Working at home as a mom can be draining if you don’t have the proper work-life balance to keep all your plates spinning in midair. You probably got into this career to care for your children, or maybe out of necessity, but now you’re finding you have even less time than before you worked at home!
That’s very disheartening because you wanted to have the best of both worlds. Whether you’re a single Mom or married, you now have a family to tend to – including your children, possibly a spouse or partner, and yourself – not to mention a business that needs nurturing.
There are a few ways you can minimize stress and find that balance in your life that you’ve been craving. These years when you’re a parent will be fleeting, so while you want balance, you do still need to have your priorities straight – and our kids are our most precious resource.
Pick a Niche That You’re Passionate About
There’s one thing that differentiates Moms who succeed online and Moms who just feel overwhelmed. That’s their enthusiasm about their work. We’re already enthusiastic about our kids – they’re our entire world.
But when it comes to careers, they can either be something we tolerate, or something that helps complete us as adults.
There are so many niches you can get into and profit from, that it’s a shame when we see marketers and WAH Moms getting into some boring, drab niche – one they can’t stand – just because someone told them it would make them money.
You want to wake up each morning amid the chaos of a regular household and look forward to your work. You want to be driven to succeed, not forced to try to make a viable income.
Picking a niche that fits into your life already is a great solution. For example, if you’re the mother of twins, then you might want to launch a Mommy blog promoting twin products and teaching the best way to manage the parenting of twins.
Get your kids involved if they’re old enough! You might have kids older than toddlers – through the teenage years in the house who can help you with a top toys blog.
Or maybe the family loves to garden. This kind of niche is a great way to monetize your offline lifestyle! You can have the kids help you garden, creating special bonding moments with them – and upload pictures and advice to your blog, monetizing the products and information you use.
Maybe health is something you advocate for your family. You can start a blog or site about ways to improve your family’s health. Talk about improving the nutrition, exercise, and even mental well-being of the family that you’re raising.
Sometimes you can get into very targeted training. For example, you might create an info product on potty training because it’s something you just mastered with your own child.
Or perhaps your family is very involved in something like child modeling or beauty pageants. You can create a tips guide that helps other parents assist their child in having success with their dreams.
This doesn’t have to be a niche that you have already mastered. This can be something where you begin blogging about your journey, and you share with others what works and what doesn’t.
This is what a niche audience loves most. They don’t want to learn from someone who has never failed (like they have). They want empathy and to know they’re not alone. Your insight helps put them at ease.
Work During Non Family Hours
Finding time to squeeze in some work is key to helping busy work at home Moms create a thriving business. But the reality of what happens is far grimmer. A well-meaning Mom makes the decision to stay home and create a business online.
She does it because her babies are her world – and she envisions holding them, caring for them, playing with them and cooking nutritionally sound meals for them – not to mention being able to take them to all sorts of extracurricular activities.
It’s not long before the pressure to develop an income increases, and she’s suddenly finding herself hunched over her laptop more hours than not. She can’t find time to cook those healthy meals – she’s relying on fast food and frozen quickies.
The self-care goes completely out the window because any spare time she does have, she uses to assuage the guilt she’s feeling for making her child play all alone during the day while she works.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
You can adequately balance your professional and personal life easily if you start out understanding that working at home gives you complete power and flexibility over your schedule.
You no longer have to work 8-5 with a specific lunch break in the middle. This is your life now, and you run the ship. That means you can work when it’s convenient for both you and your child.
Before the family is awake, you can set your alarm an hour earlier and get a good deal of work done so that you start your day feeling proud of what you accomplished.
During this time, do things that require peace and quiet, like a video blog where you don’t want the distractions of household noise showing up on camera. Or use this time to do the tasks that require full concentration.
If your children are small, you might work during their naptimes. It’s tempting to nap yourself when they sleep, but if balancing work is an issue, try to stay awake and take advantage of these moments.
If your kids are of school age, then you can work while they’re away. Being a work at home Mom does give you the perk of leisurely getting to attend their school plays or field trips – or even stop midday and go have lunch with them!
If you have a lot of “sit and wait” times, like carpool lanes where you sit in line not moving, or after school activities to attend, you might consider working from your laptop.
You can also stay awake past when everyone else goes to bed and get work done. It doesn’t have to be lengthy if you’re tired, too – but it can be a quiet time to squeeze in a bit more work.
Build Multiple Business Models
Every work at home Mom should learn how to balance multiple business models. You’re already a master of balancing your home life. Chances are you somehow manage to get the kids fed and cared for every day and take care of your own needs.
You cook, have the laundry done, and clean house. So now it’s just a matter of adding business into the mix, and you’ll juggle those various branches the same way you do your home life – a little at a time here and there until it’s all done to your satisfaction.
Services are one branch of business that helps work at home Moms make a faster income. This is when you go to work for another already successful marketer who needs to outsource tasks.
You might become a virtual assistant. Just make sure that you can work the hours being demanded, because you don’t want to experience more stress because the kids are having a tug of war with your client over your attention.
You could do freelance ghostwriting where you create good content for other marketers’ blog, email autoresponder systems and sales funnels. This can be great for work at home Moms because you get to research and write about a wide variety of topics.
Or, if you have a skill such as graphic design, you might want to start a service where you create minisites or ecovers, banners and other digital images for marketers who are making money online.
You may find that you enjoy personal one-on-one or group coaching online. This will work if you’re free from interruptions, such as having school-aged children, so you can coach during the day. Just make sure your kids never feel like they come second to any of your clients.
Affiliate marketing is a viable option for work at home Moms. You can start an affiliate blog, a Facebook Fan Page and a Twitter account and spend your day recommending and reviewing products and networking about them online.
This is a great way to combine your hobbies or typical life with your business. You might love to cook but feel like you don’t have time. By starting a cooking blog, you can cash in on your time spent cooking!
For example, you could write a short guide about your favorite recipes or teach people how to cook in a certain way. You could create video blogs that teach them cooking methods, and then make money recommending the set of pots and pans that you’re using!
There’s no end to your ability to make money as an affiliate, and there are tons of programs that cater to work at home entrepreneurs, such as:
CJ Affiliate (formerly Commission Junction)
Rakuten Linkshare (not for beginners)
And those are just the tangible ones. You also have digital promotion marketplaces, such as (links open in new tab):
Rakuten LinkShare (for experienced marketers, so build up to this)
Info product creation is a good way for stay at home Moms to work and make money online. You have so much knowledge that’s one step ahead of what someone else knows, so sharing it can help you build a residual income.
A residual income, where you do the work once and see money rolling in continually, is better than one-time instant payments. While the instant payments help alleviate financial pressure, you’re always stuck looking for more work to pay the next batch of bills.
You can create info products that are made of text, video or audio files. You can package them and list them for sale on digital info sites. Or, if it’s a text creation, list it in Amazon’s Kindle selections and let their marketplace help promote it for you!
Engage in Self Care
As a Mom working from home, you’re going to be tempted to neglect yourself. It’s just what Moms do – they put everyone else’s needs above their own. Try to remember that if you pamper yourself regularly, not once in a while, you’ll be better for your family, and you’ll also be a better worker.
Self-care doesn’t have to be expensive or take up a lot of your time. It can be 10 minutes of just turning everything off and relaxing in a chair to read a good fiction novel.
Just let yourself indulge throughout the day in small increments. Or block off a substantial amount of time when you aren’t being a Mom or a business owner – and take care of your needs with something a little more generous, like a paid mani-pedi at your favorite salon.
You have the beginnings of a very satisfying personal and professional life. Don’t grind yourself into the ground struggling to balance your work and home life according to someone else’s idea of perfection.
Find what works for you and then enjoy the fruits of your labor as you bask in the love from your family and see your bank account building up with a monetary reward from your efforts.
FROM SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEUR, ALEX GENADINIK
- 4 Hours
- Step-by-Step
- 20 Modules
- Actionable Downloads Included
A complete 20-module, 108-video training course designed to accelerate the start-up of your new business idea.
Alex will take you by the hand and guide you, step-by-step, beginning with the idea phase. The course doesn’t end until you have a complete business ready to launch.
