Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Real Work At Home Ideas for Women

Here Are Some Real Work From Home Ideas For Women...from someone who's been doing this work form home thing for a long time!

Are you ready to make the transition from work-for-a-boss to work-for-yourself? The Internet can be the perfect work from home opportunity for many women!

It's the dream of many - and, unfortunately, the reality of few, but that need not be the case! Being your own boss is not out of reach of the 'average' person - trust me - I am VERY average and have been self-employed for almost 2 decades now.

I started on the work from home path long before the internet came along - back when it took quite a bit of money to actually launch a business of any kind. Mail order companies were the choice of most of us that wanted to run a home based business and it was not only expensive - but slow and time consuming.

The fastest way was to buy or rent a mailing list, and send out your ads by snail mail - and that was at least a $10,000 investment right there - without even knowing if you had a good product or not! The alternative was buying magazine ads - a lot cheaper but with a lead time of several months before the magazine hit the stands - testing your ad or your product could take you a year or more to get it right!

Then - along came the internet and everything changed! Starting a business online can be done quickly, easily and with a minimum of costs, and literally launched and run in a few hours a day - or even a week, if your schedule is that busy.

The bottom line is that if you TRULY want to be self-employed - there are few barriers left to prevent you from starting your own business today - and a lack of money is definitely not one of them. If you have a computer or access to one, and access to the internet - you can soon be on your way to your own online business!

Here are some great Real Work From Home Ideas For Women, and for other women that I know personally:

EBay: Don't laugh - EBay is a lot more than just a giant garage sale these days. Get some experience first by selling those odds and ends around the house, and then get into growth mode by checking out what others are doing to make some big bucks here: dropshipping (don't fall for the services that want a big sign-up fee - it's not necessary!) ebook selling (dig out those family recipes for a nice little e-cookbook?), maybe you have a special craft or art that you can sell? Or maybe you KNOW someone whose work you could sell? Get creative - there are a lot of ways to make money on EBay other than cleaning out your garage!

Blogging for Moola: Yes - blogging can bring in some big dollars these days and can cost you zero to start! You can get a free blog at wordpress.org or blogger.com or many other places online to get started fast and cheap. How to make money? That's pretty easy too with Pay-Per-Click programs like Adsense out there that will pay you whenever a visitor clicks on one of the ads on your site...

Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate Marketing is basically selling other people's products (with their permission, of course!) for a share of the sale. This can be done with a blog or website - or simply by advertising the products in different ways online and sending the traffic to the company's website. You can sign up directly with a particular merchant or register with one of the many Affiliate Management companies (and there are lots to choose from) No matter what you might want to sell - you will probably be able to find a product that will fit your needs!

MultiLevel Marketing: MLM has had it's bad press over the years - thanks in large part to the company that launched the concept decades ago with an overzealous 'take captives' sort of approach, but in fact, MLM is a great way to market products and can be a fun and lucrative way to make a living. Companies today are tightly regulated and must adhere to quite a number of very stringent laws to protect both members and customers. It's a business model that is essentially advertising by word of mouth rather than expensive commercial advertising methods (TV, magazines, etc) and sharing that savings with the bodies that are doing the word of mouth ads! Today's companies tend to market more online than the old style 'coffee meetings' and you will find many well-educated professionals involved.

If you really want to work from home - even if you no budget to start a business - ideas are everywhere online!

More Work From Home Ideas For Women!

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Work At Home Ideas For Women: Rebate Processing

"Rebate Processors Wanted" "Make hundreds daily processing rebates online!"

If you're like me - you probably get a lot of these emails every day or you see them as you surf around the web - so I finally decided to check a few of them out and here's what happened:

For $39.95, I received a book about.....(drum roll,please!) AFFILIATE MARKETING!

I know, I know, I can hear you asking what affiliate marketing has to do with processing rebates........and in fact.......it's a very creative concept that is used by a number of very successful affiliate marketers that I know, so the CONCEPT can work -

BUT the way it's being marketed is pretty deceptive as far as I am concerned, and that's a shame, because it doesn't need to be marketed in this way.

Here's how it works: you sign up for an affiliate program, and advertise the product through the usual online marketing methods (pay per click, article marketing, forums etc) and offer the buyer a 'rebate' - out of your commission - if they buy the product through your affiliate link. You just tell them to send you their receipt and you will send the 'rebate' to their PayPal address.

Now the truth is - this IS a very effective marketing tool, but you also need to very careful with this approach because if you refund the customer money before the product guarantee period is up - you could wind up losing money. You want to make sure that if you rebate any money, that you only do so AFTER the refund period has passed and that the customer clearly understands that they do NOT get the refund immediately.

And of course, you need to know something about affiliate marketing.

So, while the description used to market this method is somewhat less than truthful as far as I am concerned - the actual method is used by many, many successful affiliate marketers - and in fact, COULD make you a decent income - but it does require more knowledge and more effort than the ads would lead you to believe......but then that is pretty much the case with just about any worthwhile business venture!



If you are interested in making money with Affiliate Marketing - there are some excellent products on the market - one of the newest ones is Secret Affiliate Code - which I really love because a) it doesn't require you to spend a bunch of money to follow the methods recommended b) I have personally had very good results with the methods c) you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out how to follow the method.

While it doesn't focus on the 'rebate processing' method - it will give you a better education in the fundamentals of Affiliate Marketing and driving traffic to your offers - which is the most important thing to learn if you want to be successful in Affilate Marketing.

Once you have the basics of choosing a good product and getting traffic - THEN you can tackle the different methods such as 'rebate processing' - safely and without losing your shirt!!

For more REAL Work At Home Ideas visit Work At Home Ideas for Women or The Work At Home Couple! for tips on surviving working with your spouse!

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Work At Home Ideas For Women!

Are you a woman looking for a work at home idea? 

Tired of the rat race and want to start a home based business? Or a stay at home mom that simply wants to add to the family income with a small online business?

As a woman that has been working at home for the last 20+ years, and running online businesses since 1996, I feel pretty qualified to give some advice in this area!

When I first started working from home - it was something that we all tried to hide from clients the general attitude was that you worked form a home office because you were not successful enough to have a 'real' office away from home.

Personally, I never felt that way - I worked from home by choice, not necessity. I certainly could have afforded an office, but I enjoyed being able to work my own hours, and having everything I needed at hand. It meant that if I needed to work late, or needed a file at an 'odd' hour - it was close by - not a 30 minute drive away.

The advent of the internet has changed many aspects of our lives - and the home based business is certainly one that has changed because of the web. Today, working from home is the preferred lifestyle, and one that is highly sought after. No one hides their home business anymore - rather we proudly flaunt our lifestyle business and clients realize that we work from home because we are successful enough to be able to choose this option.

Ideas for home based businesses run the gamut from consulting to sales, mlm to web design.No matter what your skill set, your interests or your passions - if you have a computer and internet access, you can find a way to run an online business from home today!

My first web WomensNet.Net, launched in 1998, and it was an expensive and time consuming process. I knew nothing about html, and had to rely on others to manage and update the site - never a good thing! After losing the entire business because my web mast did not bother to back up the site in 2001, I learned html and re-launched the site myself. I love the site, and there is a lot of content there for women entrepreneurs - but truthfully - it's a pain to maintain!
It has a very active forum of women entrepreneurs, and gets several thousand visitors a month.

Blogs have made launching and maintaining websites much easier - my blog Work At Home Ideas For Women has been live for more than a year, and it's articles are picked up and promoted by many sites. It gets excellent traffic because everything that we write about comes from real experience - good and bad!

Membership sites are also very popular these days, although they can be rather complicated to get set-up and running. WomensnetOnline, a social and business networking site form women entrepreneurs that I started last January, was 6 months in the planning, and I wen through a lot of different scripts and programmers before I found one that did what we needed! But it was worth the effort - the free site has over 3,000 members and has become a great resource for women looking for home business ideas.

Over the years, I have launched a lot of sites, and today, I earn a nice healthy income from Adsense, affiliate marketing, EBay, and lots of other methods online.