I came across an article the other day in support of working moms. It came about due to a forum thread that said the lack of stay at home moms is what’s wrong with the U.S. No explanation of what exactly is wrong, though. There were plenty of things that bothered me about the whole deal.

1. Why the focus on moms?

This is one of the things that drives me up the wall. Why blame only moms for putting their kids in daycare and going to work? Why not the dads? I have two very competent stay at home dads in my family. Don’t tell me it can’t be done.

Sure, it’s more common and more traditional for moms to be more involved in child care. Unless you’re talking about pregnancy or breastfeeding, it doesn’t really have to be that way. Dads can do plenty, and they usually enjoy it.

2. Daycare is a perfectly acceptable option.

I may be an at home mom myself, but I have absolutely no problem with putting kids in daycare if that’s what the family needs.

My mother raised four of us on her own, so I speak from personal experience when I say daycare doesn’t have to be all that bad. It is not having someone else raise your child. They’re helping, yes, but so are the schools. Believe me, my parents still had plenty of influence on my choices throughout life, even my dad who I didn’t always see that much of as he didn’t always live nearby or even in the same state.

That said, I know daycare gets expensive fast. You do have to look at whether having both parents work makes sense in the face of daycare costs. Sometimes having a parent stay at home makes more financial sense. Still, that doesn’t mean working moms are in the wrong.

3. Not all stay at home moms are good at it.

It’s like anything else. Some stay at home moms are wonderful, attentive, caring, hard working mothers. Others aren’t. There are plenty of times when it’s better for the kids for both parents to work and have them go to daycare.

I don’t think you’re bad at being a stay at home mom if you aren’t up to June Cleaver’s level or anything. If staying at home is more of a miserable thing for you because you’d rather have a career, get out and get one. You won’t be called a bad parent by me for it.

4. Staying at home can be stressful.

Many people view being a stay at home mom as this wonderful, unstressed lifestyle. Somehow even the financial troubles just aren’t that big a problem for them. They make it work and life is good.

That’s not true for everyone. If you go to one income and can’t pay all the bills for little things you need such as rent, food and electricity, that’s stressful. Dealing with children can be stressful. Really and truly, the life of a stay at home mom isn’t all television and bonbons.

Is it less stressful for some than for others? Absolutely! That doesn’t mean it’s stress free for every stay at home parent. Financial challenges and other problems cause plenty of stress for others.

5. No acknowledgement of the real financial struggles many families face.

The people saying moms should just cope with the cutting back financially and stay at home have no concept of how much many families struggle. It’s not always a choice between a bigger house or a smaller house, or a newer or older car. It’s getting by, period.

Yes, some families are fortunate enough to have circumstances where they can get by on a minimal income and have one parent home. That’s the exception. We can’t all find extremely low rent, have family provide a home, inherit one, or otherwise get off cheap on housing costs. Some places are more expensive to live, and if that’s where your work is, it’s really not so simple as packing up to move someplace cheaper.

Then there’s food costs. Frankly, if the only way you can have one parent stay at home is to go on food stamps or other assistance, you need to look at increasing your income. That can be by working at home, I don’t mind that (obviously). I just don’t think you should use assistance to support a lifestyle choice, no matter how much you love your kids more than money. Use public assistance to keep going when you must, no problem there, but not as a lifestyle when you have other ways to get by.

6. An old car isn’t always a good solution.

Some people in the forum posts mentioned having an old car as one way to cut down on costs. That’s great when it works, no car payments, but sometimes the repairs run more than a car payment would. What do you do then? Unless you live in an area with good public transportation or close enough to work to walk or bike, a car can be a necessity.

Older cars are going to hit that point where you have to repair them more often eventually, and although they can be quite cheap to own for a time, repair costs can be more than payments on a newer car. What are families supposed to do then? A single income family can’t always save up a few thousand for a newer used car.

7. Stop with the “Only have as many children as you can afford” thing.

This one always annoys me. Certainly, there comes a point where people know they’re having more children than they can afford, but that’s not always what happened at the time the child was conceived or was born. Circumstances change. Jobs are lost, businesses close, incomes decrease. You can’t ever be certain that you can “afford” your children the entire 18 years you’ll be raising them, never mind whether or not you’ll be able to help with college.

Yes, I do agree that parents should think if their current circumstances will allow them to afford a child. It’s not my place to tell them what their final decision should be, however. If my husband and I had waited until we knew on paper that we could afford children, we wouldn’t have started when we did. We made it work anyhow, and while it’s been a struggle, we haven’t had to go on any sort of public assistance, and are finally making progress on the credit card debts.

8. Working moms spend plenty of time with their kids.

It has been shown that working moms spend more time with their kids now than stay at home moms did back in 1965. Dads are more involved too. Sure, stay at home moms spend still more time, but it’s not likely that the average kid is lacking for time with his or her parents due to being sent to daycare.

9. Women benefit from working.

I love the work I do at home. I don’t believe I would cope at all well as a stay at home mom if I didn’t have my business. It gives me something to think about beyond my home and children. That’s a good thing.

There’s also the money moms lose from not working. I don’t just mean in the moment. I mean saving for retirement as well as building a solid base for her career, missing out on promotions and so forth. It’s a long term income loss that can be hard on parents long after their children are grown.

That’s a big part of why I’m such a fan of working from home. Maybe you don’t need to earn the equivalent of a full time job, but at least you can keep some money coming in and some job skills current. Life’s uncertain, and that’s one way I cope.

I have a lawyer friend who tells me that most stay at home moms he knows don’t really understand what they’re losing out on by not working. He’s dealt with them on Social Security issues, and it basically comes down to if you don’t contribute, you don’t get anything. Sometimes that’s a huge problem.

10. The United States isn’t easy on families.

If you take a look at work policies around the Western world, the U.S. doesn’t look remotely family friendly. There’s a lack of parental leave available, childcare standards aren’t as good as other countries, education isn’t as good, the list goes on.  I’d call that a bigger problem than whether or not mothers stay home with their kids.

11. It’s possible that working parents are better for kids.

Now, all kinds of conclusions can be drawn from studies, nonetheless it is possible that working mothers really aren’t bad for their kids.

12. Women have often worked outside the home throughout history.

Women working outside the home is nothing new, and they didn’t just do so before marriage or motherhood.

13. I absolutely support at home parents.

Despite everything on this rant, I absolutely support at home parents, whether it’s the mother or the father. I wouldn’t run this site if I didn’t. It just makes me mad when people glance at working moms and declare them to be awful parents. They aren’t.

There’s nothing wrong with raising kids in the tight financial situation that often results from being a single income family. I suspect there’s some good in it, as kids then learn that they don’t get everything they want all the time.

14. Parents supporting their kids is the most important thing.

What matters most in the long run is that parents support their kids. I don’t just mean financially. I mean educationally, emotionally and so forth. You’re a parent and you’re probably doing the best you can for your kids. That doesn’t mean you can’t do your best for yourself too. If your kids are loved and know it, there’s a good chance they’ll be fine whether you’re at home or working.

While you don’t have to make resolutions if you don’t want to for the new year, this is a great time of year to get yourself organized and decide where you want to take your business over this next year. Have you taken some time to prepare yet? These are some things you should do to get yourself ready for the new year.

1. Get Your Finances in Order

The end of the year means tax time is coming all too soon. If you’re paying quarterly estimated taxes, you have to be ready for those by January 15. But even if you don’t need to do that, you need to get ready for filing your taxes by April – although I’d recommend sooner if you think you’re getting money back.

If you use an accountant or bookkeeper, the sooner you get the financial paperwork they need over to them, the sooner they can take care of you. It’s just less of a scramble if you don’t both have to rush to get things done at the last minute.

2. Assess the Past Year

Was this a good year or a bad year for your business? What went right and what went wrong? Anything you wish you’d done differently?

This is an initial step in setting goals for next year. It’s hard to know where you realistically can go if you don’t know where you’ve been. You have to be sure that the steps you’ve been taking have been effective. If not, you need to figure out what’s been going wrong. Pay special attention to the things that went really, really right, and the things that just plain went wrong.

3. Review Your Business and Personal Goals

While I don’t do resolutions, I do like to have goals. It’s fun to meet them, even when they’re tough. Many relate to my business, but there are goals for me too, such as trying to get in better shape,.

Think about what you’d like your business to do over the next year, and make sure you consider how you’re going to get there. Saying you want to earn $5000 a month is a lovely goal, but if you have no idea how you’ll get there it will be much harder to reach. Make sure you include actionable goals, not just results.

4. Decide What Your Business Focus Will Be

You should always know what the main focus of your business is, and this is a good time to reassess what you’re doing. Do you need to change your focus slightly? What’s working for you? What isn’t?

5. Review Your Networking Strategy

How much do you interact with others in your home business? Are you taking the time to network with your fellow home business owners as well as with potential customers and clients? How effectively?

If it doesn’t come all that naturally to you, networking can be a pain. If it does come naturally, it may be one of those things you have to keep under control because it turns into excessive socializing that takes away productive work time. Or maybe you have it balanced just right. However things are going, take a look to make sure you’re networking effectively, whether online or in person.

6. Check Out the Competition

It’s a generally good idea to keep an eye on what your competition is doing with their business. While you don’t want to exactly copy their offerings, you do want to know how your own compare. Sometimes there’s inspiration in what others do, so long as you make it your own.

Consider the products and or services they offer, the look of their website, their website rankings, backlinks and so forth. You don’t want to be an imitator, you want to compare favorably to them.

7. Pick Something New to Try

Rather than stick to the same old, same old with your home business, settle on one new something you want to do with it. It could be video marketing, a new product or service you want to offer, a new place to network, a skill you’ve been meaning to pick up, something.

8. Par-tay!

Hey, it’s the new year coming up. Surely you get to have some fun.

When you read up on marketing your website, getting good rankings on Google is always a big topic of conversation, and no wonder. Google drives a ton of traffic for many websites, and many online businesses would wither and die without that traffic. But does that mean good Google rankings are the only thing that matter to a successful online business?

Not at all. There are other ways to bring lots of traffic to your website. Some will also help with your ranking on Google, while others will have more limited benefits that are still very much so worth the effort.

Run Your Own Newsletter

Running your own newsletter can be wonderful for bringing traffic to your website. A nice size, well engaged list will pay attention to what you have to say, allowing you to generate traffic on your terms.

You are best off going with a paid newsletter option such as AWeber or Get Response. There are scripts you can buy to run your newsletter off your website server, but these can be very limited, and a spam complaint has the potential to shut your site down. Paid services handle spam complaints for you, keeping track of who signed up and when.

Your newsletter should give subscribers the information they expect from you. If you’re purely a store, send information about specials and new products, things like that. If your website is more information based, be careful about how promotional you get. Provide the information people want from you, and sell as appropriate, rather than just for money’s sake. Your list will trust you more, which should give you more chances to make sales. Recommending a poor quality product just because you wanted a commission is a great way to lose the trust of your subscribers.

Article Syndication

I’ve posted a bit lately about getting your articles published on other websites, newsletters and ezines. It can be a very worthwhile effort to make.

You want to syndicate your articles to places that already have the attention of the audience you want. This can be far, far better than what Google and other search engines send most sites.

You do not necessarily need to write a unique article for publication on other sites. Some do require it, and in such cases you will have to decide if the particular site is worth it. Sometimes they are. Be sure to note whether you will ever be allowed to publish the article elsewhere. Some only need to have it be unique for a month or so.

Other times you can syndicate something you’ve already written for your own site. This is much easier, and no, you do not need to spin the article to avoid a duplicate content penalty.

Get Mentioned in News Articles

When Home with the Kids was mentioned in an article that made the front page of Yahoo Finance and Bankrate, there was so much traffic that my server couldn’t handle it and I had to move to a dedicated server for a time. This was an article which didn’t even link to my site – that is, people had to type in or search for my domain name. I still get traffic I’m pretty sure is from that article. It’s hard to be certain as the traffic isn’t direct.

That article wasn’t one I had written. I had been interviewed for it months before. In fact, I had given up on ever seeing anything from it when my site was suddenly clobbered with traffic.

You can write press releases and post them to press release sites. This has been a pretty popular search engine optimization tactic, but it’s better if you think in terms of who you really want to attract with a press release, and it’s really not the search engines. You’ll get more and better benefits if your press release is deemed worthwhile for a news source to pick up or to include you in an article or interview.

Sign up for the Help a Reporter Out (HARO) if you want to keep an eye out for reporters looking for information on your topic. You won’t find a reporter looking for people like you every day, but it can be very much worthwhile. And free if you choose that level, although you may find a paid level to be worth your while. Check it out first to be sure.

Advertise

Many websites and newsletters accept advertising, and of course there are always options such as AdWords. It’s going to cost you money, but an ad in the right place will make up for that. Just beware the learning curve and don’t go overboard.

When you advertise, it’s extremely important that you keep track of which ads are doing well and which aren’t paying for themselves. Keep track of where your traffic is coming from and especially where your income is coming from. Ads that drive the most traffic don’t always bring in the most income. The Definitive Guide to AdWords is a good place to learn about AdWords advertising.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing won’t necessarily bring you tons of traffic, but a presence on a small number of social media websites can be a very good thing. You don’t want to overwhelm yourself trying to keep up with your social sites at the expense of the rest of your business.

It takes time to build up a good social media following, and shortcuts are often not worthwhile. There are plenty of sites that will allow you to buy friends or followers for the different social sites, but an untargeted following isn’t going to do you much good at all. You really want those targeted followers who chose to follow you because what you say is interesting to them.

Make sure it’s easy to find your social media accounts through your website. Yes, if they’ve been to your website they already know about you, but some people prefer to keep up on such things through social sites these days, and it’s better to go with their preferences than to not capture them as followers any other way.

As you can see, none of these rely strictly on Google or any other search engine. There’s still a lot of work for you to do to get these kinds of traffic, but once you know how to do a particular sort of marketing or advertising, the traffic should be there when you want it. It’s a lot of work, but it can be very much worth it.

Having someone else publish your article is a great way to bring traffic to your website. It’s a chance to get attention from people who may be interested in what you have to offer, but haven’t heard of you yet. Not all articles are published to websites, however. Some are only sent to a newsletter or ezine list. Does it matter whether your article is published on someone’s site versus their newsletter?

The benefits can be different for each, but it’s not something I stress about, personally. The main thing you want from your articles is exposure to a new audience.

Website Publication Benefits

The benefit of having your article published on someone else’s website goes beyond the initial exposure to human visitors. An article on a website usually stays up for years, potentially giving you traffic for years to come. Links in the article may provide you with benefits for your search engine optimization efforts. It’s a pretty good deal when it’s done right.

Newsletter Publication Benefits

The publication of your article in a newsletter has similar benefits, except it may be for a shorter time. How much initial benefit you get depends on how big the list is, how engaged they are and how relevant they find the information you’re sharing.

If it’s a big list, but they send out so many emails that many don’t get opened, your article may get lost in the shuffle, no matter how well written and topical. You have to be careful when choosing newsletters to offer an article to, because some won’t be worth the time.

Some newsletters also get published on websites, so while there’s no guarantee of later visitors finding the article, or of any SEO benefit, you will get that sometimes. Don’t expect it unless you know the newsletter is published on a website as well. A membership with the Directory of Ezines is a shortcut to finding relevant newsletters to check out.

With any newsletter, the main surge of traffic you may get will be on the day the newsletter is sent, with late readers trickling in over perhaps a few days.

Does the Difference Between the Two Make a Difference?

While the extra traffic you can get over time from having an article published on a website is nice, don’t completely rule out newsletters and ezines. Most important is which one will get you in front of the audience you’re after. Getting in front of the right audience can do far more for your online business than any search engine benefits you may get.

Don’t get me wrong. Ranking highly on the search engines for your keywords is a wonderful thing. Sometimes it’s a huge thing. But it can also be short lived and frustrating. Rankings rise and fall, and there’s only so much you can do about it. Build your traffic in other ways, and a drop in rankings won’t be quite the crisis it would be otherwise.

While it pays to keep both the short term and long term benefits in mind, you shouldn’t always sacrifice one for the other. Besides, if you get a good list of newsletter and website owners who are regularly willing to publish your articles, you’ll have a long term benefit already. You’ll be able to write articles and know that you can pull in traffic more or less when you want it, not just when the search engines like you.

Having an article you wrote published in the newsletter of another site is a great way to bring traffic to your site. The right publication can bring many interested visitors to your website. The only problem is getting your article published in the first place. How do you do that? You have a few options.

No matter which route you take, make sure your articles are not overly promotional. They won’t get published if they are. Write articles which provide quality information and leave the self promotion to your resource box. Don’t overdo it there, either, and if you published the article on your site first, don’t link back to that same article. Link where you want your traffic to go.

1. Hope.

Hoping for publication is when you add your article to an article directory and hope someone picks it for their newsletter or website. It’s best to use the better directories for this, such as EzineArticles, as they have some degree of quality control and your article won’t be surrounded by complete and utter spam. Doesn’t mean all the other articles will be great, but they’ll be better than the ones on sites that approve all articles.

I call this method hope because that’s all you’re doing. You aren’t finding publishers yourself, you’re just putting your article someplace they might look.

It can work. You can have your articles picked up from an article directory and used in someone’s newsletter or on their website. Just don’t count on it for every article. It may also be lost in the crowd.

2. Seek out relevant newsletters and pitch your article.

If you want a better chance of getting your article published by others, you have to seek them out yourself. Start by searching for newsletters in your niche and closely related niches. Searches such as “keyword + newsletter” are a good place to start.

Check to see if the site has any information about accepting articles, article guidelines and so forth. If things look good, subscribe or check to see if back issues are published on the website. You want to see how the newsletter looks. Are articles buried in a sea of ads? What kinds of articles have been published? Has the newsletter recently published an article on too similar a topic?

If things look good, follow instructions and send in your article, including a good resource box pointing back to your website. Your article won’t be accepted every time, but over time you’ll develop a list of newsletters publishers who are generally willing to post your articles.

3. Use the Directory of Ezines

Rather than search for ezines that take articles on your own, you can buy access to a list of ezines through the Directory of Ezines (DOE). This is a paid membership, but as of this writing it’s a one time expense. I can’t promise that will be true forever, so if you’re considering it, check the pricing for yourself.

DOE has a good sized list of ezines, and includes information about what kind of advertising each accepts and whether they accept articles.

While not all ezines/newsletters are listed in the DOE, they have a good number, and the basic information you need about whether or not they accept article submissions is right there. That could be a big time saver. It’s still up to you to match your article to the ezines and to write something worth the publisher’s time to share. Do it right and you’ll be in good shape.