While this site is not a SiteBuildIt site, I’ve always been a fan of their philosophy. When my dad wanted to start a website that was the service I recommended, and what he continues to use.

If SBI is something you’ve been considering buying, now’s the time. You can get two SBI sites for $399 rather than one for $299 from now until October 31, 2009.

SBI is a great tool if you don’t know how to build a website or even if you do. It’s not just hosting. It’s lessons on how to start your site successfully. It’s site building tools if you need them. It’s research tools.

It’s useful.

SBI is best for people who expect to work to build a successful website. It’s not about doing it the lazy way. It’s about building a business with the intent to succeed and keep going with that business.

You don’t have to use the second site yourself. You can give it to someone else. Or just save it until you’re ready, so long as you start the second subscription within 9 months of the purchase.

That’s pretty useful when you don’t want to overwhelm yourself with things to do just so you aren’t wasting time on your subscription. Get one site, started, then get the next going when you have things moving.

Either way, you’ll want to hurry. October 31 is not that far away. Check it out and order today.

I hear from a lot of people worried about being scammed while looking for a work at home job. It’s tough to know which companies to trust, even when they aren’t asking for money upfront.

If you can stand it, sometimes the best solution is to create your own opportunity. That’s right, start a home business. You’ll have ups and downs with a business, and have to deal with clients who are reluctant to pay you, but at least you’re in charge.

It’s not for everyone, of course. There’s stress involved. It can take a long time to earn anything. But if it’s taking ages to find a legitimate work at home job you really aren’t losing out by starting a business. You might even earn more than you would have from a work at home job.

Here are some that you may want to consider:

Affiliate Marketing

I’m rather fond of this one. Affiliate marketing earns me some pretty good money some months. Lousy income other months. There’s quite a bit of range in there.

There are scams possible in this one, so it’s important to remember that you should never pay to become an affiliate. The merchant should be making their profit off selling to the customers you refer to them, not from you.

One of the keys to succeeding as an affiliate is finding an interesting niche, nothing too broad at least for your early efforts.

SiteBuildIt’s Affiliate Masters Course is a free resource on running your own affiliate websites. They’ll walk you through many of the steps you’ll need. It’s still up to you to make it work.

Errand Running Service

If you don’t mind being out and about a lot, running other people’s errands can be a good business. You can focus on helping out the elderly, people whose jobs keep them too busy to run their own errands, that kind of thing.

Virtual Assistant

This is a popular choice if you’ve been looking at all the data entry and customer service positions, although it’s not exactly the same thing. You may be doing some of those jobs as a virtual assistant, but if you have the skills you could also be working on a website, managing ads, writing and submitting articles, answering emails and so forth.

Writer

Another popular choice. There are plenty of freelance opportunities for writers. A lot of them don’t pay a lot, but as you get experience you can do better. You might be writing website copy, articles for websites, articles for magazines and so forth.

Blogging

Just another form of being a writer in many ways, but you can do it on your own. If you want to make a business of blogging, I strongly recommend getting a domain name and paid hosting rather than going with the free stuff. It looks better as you grow. Blogging to the Bank is one resource to help you learn how to make blogging pay off.

Other Home Businesses

There are tons of other home business ideas out there. The one thing I can promise you about them is that there are no guarantees. More home businesses will fail than succeed. That’s just life.

There’s an article up on CNN about a doctor who’s making more money selling clothes on eBay than she is as a doctor. Pretty amazing.

eBay businesses are certainly not the easiest things to run. You have to find products that you can sell at a profit. You have to deal with sometimes changing fee structures. You have to get things shipped out promptly and deal with a sometimes unfair feedback system.

Honestly, it’s not my style. But I do like pointing out when people succeed in a home business. It’s good for all of us working toward such goals to see that.

But if it’s for you, a quick search turned up some resources you may want to consider:

Salewhoo Wholesale Sources
eBay Fortune
Silent Sales Machine

An old online friend of mine, Dan Reinhold, has asked me to post about a fundraiser he’s promoting to help autism research. It’s going to be over Friday, October 9, 2009 at noon EST, so I figured I’d better get it posted for you.

All you have to do is donate $25 and you get a package of 25 internet marketing products. He has products from Alice Seba, Kelly McCausey, Dan Thies, Carrie Lauth, Lynn Terry, Chris Brogan and many more just waiting for you and your donation.

Dan’s a fun guy. He also has a son with autism, and this research is very important to him and his family. If the products offered look good to you, or even if you just want to help autism research a little, go check it out. Now.

Oh, I’m not at all surprised about this one. It’s been coming for a while.

But now it’s official. The FTC expects bloggers to disclose payments and freebies given in exchange for product reviews.

Reading through things, I would expect that it could be applied to affiliates as well. After all, that’s one of the major sources of false reviews.

What I think they will need to make more clear is how disclosure is done. I have a standard disclosure on this site that I may accept payment of various sorts. Is that enough or do I need to specify exactly when a particular product review is paid?

Of course, what it basically comes down to is be honest in your reviews.

But this also means that if you are selling products you need to be aware of the rules. If you pay for a review or have affiliates, you could be held responsible for false statements made about your products. That’s not an easy thing to control, but still something you’ll have to watch out for.

No doubt there’s going to be a lot of talk about this over the next few days.

The decision to work at home is one I’ve never regretted. It’s challenging, exhausting, takes up pretty much all of my spare time plus any other time I can give it, but it’s still a great experience.

I have to admit, though, the ups and downs can be pretty rough. Especially the financial ups and downs. But it’s all part of the game.

Dealing with the Financial Ups and Downs

I must say, the financial ups of working at home, and particularly of running a home business have been pretty amazing for me. I don’t just mean not paying for daycare, which would be a pretty big expense with 3 kids.

I mean the months where I get really good commission checks. Bringing in a really healthy check (by my standards) feels great.

On the other hand, those months where it seems like I can’t earn a decent check no matter what I do really suck.

That’s something you’ll face in most home businesses and many work at home jobs. It’s a reality.

Demand for your business goes up. Demand goes down. Competition comes. Competition goes.

For work at home jobs, sometimes there’s tons of work to be had. Other times things are just quiet. That was true even when I was a medical transcriptionist, and that’s a pretty high demand field.

If you aren’t ready for the financial ups and downs (especially the downs), working at home in any capacity is going to be pretty hard on you and your family.

Dealing with the ups is pretty easy. Just don’t overspend in the good times. You need money ready for those times when things aren’t so good.

Dealing with the downs is harder, especially if you haven’t prepared well for them. It’s easier if you have enough money to get by for a few months despite a low income.

But even with that, it’s going to be rough emotionally.

Dealing with the Emotional Ups and Downs

How you feel about working at home in part echoes how your income goes, but not entirely. You can get frustrated even when your income is great, and you can feel great about the work you’re doing even when it’s not yet bringing in any real money.

This is where you need family support. When things just aren’t running smoothly, you don’t want to hear “I told you so” from anyone. You want and need support.

Family’s the best place to get it, but you can also get great support from online friends. Just don’t let it lead into so much goofing off online that you don’t get any work done.

You can share your problems in your favorite forums. You can tweet about them, share with your Facebook friends, whatever and wherever you like to do to vent your frustrations.

Just don’t forget to share your triumphs too.

Enjoy the Ride

Working at home can be a roller coaster in so many ways, but you can’t let it get to you too much. Enjoy the good, deal with the bad and don’t give up. Believe in your ability to make it work, and eventually you will.

I posted last week on how many people set their sights too low when working at home. There’s a flip side to challenging yourself, of course, and that’s working too much.

This is a mistake you can make even if you haven’t set very high goals for yourself, and what defines it is quite vague. It much depends on you and the needs of your family.

Sometimes a particular schedule is just right, but then circumstances change just a little bit, and the schedule is overworking you.

This is something I’ve dealt with quite a bit lately. Having a new baby, moving, getting settled, taking my son to speech therapy, figuring out if we can manage preschool classes for him, taking my daughter to and from school… it all adds up and really makes for a more challenging schedule for me to work.

And so I work fewer hours on my business than I’d like because my family has a lot of needs right now.

I’m much prone to overworking, and I know it. I’ll stay up late even when I know the baby hasn’t been sleeping well and I’ll just be dragging the next day. It’s not the best of habits, really.

It doesn’t feel like overwork; I enjoy what I’m doing. But when I’m that tired later on, I know.

So how do you balance your ambitions with working an appropriate amount?

It’s not always easy. You need to pay attention to your own needs as well as the needs of your family. You don’t ever want to forget why you’re a work at home parent.

Make sure you take some time every day with your family. Eat meals together whenever possible. Play as a family before putting the kids to bed. Take a break with your spouse.

Sometimes, yes, you’ll overwork yourself by working more after doing all the fun stuff. That’s how it goes at times. Just don’t let overwork be your entire way of life.

I think I’m like a lot of work at home moms in that my original reason for working at home was to add to our family finances without needing daycare. Not all that much was needed, as by the time you take out the costs of daycare, transportation, wardrobe, eating out more and so forth, any job I was likely to get at the time wouldn’t be bringing in that much.

Either that or I’d be bringing in enough that we’d complain that my husband’s income was getting entirely eaten up by that stuff. But since I was the one having the baby and having left my job for other reasons at the time, as well as taking training in medical transcription, it just made sense for me to be the one at home.

And sure enough, those first few years I didn’t earn that much. I just worked part time hours on my transcription and dabbled in a couple websites. Nothing serious.

Until the first month that I had a website outearn my husband’s income.

That was quite a flash of insight. Suddenly I realized that there was much more potential in what I had been working on.

These days my sights are higher. I don’t always outearn my husband; matter of fact some months flat out suck. But knowing that I can do that has made me set my sights even higher.

I want to let him work at home.

That’s a tough one, I’ll admit. That means a sufficiently stable income to take that gamble. It means being able to pay for health insurance for a family of five. It means money to invest in whatever it is he wants to do and keep it up while he gets things moving.

After that, the goals get higher yet.

What Do You Expect of Your Home Business?

When you set a goal of just a couple hundred a month, you probably aren’t pushing yourself hard enough. It may be all you need, but is it really enough to motivate you to work as hard as it takes to get things going?

Admittedly the benefit of being there for your family is pretty motivating too. But it’s motivating in a different way than earning money.

Here’s the thing. If you can earn a couple hundred a month, there’s a pretty good chance that you can expand on those same concepts and earn more the same way. It won’t always work; some things just don’t grow that way, but often enough one thing leads to another.

I like having tiers of earning goals. There’s my basic goal of a regular $5000 a month which I’ve hit a couple times, but have yet to reach regularly. And since my lows can be really, really low yet I know I have a good bit of work to do.

But that goal is just the first, and it’s not enough to get my husband working at home. Not in southern California anyhow, and we have no plans at this time to leave the state. Both of our extended families are primarily here.

Set your goals high enough to be challenging but low enough that you know you’ll reach them eventually. You won’t know how long it will take, but make it reasonable and it will happen.

Plan rewards for yourself for each goal. I have rewards planned both for occasional high earnings and for when things start looking regular.

How Do You Get There?

There are a few key factors to reaching your business goals. One quite simple to say – hard work.

Hard work won’t guarantee success, but you’re not likely to get anywhere without it.

But there’s generally more to it. You need to invest time and money into training yourself. How you balance this depends on what you can afford to spend versus how long you’re willing to take to find the right information.

If you’re in network marketing, for example, downloading The 7 Great Lies of Network Marketing and buying The Renegade Network Marketer can be a great place to start. You need to know how to build your business, and trial and error or working your family and friends isn’t always all that effective. It’s better to learn from someone who knows what works.

The resources you pick depend on just what it is you want to do. If you really aren’t into network marketing, those resources aren’t going to do a thing for you. They’d be a waste of time and money.

Pick just one business skill you want to improve. It should be something that helps you to make money, whatever it is. You might want to do more on AdWords and want the latest version of Perry Marshall’s AdWords guide. You might want to learn more about article marketing, blogging, forum marketing… any one of many more skills that you can use to grow your business.

Yes, you’ll probably have to spend money. Buying ebooks or training from reliable sources is very much so worth the expense. You might find the same information for free elsewhere, but you’ll have to dig through a lot of garbage and inaccurate information first. The time saved is worth it most of the time.

Don’t try to improve all your skills at once. You’ll probably just make it harder to improve any of them. Pick one. Get comfortable with it and see how it works for you. Focus on it.

Once you’ve really mastered it or decided that it really isn’t for you, then you can go on to the next thing. Don’t drop anything that works well for you, of course.

Your focus should always be on meeting your goals. While you can have very simple goals, the simple truth is that having higher aspirations can be more motivating than merely wanting enough to get by. Don’t settle for good enough. That can be your first goal, but why let it be your final one?

Like many people, my big reason for starting to work at home in the first place was to be there for my kids. With three of them now, that reason only gets more important.

But I have to admit, dealing with a baby when I want to get work done is not easy. It’s been really tough lately to come up with enough hours to get even the minimum amount of work done I’d like to. Especially as she gets older, more mobile and more demanding.

Time was when I could sit her on my lap and still get a little bit done. That’s not quite so simple now. She’s bigger and much more interested in my keyboard and anything she can reach on my desk. Especially if it can go in her mouth.

Yeah. I pretty much need her naptimes to get anything done. And it’s still not easy many days then, as she’s not exactly a champion of sleeping through the night. Thank goodness I don’t have to drive to work that tired.

This is one of the times that it takes incredible dedication to keep going. Believe me, it would be much easier to just take off, but that’s not what I’m going to do, and if you’re in a similar situation, not what I’d recommend either.

When daytime naptimes don’t work for me, working at night after all the kids are in bed can. Other work at home parents prefer early, early mornings, a thought which gives me the chills. Really, really not for me!

But you do what works for you.

Work early in the morning. Late at night. During baby’s nap. When there’s another adult available to watch the kids.

You can even hire a “Mother’s (or Father’s) Helper” to just play with the baby as you work. I did this when I was a medical transcriptionist, and it was pretty helpful. You don’t even need your helper able to feed the baby or change diapers. Just play with the baby and let you know when something more is needed. Older siblings (where available) can also help.

I like to remind myself that this won’t last forever. That means enjoying this time with a baby and not letting it get me down too much just for being tired. And if the price for not losing a post to a baby pounding a keyboard is a little less sleep, so be it.

Never let anyone say running a home business is dull. It’s not. It shouldn’t be, at least some of the time. There are dull things you have to do in any business, but you should love doing most of it.

But then there comes a crisis. Sometimes then another. And that’s how things have been around here.

Recently, it was my home business computer having trouble. A problem to be sure, but one I had planned for, knowing that computers are nearly as temperamental as cats.

Since Sunday, it’s been watching wildfires.

Wildfires within a few miles of me.

Two of them. Oak Glen and Pendleton fires, for any who have been keeping track on the news. But I’m not in a part of Yucaipa that’s had to evacuate or is likely to need it. I did leave for a while last night after spotting the Pendleton one, just until we knew where that one was going.

Yeah, the air’s pretty awful outside, even though neither fire is headed in my direction. The winds have been kind to me.

Let me tell you, I’m getting pretty good at dealing with this kind of stuff. It was just about two years ago that we last had to evacuate due to wildfires. That was in Poway, not Yucaipa, but still. I still have a pretty good notion of what to grab fast.

My business computer is one thing. Not the monitor, keyboard, mouse or any other parts. They’re all easily replaced. In a big rush I would just grab the backup drive, as it’s fewer plugs to yank, but when I have time, it’s the whole thing.

Otherwise, clothes, important business papers, pictures, whatever can fit in the vehicle available with the kids.

You hope to never need to deal with a natural disaster hitting your home, family and home business, but it can happen pretty much anywhere. Having plans for what you’ll do is a big help in moving out fast.

For now I’m keeping the bug out bags packed, just in case we really do need to go for a while. I don’t expect to have to go, although air quality is making it tempting.