Hard to believe the holiday season is upon us already. Whether or not you personally celebrate Christmas or any other holiday at this time of year, you probably need to get ready for those who do if you sell anything that might be given as a gift.

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.

I’ve been reading The Power of Being Personal on Your Blog over at ProBlogger and really enjoying it. Like many people I vary how personal I get because I think about my privacy and that of my family as well.

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.

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?