We’re heading into the holiday season, and that means lots of distractions. Shopping to be done, school events for the kids, parties… it’s all pretty hectic and when you work at home, that’s a problem. How can you keep on track with your work while still enjoying the holiday season?

Take Your Work Seriously

The first thing to do is to take your own work seriously. If something wouldn’t have been a distraction if you were working outside the home, should you let it distract you just because you’re working at home? Possibly so, possibly not.

One of the frequently stated advantages to working at home is the flexibility. This is the time of year to take advantage of that, so long as you don’t go overboard with it. Don’t skip work you can’t make up later, especially if it needs to get done. Take care of any obligations to your employer and/or clients. Forgetting them is not professional.

Know When to Say No

Too many people don’t understand that when you work at home, you aren’t always free to do things for them. You might be on the PTA/PTO and get a lot of requests to help out on committees, or you might have family or friends asking you to run favors. Just like the rest of the year, you need to know when to say no because you have to work.

This certainly doesn’t mean you say no to everything. If you can spare the time and want to get involved, do so. Just don’t do it at the expense of your work.

Rethink Your Schedule

Sometimes the schedule you usually keep won’t cut it during the holiday season. You may need to make more time for fun, shopping and so forth. Those work hours while the kids are at school, for example, may be better spent shopping for presents. Not every day, of course, but odds are you wouldn’t want to do all your shopping after the kids are in bed. Sometimes you have to make time during the day.

You may have to decide to stay up later or get up earlier so that you can handle daytime extras better. Pick whichever works best for you. I’m no early bird, so I stay up later if I can’t get things done during the day. That’s hard if I’m tired out from running errands or doing other things throughout the day, but it can be necessary.

That said, I love online shopping. No worry about store hours, I just do it when I feel like it. It doesn’t always replace shopping in person, but it’s a pretty good option most of the time.

This can be a great time to write out the things you need to get done each day even if you don’t normally do so. With a lot of extra things you need to do, sometimes you need just a little extra help in making sure you actually get it done. Writing it out may be just the boost you need.

Hire Help if Appropriate

Depending on the kind of work you do from home, you may be able to hire someone to help you get it all done. This is a great time to try hiring a virtual assistant for your business. It may add a little stress as you locate and train the right one, but it can be worth the effort.

Remember to Have Fun

Lots of people get far too stressed out about making the holiday season just perfect for their families. Don’t worry so much about perfect, just try to keep it fun.

Get out with your family and do something special, such as looking at holiday displays. Make a special treat together. Find something that fits into your schedule and make it special. It doesn’t have to be grand or expensive, just fun.

“Are you going back to work when all your kids are in school (grow up, etc.)?”

It’s a common question stay at home moms get, and not the most welcome one in a lot of cases. Many people assume that once your kids are in school, you don’t need to be a stay at home mom for them anymore, despite all the challenges of getting them to school and back home again after, coping with sick days and so forth. And certainly you won’t be staying home once all the kids are grown! What are you going to do once that time comes that you need to find a job when you’ve been spending years as a stay at home mom?

This can be a real dilemma, although it gets worse if suddenly you can’t be a stay at home mom anymore because your family needs more money coming in for one reason or another. Then it can be urgent.

I get this question here and there, even from fellow stay at home moms. In my case, I’m fortunate enough to have a business that I love and that may allow me to continue to stay at home, kids or no. We’ll see what the future holds. It doesn’t hurt, however, to plan ahead so you know what you’ll do when you’re no longer able to stay at home.

Keeping Up or Building Your Job Skills

What kind of work would you like to do when you’re no longer staying at home? Do you have a dream job you’d love to have? What would it take to get you into that job?

If it’s a job you had before you became a stay at home mom, you may have skills you need to keep up. There may be journals in your field you should be reading to keep up on the latest, or short classes you can take here and there to maintain your skills. These are the kinds of things you might be doing even if you were working in the industry now, and there’s little reason to give it up just because you’re at home now. Hopefully they’ll come in handy again in the future.

If you have a dream job you’d like to get into when the kids are old enough, at what point should you start taking classes to help you in that direction? Are classes available online that you could take while watching your kids?

For example, I have considered the possibility that I’ll go into Instructional Design someday. I took a course in that in college, and it was a lot of fun. My college had a Master’s Degree program for it, so if I want to do that in the future, I’ll have to look at how I’d qualify for that program.

Look into any grants or scholarships you may qualify for when you’re getting ready to go back to school. There are grants available in some places for homemakers who want to build marketable skills. Check with your local colleges to see if something is available to you to help with the costs. An online search can help too, just be careful of scholarship scams.

Working from Home

Many stay at home moms keep their skills or build up new ones by working at home. You can find a job you can do from home, freelance for a variety of clients or start your own business. This is the option I took, and I’m glad of it, as it has allowed me to stay home with my kids even when my husband was laid off work, plus  I’m continuing to pay into Social Security in the hopes that it will continue to be there.

Even if you believe you’re always going to stay at home, earning some amount of income is a good idea. Not only do you never know what’s going to happen in the future, you need some way to save for retirement. If you aren’t earning your own money, make sure to take some of your husband’s income for a retirement account. Odds are you’ll need it someday.

I like working from home. It’s rough getting things started, but for me it has been well worth the trouble. I’ve had pathetic months where my earnings have been miserable, and great ones where I’ve earned more than my husband, all while being there for our kids.

I have skills now that I could use in a job outside the home if I had to. If it comes down to it, I might still go for that, but I could certainly show a potential employer that I could help them with certain online parts of their business. It’s not a bad skill to have. Alternatively, I could brush up my old medical transcription skills, although I’d have to learn to cope with electronic medical records.

Earning some amount of your own money at home can be very good for the future of your career as well as your retirement. You may not want it to take over the time you mean to spend with your kids, but there are always early mornings, nap time, school time and/or night time to work if you want to be mostly focused on the kids during the day.

Setting Up Your Resume

The resume is the hardest part for a long term stay at home mom. You may not feel as though there’s much to put there, and just where are you going to get references anyhow?

The important thing to a potential employer is that they know you are truly interested in getting back to work. They don’t want to hear how you’re missing being with your kids or other such things. If you might have childcare issues, be upfront about that.

As a stay at home mom, you’ve done a lot of work keeping your family organized, dealing with finances, possibly you’ve volunteered at the school or other places. These things can be highlighted on your resume, along with any work you’ve done or classes you’ve taken to keep your job skills up to date. Volunteer work may be a good place to get references. Don’t be ashamed of having been a stay at home mom; just point out the skills you used as one. Skip silly titles for the work you do at home and go for realistic ones.

Remember to tweak your resume for each job you apply for. You want to emphasize the skills the job listing asked for. Focus more on skills than on dates, but have the dates available on your resume, as many employers still want to know. A flat out chronological resume may not be your best choice, but a combination format allowing you to emphasize your skills while giving employers access to the dates they may be interested in is often your best choice.

Don’t stress too much about keeping your resume down to a single page, but don’t make it excessively long either. These days you’re more likely to be sending your resume by email or through an online form.

Make sure you know how to write a good cover letter too. Some companies care about them, others don’t, but you usually won’t know that in advance.

Try a Temp Agency

If you just aren’t finding a permanent job of the sort you’d like, try a temp agency. Sometimes these jobs turn permanent, but even when they don’t, you’re building up your skills and making them more current while earning money. That’s far better than being out of work.

Don’t expect a temp agency to be the solution to your job search woes. They won’t always have work available to you immediately. They are simply another tool you can use as you look for a job.

Update Your Wardrobe

Make sure you have a reasonably current wardrobe appropriate to the type of work you’ll be doing. Just what you need depends on the job, and it may not be exactly what it was when you last worked outside the home. Many are more casual than they used to be. Fortunately, dressing up a little for interviews is still a good plan in many industries.

Returning to work after being a stay at home mom for a few years or more can feel pretty strange, but it’s entirely possible to make the transition. Search hard, prepare well and do your research before interviews.

It’s common for people who are trying to run an online business to buy information product and tools to help them do their work. It’s how you pick up information quickly, find out how to earn a living online, and get the work done more quickly than you would otherwise. The right product is a tremendous help to your online business.

Unfortunately, many people are disappointed when they buy information products or online tools. They aren’t what they expected. This leads to disappointment, frustration and refunds. While too often the problem is misleading information in the sales page, other times it’s your own fault. You didn’t read carefully enough to see if the product is really what you needed for your business.

Are You Just Skimming the Sales Page?

Most ways, skimming is a reasonable habit to have when you’re reading online. It’s often enough to give you the information you need. That’s why many sales pages use bullet points and otherwise break up the information about the product. It makes it easier for people to skim the page and get the basic information.

Skimming is fine when you’re deciding if there’s so much as a chance you’re interested in the product. Once you think you want it, you need to go back and read more carefully to make certain that you understand what’s really being offered. You might have missed something important in your quick skim of the page that could either make you want the product more or help you to realize that it’s really not what you’re after.

A good sales page gives you the information you need to decide whether or not you need the product. There are plenty of bad sales pages out there which don’t give you that information. I truly loathe the blind pages which make their product sound like the greatest thing ever without actually explaining what the product is. I won’t buy from such pages personally, and I’d suggest you don’t either.

Look at what the sales page says the product offers. Is that really what you’re after? Is there something you wish it would have that the sales letter doesn’t mention? Will that be a deal breaker?

A sales page can’t tell you everything perfectly, of course, although a well written one will tell you enough. If you’re left with questions, check for a “Contact Us” link on the page and ask the product creator your question. Not only will this hopefully get you the additional information you need before making your purchase, you’ll get a feel for if the product creator responds to customers. Sometimes that’s important.

After the Purchase

Once you’ve bought, make sure that you don’t just skim the product or the instructions for the product. You might miss something important. Take some time and get the most out of your purchase.

An information product detailing a certain way to earn money online, for example, may include steps the author recommends you follow. If you skim, you might miss a very important step which could have improved your chances of success.

If you bought a tool, skimming the instructions could mean you miss out on ways to make the most of it. Not everything is completely obvious, after all. I’m still learning more about how to use Market Samurai, and I’ve owned it for more than a year. In that case, there are videos to help, which take more time for me than reading, but then you can see exactly what to do. Either way, if I want to make the most of it, that’s what needs doing. I just watch at the time I’m ready to start using a different function of it.

Sometimes I still get caught off guard about how people see stay at home moms, even other stay at home moms. There’s this assumption that you aren’t really doing anything that happens all too much. I dealt with this problem recently with a fellow stay at home mom at my children’s school.

I was telling her how happy I was to finally have a way to get my volunteer hours in at the school with my toddler in tow. To get guaranteed admission for my kids into this new charter school, I had agreed to do 50 hours of volunteer work at the school. This has been a bit of a problem as she’s not allowed to be with me if I volunteer in the classrooms. However, as the school has a room for parents to work for the teachers while watching their younger children, I decided to see if I could do reading with individual students. Happily, they gave me permission to do that, so long as I don’t leave my little one alone in the room. She’s two, so that much was obvious to me.

The other mom congratulated me on having a new way to keep busy.

Busy? I thought I was busy. I’m raising 3 kids and have a reasonably successful online business. My life isn’t exactly quiet. Adding in reading with my son’s classmates makes my life busier, sure, but it’s not the only way I do that by a long shot.

I always wonder if these attitudes come about because so many stay at home moms don’t see their own work as work in that sense. It just has to be done, as though that makes it less valued than other sorts of work, and it’s certainly not enough to keep you busy.

I also don’t consider this sort of volunteering to be social time. I won’t even get to speak to the teacher much, since we’ll be in separate rooms, she’ll be busy with the kids in the classroom and I’ll be busy with each child she sends to me, plus my little one. I’ll be more interested in how many kids I can get through each day before my youngest gets too frustrated with the whole process. She loves listening to stories so I hope she won’t be too difficult, but she’s two. It happens.

I’m not a big believer in stay at home mom boredom. I don’t think most moms who really chose to stay at home are bored. If you are, it’s probably a good time to find something to add to your day, just don’t assume that I’m bored too. I have too many things I’ve chosen to add to my days for boredom to be a major part of my day.

You can read all kinds of rules about what makes for great website content. There are plenty of opinions out there on how long an article or blog post should be, the use of bullet points or lists, paragraph length and so forth. If that’s not your writing style, it can be hard to write in a way that others say is the best way to go. Is it really necessary to follow such rules when you’re writing for your site?

I don’t believe you need to do that. I follow one main rule when I write, which is to keep it interesting and informative. I suppose that could be phrased as two rules, but you get the idea. I don’t stress about article length, paragraph length, bullet points, etc. I’d rather be concerned with presenting the information clearly, in a way I can enjoy writing it, and that will hopefully attract readers.

Let’s take a look at some of these rules.

Rule 1: Write short articles and/or blog posts.

The idea here is that people have short attention spans online, and so you need to be able to make your point quickly, or you lose them. I firmly disagree with this one.

Write your articles and posts as long as they need to be for the topic. If 200 words is enough, they’re enough. Don’t overdo it. If 2000 words is what it takes, write those 2000 words. You may be able to break up such a long article into shorter articles, but sometimes you’ll feel better leaving it as one big article. Just relax. I know some people swear by the benefits of longer articles, as this allows for the use of more related keywords.

I believe that your ability to keep people interested is far more important than whether or not you write a long article. If it’s information they want and it’s well written, people will read long posts, even online.

Rule 2: Use bullet points or lists.

Yes, this post is written as a sort of list, but it works well for this topic. It doesn’t always work that way.

I’ll admit to a fondness for lists because they allow me to give visual separation to subtopics within a post, which is supposed to make them more readable. That’s certainly a good thing. Just don’t drive yourself up the wall trying to find a way to make a post into a list or bullet points if it doesn’t work out that way.

Rule 3: Write short paragraphs.

This rule comes from the idea that shorter paragraphs are easier to read online. It’s probably true enough, but that doesn’t mean a short paragraph should be a firm rule.

Look instead at what is a logical length for the paragraph. Is it expressing your complete thought? You shouldn’t be chopping up a paragraph into two or three paragraphs just because you read that shorter paragraphs are better. You should be writing paragraphs that make sense as a whole.

Rule 4: Go for the controversy.

Some people are big on going for controversy as a way to bring traffic to their websites. It can work. Having an opinion online is a good thing. Just be sure you express it well.

You certainly don’t want to introduce a controversial topic and then not state your own opinion. Discussing and even sympathizing with both sides is good, but have an opinion of your own. You don’t have to agree with everyone. Just back up your opinion with facts or reasons why you believe it.

Having an opinion doesn’t mean you have to be offensive about it, although if that’s your persona, go for it and be ready for battle. Some people enjoy that, and others don’t. It’s not my style, but that just means I don’t go for the controversy very often.

Not every topic is really conducive to controversy. People get all heated up on various parenting topics, for example, and you can maybe even get some venom going on Mac vs. PC debate, but it’s going to be a bit more difficult if you’re writing about the best lawn mower for a small yard. If your topic doesn’t have a lot of controversy, you can look awfully silly trying to make some. Then again, if you thought your topic wasn’t controversial but it turns out to be, make the best of it.

Rule 5: Stick with what’s popular in your niche.

It’s kind of a funny thing. It’s often recommended that you pick a tight niche to cut down on the competition, but you’re also supposed to stick with what’s popular within your niche.

The problem with sticking with the popular topics is that you don’t stand out enough. Write about the popular stuff, absolutely, but make sure you delve into corners that others pay less attention to, especially the facets you prefer. Have content that stands out from what the rest are doing.

Remember that a big part of your success comes from your own interest in your niche. It shows when you’re truly interested in the information you’re sharing and it shows when you just put up something because you felt you had to.

Certainly the popular topics have a lot of benefits. They’re areas which can generate a lot of search engine traffic and blog comments. If you get into less popular topics or go into better detail than others do on the popular topics, you’re giving your readers something more to look forward to. That’s a very good thing, especially if you want people coming back to your site.