One of the more difficult things to do as a stay at home mom is to find time to get out without the kids tagging along, especially when they’re younger. It’s bad enough the rest of the year, but when the holiday season comes and you want to get presents for the kids without them catching you at it, things can get pretty difficult. How can you handle all that shopping when you need to watch the kids?

These are just a few of the ways I handle things. It’s not always easy to get time on my own, but something is usually possible eventually.

Shop Online

This one should be obvious these days, but it’s not always easy to keep kids from peeking over your shoulder, nor is it always a replacement for going out and actually seeing the things you want to buy. When you’ve got just a little time and privacy, it’s one of the easiest. Great selection, shipping free from many sites, this stuff can be good.

Amazon is a common favorite because they carry such an amazing range of things. I also have a deep fondness for ThinkGeek. I’d imagine you have your own favorites too.

Shop During School Hours

If the kids go to school and you have a few hours without them, it’s a great time to get your holiday shopping done. It means watching the clock a little, but that’s not usually a major problem.

Have Someone Else Watch the Kids

I love this option. Usually it’s my husband or a grandparent watching the kids to give me time out for holiday shopping. Grandparents are particularly useful if my husband and I want to go out shopping together. It’s fun picking things out with someone else to talk to, after all.

If you don’t have family nearby, see about trading off with friends. Surely you know someone else who has a hard time getting out to shop because of their kids. Make a deal which benefits you both.

Remember Toddlers Don’t Really Understand Everything

I do a lot of my holiday shopping with my toddler in tow, even if it’s for her. I can show her things, even put them into the cart and buy them, and know that by the time I give them to her, she’ll be excited all over again. She also doesn’t yet have the vocabulary to spoil any surprises for her siblings.

Shop Later

One of the presents my kids ask for most often is that I take them shopping after the holidays or a birthday. They love that a big part of their present is time out with me or their father, whoever they pick. A budget is set, the kinds of things I’ll be willing to buy explained, and off we go. Usually there’s ice cream or a movie involved as well. It’s fun and it ensures that whatever is bought is what that child wanted.

I try to make this one on one time, but it can be done with siblings along if desired. Just make it a little extra special.

Running an online business is very much about making money. Money may not be your only goal, but if you want to earn a living, it’s probably a significant one. If you’re also trying to provide information, sometimes monetization is a challenge. Will you need to be more direct if you want to earn enough money for your efforts?

Why Are You Writing?

A large part of how you monetize will depend upon why you’re writing in the first place. Sometimes the reason you’re writing online in the first place doesn’t go well with being too direct about trying to make sales, at least not on every page of your site.

This is especially true if you’re writing something for another website or a print publication where it’s more about building your reputation and/or backlinks to your website. Odds are that you shouldn’t be putting in a lot of direct monetization, and it may not be allowed at all. You may simply be able to refer people back to your own website instead, and attract what income you may from there.

On the opposite extreme, you could be writing on your own website to inform people about a particular product or service you hope they’ll purchase. In that case, you want to be very direct indeed, with obvious links to click in order to make a purchase. You should still aim to be informative about what you’re offering, so that people can make a good decision and feel comfortable with what you’re offering.

There are many levels in between, and you have to decide how best to monetize them. Fortunately, you have a lot of options for monetizing an online business.

Monetizing With Banner Ads

A very simple way to monetize a website is with banner ads. You can go the low effort way and put up blocks of AdSense, pick banners to show on every page of your website, or pick each banner carefully by the topic of the page you’re placing it on. How you cope depends on your particular goals and the effort you’re willing to put into it all.

The problem is that banner ads are easily blocked. There’s plenty of software out there to handle it. Anyone who is blocking such ads won’t see the ones on your site, and so you won’t earn from them.

Monetizing With In-Text Links

Placing text link ads within your content is another good way to monetize your website. There are services which will do this for you; you just add a bit of Javascript to your site to make it work. This is easily blocked by those who don’t care to load Javascript when they visit websites, as many know that’s a common way to serve ads.

You can also place ads manually, selecting the text you’ll link yourself. This can look much better, and because it works the same as other links, is less easily blocked. You have to put in the effort to find the right products to link to, but done right, that’s the good part.

Linking within text is the obvious choice if you’re discussing a product or service, whether it’s your own or an affiliate product. Once again, it’s about making it easy for the visitor to decide to buy.

Making Appropriate Disclosures

When you monetize your content, you must be certain you’re making appropriate disclosures. If it’s your own product, it’s pretty obvious that you’re going to benefit from any purchases, so your main concerns will be with keeping your claims accurate, respecting people’s privacy, having a terms of service and so forth.

If you’re selling affiliate products, you should be clearly noting that you get paid to recommend products. Make this one really obvious. If you’re recommending products honestly, being clear about faults as well as benefits, saying you earn something when people buy from your link shouldn’t hurt your chances to earn. It’s when it seems as though all you care about is what you earn that it hurts.

Keep Testing

You may not hit upon the right kind of monetization right away. What other people are trumpeting as the greatest way ever to earn money online may not work so well for you. Keep trying out the different options and you may find one that works pretty nicely for you.

Not every business picks up as Christmas and other winter holidays approach. Some slow down. What do you do if that’s your business, but you really need the money to keep coming in? This is especially a problem for freelancers, as many clients send out less work as the holidays approach, as they’re busy with the holiday season.

1. Brush up your skills.

Less activity in your business means you have time to work on your skills. Think of something you’d like to do better, and make it happen. This won’t earn money immediately, but could pay off in the long run.

2. Get ready for tax season.

You know it’s going to have to be done some time, what better time to start getting your paperwork in order for when you need to figure out your taxes than when you don’t have customers or clients to care for? Get things organized now, and it will be much easier to figure things out or get them to your accountant later. Remember, if you’re sending in estimated tax payments, there’s one due on January 15. For those of us in the U.S., anyhow.

3. Consider new income streams.

This one may be very important if things dry up badly for you around holidays. Can you come up with something to do during the holidays to bring your income back up?

You may also come up with income streams that relate to what you’re doing already. Are there other services or products you can offer clients and customers? It doesn’t have to be your own product or service, it just has to be relevant to your customers’ needs, and you have to earn something from it, whether it’s a direct payment to you or a commission through an affiliate program.

4. Offer holiday specials.

If business isn’t coming to you the way you’d like it to, encourage it a little more. Make special offers for the holidays so that clients and customers are more motivated to make a purchase.

5. Review your goals.

Many people make goals for the new year. It’s getting close, so why not get a head start? You can have a plan ready before New Year’s Eve rolls around.

6. Take a break.

It’s the holiday season. You may be stressed if you aren’t earning what you’re used to or what you’d like, but are you taking some time to enjoy the holidays yourself? Especially if you have little else going on with your business, why not?

7. Pray for January to come.

When you’ve done everything else you feel you can, and things are still going slow, it’s time to start praying or wishing that January will come. It won’t make it any sooner, but it can be on your mind.

I decided to spend a little extra money on my business the other day. I’m careful about doing that, as there are plenty of things out there that aren’t worth spending money on. There are also many things that are very much so worth spending money on. I bought CommentLuv Premium, and I’m hoping it will be worth the money. I think it will be.

The nice thing about CommentLuv free or premium, is that it encourages people to comment on your blog. The free version is a good way to try things out to see if you like the kinds of comments you get for having it on your site. It’s easy to download and install through your WordPress plugin control panel.

The premium version gives you more control over when visitors are allowed to get a list of their posts to include. You can give them incentives to tweet, +1 or Facebook like your posts, that is, if they do one of those things, they can get a list of their 10 most recent posts to choose from, rather than just the one most recent, or you can give them a dofollow link rather than nofollow. Or both, of course.

For yourself, you can even choose your favorite posts to share when you comment on CommentLuv enabled blogs. This is nice when you’re taking the time to reply to people, and perhaps it’s not the most recent post you want to promote.

It also allows people to add their Twitter user name to their posts if you so choose, and allows keywords in the user’s name to be the link rather than their own names, much as KeywordLuv does.

You also get Growmap Anti Spam Plugin (G.A.S.P). The basics of this are pretty simple, it adds a checkbox that human visitors will see and need to check. It also can be set to check for post permalinks for trackbacks or block certain types of trackbacks. Depending on your settings, you may still have to go through a number of spam comments on your site, but it’s a way to control spam that doesn’t rely on hoping that legitimate users have been caught in the wrong database, as happens with many other spam blocking plugins.

Will all this definitely increase the number of legitimate comments and visitors to your website. Maybe. That depends on a lot of factors, and you do have to be aware that some human spammers seek out CommentLuv blogs for that extra link. You have to decide if it’s going to be worth the potential trouble.

I think it will be worth it for me. I can’t say that any changes have happened yet, but I just bought this plugin the other day. It takes time for changes to happen. But I am glad to have made the change from free CommentLuv to premium. Yes, I am promoting this as an affiliate, one more benefit you get if you buy the plugin. It’s an unlimited license, so you don’t have to buy a copy for every blog you use it on, so long as you own or administrate that blog.

Online selling is very different from selling in person. You’re convincing someone to make the purchase on their own time. Bore them, fail to make the case, and they’re gone, off your site. You may be able to slow them down with a popup window, but you can’t stop them, and you don’t even know for certain what their objection was. How do you improve your websites so that you make more sales?

1. Make it easy to buy from your site.

Sometimes the problem is as simple as people can’t figure out how to buy from your site. The “buy now” button may be difficult to find or it takes to long to go from cart to finished order.

If people have to struggle to buy from your website, they aren’t going to. The internet is a big place, and even if other sites won’t have exactly what they were after, there will probably be something close enough elsewhere.

Links to add a product to your site’s shopping cart or to buy the product through your affiliate link should be easily found. Even if your copywriting still needs work, a clear and simple path to making a purchase will improve the chances that people will buy from you.

2. Make your site easy to read.

An easy to read website is a combination of good copywriting and good layout. A poor job on either of these factors will cut down on your website’s conversion rates.

Most people do better with short paragraphs and bullet points when reading online. You can use longer blocks of text if that’s what it takes to get your point across, but remember that many people skim more than they read online. Make it easy for them, and provide greater detail a little further along for those who want it.

Keep your writing simple too. There’s probably a lot of jargon specific to your niche, and while you may be comfortable with it, others may not be. The same goes for showing off your vocabulary in general. Use simple words everyone understands.

3. Use appropriate graphics.

The right graphics are a big help in making sales. People can’t touch your product when they’re online, so if you’re selling a physical product, graphics are the one way you have to show them what they’re shopping for.

Make sure your graphics look good. If you’re selling a product as an affiliate, there are often good images available for your use – just check with the program you’re associated with. If it’s your own product, make sure you take a good picture. A photo taken with a cluttered background or with several other of your products won’t be nearly as appealing as a clean one showing just the product in question.

4. Establish trust.

If your website gives people a bad feeling, they aren’t going to buy from you. Do your best to make your website look reputable.

In part, this means avoiding hype in your descriptions. Be clear and honest about what the product is and what it is not. People like to know what the advantages and the disadvantages are when they’re shopping.

This also means avoid spelling and grammatical errors. We all make them, but if they’re all over your website, people won’t trust you as much.

5. Encourage newsletter or autoresponder signups.

People don’t always buy on the first visit. It’s often said that it can take seven exposures to convince someone to make a purchase. Having a newsletter or autoresponder for people who want more information about your products can have a big impact on your sales.

Provide solid, relevant information in your newsletter, plus sales links as appropriate. Don’t go overboard on trying to make sales on your newsletter unless you understand that you will get a lot of people unsubscribing quickly. Some people can make that work, but others lose more than they gain that way.