Home Based Business Ideas for Stay At Home Moms

As the internet grows and small businesses need for good content increases, so grows the need for freelance writing services. The important thing to consider when getting your content for your website is that it be quality content. Some of the content will end up on a website, but most of the writing will be used in article distribution. Because these articles can literally be written about tens of thousands of topics, who better to cover the stories than you guessed it: moms. I have a mom and am married to a person who is a mom. They know a lot of stuff and tapping into that expertise about every topic from "the best way to clean a knee abrasion" to "how often to baste the turkey" while it's in the oven is something that small businesses should be doing.  The vast life experience of moms keeps them busy since their time at home usually has them running from appointment to appointment, recital to recital, and all before anyone even touches homework. 


In the past some moms have excelled at running a tight ship at home and given nary a second thought to the opportunities right in front of them. They fail to realize that by using their experience they can write content to make some money on the side. The need in the marketplace for "blogger moms" and other content developers has become so great now because of their valuable life experience. These instances are a lot more common than you think. I could probably sit down with any of the super moms in my life (wife, mom, sisters, aunts, etc.) and find enough documented life experience to make your head spin. Maybe it's just me, but these are just a couple of home based business ideas that I have in mind for stay at home moms. 

I lost 15 lbs in three weeks eating fatty foods

I officially hate the food pyramid that the government created. Even the new one stinks, you know the one that looks like a pie chart stuffed inside of a triangle with a flight of stairs slapped on the side. I try to follow history as much as a person who is as busy as I am as much as possible. This country's fatness as a whole is a pretty recent development. The top contributors to the really bad health our kids and even more adults suffer from are the following:

• video games and other sedentary activities
• sugary soft drinks (yes, i'm taking aim at you too Sunny D)
• ready access to government subsidized grain heavy processed foods
• low fat diet crazed people who forget that white bread/sugar/flour are poison
• foods rich in nutrients and low in toxic chemicals have been priced out of people's budgets
• text messaging (that is more of a contributor to societal brain rot than people's physical health)

I really have only started here and I could start six different blogs about each of the above points, but I have a hard time believing that weight loss should be as difficult as people make it out to be. I eat a steady diet of the following foods:

• Scrambled eggs with steamed/sauteed vegetables
• Grilled chicken with sour cream, cheese, and salsa
• In-N-Out Double Double burgers served protein style (wrapped in lettuce)
• Low Carb Six Dollar Burgers from Carl's Jr.
• Any Cafe Rio Salad without the tablecloth sized tortilla
• Spinach salads with grilled chicken
• Chicken ceasar salad from Costco
• Salmon sandwiches on the paper thin Orowheat whole wheat bread
• Steamed veggies with BBQ chicken breast
• Cottage cheese with fruit (fruit consumed sparingly)

I don't know how you feel about these foods, but I love them. I am never hungry, I take good multi-vitamins, I have a ton more energy, and I don't feel like I'm being poisoned. Just in losing 15 lbs, I feel like I've had a water softener salt sized bag of crap removed from my system and mid-section. Mark's Daily Apple is a blog that promotes this style of eating (I'm pretty hesitant to call it a diet because it's not something I really want to abandon after time, as I would like to sustain health in the long term). If you've had a hard time in the weight department, check it out. If you have experiences or comments, please share. Back to my cheese cube snacks.

Is eCommerce Better Than Affiliate Marketing?

In promoting products, the two major means of making money are affiliate marketing and eCommerce or selling a physical product on a website. Both of these options have their pros and cons. I am going to give you a rundown of these scenarios. When you are drumming up ideas for your home based business, you should determine the best platform and strategy to make money. 

Affiliate marketing is a great strategy for people who want to advertise in a variety of methods including PPC, Facebook, cost per view, and other varieties of paid advertising. Once you are accepted into an affiliate network, you can start making money relatively quickly. It requires and advertisng budget, but results can be close to instant.

With eCommerce platforms, there are set principles that you can follow to get where you want to be. You can write articles, submit to certain directories, and you can start creating press releases and ramping up on your blogging efforts. These will help you build a long term presence on search engines and improve rankings. With ecommerce, you are creating a website with categories, finding a supplier who will hopefully dropship items for you, and essentially trying to stay around as long as it takes to make sales on your site.

Ultimately it is up to you to figure out which strategy you'll use to promote your products or offers. Important points to consider include, cost of development for your product based website, an advertising budget for promoting offers with affiliate marketing, and your willingness to wait for search engines to rank your site and bring you the visitors you'll need.

How To Find A Niche Market

When people are looking for opportunities to start their home based businesses, they usually miss the boat. Where they fall short is their broad, open-ended approach to picking a product or service to sell or promote on the web. Because we have access to so many tools online, there is absolutely no excuse to launch a website or start a business without having done proper research. The tools available to marketers and small businesses include keyword list generators, reverse search tools, and even a few that allow us to assess how much competition we will have upon launching our websites. With all of these pieces in place, we have little or no excuse for picking a bad niche.

If you were going into battle, would you pick an enemy that was 1 million troops strong, or would you rather fight a group of strays who are few in number and less ready for combat? The same question can be asked when you are going to compete in a given niche or marketplace on the web. I know there is a lot of competition for home and gardening wares, and that there would be seemingly limitless competition here, so I would want to consider niches like composting or even pruning equipment. Competing with the bigs like Home Depot, Lowes, et al would be a bad move in this situation. When you choose a smaller target like composting equipment, you make it easier to do well in search because you have fewer customer types. Considering your competition is as important as determining how much demand there is for that product. I have fought tooth and nail with clients who have wanted to sell or promote things that based on Google (and let's face it, who else would you need to base it on?) do not exist and have no market. Don't market to non-existent customers. Simply put, there are factors such as supply, demand, and competition that need to be a huge part of the conversation when picking a market niche for your home based business ideas.