Do You Have What it Takes to be a Mommy Blogger?

Many stay at home moms are able to care for their families while making some money on the side with a home based business. But this can be especially challenging for a homeschooling mom, who already has two full time jobs: being a mom to your children, and assuming full responsibility for their education.

One way to make money that is often overlooked is blogging. I'm not talking about blogging for exposure - that is a good thing too, and can drive visitors to your own blog or site where you may be able to convert them to customers. I'll talk about that in a minute.

I'm talking about bloggers who are independent contractors who work for clients that need bloggers on a daily basis, or who design blogs for themselves that rely on Google AdSense and affiliate links to make money. Some people laugh when they hear how blogging moms make money, but the truth is that there is quite a bit of money to be made blogging for yourself. You do have to know how to drive traffic to your blog, develop a following for your topic, and how to present your affiliate links and Google ads to make money.

Blogging for someone else enables you to receive upfront pay. This is the preferred method of blogging for many moms. You can expect to be paid a minimum of $5 for a three hundred word post up to twenty dollars a post. I have been paid as much as $50 for a blog post. You can find many blogging jobs at sites such as ProBlogger and Craigslist. Companies use blog writers to keep their blogs updated every day or every other day. If they started a blog but never update it, it will not drive enough traffic to make any money, and they need you to generate enough advertiser or other income to keep the blog running.

Some moms that work at home write content for their own blogs. They start a blog in a niche that they enjoy writing about to attract traffic. An obvious example is this blog - I started this blog in 2006 as a way to talk about the challenges I was experiencing trying to homeschool and work at home. Some of the people that visit this blog will see Google ads and click on the links. Every click makes some amount of money. If you choose the right keywords, the Google ads can amount to quite a bit of money.  It is worth taking a little time to learn how to select the right keywords.

Bloggers also join affiliate sites to host banners for big companies such as Petco, Baby Bee and even Sears. Many people use Commission Junction, or one of the other affiliate link programs to find commission ads. Still others are members of individual affiliate programs for products they feel strongly enough about to recommend. Others are popular enough to attract advertisers who will pay to have banners or other display ads on their sites. These are just a few ways to make money blogging for yourself.

You can also run contests and free giveaways to bring traffic to your blogs, and over the past few years, special tools have been developed to help you manage contests and giveaways. One of my favorite giveaway bloggers is at http://www.mikishope.com - she specializes in giveaways of books, but she also gives away lots of other things. There are as many different kinds of giveaways as there are blogs.

Although writing is part of the blogger's job, if you don't have any marketing experience, you probably should join forums and message boards so you can participate in discussions with a link as your signature. Everyone on the discussion boards sees this link and they can click the link and check out your blog. This is just one way to generate more traffic that can lead to more Google ad clicks. It's more writing, but it is free, and that is usually a consideration for a work-at-homeschool mom.

Even though you should write about something that you enjoy, you also should do some research to see what types of blogs get traffic before you start. You can make as many blogs as you like free with Blogger. Therefore, you might have more than one blog that increases your chances of making money for yourself. The most successful of these blogs is going to be the one about a topic that you are passionate about, that also happens to be a topic that gets massive searches that people are dying to read about.  Generally speaking, a "mommy blogger" is someone who writes about topics of interest to mommies.  But there is another sense in which a "mommy blogger" has become one who writes about mommy issues and attracts boatloads of mommies. The goal of any blogger is to draw traffic to her blog so that she may get some clicks on affiliate sites or Google ads, and the mom who attracts enough traffic to begin to also attract sponsors achieves the level of a serious "mommy blogger."

Blogging for yourself is a slow process, but if you participate in discussions at forums and message boards with your link, you can increase your traffic and increase your chances of making money. If you need guaranteed pay, you can apply for blogging jobs that pay weekly or monthly. If you blog for a big client, you can actually make as much as one hundred dollars a day just writing five blog posts a day.

The only disadvantage of blogging in a particular niche, is that you may grow weary of your topic if you have not selected it carefully. If you are working for a client, the greater the chance that the topic is going to become tiresome. This is something that you have to consider before starting any blog or blogging job. 

Some bloggers also make money making their blogs available for advertisements.  One way is to allow the advertiser to show an ad on their blog. Advertisers are always looking for blogs with a large readership where they can promote their products. Miki's Hope has an Alexa ranking in the US of less than 15,000. That's a lot of eyeballs to attract advertisers.

Another type of ad you can have on your blog is called Paid to Post. Companies and individuals pay you  a certain amount of money to write up a post about their product or website and post it on your blog. Depending on the size of your blog audience, you can make as much as one hundred dollars for a three hundred word post.  Of course, it is important to disclose when you have been paid for a post, and the FTC has strict regulations about this. Ignore them at your own peril.




You can also blog for exposure - by that I mean, you can write a guest post on someone else's blog that has a resource box that links back to your blog, or you can write something that you are excited about just for the sheer joy of doing it, with a few links to sites who may send traffic your way once they get wind of your post. I'm thinking of the post I did about Topsy Turvy Garden Bags on this blog a couple of years ago.  I totally should have gotten paid for that. But I was more excited about my awesome tomatoes than I was about getting paid.  And that post has been widely seen by people searching on gardening topics in general,  and Topsy Turvy in particular - enough so that it is still listed in my "Most Popular Posts" sidebar widget even two years later.

Whether you want to work for someone else or blog for yourself will depend on the amount of money you want to make, and the amount of time you have. You can do both paid blogging and blogging for yourself and increase your income, as long as you remember that your primary responsibility is caring for your family and secondarily, teaching your children.

Lost In The Translation

Welcome to my 1500th subscriber!  Thanks so much for your support!

I have been in the process of moving some of my email from an old address to one I check every day, and eliminating subscriptions to newsletters I no longer read, etc. Today in my inbox was an invitation from my old internet marketing friend, Beth Schmillen, to "stumble" a website called "Lost in Translation."

As a linguistics minor, I have never lost my love of the mechanics of language, or my fascination with the relationship between biology and the human ability to speak different languages. As an internet marketer who has many team members from other countries, I have struggled for years trying to make use of inadequate translation software trying to communicate the language of my industry. Let's face it, network marketing has its own language, and the concepts often are lost in the translation.

Back in the '90s, many of my international team members did not speak English. Now translation software is usually not needed. Most of my international team members speak flawless English - it is mostly the Americans who cannot speak English.

dude hahah u r kiddin me yo i know how to transl8

No doubt.


I wrote about translation software in this space a few years ago in an article called International Trafficking and My 15 Minutes of Fame, which also sports the above screenshot of my blog in Korean!

But this website that Beth sent me is even funnier, because it enables you to enter an English phrase and translate it  back and forth from English to other languages and back - usually giving you a totally incomprehensible version of what you originally entered.

Kind of like the old game "Telephone" we played when I was a kid, where you had a line of kids and whispered something into the ear of each one in turn, and ending up with hilarious results at the end.

For instance,  "what goes up, must come down" became "the iron and steel industry of the increase must consider."  What?

Here's how:

Original English Text:
what goes up, must come down
Translated to Japanese:
上がる何が、来なければな らない
Translated back to English:
Something which rises must come,
Translated to Chinese:
上升的事必须来，
Translated back to English:
The rise matter must come,
Translated to French:
La matière d'élévation doit venir,
Translated back to English:
The matter of rise must come,
Translated to German:
Der Stoff des Anstiegs muss kommen,
Translated back to English:
The material of the rise must come,
Translated to Italian:
Il materiale dell'aumento deve venire,
Translated back to English:
The material of the increase must come,
Translated to Portuguese:
O material do aumento deve vir,
Translated back to English:
The material of the increase must see,
Translated to Spanish:
El material del aumento debe considerar,
Translated back to English:
The material of the increase must consider,
Translated to French:
Le matériel de l'augmentation doit considérer,
Translated back to English:
The hardware of the increase must consider,
Translated to German:
Die Hardware der Zunahme muss betrachten,
Translated back to English:
The hardware of the increase must regard,
Translated to Italian:
Il hardware dell'aumento deve considerare,
Translated back to English:
The hardware of the increase must consider,
Translated to Portuguese:
A ferragem do aumento deve considerar,
Translated back to English:
The ironwork of the increase must consider,
Translated to Spanish:
La industria siderúrgica del aumento debe considerar,
Translated back to English:
The iron and steel industry of the increase must consider,

In all fairness, this translation is powered by the venerable "Babelfish" - which was around in the '90s and has been supplanted by other better translation engines.  But it is still hilarious.  Visit the site and put in your own phrase and see what you come up with.

What has been your experience, if any, with translation software?  Do you have a recommendation?

PS - If you have not spent any time on Stumbleupon, block out a couple of hours because you never know where you will end up.  Very addictive!

Saying Goodbye After 4 Years of Homeschool Blogging?

Well, not exactly...

My homeschool adventure is drawing to a close after 20 years. Not sure how I feel about that.

My online persona for a number of years has been "Work-at-homeschool-mom". To a great extent I have defined myself by homeschooling.

But, let's face it. I'm so done with this. My son is 18 and about to graduate. More or less. This could be our last year at the Sandy Cove conference since we will technically no longer be homeschooling. If there are more homeschool families than there are rooms, we will bow out next year.

In the last year or so, this has morphed into a blog about homeschool freedoms and other parental rights issues more than a blog about either homeschooling or home business.

And I have been so busy with my business that I haven't even had time to post here in six months. Of course, that is probably because one of the things I was doing in my business was extensive blogging for clients. I could hardly stand the thought of one more blog post at the end of the day.

I am so grateful for my subscribers and readers, and thank you for the privilege of sharing my homeschool adventure with you!

So, while I am not exactly saying goodbye, I am going to be putting more of an emphasis on the home business side of things. Both my children have joined me in my business, and are finding that they are both cut out for working from home.

Not everyone is, of course. Are you?

I invite you to take a quiz on the subject if you have ever considered working from home.  While it is true that you need self-discipline, there are many ways to have a home based business - and most of them do not involve working your fingers to the bone 80 hours a week. The results of this quiz will help me figure out what kinds of things are your best option. You may not have time to have a "job" at home, but you may have time to get set up to sell affiliate products that will give you a passive income. 

You will receive your results instantly, and I will receive an email with the results. Then over the next few days you will receive emails from me with more information about your quiz.  And after about a week, I will reply with some questions for you so I can make a detailed recommendation about the best kind of business for you.  It may or may not even be something I am currently involved in.

I hope you will take advantage of my offer, whether you are a homeschool mom/dad or not.  With economic uncertainty affecting everyone around the world, now is a good time to implement a "Plan B" for yourself.

Who knows? It could work so well for you that it will eventually replace your "Plan A"!

What You Need to Know About Affiliate Marketing

Well, you have finally done it.

You have told your boss to take your job and shove it. You have taken the plunge and made the decision to join some affiliate programs.

But what does that mean, exactly?

There are active affiliate programs that encourage you use your sales savvy to actively recruit in other new affiliates, purchase product and sell it retail. Then there are passive affiliate programs, such as the Amazon Associates program, or Commission Junction. Most people simply place banner or text ads promoting products on a website. You can be as active or as passive as you want to be, changing banners, or offering many categories of products and rotating them, but generally you do not have to recruit other affiliates or stock product - it will be drop shipped by the company.

Here is the banner I have in the sidebar of this blog that promotes Amazon Prime, the fabulous "free shipping" program they have for $79 a year. One price gets you free two-day shipping on any item, with no price or "total purchase amount" restrictions.

Only certain products are eligible, and only products that are actually sold by Amazon, as opposed to J&R Music World or one of the other stores that uses Amazon shopping carts, are eligible for this special offer. As someone who spends thousands at Amazon in a year's time, and buys cases of toilet paper, trash bags, and other heavy cartons, as well as other groceries, books, DVDs and small appliances, I can confidently say that Amazon Prime is the deal of the century.

If you follow the link in the sidebar for "Resources for Work-at-Homeschool Families" you will find an Amazon "A-Store". There I am offering a selection of product relating to homeschooling.

These are both examples of passive affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing can be very lucrative. It provides people with the opportunity to work for themselves with very little risk. Those that are sales savvy, good at marketing and are not afraid of a little hard work can often do incredibly well with an affiliate marketing program.

Affiliate marketing sounds easy but you do need to exercise some caution. You will want to avoid the affiliate marketing pitfalls that can ruin your business - or worse, have you crawling on your hands and knees back to that boss who now knows how you REALLY feel about him.

People tend to get excited when they start a new venture. Unfortunately, in their excitement to begin, they may fail to read the fine print in their agreement. Whenever you sign up for an affiliate marketing program, you will be expected to sign an agreement. The "terms and conditions" will govern your relationship with the company.

If they want to hide something this is where they will put it. It will either be in the small print, or they will dazzle you with legal language. Either way, you need to read and understand your agreement thoroughly to avoid disappointment and lost earnings.

If you are signing up for a commission based affiliate marketing program then you need to understand how the term revenue is defined. This is one of the biggest pitfalls of the contracts. They may advertise 5-10% - or even 20-30% commissions, but it all depends on how they define revenue.

Most affiliate marketing programs will calculate commission on the gross value of the sale; in other words, the amount of money the company will get at the completion of the sale. Before you get too excited about that, you need to read this part of the agreement very carefully. The amount of the sale almost always excludes credit card or debit card payment surcharges. They also are likely to exclude payment and delivery charges as well as any gift wrapping or other surcharges.

What sounded like a nice commission is soon shrinking before your eyes. Ask these questions specifically before you sign an agreement.

Some affiliate programs are even stricter in their definition of revenue. Your commission may be based on the profit margin of the product sold. For example, if you help sell a book for 20 dollars but the company only makes 10 dollars profit, you’ll receive a percentage of $10, not $20! This can make a substantial difference in your earnings. Again, make sure you understand these things and ask specifically what your commission will be based upon. Read your agreement and look out for odd sounding clauses. These could come back to haunt you later.

Here is a real world example. I participated in a certain travel opportunity several years ago and later discovered that the travel company was ITSELF an affiliate of another travel website! So the great commissions I thought I would receive on travel that people booked on my affiliate site were actually a percentage of the commissions the COMPANY received as an affiliate for the other travel site! I thought I would be getting 14%, for instance, only to discover that it was 14% of the 20% the company was getting.

Something else to be aware of when you work on commission is returns. Many affiliate marketing companies only pay commission out on completed sales and then only if the customer keeps the item. If they return the items your commission could be cancelled. You could also be billed for the outstanding commission if you do not have sufficient commission credit built up. Make sure you understand this before signing on. You cannot expect a company to pay you a commission on an item that is returned, so make sure you understand their return policy. Find out your rights in this situation.

Affiliate marketing can be a great way to earn money. If you have good sales and marketing skills then it can give you the opportunity to put them to good use. You’ll be able to work for yourself and not someone who undervalues and does not appreciate them. But you need to consider affiliate marketing carefully.

Make sure you understand your agreement and exactly what you will be paid for. You don’t want to have to go crawling back to your boss begging for your old job back.

Affiliate Programs Make It Easy to Homeschool and Have a Home Business

If you have been longing to start a business online you may be coming across terms you've never heard before. You may also have found the opportunities available are overwhelming. Where do you begin?

AFFILIATE PROGRAMS - EASY START

Affiliate programs may be the easiest online business to start running. Why?

With any online business you must have a product or service to sell. First you must create this product or service and then you must be able to fill orders.

Selling your own product or service also means creating a website, learning how to write ad copy, setting up a marketing plan, being able to accept payments online and obviously doing the work. If you're selling a physical product then you will need to make or buy the item, package it and pay for shipping costs. If you provide a service than you will likely have to start by doing free jobs to build your credibility and then when you are charging for your service you are still limited by how much work you can actually handle.

THE MAGIC OF AFFILIATE PROGRAMS

Affiliate programs are a great way to get started in an online business. In fact there are even some 'Super Affiliates' who are making fabulous incomes from affiliate programs. So, what ARE affiliate programs?

Affiliate programs allow you to sell another company's service or product and make a commission on every sale or lead. You do not even need to build a website or handle the transaction. Your job is to drive traffic (customers) to your affiliate link.

An affiliate link is a special URL code that will identify customers coming to the company's site from your advertising. It will likely be the website address with a code attached to the end.

Some affiliate programs also have tiers. That means if someone who is interested in SELLING the product comes through your link and signs up you will also get a small percentage of THEIR earnings.

HOW DO I CHOOSE A PROGRAM?

You should research the popularity of some of your interests. Try to determine if people are buying that product or service online. There are many sources for finding that information including free ones such as the Overture keyword tool.

When you have found an area that is popular then type the subject along with 'affiliate program' into your search engine and see which programs have services or products for that area. You can also use an affiliate program directory.

When you have found a program that looks interesting you should read the terms of the program. Make sure that payouts are not based on a high commission earning or you may never see your money. Also try to choose programs with high commission rates. Often you will find ebooks and downloadable software has the highest rates as there is no physical product to make or ship. If you are satisfied with the terms then you need to sign up - usually a simple process.

START MARKETING

The reason affiliate programs are so great for beginners is that you only need to focus on marketing - not making - your product.

Many affiliate programs have information on how to market and give you tools such as banners, product feeds and more. You can also look for other information on marketing including writing articles, creating pay-per-click campaigns, commenting in online forums etc. As you gain experience marketing you will make adjustments to your selling and start creating a wonderful income!

I have been an affilliate of SFI since 2001, and believe that it has the best overall marketing courses and information available for the beginning affiliate marketer. I am often surprised to realize how much I know about marketing that I learned from SFI. You can sign up for free and check it out. Be sure and check out the International Association of Home Business Entrepreneurs while you are there.

Time Flies When You're Having Fun...

...and even when you're not.

This is a ridiculously busy time of year, leading up not only to the Easter break, but school board elections, our anniversary, standardized testing, and last but not least, our annual squeeze by the taxman.

I can't believe that it has been a whole month since I started this, and I have not posted a single "home business" kind of post, when that is, after all the topic of this blog: how one can successfully work at home AND home school, too.

So I guess a turnkey home business idea would be the easiest for the busy homeschooling mom, one that can actually make you money working only a few hours a day. One that I have been promoting recently is called 1 Step System. I have been working with a partner, and we made about $6000 in the last seven or eight weeks working part time.

Rather than waste a lot of time here trying to explain it again, here is a link to our very excellent review of the program entitled 1 Step System - Hype, or a Home Business Idea That Works?

ADDENDUM 2008 - I am no longer promoting this program, and while the link takes you to the same place, it now talks about how 1 Step System fell short of what we hoped it would do, and suggests another program we believe is better for the average person.