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.
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