So you are looking for a way to supplement your income while at the same time looking after the kids at home.  Depending on your circumstances there are a few different working from home opportunities available to you.

First of all it is highly unlikely you will find any actual “employment” that will give you a part time job at home.  Most people working at home are doing so because they have started their own little business.  Don’t think this is too hard for you to do as you would be surprised at how easy it really is.

Now if you are a stay at home Mom, what kind are you?  Do you ever have any time where the kids aren’t around that would enable you to go out and do a little bit of work?  Or do you have a baby and therefore any work you undertake MUST be done from the house.

For the Moms that have some time that allows them to leave the home there are many more options open to you.  Perhaps one of the easiest is to offer cleaning or housekeeping services.  You could target the more affluent areas where everyone works and the householders have no time to clean for themselves or the retired and elderly areas.

This can be a very quick way to get some instant work as people who are looking for such a service are very likely to hire you right away.  If you are in a position to undertake this type of part time work you could start by advertising in free places where these type of clientele frequent.

For older people the post office is a good place to put an ad in the window or something like that.  Some may charge you a small fee like $1 per week or month.   Very reasonable advertising cost and can result in some work very quickly.  You could also print up some flyers and distribute them in the retirement areas nearby your home or if you have a car you could venture out even further.

It would be best to knock the doors and speak to the people face to face as apposed to dropping the flyer in the mailbox.   If you don’t speak to the potential client then your flyer will very likely end up in the garbage.  However speaking face to face with them enables them to see who you are and will make a lasting impression upon them as having someone come into your home and clean is a little daunting for many.  They want to be sure they are comfortable with you and a flyer will not enable them to see if you meet those requirements or not.

The same can be done if you are targeting the more well to do clientele.  However the time of day you canvas will likely have to be well picked as they are much less likely to be home at certain times.  Where you advertise as well can be harder as these type of people don’t tend to spend much time gazing at window ads.  They are pushed for time so they get in and out of the shops as quickly as possible.

Another nice thing about cleaning work is that your name and reputation tend to spread like wild fire.  Once you have a few clients you will find they quickly recommend you to friends and soon you will have too much work.  Be sure not to under price yourself or be too cheap as it’s very hard to raise prices later.  When people recommend you they will be sure to tell their friends what your rates are so you won’t be able to raise your price for those new customers.

It’s not just cleaning services you could offer but anything really that these type of people need.  It just so happens that cleaning is one of the most likely required services by many.  Ironing services are also popular in some places.

Now if you happen to be a real stay at home Mom i.e. there’s no way you can leave the house and all work must be done from home, there are still some legitimate work from home opportunities available to you.

If you happen to have any skills be sure to try and market these skills ie sewing or the like.   Again for this you will need to advertise.  You could offer drop off and pick up laundry or ironing services.  People usually prefer someone come to their home for this, but that doesn’t rule out the possiblity that some are willing to bring the work to you in order to save a little bit of money.  Because drop off and pick up are naturally much cheaper than having someone come to your home and do it.

Further, some people may not like having strangers in their home and therefore wouldn’t even consider an on site service at all.  These are the perfect customers for working from home Moms.

Apart from these manual services there are also a few free legitimate work from home opportunities that you can do using your computer.  If you are able to write an article about a certain topic, or any topic, there are many people out there that will pay you money to be a “Ghost Writer”.  They basically give you a topic to write about and you come up with something unique based on that topic.  The length of the article will depend upon the customer, and the amount you earn is completely up to you.

However, keep in mind the competition is also pretty fierce as there are a lot of other stay at home moms and other people doing the very same thing.  Further, if you don’t have a reputation or experience it’s going to be very difficult to get any writing work.  So in the beginning you will very likely have to charge very low rates, maybe even work for as little as $1 per hour just to get your foot in the door and some part time work coming your way.

The work itself isn’t that hard, but actually getting the customers and the work will be very hard.  If you want to try you can join some websites that connect writers to the people who want the content.  You may have to give a portion of the fee to the website, but you will still make money regardless and the work you get from the client after the fact might be fee free.

If the above doesn’t appeal to you then you could try the other legitimate no fee work from home for free opportunity I talk about on this site.  Just click that link to read more as there is no point in me repeating the info here.  It doesn’t require you to get any customers so that’s nice but the work itself is much harder than just simply writing an article.

All of the jobs above would be considered completely legit work from home jobs.  They don’t require you to pay any fees, they aren’t MLM or pyramid schemes.  However, if none of the above jobs appeal to you as a stay at home mom you might consider one of the MLM schemes mentioned on this site.  These are quite easy to do and the fees are as low as $11 one time fee as in the case of  4×1 fortune.  If you have a little bit of internet knowledge and can place ads in places then you might be successful at it.

Other computer jobs at home could include paid to click.  You basically earn money by looking at and clicking on ads.  However this is very little, maybe amounting to about $1 or so per hour.

Feel free to have a browse through this site where you may find a work from home opportunity that suits you.

Here I introduce my current top rated MLM program (but #2 rated work from home program as the #1 rated work from home opportunity is not an MLM program).  To start off with I would have to say mathematically speaking 4×1 Fortune is one of the best online business opportunities as far as commissions goes.  Of course all of these programs are the same really.  You spend “x” amount of dollars to join a program and then you try to get others do the same, and make money doing so.

This one happens to be a one-time fee of $11.  This program is a “cycler” so it works a little different in that you don’t get paid from your very first referral.  You need 6 referrals before you get paid anything.  After your first 6 referrals you will get paid $30 which is pretty good when compared to other programs.  Not too many programs allow you to nearly triple your money with only 6 referrals.

After 6 referrals it gets a little confusing.  After your next 6 referrals (ie your 12th referral) you get nothing.  The next payout doesn’t happen until you reach 18 referrals (which I haven’t done yet).  It appears that once you reach that level you get paid $110.  This is pretty good considering 18 referrals generates $198 for the company and you will have received $110+$30 of that.  Pretty good compensation rates.

The “product” is just another library of digital products.  Mostly e-books for marketing etc.  I haven’t had much of a chance to go through any of it but I’m sure you could find some useful stuff in there.

I will say that 4x1fortune.com is something that you have to promote in order to make any money.  The spillover is very limited so don’t expect to get anywhere with spillover with this or any other cycler matrix.  If you want spillover then you should consider Work for $3 which has the possibility of providing spillover forever.  But then again Work for $3 is a yearly fee and I prefer 1 time payment MLMs, and I think others do too.  I don’t like to be committed to a monthly or yearly fee.

The trick, or scheme, behind 4x1fortune is that they don’t need to make any payments until you “cycle”.  This allows them to hold on to the cash for a while which they could invest or use otherwise.  Further, they likely bank on the fact that people won’t make it to their next cycle and they will get to keep all the money themselves.  Maybe there is some sort of a figure out there that says on average each marketer can only recruit 15 people or so.  This is the type of info that makes this a perfect business model, as the big payout comes once you reach 18 people.  I am about half way there and when I reach 18 people I will be sure to update this page to let you know what happens.

So if you are as curious as I am, by all means join using my link (Click HERE to Join the 4×1 Fortune Opportunity) so I can reach the 18 level  that much faster and post the result here.  All kidding aside this opportunity is actually quite good when just analyzing the math.  I haven’t found too many programs that pay out so much, it’s just the waiting for the payment that’s the killer.  The other standard matrix programs like Work for $3 and Teamwork Revolution Power System pay you after each recruit, no waiting to “cycle”.

If you don’t like recruiting people then you should look at my other recommended online opportunity No Fee Real Legit Work at Home – Niche Marketing which doesn’t require any fee to join and is probably the only real legitimate job/business opportunity reviewed on this site.  However it isn’t as easy as the others.

The other nice thing to remember about 4×1 Fortune is that it’s only a 1 time fee of $11.  If you join with me I will help you as much as I can, as your success is my success.

Click HERE to Join the 4×1 Fortune Opportunity

UPDATES

MAR 13 2010 – What a nice surprise today.  I got paid $11 from 4×1 Fortune out of the blue.  I wasn’t sure why but I found out it was a “matching bonus”.   I never really talked about matching bonuses above but I will mention them now.  If someone you recruited yourself cycles then you will get paid this bonus.  The website never actually said how much it was but I guess we know now.   I don’t know which of my recruits cycled but at least this tells me at least one of them is active so there is hope I will get more of these matching bonuses on the future.  So I have made a total of $41 in commissions with this little program which cost me only $11 to join leaving me with $30 profit at this point.

Click HERE to Join the 4×1 Fortune Opportunity

Project Payday is an interesting, unique online money making program.  The basic idea is you sign up for trials of stuff and make money by doing so.  The biggest catch is you must live in the US to participate.

It requires a highly organized and disciplined person, however, as you need to be sure to cancel the trial in time before you end up paying the actual fee.  If that happens you probably lose money.  So normally you are trained to create a spreadsheet with all the trials you are currently “trying” and the dates they expire etc.  Then you check it regularly and schedule the times when you need to cancel.  If you have a PDA with an alarm feature this would be highly useful.

You normally have to work with some sort of a mentor.  He will also make a bit of money from your efforts and as you get better you can eventually graduate from the mentor and even become a mentor yourself.

The trials can be anything from vitamins to DVD rentals.  You also need a credit card in order to participate in the trial.  I wouldn’t worry too much about credit card fraud as you aren’t giving your credit card details to project payday, you are giving them to the company offering the trial.

You can pick and choose the trials yourself.  There is a wide range to choose from and some of the trials you may end up keeping because you like them.  Whether you continue or not with the product has no bearing on anything, it’s the trial you get paid for.

However I must admit that one of the companies they use is the Google Cash Kit which I warned against on this site.  So if participating in projectpayday.com one needs to be very careful and read all the fine print.

I don’t think you will get rich with this program, however I am sure you can make more than $10/hr on average.  So for working from home it’s a pretty legitimate opportunity.

You may wonder how is this all funded ?  It’s simple really.  Big companies spend billions on advertising and this is just another one of those advertising methods.  Companies know that word of mouth is one of the most powerful forms of advertising as we are far more likely to buy something a friend has recommended as apposed to something from a commercial.

So these companies have decided to give away free stuff and even pay money to do so instead of giving this money to the advertising companies.  This gets the products into the hands of people whereby the company is banking on the fact that a certain percentage of people will fall in love with it and keep it.

I’m not so sure how this Project Payday will influence this however.  If a company notices an unusually high number of cancellations this could throw up some red flags.  But that shouldn’t affect project payday as they have many programs to choose from.  Of course nowhere are you allowed to advertise the fact that you are trying the product with the intention of canceling.  Project Payday is set up primarily to be a portal to get free or reduced priced products on trial.  The word “cancel” is taboo although everyone knows the idea is to cancel. Shhhh ….

This is perhaps the only REAL legitimate work from home job that I have tried so far.

It is completely free, there are no membership fees and you don’t earn money by recruiting others.  No Pyramids, no MLM.

However, it is by no means easy.  I have been experimenting with this for the past few months, researching and learning as much as I can.  I haven’t made enough money to quit my day job yet but I am sure I will eventually get there.

There are 2 different ways that I make legitimate money working from home via my computer.  The methods discussed here don’t require recruiting other people like a pyramid which I would say at least 90% of online schemes are just fancy MLMs.  One way I earn money is by promoting clickbank products.  Instead of writing a long article about that, you can learn about it by reading about the clickbank course (CLICK HERE).  Clickbank is free to join but of course no one is going to teach you how to do things step by step for free, so you have to be willing to either spend years learning how, or spend a few bucks and buy a book from someone who has already done it then you can start earning a little quicker with that little head start help.  I decided to buy a few books and get a head start and it worked out for me.  I will talk a little bit below about my second work from home income method.

Now although there are no membership fees thiese businesses are by no means without any costs.   It is nearly impossible to have any business without incurring costs.  You use your electricity to run your computer, your telephone etc.  In order to run these businesses there are things you cannot do without.  The difference is that those things that you need do not benefit any “recruiter” just like your electricity and phone bill does not benefit any recruiter.  I cannot “recruit” you into this business and if you decide to try this out I won’t earn a commission from your efforts.  That is also why I cannot spend time training you how to be successful because I don’t earn any money from doing so.  I am merely explaining the basics in this article in order to provide good content for my site and hopefully help people  find a legitimate way to earn a living online.

In order to run these businesses (or any online business) you need to have web hosting, as these businesses are all about creating web sites and making money from them.  Web hosting companies are a dime a dozen so feel free to pick any company you want.  However I have been using this web hosting company and they have been great.  They are only about $5 per month for unlimited everything (cheaper if you pay a year or more up front).  Further, perhaps the greatest feature they have is one click WordPress installations.  I used to have to do this manually and it would take about 10-20 minutes getting everything set up and it wasn’t very easy.  So for a newbie you will love the one click wordpress install feature as wordpress is a great and easy way to create websites for this business.

The only things you MUST have to start these businesses are a computer (which you likely already have) and web hosting.  You could even use someone else’s web hosting if you didn’t want to pay the $5 or so per month for your own.  So once you have a web hosting company you then have to begin your “keyword research”.  The research is perhaps the hardest and longest part of the job.  You are looking for topics that aren’t too competitive because your goal is to get onto the first page of Google for search results of your targeted keyword.

This is very easy if for example your targeted keyword is “things people like to do on the beach on July 10th“.  If you wanted to be the first position in Google for that phrase I’m sure it could easily be done.  The problem is how many people in the world do you think search for that term?  Probably none! So what you are trying to do with your keyword research is find search terms that are somewhat popular but don’t have a lot of competition.

One website you will need to check is https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.  Here you can type in any keyword and it will give you a rough estimate of how many people search for that keyword.  Select “Exact Match” as that is the number of people who search for that exact phrase.

In order to check the competition for a certain keyword you can type in the keyword phrase into Google and look at the top 10 results that are shown.  You will want to use a plug in for your browser like http://www.seoquake.com/ for Firefox.  They may have a plug in for Explorer I’m not sure.  Just install and use Firefox as it’s a great browser.

Otherwise just do a search in Google for “SEO Plugin Explorer” or something like that.  I am sure you will find something.

Once you have the plug in installed type your keyword phrase into Google and look at the first 1o results.  First thing to look at is the Page Rank of each website.  If the top 10 websites are all Page Rank 3 or lower that’s your first good sign.  The plug in should display this information next to each website.

The second thing to analyze is how many backlinks do each of the sites have ?  The lower the better.

So if the top 10 sites are all low page ranks with low numbers of backlinks then you could be on to a winning keyword phrase.  Another thing to look at is the total number of results that Google gives you.  This number is normally displayed at the top of the search results.  It could be millions of matches or maybe even only 1000s.  This is not as important as the page ranks and backlinks of the top 10 sites, but it is still another indicator as to how many sites are out there with this keyword phrase in them.  The less sites there are the better.

Of course this will likely take you many many hours to do, coming up with ideas for possible website niches and then doing the research, checking the top 10 results etc.  You will probably find a good keyword phrase 1% of the time , so be prepared to spend a lot of time trying to find good target keywords.  It’s all about trial and error (mostly error).

If you don’t want to wait, or don’t have the patience to jump through all the hoops then you may consider buying this software that does a lot of that work for you.  It takes a huge amount of the leg work away.  You type in a keyword phrase and it basically gives you a rating from 0 to 1000 for that phrase,  0 being the easiest and 1000 being the hardest.  Generally if you are just starting out you should target phrases that are less than 20, 0 of course being the ideal.

I use this software and it’s great, but I will stress that it isn’t necessary.  The only thing that is absolutely necessary to start this business is web hosting.  You can use the same company as me or maybe you already have webhosting ? If you are a member of one of these webhosting matrices like Teamwork Revolution, or the like, then you can just use their hosting.  But those normally cost $10 or more per month, whereas I only pay $5.  I’m sure you can find it cheaper but this is the company my friend has been using for a while now and he is also doing this niche marketing work.  However, he does it full time and makes a living at it.  So I am trying to learn from him and follow in his footsteps.

He also uses the Niche Finding Software and swears buy it, and so do I.  But again if you have more time than money then don’t worry.  Just spend the time doing the research manually as the software costs $97, but worth every penny.

Once you have found your keyword phrase with low competition then you will want to buy a domain.  GoDaddy is a pretty cheap domain name provider, but I’m sure you can find cheaper.  A domain will cost you about $10 per year.  This is another cost associated with this business that you can’t avoid.  Nobody makes a commission off you buying domain names except the domain name company.

You will want to find a domain that matches your targeted keyword phrase exactly.  So if you are targeting the keyword phrase “dog grooming kit” you will want to try to get the domain “www.doggroomingkit.com.”  It’s very likely that it will already be taken so you can try to get .org or .net.  Don’t go for any other extension other than those 3.  If those are all taken you could try to go for hyphenated domains like “www.dog-grooming-kit.com” or the like.   However, the fact that the domain is already taken could be an indication that another person is trying to do the same thing as you.  So you may take that as an indicator not to bother as you may not want to go head to head with another niche marketer that is likely more experienced than you and who will easily out rank you.  It’s up to you of course.  If they aren’t in the top 10 search results then perhaps they aren’t that good anyway.

Now, how do you make money you may ask ? One very popular way is to simply put Google Adsense on your site.  People who visit your Dog Grooming site will see ads about Dog Grooming so they are quite likely to click on them and you earn money every time someone clicks on an ad.

A word of warning here.  DO NOT EVER CLICK ON YOUR OWN ADS OR ASK FRIENDS TO DO SO.  If you think Google won’t know then you are highly mistaken.  Google knows EVERYTHING.  So don’t try to be smart and increase your earnings by a few bucks, because that type of short sightedness will get you banned FOR LIFE from Google adsense.

If you choose to use Google adsense to earn money from your site you will also want to take into consideration the amount each click is worth.  You may stumble upon a Niche that looks very easy to target but when you see what the average CPC (cost per click) is it may not be worth it.  $0.01 per click might make you a few dollars per year.  Just enough to pay for the domain name perhaps and maybe the hosting.  So there is a combination of many factors to consider when choosing a niche to go for.  You can check out what keywords are roughly worth at this site https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox

Another way to make money from your niche site is to sell affiliate products, for example Amazon.  With this type of affiliate marketing you only get paid a commission on each successful sale, not on clicks like Google adsense.  So it may be harder to make money with Affiliate commissions as you are depending upon people actually buying something.  Whereas with Google Adsense all you need is a simple click to make money.

In reality however, I have sites that earn more money from affiliate commissions than from Adsense.  So both ways are good.  Even both ways on the same site work well too.

The main thing to remember about this business is that it is very slow going and has a huge learning curve.  It isn’t a get rich quick scheme but a real legit way to work from home.  Initially it will likely be a hobby as it is for me.  You can expect to make money after about 1 year of trying this so don’t be dissappointed when one or more of your websites don’t make any money.  Some of the guys who have been at this a while launch 100s of websites EVERY MONTH !  Those guys admit that only 20-30% of the sites actually make money and they are experts.  So if you embark on this make it a long term goal so as not to get too disheartened.  I have been at it for almost 1 year now and I can by no means do it full time (yet).  But I have learned a lot during this past year and I am certainly getting better at it.

I also know that I will be able to this full time one day, it just a matter of when, not “if”.

If you are interested in working from home in the same way as I am then you need training as I did. I recommend this Training Course.  Of course if you are reluctant to spend money on any training you will still likely succeed in carrying out this business as I have.  However it took me over a year to reach any decent income level.  If you don’t have that sort of patience then the training is right for you.  I know make over $500 per month with my websites and each month that number slowly grows.  I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to have a completely independent source of income.  I feel like my experiment has finally paid off.   I sure wasted a lot of time with the MLMs but I don’t regret it.  Overall I haven’t lost money because I view those MLMs as a stepping stone that brought me to this REAL business.   I hope the same can happen for you.

Start learning how to make money with from home with websites now by clicking here

I have seen a lot on the internet about working from home stuffing envelopes.  This seems like an easy and a great opportunity.  Just sit around in your pyjamas watching TV and getting paid to stuff envelopes.  In fact the idea seems plausible as many advertising companies need a lot of envelopes stuffed so it would seem logical that such a business opportunity exists.

What you will find though is that whatever ad you are reading about this opportunity has a lot of hype.  What is worse is they will likely ask you for some sort of up front fee.  They will justify it by saying they need to weed out the time wasters and only want people who are really serious about the opportunity.  Or perhaps they will say something like they need the money for postage and packaging of the info pack with the instructions of how to get started in this “home business”.

If you do pay that fee because your curiousity is killing you, what you will likely get is a kit telling you how to promote the same business you just bought into.  It’s essentially another pyramid scheme where you earn commissions by “tricking” others into paying the same fee you did.  Where does the “envelope stuffing” come in you may ask ?  Well the company can easily justify it’s claim by saying you need to “stuff envelopes” with ads about the “envelope stuffing business” and then mail those out to as many people as possible in hopes of hooking someone else into the dodgy business opportunity.

Further, there are many machines that do this type of work much faster and cheaper than any human can do it.  I should know because I used to fix them.  Companies like Pitney Bowes and Francotyp Postalia make  folding and inserting machines that do this work.  So why would any company pay a human to do a job that they could get a machine to do ?

Further, there are many companies that specialize in these services that have these machines.  They can do the work very cheaply.  I am sure it works out to less than $5 per hour, so why would any company in their right mind pay a human big money to do this tedious task ?

The answer is obvious.  The ad you have read or stumbled upon is just another scheme trying to prey on the desperate and needy.  Unfortunately it works well, but hopefully you have stumbled upon my site before sending off for your “info pack”.

If you have any experiences with this type of scheme please post them below for others to learn from.