Working At Home..

The maternity benefit doesn't last forever! You have a choice: do you find good childcare for your baby and return to work, or do you try to earn money working from home?

 

It is possible to make money working at home and spend quality time with your family, how much money will depend on your own effort.

There are several schemes we don't recommend: stuffing envelopes and similar mind-numbing tasks will bring in little cash, require up-front payments and often turn out to be scams. Similarly, don't pay for directories that are supposedly full of money-making ideas; they're not worth it.

 

Of course, if you have someone to look after your baby, you can stack shelves at your local supermarket (uggh!). This page, however, is about working for yourself.

 

First off, let's consider things we tried and do not recommend. We tried various network marketing schemes like Avon and Kleeneze. Avon have good products and you get your own exclusive area. The problem is the area is too small to earn decent money, about 100-150 houses. Remember that you have to pay for the catalogues and plastic bags yourself. Your profit margin is 20-25% depending on how much you sell. Expect to make as little as £10 - 15 each week, often less! If that's enough for you then go ahead, it can be fun except in the winter when it's too cold to walk from house to house. You can also recruit a sales team of other Avon reps and you will get paid a small commission on their sales. The problem is that they leave very quickly because they can't earn enough - building a team is a bit like trying to fill a bucket with water when there are holes in the bottom of the bucket! Avon is free to join.

 

Kleeneze also has good products. Their problem is that you often get 2 or 3 reps covering the same territory, so the orders from an area have to be split between 2 or 3 people. We found that we would leave a catalogue (which we paid for) and if the customer placed an order and left the catalogue and order slip in the bag on his doorstep, often another rep would pinch the order (and catalogue) - so he would get paid instead of you. Kleeneze paid well when it first started 20-30 years ago, now IMHO there are too many people doing it and the return is not worth the effort. It costs about £65 to join.

 

Finally we found something that brings in decent money, not a fortune but it's building all the time and we work from a nice warm room at home at a time that suits us. We make money from the Internet, enough to pay the mortgage and feed a family of 2-4 depending on whether the kids are at home from uni. Thousands of people do that, it isn't difficult, and the Internet isn't just a young person's world.

 

You will be aware of sites like Facebook, and other what are called W2 websites (W2 means that the sites are interactive, with you providing the content). Well some of these W2 sites actually pay you to publish on their sites, either some text, a video, a recipe or even just a joke. And every time someone looks at that page you get paid again! Facebook itself doesn't pay anyone, it's more the smaller sites that are trying to get into the same league as Facebook and the other big names.

 

So are they just giving their money away? Well they're not charities! They make money from you and they are really just sharing the income that they receive. You see the ads on the side of this page? Well, every time someone clicks on one of these it earns the website money.

 

As well as publishing something on a W2 site, you can have your own websites and earn money from them. Can't make a website? Bet you can, and with free software! Who will find and visit your website? For a start people who read or view whatever you have published on the W2 sites, because you place links from those pages to your websites and people click through to your site.

Although your own website isn't a necessity, just publishing something on the W2 sites can bring in enough to live on!

 

So how do you find out more about all this? Start where we did. You have to pay $97 (about £50) to become a member, after that there is nothing to pay and you get all the tools to make a video, build a website, the addresses of the sites that will pay you to publish anything you like, more than 30 instructional videos, an easy to follow manual, a forum where you can ask questions and get all the help you need. You can quickly make the £50 back.  Read more about this by clicking here.

 

There's also a free report: The Social Marketing Blueprint Formula - Free PDF Download that is well worth a read. The report is free and very helpful. If you decide you like what you read and decide to sign up there is a monthly fee. I joined and my income is zooming. There's a guy completely new to this sort of thing and he is giving a day-by-day account of his project which is to earn $20 each day from each of 20 websites within 3 months - that's about £200 per day. It is NOT difficult once you know what to do and can put in the necessary effort, and ideally suits someone working from home.