I get a lot of emails promoting the latest and greatest products for easy success at home. Going through my emails, just the subject lines, I have offers for “30 days to a $25,000 business,” “how he “snowballed” himself into his first $300K online,” “Make $557.22 every 24 hours,” “Sneak $86,143.08 on autopilot,” and “How Would You Like $5,539.95 In Just 24 Hours?”

Damn, I wish it were that simple. Really I do.

These guys are selling dreams, of course. We’d all love to see our money troubles vanish. Most of us would just be glad to have a home business that paid the monthly bills. It’s just not usually going to happen in 24 hours or even 30 days.

It takes work.

The people who have earned big bucks in a short period of time have usually been in business for some time. They know what they’re doing. They often have a list to sell to. They aren’t still trying to figure it all out.

They also aren’t telling you about their expenses, usually. Most of them don’t discuss their pay per click costs when they show you their supposed sales data, yet that’s a vital piece of the puzzle.

If you don’t know what was spent, you don’t know what was really earned. After expenses, earnings could even have been negative. You just don’t know.

Not to mention how easily sales data is faked. There are sites for that.

Is It Wrong to Put Your Business on Autopilot?

Not everyone is a fan of autopilot home business models. There’s autoblogging, for example, which too often is merely clutter for the search engines. It doesn’t tend to produce highly useful sites. The goal with something such as autoblogging is usually to get visitors, and therefore ad clicks or sales, nothing more.

At that, autoblogging usually cannot automate more than the postings on a blog. You’re still going to have to do work to get backlinks and such. It’s still not completely automated.

There are good ways to put parts of your business on automatic. Setting up a squeeze page that sends subscribers through an email series you’ve set up is a good use of automation. You can set up promotions and information to keep them interested to improve your chances of making a sale, yet be fairly hands off about your list.

AWeber and GetResponse are my two favorite autoresponders. They both offer good service with a lot of options so you can manage your list and the emails you send them.

You can set up standard responses to questions you get by email too. This allows you to hire a virtual assistant to handle routine emails, freeing you to work on other issues.

You should look into automating or hiring someone to do any kind of repetitive work which doesn’t require your personal touch. That allows you to focus on the important stuff.

Your social media marketing can be automated to a limited extent, at least if you intend to take fullest advantage of the social part of social media.

You can automate the tweeting of your blog posts, for example. There are a number of sites such as TwitterFeed and HootSuite that allow tweet posts from an RSS feed automatically. Alex King offers plugins for your WordPress blog to automate tweets.

If you share your login information with any service, as you would need to do to automate them, make sure they’re legit. You do not want your login information used for someone else’s purposes. That’s a great way to lose your Twitter account.

Just don’t expect great social results if all you do is send automated tweets. There’s more to Twitter than that.

Where’s My Autopilot Success?

Will automating aspects of your home business help you to succeed? Certainly. But they won’t guarantee it. Nothing guarantees success. The only thing you can do to improve your odds of success is to work hard, do your research on your topic, and not give up.

You might hit it lucky and succeed in a fairly short time. Then again, it could take months or years or not happen at all. Be prepared for whatever path your home business takes and don’t give up too easily.

Just a quick note to say that in all the craziness of the holiday season, I’m thankful for the opportunity to work at home. It’s tough to get things done this time of year, but it’s all worth it to be there for my family.

Recently I started reading a book about the history of women in America. We tend to have the idea that women in those days worked primarily in the home. It turns out that in pioneer times, colonial women were earning money for their families in any way that they could. Even if that meant starting their own businesses. Colonial women were running boarding houses, restaurants, trading posts, and even printing presses.

Since I’ve been working in self storage, I’ve met a lot of women. Actually, that’s a bit of an understatement. Some facility managers tell me that 70 percent, or more, of their customers are women. I’ve come to realize that women haven’t changed since colonial American times. They are still a business-savvy, resourceful bunch of entrepreneurs. They believe in keeping costs low and in maximizing profits. One, very sucessful, way to do that is to run a “business in a box” or a business headquartered in a self storage unit. These are some of the businesses I have found women running from storage facilities:

Internet Florist

I met a woman in Houston who runs a florist business from a climate-controlled self storage unit. Her orders all come in online, so she hasn’t felt the need for a storefront business that could take walk-in customers. Instead, she keeps her inventory in a clean, cool unit, fills her orders, and rents a small truck or van from the storage facility from time to time to make deliveries. Recently, she has started branching out into gift baskets for birthdays and holidays. I don’t know that her business will stay in a self storage unit forever (she may want to expand one day), but it certainly works for her now as she does what so many businesspeople are doing: keeping overhead low and riding out the recession.

Handmade Sundries

Not all knitters are women. I was sitting next to a man on a plane recently, and he was knitting a scarf out of hand-painted wool. He looked sort of sheepish about it, but he said that he had been trying to quit smoking and he needed something to do with his hands. Fair enough. Anyway, I commented on the beautiful wool yarn he was using, and he informed me that he had purchased it in, of all places, a self storage unit! Some self storage facilities have “garage” sales from time to time. He had gone to one, and met a woman who spun beautiful wool yarn that she dyed and painted herself. The wool came from the sheep that she was raising at her home in eastern Washington. She had space at home for her wool, but she also had several cats and she had gotten fed up with the cats getting into her yarns. At the same time, her business was growing, so she decided to expand. Now, in addition to her other businesses (I’ve learned that many women who work at home have several businesses that they run simultaneously which doesn’t surprise me a bit, especially in this economy), she has a “business in a box.” She takes her yarn, and items she makes using it, to arts and craft fairs and even advertises in the newspaper. Her regular clients, who have come to love her yarn, will even make appointments with her to buy more.

Specialty Books

As I mentioned before, many women run several businesses at once. A woman I met in Wisconsin ran at least four: she taught yoga, read tarot cards, sold crystals, and has a bookstore dedicated to books that fall into her specialty niche. She collects and sells both used and new books that are focused on metaphysical philosophy and spirituality, as well as alternative healing methods. Since she does not have time to stay in one place in a storefront, and also does not have the funds to support a full-time store in a heavy traffic area, she instead runs her business from the Internet…and keeps her inventory in self storage. She keeps both books and crystals in self storage, and is the only tenant I’ve ever known who took the time to arrange her storage unit according to principles of feng shui. She also has the most beautiful storage unit I’ve ever seen. I said to her one day, “If this is what your storage unit looks like, I can’t imagine how beautiful your home must be!” She just laughed and said that if she was going to spend a lot of time there, she wanted her surroundings to be nurturing. I can’t argue with that!

The Tupperware Model

Remember Tupperware parties? They still exist. Only women have branched out. Now they have book parties, kitchenware parties, educational toy parties, alternative health product parties, etc. I met one woman who runs a business selling essential oils. She is very committed to her oils and has built up a small clientele of like-minded individuals who are interested in having blends of oils to do everything from household cleaning to aromatherapy to room freshening to treating colds and flus. She keeps her inventory in her unit, but also uses it for mixing blended oils for clients and for holding orders that need to be delivered or picked up. Oils don’t take much space to store (they come in tiny bottles that have, at most, an ounce or two of fluid in them) so her business is almost literally a “business in a box” because she rents the smallest unit her facility offers. That’s what I call keeping overhead low!

I love seeing the creative ways that entrepreneurs find to start their own businesses with limited capital and in many cases, limited resources. What I see, especially with women who are trying to run businesses while also being at home for their children, is businesspeople who take the resources and skills that they have and find an imaginative way to use those skills and resources as tools that can support a brand new business. These businesses in some cases are so small and self-contained that I am not sure they should even be called small businesses. They are more like tiny businesses. But when I talk to entrepreneurs who run tiny businesses, what they tell me is that it’s not the size of the business, but the regular flow of income, that makes a big difference in the quality of their lives.

Art Gould is a division manager with Self Storage Company, which operates a group of websites, including a Arizona self storage locator. Art often travels between sites, from Texas to the Colorado self storage site, and in doing so has the opportunity to interact with a wide spectrum of customers, something he has found very productive for business.

There are a lot of obstacles to earning money from home. You have to decide what you want to do. You have to find your way around the scams. It’s not easy.

But the biggest challenge most of us face is simply taking action. We spend far too much time thinking about what we could be doing and not enough time doing. Even those of us already working at home often do this too much. I know I do. There are so many things I could be doing, things that it would not be impossible to make the time to do. The hardest step is actually doing it.

Many things can get in your way. Simple procrastination is the most common problem. It’s easier to procrastinate than it is to get things done. That’s true in many aspects of life, not just trying to earn money from home.

Procrastination isn’t the only thing that can stop you. Fear can too. It’s not just fear of failure either. Sometimes people can fear the potential for success just as much. It sounds odd, but it can happen. You may not always be certain of what you’ll do if you fail miserably or if you succeed wildly. They’re both pretty intimidating at times.

You may also stop yourself because you’re so focused on learning just exactly how you’re going to succeed that you never stop learning to start working.

The desire to get everything just perfect can keep you from getting started too. You may want to look just right before you launch your home business, and fail to realize that it’s keeping you from having any business at all.

No matter what’s keeping you from taking action, the time comes when you have to realize that you must take action or you won’t get anywhere. All these things that you’re letting stop you are just obstacles.

You can set aside time for the things you most use to procrastinate.

You can decide to face your fears.

You can always keep learning.

You can always improve the look of your website.

Give yourself that push and just take action. Whether it works out or not, you’re trying. That’s the only way you’ll have any chance at all at success..

One of the biggest pitfalls for a work at home mom is accepting very low pay for her work. The usual justification is that any money is better than none. It’s why people do jobs that pay a miniscule amount per click. It’s why they charge low rates for their professional quality work.

I get the desperation, I really do. You want to earn money from home, and it’s easier to to earn a tiny bit than it is to earn a living. But that doesn’t make it the best choice most of the time.

The problem is that too many work at home moms end up accepting rates that are below minimum wage. Not that they’re usually calculating the hourly rate, but when you work it out, it’s often much too low. It’s one thing to have low earnings when you’re starting a business and you just aren’t making a lot of sales yet. That’s the chance you take with a business, and if you’re working hard at growing your business, that should change over time.

It’s entirely different when someone is paying you to do a job for them. If they aren’t paying you what your work is worth, you’re not doing yourself any favors. If it takes you two hours to earn $5 or less, is there a problem with the way you’re working or with the pay you’re accepting?

When you work for absurdly low rates, you’re hurting yourself financially and you’re sending a message that low pay rates are just fine for you. Enough people do this online that many people expect to pay just a little for work that takes a significant amount of time.

I know that a part of the reason low rates are out there is that some people do live in places where low pay is reasonable. Their cost of living is significantly lower, and what’s insultingly low to me may be a great pay rate where they live. That’s the reality of the World Wide Web.

But when you take the jobs that don’t even pay your local minimum wage, or what would be considered fair pay for the job in your area, that’s a problem. You may be spending time on a poorly paying job while you could be looking for something that pays you what you’re worth.

That may be hard to think about when you just need money, any money you can get. Just remember that your financial problems will get better sooner if you can find a way to earn what you’re worth, rather than scraping for every dollar you can get. You may be exhausting yourself working on something that won’t pay much at all, and miss better opportunities.

If you really just need the money that badly, think about your other options. Is it time to work outside the home? Could you spend less time on the low paying junk and spend a little more time seeking out work that will pay what you’re worth? Is there some other way you could earn the money you need with less time and effort? Is there something you could cut back in your lifestyle that would give you enough of a break that you can focus on finding work that pays what you’re worth?