Becoming a WAHM - Part 2 - Investigate your options

So you are a stay-at-home-parent and have decided that in your spare time you would like to make a little bit of money. Where do you start?

This is the second in a series of posts giving advice on how to get started making an income from home. In the first post, we identified our skills and interests.

Now we have to investigate how the items on the list might be turned into a WAHM venture.

Investigate your options
Take a another look at your list of skills and interests, and consider for each point on the list how you might turn it into a money earner. This is obviously the crucial bit, and you may have to do a bit of research.
As an example, we’ll go back to my list.

• Writing
• Knitting
• Translating
• Cooking
• Research

We’ll look at each the items in turn, and the various ways I could turn these skills and interest into something potentially profitable.

Writing
There are many possible ways to turn one’s skill at writing into money. You can try to write a book and sell it; in many ways this has become easier as it is now possible to self publish ebooks and sell them in a variety of places, such as Amazon or Smashwords.

There’s also blog writing. If you have a successful blog using a free platform such as Blogger you can use Google AdSense to put adds on your blog and bring in some cash. You can combine blogging with one of your other skills or interests too. In my case, for example, I might start a blog about food or history.

If you do not want to blog, you can write articles on a website such as Bubblews or Hubpages. Websites like these work on the basis of revenue sharing. The site’s owner gets paid for people viewing pages and clicking on adds. You get to have a share of the profits for the pages you create.

A final option for making money using my writing skill is freelancing. There are many ways of getting paid to write all manner of things. Elance, oDesk and Constant Content are examples of websites that basically act as a broker between those we require and offer written content. By the way, the first two of these are general freelancing websites and have contractors offering paid assignments for many things aside from writing, such as graphic design and coding.

Knitting
When I was looking into becoming a WAHM, my first thought was actually to turn my knitting into a business. It seems obvious; I’m already spending the time creating items that I know are of good quality. My thoughts immediately turned to Etsy, a website that allows people to sell their handcrafted items.

Cooking
There are some people who have managed to create a successful home business with food related items. Cupcakes seem to be a popular one these days. There was the possibility of turning some of my food related interests into saleable products. I considered farmers’ markets.

Translating
There is a number of agencies on the web that hire translators and broker services. As I’m not actually a qualified translator, however, I ended up looking at Elance, oDesk for this as well. There’s plenty of translation jobs on there, and though the rates can be low, contractors usually don’t demand qualifications aside from native level fluency.

Research
This was a difficult one. How do you turn a skill like internet research into money?

Again, I found Elance, oDesk offer opportunities.

A more informal alternative to those two big websites is Webanswers. This is another revenue sharing website. People can ask questions to which you can post answers, and ger so share in the page revenue through AdSense. where contributors share in as revenue for page views through AdSense.

WAHM Ideas
When investigating your options for making money, there’s a list of WAHM ideas to be found on this blog. It’s not complete yet, but I’ll be adding to it over time - suggestions are most welcome, by the way!

It’s a place to start, but depending on what’s on your list of skills and interests, you may have to do a bit of research of your own.

Use Google. You never know what a simple search term like “how to make money doing [your skill/interest]” will turn up. Don’t give up too easily, but if you get stuck, do post a comment here and I’ll see if I can give you a hand.

Next…
Your list of skills and interests should now have a list of money making possibilities to match. In the next article we’ll look at how to evaluate the realistic possibilities of putting our plans in action.