One of the main reasons why there are so many work at home scams out there is that so many people want to work at home, yet relatively few jobs are available. At home job seekers become desperate, and will try anything to find work.

You don’t have to be quite so desperate if you’re willing to think more like an entrepreneur, even when you’re after more of a job than a business opportunity. Some of the best work at home jobs are the ones you find by asking around, rather than waiting for a job to be listed. There’s less competition that way.

The first thing to do is assess the skills you have and prepare a solid resume. You want to seek out work that you’re well qualified to do, so that potential employers are comfortable with the idea of having you do the work from home.

Don’t Limit Yourself to the Lists

There are plenty of websites that list companies that are known to hire work at home employees. I have a list here myself. But that doesn’t mean these companies are your only or even best choices for your job hunt. After all, they’re better known and that means you may face more competition in your search.

You can check the major job boards, Craigslist and so forth for jobs, but be aware that scams can be anywhere. You can also search using Google or any other search engine using terms such as “this is a telecommute position,” “this is a virtual position,” “will have the option to work from home,” “work can be done remotely from home” and so forth. Get off the beaten path and you improve your chances.

The Internet May Not Be the Best Source of Work at Home Jobs

It’s pretty easy to use the internet to look for work at home jobs… aside from all the scams, that is. It’s a pretty good source for some types of work in particular, such as freelance writing. But for other types of work, you may be better off contacting local small businesses about their needs.

Data entry and bookkeeping are two places where you may be able to help a local small business from your home rather than seek out work online. Many small businesses need help in these areas, but may not want to hire a full time, on location employee to handle it.

Look up local companies online, in the phone book or even just walk up and see if they’ll take your cover letter and resume. Not all of them will be at all interested in having someone work for them from home, but some will see the advantages.

You will need to consider whether you’re wanting to be an employee or an independent contractor. There are differences, and they’ll determine in part how you approach potential employers, as well as certain legal and tax issues you will face.

However you search for your work at home job, don’t give up just because they aren’t easy to find. It takes determination and persistence to land a job pretty much anywhere; there’s no reason to expect working at home to be any different. Just remember the reasons why you’ve decided you’d rather work at home and keep trying until you make it.

No matter how carefully you run your online business, sometimes stuff goes wrong. An important account gets deleted or suspended, a prime source of income vanishes, your rankings in the search engines go poof. It’s just not possible to control all the things that can go wrong with your business when there’s so much out of your personal control. What’s your backup plan?

The Easy Stuff

While not entirely painless, backing up your business data is the easy part. You should always have backups of everything on your site made regularly and in your control. There are WordPress plugins you can use for your WordPress sites, and it’s not too hard to export a backup of any MySQL database if you have access to phpMyAdmin. If you do this regularly, you’ll be prepared if something goes wrong with your hosting.

Backups are something you should make for any hosted service you use – your autoresponder, your websites, GMail or other online email services you use, anything where you have the power to back up the data, you should.

But don’t just backup your data at home. It’s smart to use an online backup service such as Mozy to ensure that you’ll have access to your data if something goes wrong with your computer at home. Computers don’t last forever, they get viruses, a natural disaster strikes… stuff happens. An online backup can save you the loss of a lot of data.

Protecting Your Income

Protecting your income is much more difficult, but just as necessary. It’s why they say to not put all your eggs in one basket, although until you know how to make your business work you may need to stick to one basket. You need to have alternatives ready.

Just look at how easy some online income sources are to lose. People get banned from AdSense. Amazon drops affiliates due to tax laws being passed in your state. A merchant goes out of business. Paypal suspends your account for no reason you can understand. Suddenly you’re scrambling to make up income that seemed secure so long as your site had traffic. The traffic hasn’t vanished, but the income source goes away.

You should always know your income alternatives. Where else can you earn money in your niche and how can the money be sent to you? Can you talk to someone and get your account back?

Protecting Your Traffic

Your typical online business isn’t much without traffic to your website. Kind of hard to make a living with out traffic, yet so many sources aren’t entirely within your control. Try as you might, there’s only so much you can do about search engine rankings, and other forms of online marketing also rely on other sites you use to promote your own.

So what happens when you lose that Twitter account with all the followers, or that YouTube, Facebook or forum account? What if you get banned from your favorite pay per click search engine? What if you lose your search engine rankings?

When accounts are banned or suspended, sometimes you can talk to someone and get the account back, other times you’re just out of luck. You’ll have to make up that traffic someplace else.

Your traffic may well be one of the hardest parts of your online business to protect, making it the most important to have a wide range of sources for it. You don’t want to lose more of your income than necessary just because something goes wrong with one traffic source. You want multiple sources, and the more that drive significant traffic, the better.

Any time you permanently lose a valuable source, it’s important to look at it as a challenge. How can you not only make it up, but make it better? There are always alternatives, better and worse; you have to figure them out.

Obey the TOS and You’ll Mostly Be Okay

For the most part, you aren’t going to have a problem if you obey the Terms of Service for the various providers you rely upon in your online business. Follow the rules and you usually won’t have a problem. But once in a while the rules will change or a business will go under, and you’ll find yourself in trouble. It’s better to be prepared as best you may for contingencies.

Have you taken steps to protect your business? What’s your backup plan?

I was talking with my daughter the other day about a playdate she’d had with a friend. It was fun she said, except when she hurt her knee. I told her what I usually tell her about getting minor scrapes when playing, that if you don’t get hurt once in a while, you probably aren’t having enough fun.

That may sound a little callous to some, but it’s true, for children and for working on your online business. If kids don’t sometimes get hurt when they’re playing, they’re probably not being active enough or taking enough chances. Minor bumps, scrapes, even the occasional and unfortunate broken bone may be a part of childhood. When they go out and do things, they take the chance that they might get hurt. That’s good for kids because it teaches them their limits, and as a parent you can only hope that the limits you set are enough to keep the hurts minor. Whether they get hurt or not, kids expand their knowledge and abilities by taking chances and doing things they haven’t yet mastered.

It’s rather like how you run your business. You can set limits on how you run it to keep yourself from getting hurt, but the best parts of having your own business come from taking risks.

Stay in Your Safe Zone and Watch Your Business Decline

The problem with playing it safe with your business is that it’s too easy for it to decline. What works now doesn’t always continue to work. You have to take chances to keep your home business growing.

I don’t mean you should take wild chances with your online business. You wouldn’t expect your toddler to perfectly cross a balance beam the first time they saw one, but you would expect an older child to do better, as they have the skills to keep their balance better. Similarly, you wouldn’t want to take your online business in an entirely new direction that you aren’t prepared for. It wouldn’t be a smart chance to take.

However, there are plenty of smart chances to take. Hopefully you feel that starting your business was one of them, even if you aren’t having as much success as you’d like yet.

It’s smart to try new marketing tactics, so long as you think about how you’re using them. Think about new ways to reach your target market. Where do they go that you could get your name in front of them? How much time and/or money will you need to risk to contact them there?

There are many other risks you can take with your business, both small and large. Even making what feels like a minor change to your site can make a huge difference. But if you don’t take the chance and make that change, you won’t know if you would benefit from it or not.

Sure, jumping right in and taking a chance will sometimes work out amazingly. You might find that something you did for your business on a whim just worked out for you. It’s great when that happens. But more often such risks don’t turn out right. If you’re lucky, it’s easy to turn back and keep your business running the old way, but sometimes you can permanently damage your business with a poorly chosen, poorly planned risk.

There are simply different levels of risk. What seems overly risky at first glance may turn out to be quite workable if you take a little time to plan out how you’re going to do it. What looks utterly sensible may turn out to be a bad idea when you take a closer look. Either one is a risk, but you won’t know which is the right one until you take a better look.

Your attitude toward risk is a part of what will determine your success. If you never take any chances with your business, you probably won’t even get started. You have to work past the challenges that each new risk puts in your way and make it all work.

What Kinds of Risks Will You Take?

If you feel like your business is just sitting there, and you’re getting frustrated with it, or even if you think things are going great, it’s probably a great time to take a chance on doing something different with your online business. Here are just a few things you can take a chance on that might help your business grow. Or they could be a waste of time or money. Only way you’ll know is to try.

Offering a new product.
Trying a new social network.
Contacting a bigger blogger in a related niche and offering to write a guest post.
Contact current and old customers with a related offer.
Change your price structure.
Tweak your website design.
Be more direct about recommending products on your blog.
Write an ebook.

One of the big events for most kids as they grow up is when they’re first allowed to stay home alone. It’s a mark of maturity and parental trust. The hard part for the parents is deciding when it’s appropriate and for how long.

State Law

The laws on when kids can stay home alone vary from state to state, but most states decline to give an actual age requirement. Many do give recommended ages, which can range from age 8 to 14. Considering that most places kids can start babysitting at age 12, I consider older than that to be overly strict on the state’s part, but that’s what you have to consider when you’re making this decision.

A part of the rules effective in your state will depend on how safe the situation is. Being home alone for a while during the day is very different from being home alone all night.

If you aren’t sure about the guidelines or laws in your state, your local CPS agency can tell you about the the rules they recommend following.

Maturity of Your Child

The simple truth of the matter is that some kids are ready to be left home alone sooner than others. You know your children best and know when they’re ready to be left home alone for short periods and when it’s okay to increase how long you’ll be gone.

You should be confident that your child won’t break any of the rules you set for when you’re gone, such as having friends over, answering the door and so forth. They should also be prepared to deal with minor problems and know what to do in case of an emergency. They should know how to reach you at need. Cell phones are wonderful in this regard, as it makes it much easier for a child to reach a parent who is out and about.

Siblings

A child with older siblings able to watch him or her can stay home without a parent younger than one without older siblings present. A child needing to watch younger siblings will need to be older before being allowed to watch them without parents home. Taking care of yourself and siblings is a much bigger deal than just taking care of yourself.

How Long?

How long are you going to leave your kids alone matters too. You can trust kids while you run a quick errand younger than you might trust them to be alone for a few hours.

They’ll also need to be a bit older if food preparation is required. Snacks may not be so difficult to deal with once rules are agreed upon, but if a meal needs to be prepared, even if just in the microwave, there’s more responsibility required of your child.

What Options Do You Have?

Sometimes you aren’t entirely happy about leaving your child home alone, but you don’t have other options. If your child isn’t ready to be home alone, you will need to find a way to deal with that. You may need to talk to a family member, friend or neighbor about helping you out, or hire a babysitter. Sometimes you can arrange a play date with one of your child’s friends when you need to get out without your child. If leaving your child alone isn’t the right choice, you’re going to have to pick an alternative and make it work.

When it comes right down to it, guidelines or no guidelines, and even state law, you know best when your child is ready to be left home alone and for how long. If you don’t feel your child is ready when the law or guidelines say they can do it, you don’t have to push the matter.

Some people consider summer to be the slow season for home business. Moms are busier with their kids out of school, and there’s just so much warm weather to enjoy that it’s easy to slack off. Just because it’s easy doesn’t mean you should, however.

Not All Businesses Slow Down Significantly

Perhaps the biggest reason to not slow down the work you do on your business during the summer is that not all businesses experience a slowdown. You don’t know if a slowdown is due to it being summer or due to less effort on your part if you just take it for granted.

If you assume your business is going to slow down, it probably will. It takes effort to keep most businesses going. It’s certainly nice if the money keeps coming in even when you take a break, but you may damage your business if you simply assume a part of it is gone for the summer. That part may take longer to build back up in the fall.

Take Advantage of Any Slow Times to Improve Your Home Business

Let’s say your business does slow down significantly over the summer. Where does it say that means you should put in less effort?

If things are quieter for your business, it’s a great time to work on the parts you may not always have had time to get done. Try improving your marketing skills, update your website and networking with others in your industry. Organize your office, files, computer and tackle that email box. There’s really no benefit to sitting around just because things have slowed down a teensy bit.

Take It With You

If you’re taking your family on vacation, you may not want to leave your business entirely behind. Online businesses still have to be monitored for problems, although you can hire a virtual assistant to take care of the basics. You can also carry business cards so that when the topic comes up naturally with the people you meet on your trip, you can hand your card to them.

Of course you don’t want to ruin your vacation by overdoing the business bit, but being prepared to deal with the parts that are reasonable is a good plan. You’ll be meeting people you never would have met if you stayed at home; why wouldn’t you take advantage of that?

Prepare for Christmas

Yes, that’s a scary word during the summer. You might not be thinking about Christmas yet or the sales you hope to make at that time of year. But there’s no reason to delay your planning for it. Work now to make your holiday season more profitable.