Work at home moms are superhumans. As if managing the household is not hard enough, they add money-making endeavour into the equation. Despite the challenges, there are more and more moms choose to work at home. The appeal is there: they are able to spend more time with their children while figuring out on a work schedule that is flexible enough to accommodate the family time and household management.

To help you getting started, here are 10 home-based business ideas for budding work at home moms that you can start right away – enjoy!

1. Virtual assistance

If you excel in getting things done properly, then you might enjoy being a Virtual assistant (VA.) VA is an independent contractor who help a client with his/her day-to-day activities, such as administrative work (i.e. data entry, writing and sending emails, client’s day-to-day scheduling, etc.) and specialised business services, such as web property management (i.e. website and its database maintenance and upkeep.)

You could join and offer your expertise in a VA company community, a freelancing site or specialised forums (i.e. expatriate forums which members are looking for local VAs to help them get into the business culture.) Learn how to be a virtual assistant here.

2. Freelance Writing

Fresh insights are badly needed in today’s information age – writers will enjoy a large demand today, ranging from a regular contribution to an online magazine or as an editor of a new book. The best thing of freelance writing is that you can do it any time, e.g. when the children are at school.

Again, you should visit freelancing sites for an abundance of writing job opportunities. Moreover, there are also publishing or other content-creation-related companies who outsource their content generation functions to freelance writers – pitch yourself to such companies by seeking the company’s contact person.

Read this one of the country’s top freelancers story on starting out and succeeding as freelance writers.

3. Child Care

Moms are good at child care, naturally. There always a need in where you live that other busy moms get things over their head and need all the help offered. You can start up either a day care center or after-school activities for kids.

The best thing to start a child care business at home is that your children will enjoy the benefit of socialising with their peers. Learn how to start a child daycare here.

4. Specialised business services, online

Business owners need all the help they can get – they need to outsource some of the business functions to keep them efficient and effective. There are needs for specialized business services, such as graphic design, web design, or SEO services (e.g. directory submissions, link building campaigns, etc.)

All you need is a PC/laptop and your (flexible) time to do clients’ work – this can be a pure make money online opportunity; join a webmaster forums, and you will see that the opportunities are limitless – It seems that people are always in need of site-related services, such as web developing, web design, logo design, banner design, directory submission, press release submission, article submission, content writing, and many, many more.

5. Blogging

Although similar, blogging is entirely different from the #2 freelance writing. With blogging, you are a specialist – your opinions count above anything else. To get started, you can either blog for your own or for a blogging network.

You can set up a blog (preferably, a self-hosted blog so that you can build an asset) using self-hosted WordPress, for instance. To start – buy a domain name, sign up with a web hosting and set up a nice design on your blog. Then you can blog anytime you want, in-between your busy day.

Alternatively, you can join blog networks as a blogger for a certain topic of interest. Such job can get you quite a lot – e.g. Write for About.com can get you about $700/month, doing at least 2 articles a week. Going full time obviously can get you plenty to have a comfy lifestyle.

6. Sell stuffs online

Okay, maybe eBay is not that hot anymore, but it still one of the largest online marketplaces today. With the help of drop shipping, selling goods online is becoming much easier. All you have to do is to find stuffs to sell (you can look for them in garage sales, in your attic or from companies doing drop shipping), create a listing, moderate the bids, and have the stuffs sent to the buyers. Neat.

Alternatively, you can sell stuffs on forums. The key is to join huge forums (that are obviously allowing you to sell physical goods) with huge traffic and start offering your stuffs there; you could join smaller forums, but consider specialised forums only (not much to be made in small, general forums – first hand experience.)

One more idea: You can set up an online store yourself, either to self-host it or join a largely free network. For a free network, you can consider blog networks, such as Blogger.com or Mulitiply.com. The more popular option today is Facebook.com (maybe MySpace.com) and Twitter.com. Even with the latter, you don’t need any sites set up – just ‘tweets’ your products away!

7. (Online) tutoring

You could help students with their homework; you can teach people to play guitar; you can teach English language to foreign students; and many more. You can do this by opening a class at home or doing online tutoring using the help of online communication tools (i.e. Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, Skype, etc.)

With tutoring, you are probably less flexible compared to the other home-based business ideas, but you can always work out a schedule that fit the regular schedule of your children, e.g. school time. Read this to learn how to get paid well as a tutor.

8. Arts and crafts

Similar to #6, if you are artistic, you can set up an arts and crafts business at home. You can paint, design jewelry, make candles and more and have them sold using an online store. Alternatively, you can consider using an online marketplace, such as Zazzle.com, in where you can make and sell your creative works (that may include T-shirt custom design, personalised gifts, etc.) Find out more on how to market your arts here.

Also, similar to #7, you can open an art and crafts class at home. You can teach others to paint, make jewelry, make candles, scrapbooking, and many more.

9. Selling (nearly free) Information

PLR is the keyword – you can consider selling PLR – private label rights – content, such as article packs, ebooks, podcasts, scripts, databases, and many more. PLR refers to reusable and resalable content that have no copyright attached to them.

Again, you can do this by setting up a website and sell the abundant content to those who need them.

How to profit from PLR? Typically, article pack of thousands of articles only costs you less than $20. What if you search through the content and repackage part of the article pack into, say, a “Health Article Pack” priced at $15? What’s more, you can sell it over and over again – the profitability is there. Recession? What recession?

10. Consulting and research

If you love consulting and doing research, there are plenty of opportunities can be done at the comfort of your home. You can offer, for instance, Management and/or SEO consulting for site owners or doing market research or survey for companies that are about to launch new products.

The good thing about consulting and research: You are likely to be paid well. In researching, some could pay you thousands of dollar to conduct a research and write a research paper for a company – indeed, you can be an independent researcher, working at home. Arrange this opportunity as a company, and you could see yourself to serve more reputable companies (companies do enjoy working with other “business with names” more than with freelancers who bear personal brands.)

Any more ideas to share? You can do so by commenting on this article.

Work at home moms – good luck setting up profitable business!

Ivan Widjaya
Proudly home-based

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