want to trade times, so you can get still quieter time by having your kids at their friend’s house. That can be worth a little lost work time.

Overall, the most important thing to remember is that you have to take your work seriously to get others to take it seriously. That’s how you can decide when to help out and when to remind people that you’re working just as they are.

The biggest problem with working at home is getting started. It’s tough! There are more scams than real opportunities out there, and lots of people get sucked in, not knowing any better. There has to be a way to spot a work at home scam, right?

Actually, there are several ways.

There’s no way to 100% guarantee you won’t fall for a scam, but many are so obvious that you can avoid them just by paying attention.

1. Ridiculously high pay.

If the pay is amazingly high for the amount of effort, it’s probably a scam. Thousands of dollars a month for easy, part time work – scam!

2. No resume required.

Real employers want to know about your past work experience. They are not going to hire every person who contacts them. They want the best person for the job, and your resume is a part of how they screen out the people they know they don’t want.

Scammers don’t much care about your resume. They don’t care about your past work experience. They want to suck you in quickly and get your personal information and/or money. Resumes are nothing to scammers.

3. Call for information.

Work at home positions don’t have people for you to call for more information. Real businesses are too busy with their business to deal with that many job seekers. When it’s a work at home job on the line, there will be a lot of people calling if there’s a number available, and employers know it.

Scammers want to talk to you. How else are they going to get you to bite? They want to appeal to your dreams of an easy work at home job with high pay. That’s easier to do with personal contact.

4. Ad says “work at home.”

For the most part, legitimate work at home positions are labeled as “telecommute” positions. It’s certainly not a featured part of the ad. Real employers want the best person for the job, not the one who first notices the chance to work at home and then the job requirements.

Scammers know people type things like “work at home” into job boards and search engines. Having that phrase feature prominently in the ad is one way to get your attention.

5. “No Experience Necessary.”

Sure, there are jobs out there that don’t require experience. There aren’t many of them in the work at home world, however. Working at home is demanding, and employers want to know that you have at least some sort of work experience, preferably in the industry you’re about to start working in. If experience isn’t an absolute necessity, they may something more along the lines of “entry level position.”

Scammers, once again, don’t care about your work experience. They count on your desperation to find some sort of work at home.

6. Vague job listing.

One of the great things about the internet is that employers can give details about what they’re looking for in an employee. It’s not like it was when job ads were usually in the newspaper, and space came at a premium.

These days you should expect to see specific skill and/or experience requirements in job ads. Employers don’t want tons of resumes from people who aren’t remotely qualified for the position. They want to hear from people who have as many of the skills listed as possible and a willingness to earn the rest.

Scammers don’t need to give a lot of information. They know the suckers are going to contact them anyway.

7. Pay to show your interest.

Scammers love to talk about how many people are interested in their opportunity. That’s why they need you to send them some money to show that you’re serious about the opportunity. It gets rid of all the people who aren’t serious about this fantastic opportunity you’re going to miss out on if you don’t send in your money.

When was the last time you heard about a company wanting people to pay to apply? Never sounds about right.

8.They want your bank account information.

Some scams will ask for your bank account information, saying they want to direct deposit your pay. Direct deposit is a wonderful thing, you get your money faster, but be careful in sharing your banking information with anyone.

If you want direct deposit for your pay, make absolutely certain the opportunity is legitimate first. You may have to work a while and receive paper paychecks for a time to be certain if the company is not well known. Even if you have researched the company, make sure you’re really dealing with who you think you’re dealing with, as some scams steal the names of legitimate companies to gain your trust.

Most home business owners will have months where their income isn’t so great. It’s a part of growing your business. The problem comes when your income isn’t enough to meet your expenses for the month. Suddenly you’ve got trouble. What can you do?

Cut Back

The first thing you can look at is cutting back where possible. How much of this you need to do depends on how often you aren’t meeting expenses and by how much.

If it’s just by a little and not too often, you can probably make it up next month without too many worries. Just don’t rely on those credit cards too much, as the interest adds up rapidly.

Figure out where you can cut back by writing out all of your expenses, both personal and professional. This list will give you a visual reference to see what you don’t need to spend money on while your income is down. Some of the little things, such as eating an occasional meal out, can be cut with little trouble.

Business expenses are more challenging. Some things you cannot cut without seriously damaging or destroying your business. Other things are a help, but depending on how your business is doing, you may need to cut them for a time. This may include tools that make your life a bit easier but require a monthly subscription, services you use, or freelancers you’ve hired. If you don’t have the money at the time, you may need to quit using them until things pick up.

This is a classic problem for any business, as it’s easier to make money with all the right tools. You’re more productive with the right kind of help, and cutting back can slow down your recovery. Think carefully and decide if the cuts are the right ones to make, or if you need to find a better way to handle your money flow problems.

Look around for free options for things you pay to do now. They won’t always be there, but there are amazing things available online for free. You may lose some features, but so long as you can get the most important features for free, the switch can be worthwhile. That won’t be true every time, so think carefully before you make the switch.

Earn More

Yeah, this one’s obvious. If you aren’t earning enough, you need to start earning more. Easy to say, hard to put into practice.

Sometimes you can do it. It may mean taking focus away from your core business for a time, but you may be able to do it.

You can write articles for other people, for example. You can offer something that takes minimal effort for you to do on sites such as Fiverr… very minimal effort, as the pay is minimal. Find some sort of freelance work you can handle for a time, ideally work that won’t take all of your available work time, so you can still run your business.

If things are really, bad, you may have to consider the dreaded job. It’s not pretty, but sometimes to make your business work you have to deal with a regular job for a time. Just make sure the job pays enough to be worth the added expenses you may face, such as childcare if you have children. Not all jobs are worth it.

If you have anything you can sell, that’s another way to bring in some quick money when you really need it. Selling excess stuff you own also helps get rid of the clutter around the house.

Work extra hours on your core business if at all possible. This is where you want your income to be coming from in the long run. All the things you do to get some quick money so that you can survive can be dropped once you have your core business where you need it to be. It’s hard work, but if you’ve chosen your business well, it will be worth it in the long run.

Most home businesses don’t grow themselves. You have to do a lot of work to make it happen. It’s generally difficult and not always as much fun as you would like it to be. It’s easy to get bogged down in the day to day stuff that doesn’t really do a lot to grow your business, but you feel needs to get done.

What if you rethink your priorities? What if you find a way to handle the parts that don’t really grow your business in less time so that you can focus more on what your business needs in order to grow?

Analyze What Works

You can’t focus on what works best for your home business if you don’t know what it is. You can take your best guess, but if you’re wrong you’ll still be stuck spinning your wheels.

First you need to consider which criteria are most important to you. Traffic to your website could be one, as could return on investment. So could the amount of time the work takes for the income generated, which is important for free methods.

Many activities are important, but won’t directly generate income. Researching niches to find ones that are likely to be profitable is important, but it’s not going to bring money in by itself. It’s the action you take with that vital information that brings in the money, yet without that research you’ll have trouble figuring out what’s going to be worth your time.

Most often, you’ll need to focus on marketing and other activities that bring people to your business. If it’s a website, you’ll need to keep it updated with current information.

The catch here is to not focus excessively on things that can be handled quickly. Don’t get sucked into your email inbox too many times a day. Don’t log on to Facebook, for example, to take care of your business’s page, and then goof off for a half hour reading personal things. Save that for a more appropriate time.

These things can be profitable, but they can also eat away at your day. Prevent that as best you can.

What About the Other Stuff?

You can’t completely ignore the other aspects of running a home business, even when they don’t bring in money for you. You have to handle your taxes and business related paperwork. You have to handle whatever customer service is necessary to your business model.

Some things you can limit how often and how long you work on them. If you enjoy participating on forums that allow you to have a link in your signature to your website, don’t let it eat too more into your day than it’s worth. Same for email. Same for all sorts of social media marketing.

If outsourcing is in the budget, it can be worth the expense, as it gives you more time to work on the profitable parts of your business. Don’t consider it impossible. Reinvest some of your earnings in your business. Get the help you need so that you can work on the things that matter to you.

Don’t Think of Your Business as Just a Home Business

Sure, your business is at home. That doesn’t mean the world needs to know about it, unless that’s your niche.

Getting out of the “just a home business” mindset can be a big help in growing your business. You still need to present a professional appearance, and trumpeting your home based status doesn’t say professional to many. Just be a business. Particularly when you’re online, few really care if you’re a one person operation at home or a larger business. It’s the value that you provide that makes the difference.

Find what gets you into the mindset of being a professional, no matter where you work. It might be dressing the part. It might be setting office hours (which are a pretty good idea in any case). It might be as simple as saying to yourself “time to work.”

If you feel professional, you’re more likely to act professional. That can be a help in growing your business too.

There’s no magic key to growing your business, no one thing that will work 100% of the time. Work on the things that are more effective to you and pay attention to the results you get for the best chances at making it all work.