That depends. Are you looking for quick results or a long term business strategy?

I’ve always preferred to consider the long term with my business. That means this site, as well as my others, don’t earn as much as they could, compared to what would happen if I focused more on bringing money in. Instead, I have a business I can trust to keep going over the long term.

Here’s an example of short term thinking. You buy some cheap private label articles, drop them onto your site and add some AdSense and/or affiliate links and wait for the traffic to come in.

It sounds nice and easy, and may bring in a few dollars over time. The problem is that cheap PLR is rarely well written, and you probably aren’t the only site posting that article, which usually leads to lower search engine rankings. Quick and easy in the short term, and maybe you made some money, but not so good for the long term.

If you’re so desperate for money that you need something that will pay you quickly, you’re probably better off getting a job. It’s not fun if you have a goal of working for yourself, but sometimes working for someone else is a necessary step. Admittedly, finding a job isn’t always easy, especially in the current economy, but it’s usually easier than making a successful home business. Just think about it.

A longer term strategy is to make a site that will be interesting to visitors for a long time, especially if you can create a loyal readership. Write unique articles for it, with solid information for the niche. You can use a bit of PLR as a base, but make sure you rewrite it and maybe add some extra information to improve it. It’s more work, but it’s your own.

There’s absolutely a balance to be maintained. You need money fast, that’s just the way it is, and you have to do the things that are faster, even if they’re no good for your business long term. So long as they aren’t going to come back to bite you later, that’s not a completely bad choice. Don’t expect it to be in the thousands of dollars that quickly, but if it’s enough to keep you going, that’s good enough. Get that fast money, just don’t forget to work on your long term goals next.

Always remember that the big key to long term success is hard work. Shortcuts aren’t going to get you there. There’s no magic button to change that simple fact.

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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.

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2. Planning for the Summer and Working at Home
3. Do You Send Your Kids to Summer Camp?

It’s often a school of hard knocks before you really get it. You may feel like a failure for months or years before you really get things moving the way you’d like to.

Don’t be Ashamed of Falling for Scams

It’s embarrassing when you realize that you’ve fallen for a work at home scam. It happens to lots of us. That doesn’t mean you’re destined to fail as a work at home parent. It means only that you made a mistake.

The only way you fail by falling for a work at home scam is if you don’t learn anything from the experience. It may be painful, especially if you have to admit monetary losses to a spouse or other family members, but it’s something you have to do.

The prevalence of work at home scams is why it is so very important to really think before signing up with any opportunity. Do your research. Ask around. This will help keep you from falling for scams.

You May Not Always Earn What You Hope to Earn

Whether you find a work at home job, do freelance work or start some other sort of home business, you probably won’t always earn what you hope to earn. It’s not a good feeling to come up short on your goals, but you have to be realistic. It takes time to get things to where you really want them to be.

Be realistic with your financial goals, and don’t give up on them easily. You probably wouldn’t make your dream income working outside the home right off either. Most of us have to work up to it.

You Won’t Always Have Perfect Cooperation and Respect for What You Do From Family and Friends

Supportive family and friends are a huge help when you work at home. It’s hard to get everyone to take you seriously when so many people you know are certain that you’re getting scammed, or it won’t work out, or just don’t think what you’re doing is real work.

What matters is that you take it seriously. The people you know will take their cues from you on how to treat your work. A few may never get it, but the more seriously you take your work, the more seriously most others will take it too.

Working at Home Doesn’t Always Mean Working When You Want

There’s the old bit about how you can set your own hours when you work at home. It’s one of the most appealing parts of working at home. The problem is that it’s not entirely true.

Many people are dismayed to find out how many hours it really takes to successfully work at home. It’s not easy. You may work more hours than you would have outside the home. You can’t always choose which ones you want, at least not if you want to bring in an income. Sometimes your work hours are set by the needs of the kind of work you’re doing.

Working at home also tends to blend into daily life and family time. Your work is always right there. Learning to separate work and family time takes practice.

It’s even rougher when you have infants and toddlers who really need your attention. You may find their needs and the needs of your job or business don’t mix too well. Despite any intentions otherwise, many work at home parents do resort to paid childcare so that they can get work done. That’s not a failure. That’s dealing with reality.

Fortunately, you often will have flexibility. Be prepared, however, to deal with the times when you need to sacrifice some of the fun times to earn a living.

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The only problem is that sometimes other parents want you to be there for their kids too much. A little is one thing but too much interferes with your work schedule and can feel like a burden. It’s really hard to say no once the habit is built, but sometimes you have to.

Then there are your own family and friends who can expect that you’ll be able to help them out whenever they need it. This can be incredibly disruptive to your daily routine, but when they know your schedule is flexible, they don’t like to take no for an answer.

When to Say No

We all like to help our family and friends when they need us. The problem is defining when they need our help versus times that they need to find another solution because it’s taking too much of our own time. You have to know it’s okay for you to speak up when you can’t help out because it doesn’t fit in your own schedule.

Watching someone else’s kids is one of the most common issues for work at home moms, and whether it works for you or not depends on the situation. Watching a baby takes a lot more care than watching an 8 year old who plays well with your own 8 year old, and that’s a very different situation from watching an 8 year old who doesn’t get along with your own 8 year old.

The main point to remember is that if you don’t take your at home job or home business seriously, no one else will. If watching someone’s child or children interferes with your ability to earn a living, that’s a problem. You can’t watch their child, or at least not without appropriate compensation, and if you earn enough from your work, there may not be reasonable compensation that can be paid for the loss of work hours. Not that you can’t be there for emergencies, but when daily or even weekly visits don’t work out, speak up!

Even if you aren’t earning much, your ability to work and eventually create an income makes your work time worth something. Don’t treat your business as less than serious just because the income isn’t there yet, and don’t let anyone tell you it’s less just because the income isn’t there. The income won’t be there until you make your business work. That takes serious, focused work time. You can’t be doing too many things for others when you need to do your own work, just as you wouldn’t if you were working a job outside the home.

In fact, that’s not a bad criteria in a lot of cases. If you wouldn’t be taking time off work to help from an outside the home job, is it a situation where you should be taking time off your at home work? You should be treating your at home work just as seriously.

When to Say Yes

Sometimes you’re going to say yes when people ask you for help. Hopefully it’s something that fits into your work schedule, so you can still get the work done while helping someone who needs it. Other times, it’s just that the need is that great.

When it comes to watching someone else’s kids, sometimes it’s to your benefit to agree to help. That would be when having another child or children over means your own will need you less, and so you can work more. That usually doesn’t work out if done on a daily basis, in my experience, but occasional friends over have given me some wonderfully quiet days with my older kids. They’re having too much fun with friends to be trying for my attention. Better yet, friends often want to trade times, so you can get still quieter time by having your kids at their friend’s house. That can be worth a little lost work time.

Overall, the most important thing to remember is that you have to take your work seriously to get others to take it seriously. That’s how you can decide when to help out and when to remind people that you’re working just as they are.

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Considering all the challenges, why do people put so much faith in having their own home business? Do they really understand the risks?

Other People’s Success Stories

Hearing about how other people have succeeded in home businesses is a big reason why so many people want to start their own. It sounds so good! This person started a simple business in their garage and now makes millions. How can you resist?

Freedom!

Another reason people want a home business is for the freedom they believe it gives. Run a successful home business and you can go on vacation when you want, work the hours you want, have tons of time for your family, the list goes on.

Following Your Passion

Running your own home business is a great way to do something you love. What is it that you’ve dreamed of doing to earn a living? You can quite possibly do it as a home business.

Is It All True?

Here’s the kicker. Running your own home business can bring you everything you want. Maybe. If you’re one of the lucky ones.

More likely is that you will work hard for years building your home business. Maybe you make a living, maybe you don’t. You might even *gasp* fail! As with any other kind of business, more home businesses fail than succeed.

Your typical real home business success story is not a tale of a newly made millionaire. Those home businesses that succeed don’t all make big bucks. Many make just enough for the family to get by. Others run their home business for extra money while continuing to work their day jobs.

And don’t count on extra time for the family. While you can take time off as you please, most people running home businesses find it takes a lot of time to do it right, and there’s the temptation to keep working well beyond the hours that you would have worked a regular job, even with overtime and commuting.

Should You Bother Starting a Home Business?

None of this means you shouldn’t get started if you dream of owning your own home business. You should. You won’t succeed if you don’t try.

What you should be doing is taking the chance with your eyes open. Understand what you’re risking. Understand that success most often means long, hard hours of work before you see any payoff. Understand that you are taking a financial risk.

You might succeed wildly. You might fail miserably. You might be somewhere in between. But if you don’t try you will never know.

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This time of year is great for making sales. Even when people are cutting back, there are still many chances for your business to do well.

Time to decide if you can increase your advertising to gain the attention of those who are spending money. Time to make your products stand out as great gifts. Time to be certain that you can fulfill customer needs promptly.

If you’re selling physical products, that’s a lot of work. Your workload has probably long since increased just in terms of preparation. November’s pretty late to be getting ready, after all.

It’s not too late, of course, even if life has been hectic enough for you that you aren’t as ready as you would like. Just means you have to push a little harder to get things done.

You don’t want to run out of stock. You don’t want to run behind on shipping. You don’t want to ignore customer needs even if you’re swamped with other things.

Even if you’re an affiliate you should be geared up or gearing up by now. Take advantage of the season and the extra shoppers! Be willing to answer questions that will help you to make sales.

I’ll admit I’m running behind on much of this myself this year. It has been crazy, but I know that I need to get it done.

Figure out what your business needs and do likewise. There’s no time to waste.

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Being personal is a big help in just about any home business. You aren’t some giant corporation. You’re you. It should show in most cases, to at least some degree. How much depends on the type of business you’re running. If you’re dealing mostly with other professionals, they may expect more of a professional attitude from you.

A Few Privacy Basics

A while back I switched the registration on this site to a private one. I really don’t like having my address and phone number out there unless I’ve given it out directly. I haven’t switched all my domains to private yet, but my big ones definitely.

Some people don’t trust private domains as much because you can’t tell who’s running them. I can understand that. But when you’re raising a family their privacy comes first.

Besides, I hope that I say enough personal things that it doesn’t matter.

That’s also why I have a P.O. Box that I now use for if I need to put my address out there. I don’t like the inconvenience, but it gives me an extra level of privacy by making my home address harder to get.

I’m not so worried about it however, that I won’t mention the city I live in from time to time or talk about things I have done. I do not mention future plans or vacations I’m going to take, or even that I’ll be out on errands. Keeping private about such things on my sites, Twitter and so forth is just good sense. You don’t know who is seeing what you publish.

Family and Privacy

Figuring out how much to share of family life is an entirely different matter. I could talk a ton more about my kids if I wanted. Some people do. It’s not my style. If I’m going to embarrass my kids in front of their friends with stories about their childhoods, I’d rather do it in person.

It doesn’t bother me to post the occasional pic of my kids, but it’s not a regular thing. They aren’t the focus of how I run my business, even though they’re the reason I have it and they determine much of my working hours.

I post even less about my husband, especially about disagreements. We don’t have many really serious ones fortunately, but in general that’s not my kind of thing to memorialize online. Others feel differently and that’s fine.

Besides, he’s just so darn cute when he’s keeping Selene out of my hair, as he is right now.

His work I especially keep private. Not relevant to anything I do here and people have gotten in trouble in the past over work related stuff posted online. I wouldn’t do that to him, even those times that it has been tempting. I’ve said if he gets a new job or something, but not details.

Minor tales about family I do sometimes post. Hopefully through the years I’ll still feel that I chose the right ones to share.

That’s the big trick with protecting your family’s privacy while trying to be personal online. Sometimes the family stuff is highly relevant. It certainly emphasizes the small and often personal nature of a home business.

Keeping it Real

Privacy doesn’t worry so much that I use a pen name. I am who I say I am. It’s just easier for me to be me that way.

I share my personal experiences, and sometimes even talk about income.

I hope to try video one of these days. That one’s difficult with three kids in the house, especially when two aren’t in school yet.

It’s little touches like that, where you don’t worry about privacy that I think really help a home business owner really emphasize that they’re a person, not a corporation. In many markets, especially online, that helps.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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