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Year: 2010

Work at Home Mom Time Management Skills During the Holidays ~ Guest Post by Maria Rainier

Time Management Skills During the Holidays

If you work from home, you know how challenging it can be to manage your time effectively. With so many work deliverables looming over your head, as well as the distractions of running a household, getting it all done can seem overwhelming. And now with the holidays quickly approaching, it probably seems more challenging than ever before. Fortunately, by putting tried and true time management skills to work, you can get it all done and still have time for that much needed glass of egg nog at the end of the night.

Designate office hours. The best way to make sure you stay focused on your work is to determine set hours for getting everything done. Therefore, if you plan to work from 9:00 to 5:00 make sure you have no other distractions during that time. This will give you a clear distinction between work and home life – and keep you focused and productive.

Tackle your biggest tasks in the morning. If you have a project that will require lots of research and focus, make sure you schedule it first thing in the morning when your mind is fresher. It will give you satisfaction to cross it off your list – and will leave the less brain-taxing tasks for that low-blood sugar time in the afternoon.

Give yourself a break. Whether you like to take an hour for lunch or prefer a late afternoon break, make sure you give yourself time to relax and recharge. Maybe it’s time to eat a sandwich and catch up with friends online, or a chance to fit in your workouts, stepping away from the office is essential too.

Set aside time for household chores. One good way to get things done around the house is to designate a few minutes to throw a load of laundry in or take out the trash. These may be good ways to catch a short break and can help you stay productive around the house too. Be warned that these should not cut into your work time so anything more than 5-10 minutes should be saved for the evening or weekends.

Schedule your holiday shopping. If you’re a working mom, you know it’s vital to get your holiday purchases made while the kids are at school. Therefore, plan to go out once or twice a week during your lunch hour to get your shopping done. If you put it on your calendar for the weeks leading up to the holidays, you won’t feel burdened and will be able to power shop when you know your time is limited.

Plan ahead. Whether you prefer to use a daily planner or you like to keep everything in your Smart Phone, the best way to make sure tasks get accomplished is by scheduling your priorities. At the end of each week, take some time to prepare your “to-dos” for the week ahead. That way when you sit down on Monday morning, you’ll have a plan in place for the entire week.

By creating a clear distinction between your work and home responsibilities, you’ll be better able to concentrate on the job at hand – which will free up time to get ready for the holiday festivities ahead!

Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education, where recently she’s been researching kinesiology degrees and programs and blogging about student life. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

Tips for Keeping Business Records ~ A Guest Post By Maria Rainier

The IRS doesn’t care that you’ve got kids to feed or that you’re new to being a work-at-home mom.  They will tax you where they can and you will hurt.  This isn’t a threat, only a truth.

So, what to do about it?  You’ll find that keeping proper business records for your home-based business is often inconvenient, usually confusing, and always a learning process.  These tips—and a few tricks you’ll doubtlessly come up with yourself as time goes by—will ease the learning curb and make tax time significantly less painful.

1.       Home office deduction.  Read up on the IRS’s rules about the home office deduction (http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=108138,00.html) to see if you qualify.  Don’t be scared to do it if you do qualify because you’ll be able to deduct a portion of your rent or mortgage and utilities bills as business expenses.  Save all of your monthly payment bills if this is the case.  Remember to not allow the kids into this room since it is your home office.  A large amount of evidence—should the IRS come poking—that you’ve been mixing business with pleasure might void your deduction.

2.       Keep receipts.  If your printer runs out of paper while printing out documents for your business, keep the OfficeMax receipt.  If your lamp loses a bulb, keep the receipt.  Keep any and all receipts made for purchases for your home office and business, including office supplies and equipment (from sticky notes to your new Mac, as long as you use that computer primarily for business).  Keep the receipts for Internet provider fees, phone bills, membership fees, and any other costs to keep your business running.  Deduct these from your taxes as business expenses.

3.       Advertising and professionals.  If you advertise for your business or have hired a professional to help you (such as an accountant or printer), save the receipts.

4.       Employee records.  If you’re not working alone, keep an accurate record of your employees’ hours to make the W-9 forms easier to fill out during tax season as well as calculate salaries.  If you’ve hired more than 10 people for your business, you’ll need to get an idea of what records OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) requires you to keep, including accident reports.

5.       Accounting.  If you ever make any kind of transaction for your business, you’re better off with evidence of it than without.  Keep copies of them to back up your income and spending in case anyone comes inquiring.  It’s best to accumulate all of your receipts and evidence of transactions in one place, like one notebook or filing cabinet, so you don’t lose things along the way.

Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education, where recently she’s been researching different bsw degree programs and blogging about student life. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

The 411 on the InfoBarrel Income Opportunity ~ A Guest Post by Chris Hinton

The Problem

Over the decade I’ve worked with dozens of friends and family in an attempt to help them build a passive income stream using the Internet.  Throughout these attempts I’ve noticed two common problems.

Problem #1

People are very optimistic with the idea of making money online, however when they don’t see instant gratification and coupled with the monetary and time investments required in maintaining and promoting a web site, most people tend to quit before they ever start seeing any income.

Problem #2

Because it is human nature to get instant gratification, people tend to spend less time on the things they don’t know much about and wind up producing something that provides no end value to their users.  The web site winds up being covered in ads essentially dragging down the overall quality of the Internet instead of making it better.

By not creating value for end users, regardless of how much time you spend marketing, it will be nearly impossible to create return visitors and even harder to get people talking about your web site or business.

The Solution

Create a space where users would not have to be burdened with the financial costs of owning, maintaining and marketing a website and could simply focus on producing quality content to share with the world while still earning a substantial passive income.  By removing these problems we hope to increase the quality of content found on the internet and making it once again a safe place to find information.

In July 2008, with these ideals in mind InfoBarrel was born.

How it Works

InfoBarrel is a shared revenue crowd sourced community.  Essentially what that means, is the content of the site is entirely created by the users who frequent the site.  To compensate writers, we provide them with a minimum of 75% of the advertising impressions from Google Adsense, Chitika and Amazon.  We also have an escalating revenue share percentage that allows writers to earn up to 90% revenue share if they hit certain criteria.

There is no cost to the writer, and the site has had extensive marketing time invested into it resulting in great organic search engine results.  To date we have many writers making over $100 a month and a few making over $1000.  InfoBarrel has become one of the top destinations to earn money writing on the Internet.  Because of our passionate users and extensive marketing plan InfoBarrel has grown from a small site consisting of a few users to a thriving community with 31,000+ members that is growing on a daily basis.  We are also very dedicated to supporting our writer community by allowing them to personally email us with any issues that they may have encountered while at the site.  With one of our goals being to improve the quality of material found on the internet InfoBarrel also manually approves all new article submissions checking them for article quality and duplicate content among many other factors. The site been touted as the next best revenue sharing site by popular web entrepreneur Pat Flynn.

Why it’s Great for Work at Home Moms

Because of the opportunity to generate money while working from home, we have had an enormous surge of WAHMs publishing on InfoBarrel.  Since InfoBarrel requires much less of a commitment than running your own website, mothers are able to sit down and write an article when they have a free moment before returning to their busy lives.  We have a number of successful WAHMs most notably MommyMommyMommy.

Community

One of the things that I am most proud of in terms on InfoBarrel is how supportive our community has become.  The InfoBarrel Writers’ Community is one of the most tight knit, friendly groups of people online.  If you need advice on how to do something, even extremely simple, the community is there to help and there is never a stupid question.

Success Stories

InfoBarrel has been around for just over two years now and has already garnered several success stories, with at least two members making over $1000 a month, and a number of users making over $100.

The following are  just a few success stories of members:

JCMayer ($1000+ /moth now)

Travis_Aitch ($1000+ /month now)

ChezFat ($500+ /month now)

A forum post talking about earnings

11-1-2010 Work at Home Jobs For Moms Announcement

Thank you for tuning in to our weekday list of work at home jobs for moms. After serious thought and consideration, we have decided to discontinue our daily list and replace it with a jumbo list of work at home employers (coming soon). In the meantime, we’d also like to help empower you with your own job search tools in order to maximize your results and, hopefully, bring your job search to an end soon. While supplying you with daily job leads has been a rewarding experience, we feel it’s in everyone’s best interest to pass our techniques along and help you broaden your search process.

You’ll notice that a good deal of our leads come from CraigsList. If you haven’t already read our post explaining why this is, please take a moment to do so now. In order to perform your own nationwide search for work at home jobs for moms on CraigsList, simply make your way over to the Search Tempest. In the “Where” field, enter your own zip code and, just beneath the zip code field, select “any” from the pull down menu (for distance) and check the other three boxes to search within Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. Remember that work at home jobs for moms are everywhere and this broad search will allow you to view jobs from all CraigsList sites including your local site.

In the “What” field, enter the following:

work from home -sales -commission

This will search all of CraigsList for work at home jobs for moms featuring the phrase “work from home” while eliminating the millions of sales jobs advertised on CL or the work at home jobs for moms that pay commission only. Of course, some of these are legitimate work from home opportunities, but we’ve tried to only post work from home job leads that pay a guaranteed wage. If you’re looking for a sales or a commission-based opportunity, by all means change the search term to include these options. In fact, you can play around with the search terms and tailor the system to find precisely what you’re looking for. We usually perform several searches for work at home jobs for moms per day, starting with work from home -sales -commission and including:

writers -auto -automotive -intern

virtual assistant -sales -commission

customer service -sales -commission

transcription

remote

blogger

…and so on. Next, select the box just under the keyword field labeled “all/advanced”.

After inputting your search term, select “jobs” under the “Category” heading on the page and then select “all jobs” under the “Sub-Category” heading and, finally, check the “telecommute” box under “Craigs Options”. No matter the keywords you command the system to search for work at home jobs for moms, selecting the right categories and options makes all the difference in the world. So be sure everything is appropriately marked before pressing “search” and voila you now can search CL nationwide for the type of work at home jobs for moms you’re interested in!

Although we only generally do several searches at a time, we only sit down to do so once per day. However, you should use the system more than once daily if your schedule will permit. Doing so enables you to find fresh work from home job leads as they’re posted.

Also, the steps described above sound more detailed than they really are. Once you’re on the site, you’ll find that it only takes a few clicks to complete. If you have any problems or questions concerning the search process, feel free to contact us and we’ll try to help.

While Search Tempest and CraigsList are the easiest ways to search for work at home jobs for moms, especially when you’re short on time, they are not the only methods we’ve used and shouldn’t be the only ones you employ either. Here are a few more job boards where you can find work at home jobs for moms:

Indeed.com

Mashable.com

FreelanceWritingGigs.com

LinkedIn.com (Create an account for free and then make your way over to their job board)

SimplyHired.com

Be sure to also read Part 1 and Part 2 of a detailed article we featured a while back on finding work at home jobs for moms.

And, don’t worry, although we’re not listing daily job leads anymore, we are still in your corner and ready to help you find work at home jobs for moms. While you search for your own daily leads, we’ll work on building a master list of sites that routinely offer work at home jobs for moms and link you to the job boards of several companies noted for offering telecommuting positions.

We’ll unveil a separate area for these companies soon, but here’s a short list that you may want to check out right away:

K12 (for teaching and online tutoring work at home jobs for moms)

Apple (for tech work at home jobs for moms)

GlobalWired (for call center work at home jobs for moms)

American Airlines (for call center work at home jobs for moms)

Capital One (for call center work at home jobs for moms)

Again, this is a VERY short list of employers offering work from home job leads. In the weeks ahead, we’ll build upon this list as we intend to offer you a one-stop portal to work at home employers. Look for official news of this new work from home company page in our newsletter.

Thanks, again, for tuning in and here’s to taking your search for work at home jobs for moms to the next level!

10-29-2010 Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Freelance Writing and Editing Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Freelance World History Writer

Legal Content Writer Needed

Freelance Content Writer

Health Literacy Writer

Product Description Writer

P/T Writer (Tampa)

Online Editor

Social Media, Web and Tech Work at Home Jobs for Moms

.Net Ajax Web App Developer

Blog Outreach Management

Online Representative

CodeIgniter Guru Needed

Social Networking Marketing Specialist

Telephone and Customer Service Work at Home Jobs for Moms

P/T Customer Support

Remote Bilingual Support Associate

Strong Appointment Setters Needed

Appointment Setter

Clerical and Virtual Assistant Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Data Entry Help

Senior Analyst/Administrative Assistant (Los Angeles)

P/T Office Assistant Exp. in Mental Health/Billing Preferred

Misc. Telecommute/Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Webinar Event Producer

State Reporting Business Analyst

10-28-2010 Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Freelance Writing and Editing Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Blog/Article Writer

PR Savvy Writer

Ghost Writer Wanted

Travel Writer

Medical Writers

Forum Poster Wanted

Social Media, Web and Tech Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Senior Enterprise Technology Architect I

Online Marketing Specialist

Webmaster


Link Building and SEO Help

P/T Web Developer


SEO Strategist

Human Resources/Information Technology

Telephone and Customer Service Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Customer Service Representative

Clerical and Virtual Assistant Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Virtual Assistant Needed

Virtual Administrative/Marketing Assistant

Marketing Assistant

10-27-2010 Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Freelance Writing and Editing Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Freelance Press Release Writer

Search Term Writer Needed

Personal Finance Writers

Algebra Content Writers

Male Dating Blogger

Writer/Editor

Celebrity News Writer

Social Media, Web and Tech Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Social Network Marketing

Linux and Amazon Web Services Guru

Google Sketchup Artist

SharePoint Developer

Clerical and Virtual Assistant Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Data Entry

Data Review Specialist

Telephone and Customer Service Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Customer Support Rep

Telemarketer

Misc. Telecommute/Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Community Coordinator for Internship Exchange Program

Volunteer Coordinator

Director of Public Relations

10-26-2010 Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Freelance Writing and Editing Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Writers for Teacher’s Guides Wanted

Writer Wanted

Travel Writer

Blog Writer Wanted

Writers Wanted

Online Writer/Content Producer

Naming and Culture Research Writer

Writer for Online Indie Music Magazine

Freelance Editor

Social Media, Web and Tech Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Layout Specialist

Website Development/Account Manager

Graphic Artist/Web Designer

Graphic Artist for Online Flash Games

Telephone and Customer Service Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Case Manager/Phone Help

P/T Telemarketing

Clerical and Virtual Assistant Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Transcription Help

Misc. Telecommute/Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Education Publishing Aligners/Correlators

Account Manager

Workmen’s Comp Pharmacy Billings and Collections

Paralegal

10-25-2010 Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Freelance Writing and Editing Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Writer for Blog and Niche Site

Freelance Editor Needed

Writer/Blogger

P/T Fiction and Non-Fiction Writers

Experienced Grantwriter Wanted

Writer Wanted (Chicago)

Social Media, Web and Tech Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Web Designer

Assist with SEO/SEM/SMM/Link Building, Etc.

Senior JAVA Web Developer

Web Presence Engineer Wanted

Social Media and Web Marketer

Telephone and Customer Service Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Chat or Phone Customer Service

Hotel/Travel Consulting

Clerical and Virtual Assistant Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Bookkeeper Needed

Legal Secretary/Paralegal/Virtual Assistant

Work at Home Typist/Transcriptionist

Data Entry Clerk

Misc. Telecommute/Work at Home Jobs for Moms

Public Relations Assistant

Foreclosure and Pre-Foreclosure Assistants

Legal Coordinator

Legal Researcher