Work From Home Moms

Work from home moms often run their own small business from home. What are the different options when considering working from home and what are the advantages and disadvantages. Read on to find out!

Work From Home Appealed To Me

Working from home is something that has appealed to me since I had children. Soon after my youngest son was born and we returned to the UK from Peru, I returned to work as a nurse to support us. I didn't work full time, but had to work three nights a week and therefore needed to sleep the following days.

Night Shifts Didn't Work

I guess because my then husband didn't initially work, this situation was OK for us, but after a few months the night shifts started to take their toll. I got another nursing job, this time day shifts. My husband's English had improved by this time and he'd got work so now we had to use paid childcare.

Home-based Childcare Business

Of course during my second pregnancy the marriage became intolerable so I left. With a newborn and a four year old I fell back on state help for 18 months, but I trained as a Registered Childminder (a professional home-based child carer). This kind of work from home appealled to me a lot as I could earn some money and be a mom to my kids at the same time; the kids had play mates too! This set-up worked well up until summer 2009 when I gave up to follow my passion (this website!!).

The Advantages

The obvious advantages of this set up were not needing to use paid childcare, but it is a business with pretty high costs and I don't think in real terms I earned very much. It was when the industry became too regulated for my liking that it was no longer financially viable to continue.

The Disadvantages

Working from home makes it difficult to "leave work behind" at the end of the day as you live there. It is easy for work to take over. It is equally difficult to focus on the family, and necessary home tasks when there's work to be done! A dedicated space within the home helps with this as you can shut the door on work at the end of the day.

Some Important Principles

When considering becoming one of the many work from home moms, bear in mind these important principles:

Multiple Streams of Income

An important principle to consider if you want to earn a significant income without sacrificing your role as a mother is multiple streams of income. Just as investment experts recommend "spreading the risk" and investing in several different companies and funds, equally, it is just as wise to spread the risk by not expecting one job or business to support you. Consider one part-time job and one part-time business, or two part-time businesses. This should add up to a good income.

Don't Just Exchange Time For Money

The traditional model for earning money that most people subscribe to is exchanging time for money. This is either in the employment senario, or in a service business. The trouble with this is, what tends to happen is that you run out of time before you've got enough money! Real wealth comes from residual and passive income.

Passive Income

This is income earned that is not reliant on your direct involvement. You earn this when you earn money from investments, receive rent from property you own, and in network marketing (more about this further down the page).

Residual Income

You earn this when you do a piece of work once and then keep on getting paid for it over and over. Authors, songwriters, musicians etc. all enjoy residual royalty income: they write the book/song/music once, then get income every time it is purchased or played. The internet is an amazing tool in the building of both passive and residual income streams.

Website Building

A good traffic drawing website is central to building many forms of passive and residual income. Many work from home moms have their own website, but sometimes getting traffic to your site can be very expensive. That's one of the things I love so much about Site Build It! Follow the Action Plan and you build a website that gets free traffic, which grows month on month! Then you have people to market your business and products to.

Information Marketing

A good option for work from home moms is information marketing. Information products (books, reports, CD's, DVD's, ebooks) have a good profit margin (especially the digital formats!) and you don't have to have your own. You can purchase resale licences for other peoples products. I have licences to resell a range of health and fitness DVD's.

Network Marketing

Another excellent option for work from home moms, is network marketing. This is often referred to as multi-level marketing or MLM. This usually works by you selling some kind of a product or service and recruiting others into your team to also sell. You then receive commission on your own sales and those of your team members. Often you are paid commission on your team members team members too, down several levels. This is how some people grow massive incomes in network marketing. My experience is you need to be a great people person and sales type to have any degree of success, but it is possible.

What's The Bottom Line

There are many options out there for work from home moms to bring in some income in a way that doesn't compromise your motherhood role. Take a look at Financial Freedom Systems to give you more detailed information about the options open to you.

You could also get hold of your own FREE copy of the WAHM Masters Course which takes you through all the information you'll need if you're thinking about becoming a work from home mom.