Tips to Help You Become a Work-at-Home Mom
Women are currently leaving the workplace twice as fast as men. Whether for the desire to experience independence or to catch those first steps instead of letting a daycare worker cheer them on, there are hundreds of women who are deciding that they want to leave the workplace.
It’s hard to be a mother and an employee. As a single mother, this struggle often became even more important to me – I desperately wanted my daughter to be with family, instead of with people who are paid to keep her. On the other hand, I didn’t have the support of a second stream of income coming from a partner, and the instability of any work-at-home job terrified me. What made things more difficult is the confusing information available; some websites claim to have made moms hundreds of thousands of dollars, while the next article I read contained nothing but horror stories.
If you want to become one of those work at home moms you’ve been hearing about, I can at least offer a sliver of hope: I’ve done it. I’m not rich, nor will I likely ever be – but I am able to work on my own schedule, and grow with my daughter in ways that a traditional job would never let me. So what are you going to do, and how to you prevent being scammed? That’s what this article is all about.
First, A Warning
In printed material and the digital page, there are a lot of scams out there. The desire to spend time with your children and work from your home to support your family can be overwhelming, and there are a lot of people who have discovered they can take advantage of what they see as a weakness. Rule number one? Don’t believe in get-rich-quick schemes … they’re just as ridiculous in cyberspace as they are in the “real” world.
These red flags should also immediately put you on guard to a possible scam:
Hype: If they say the same thing over and over, with so much enthusiasm that they put the hometown cheerleaders to shame … watch out. The old clichÃ?© “if it looks too good to be true, it probably is” definitely applies here.
Secret Info: If you can’t get all the information you need, quickly and easily, without spending a penny … you probably will be better off continuing your search. There are always “proprietary” ideas and methods that successful businesses might want to keep secret, but the basic elements should be easy for you to understand and you should be able to get to it without any problems. If you can’t find something you’re looking for, contact the company and ask – if you get a runaround or are told that you have to pay for the information, look elsewhere.
Product: What, precisely, are you working with? If the site or advertisement states that all you have to do is click on banner ads or links, or fill out surveys … you have to seriously evaluate what you’re looking at. If you don’t have a legitimate product, you’re not likely to earn any substantial income. Besides, can you imagine telling someone, “Oh, I click on banner advertisements for a living.” Really, if it sounds ridiculous … it probably is.
Something for Nothing: While researching resources to offer for this article, I ran across one website (I’ll be polite and not give its name) that actually says, “Just give us your bank account information to receive money from our clients”. Not only is this scary because they’re asking for personal information, but they’re trying to convince you that you can earn something for doing nothing – which in all reality, simply is not possible.
Evaluation
So you’ve found a company that offers a real “product”, they give you all the information you need beforehand, and none of your internal warning alarms are going off. Is this what you want to do?
Seriously evaluate your own personal needs before you dive into something. Sit down and imagine spending at least 5 hours a day, 5 days a week, doing the thing you’re looking at doing. Can you really imagine yourself sitting down clicking links in emails, or filling out surveys 20 hours of every week? And how much money can you realistically make doing one of these things?
If you’re tempted to go for it just for the money, you might want to reevaluate why you’re choosing to become a work at home mom. The only difference between an online business – which most of today’s work at home opportunities are – and a traditional brick and mortar business is that it usually costs less to get started. Beyond that, it still takes a lot of time and hard work to make a work at home business succeed. It is a huge balancing act, to make time for your work and your family – sometimes even more so when you work at home than if you worked for an employer, because you don’t “leave” the home to work.
Basically, once you’ve found an opportunity you’re interested in, you need to ask yourself how much time you can honestly see yourself happily devoting to the opportunity, and then decide if the payoff is worth it.
Reviewed Opportunities
Doing a simple search engine query on “work at home jobs” will return thousands of results. Many of these results are, without a doubt, scams. You land on the page and are inundated with hype and pressure.
Here are several websites that offer real opportunities that you might be interested in. I offer them here with the hopes that you will research them fully, and really evaluate whether they will fulfill your needs.
Xango – http://www.mymangosteen.com/distributors/hrogge/landing/ – One of the fastest growing industries in the today is the health and natural beauty industry. Within that category is a company named Xango, which offers a line of real products that you can sell both via a website and in real time. They offer a full, free tour that gives you a complete outline of what you would be doing, how much you can expect to earn (be realistic!), and what’s expected of both them and yourself.
Independent Homeworker’s Alliance – http://www.homeworkers.org/ – Not a “job”, this site works as a member’s database that actually reviews the jobs they list to ensure that what they offer is not a scam. They ask for member feedback on any of the opportunities that they work with, so that if a particular opportunity turns out to be a scam after all it is immediately removed from the database. You can try them out with all the features for fourteen days for free, so you don’t even have to take a leap of faith. Just sign up, start searching, and use your instincts when you find something interesting.
Money Making Mommy – http://www.moneymakingmommy.com/ – Another database, this website is my top pick – save the best for last, right? Not only does this website offer a ton of articles on working online and at home, and give a ton of work-at-home ideas, but it keeps an up-to-date listing of companies currently hiring work-at-home moms. And it’s all offered for free. How good is this site? Well, pretty good – it’s been featured in Women’s World magazine twice because it is so reputable.
