Are you a stay-at-home mom or working mom that yearns to stay home and take care of your little one?
You see so many other mom bloggers making money blogging and doing this full-time.
How to work from home is a real thing but you do need a plan and you need the time.
I know.
I was just like you not too long ago. Before I started blogging, I researched on how to work from home and be able to make enough income to stay home.
Because that was my dream – to stay home and raise my twins. I’m fortunate to have a husband that stays home and works, and I wanted that same opportunity for me.
I did not want to leave my twins after my maternity ended and go to work. My twins were small, and I just couldn’t do it!
Fortunately, I found a way to make money online and be able to earn enough income to stay home.
If you’re wondering what steps you need to take to start working from home, check out my plan.
There are many different plans to get to where I am, but this is the way I did it, and if I was able to do it with twins in tow, then I know you can mama!
Let’s get to this!
How to Work From Home
1. Different Ways to Make Money Blogging – Pick One to Start
If you search on Pinterest “make money online” or “make money blogging” you’ll find a ton of different pins claiming 83 ways to make money blogging or 97 ways to use your phone to make money.
Personally, these types of ways to earn income aren’t sustainable, and they aren’t a business. There are only a few legit and stable ways to earn an income online. Let’s go through them.
1. Advertise on Your Blog
Many new bloggers want to place ads on their site. The most popular is Adsense.
You place ads on your site, hoping that you’ll start making hundreds of dollars a day. You can get paid per impression (payment is based on the number of times the ad is seen) or per click (payment is based on the number of clicks).
This isn’t realistic for a new blogger. While this method of monetization can be lucrative, you need a lot of traffic coming to your blog to see any benefit.
I suggest you avoid placing ads on your blog. Personally, I don’t use ads and never have on any of my blogs.
2. Offer a Service
An easy way to start generating income from blogging is to offer a service. This is the way I started earning an income.
I started freelance writing for small businesses. I got paid to write blog posts, and I loved it. I still do freelance writing after three years.
There are other services you can offer – check out this post on 22 Freelance Services You Can Offer as a Stay at Home Mom – but the one thing you need is to have a Hire Me page on your blog.
This lets readers know you are offering something.
Some popular services mom bloggers offer are:
- Blog content
- Pinterest management
- VA (virtual assistant)
- Email management
If you want to offer coaching services, check out my post on how to set that up on your blog.
3. Sponsored Posts
Sponsored posts are promoted content on your blog. You work closely with a brand and write a post on your blog or social media promoting their product.
Usually, if you’ve been blogging for awhile, you’ll get pitched from sponsors. This happened to me early on, and I was debating whether to start doing sponsored content on Twins Mommy. In the end, I declined.
I suggest you don’t collaborate with every pitch you get. Think about your audience and whether or not that product will help them.
You can also pitch to brands for sponsored content but before you do this, make sure you create a media kit. This is just a sheet with stats on your blog and social media accounts.
In other cases, you can join sponsored networks like Izea or Bloggy Moms and work with many brands.
4. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is another easy way to start generating an income from your blog quickly. But, it can be time-consuming, and you need a strong blog strategy.
Affiliate marketing entails promoting a product or service by using a special link on your blog or social media. When a blogger clicks on that link and buys from you, you earn a commission.
For example, Amazon Associates is a popular affiliate network. You sign up and start promoting anything Amazon offers. If a person uses your special link and buys (it doesn’t even have to be the item you promoted on your blog. This person can buy anything on Amazon during a window of time), then you get that commission.
I started affiliate marketing on Twins Mommy and was able to earn thousands a month once I had a plan in place.
I also do affiliate marketing on my other blog, and that affiliate post passively generates at least $1k a month for me.
Check out my video on getting started with affiliate marketing. And make sure to subscribe to my channel!
5. Create a Product
The final legit way to start making money on your blog is to create a product. This can be an eBook or course or some other digital product like printables.
Or, it can be a real item like baby blankets or scarves!
The idea is once you have traffic and an audience you can build your brand by creating a product just for your audience.
I first did this on my Elna Cain site with my freelance writing course, and then a year after I started Twins Mommy, I created a course to boost your traffic.
Creating a product is more challenging than the other monetization strategies.
To get started you need to start a blog (I’ll get to that later).
Then you need an email list. This is an investment in your business and something you need to focus on. Most of my sales come either by email or from search on Google.
I’ll go over more on your email list later.
Once you have traffic and a healthy email list, you can start figuring out what your audience needs help with the most. You can survey them or read their comments on your posts or see what they are saying in Facebook groups.
Then it’s time to decide on the format of your product. If you create an eBook, you can use SendOwl to set up your payment and delivery.
If you want to create a course, I suggest you use Teachable. You can sign up for free and set up a free email course to see how it works.
Teachable allows you to upload videos or you can create written lessons.
2. Start a Blog
Once you decide on your monetization strategy, you need a place to market your strategy, and a blog is perfect for that.
This is a great way to create your brand, help your audience and carve your space online next to other bloggers.
I have a detailed step-by-step post on how to start a blog so make sure to check that out!
But, there’s more to just doing the tech side of starting a blog.
Let’s go through the important steps.
1. Visual Branding
You need to develop a cohesive branding palette for your blog. This includes the personality of your blog, the colors, font, and images.
The personality of your blog is a huge component of your blog and business. You can have a/n:
- Fun and whimsical blog
- Inspiring blog
- Informational blog
- Educational blog
- Transformational blog (telling your journey)
- Curated blog (have multiple authors)
- News blog
- Lifestyle blog
The personality of a lifestyle blog can be different than the personality of an informational type of blog.
But, a lot of these “personalities” can merge to create a unique voice on your blog.
And that’s important – be unique and authentic on your blog.
This will attract an audience much quicker than if you have a generic blog with generic content.
2. The Content You Want to Share
Remember, if you want to start generating an income from blogging and stay home for good as a mom, then your blog needs to serve others.
You have to help your audience so deciding on that can be a challenge.
But I encourage you to start a blog and put a post up as soon as possible.
You need to age your blog for Google. The older your blog is, the more authority it has on Google.
Twins Mommy was getting most of its traffic from social media, but now that it’s getting close to being two years old, my traffic is diversified and includes organic or search traffic (which is ultimately what you want).
So, that first post doesn’t have to be based on your audience. You can create your first post about:
- Why you started this blog
- What your blog will be about
- A simple tip to help others
- Your story to get to that point of starting a blog
Some people create 10-20 posts before they launch their blog. Is that necessary?
It depends. If you’re brand new and you have no clue who your audience is, then I wouldn’t do this. I would create maybe 3 posts and see what type of bloggers come to my blog.
That’s what I did with Twins Mommy, and it served me well.
I originally spoke to work at home moms but the more posts I created, I learned that mom bloggers were visiting my site more.
So I changed and pivoted my content to that new audience.
Play around with that and see what works for you.
3. Where You Want to Promote Your Content
After you started your blog and had some posts on it, you want to find some social media platforms to promote your content.
I suggest you use Pinterest and Facebook. Both of these platforms have groups that will propel your blog further than if you just promoted them on your channels.
To get you started on these platforms check out these posts:
- How to Use Facebook to Bring Traffic to Your Site
- 12 Proven Hacks to Grow Your Blog Traffic Using Pinterest
3. Connect With Other Bloggers
This is the key mama. You can’t do this alone. You need help and support from others doing the same thing as you.
These can be other bloggers in your niche or just other mom bloggers. By connecting with them, you open up the world of collaboration and strategies to get you further ahead than if you were doing this alone.
To get started with connection and relationship building, start commenting on other people’s blog posts.
Visit Pinterest or Facebook groups’ promo threads to see blog posts of bloggers in your niche.
You can use that to comment on their blog and connect with that blogger.
Another thing you can do to start connecting with other bloggers is to join their email list.
Learn from them and start to know them on a personal level.
This is what I did, and I’m still a subscriber to many awesome mom bloggers!
If you want to join my list, be sure to grab my free Pin Promote Planner.
There’s a monthly plan sheet for brand new pinners like you as well as a weekly planner and yearly planner!
4. Figure Out Your Client/Audience Avatar
Up to this point, we fast forwarded all the necessary components to this blog/business adventure. But we forgot to figure out your audience.
After all, this is the audience that you want to tailor your content, sales funnels and eventually products to. This is what will help you figure out how to work from home.
But, how do you figure this out?
One big way is to look at your blog comments and social media comments. If you create a post that resonates on social media, then you know you attracted an audience.
Once you’ve been blogging for a while, you can look at your popular posts on Google Analytics.
Go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages to view your popular content.
From this I know my audience is interested in:
- Starting a blog
- Making an income
- Pinterest marketing for traffic and presence
These top posts change depending on the time of year, but generally, my audience comes to Twins Mommy to learn how to build a successful blog and turn that into a business that generates income.
But, finding the right audience took time so don’t despair if you don’t know right off the bat. I suggest you just pick an audience and write for them.
You can change and pivot later (like I did!).
So, let’s say you want to start a blog on fashion.
You want to speak to young Millennials with a busy work life. So you start posting content to help them with their fashion sense.
But, you notice from your comments that young moms are visiting your site and love a lot of your tips.
This can help you tailor your content if you decide that more moms would benefit from your smart style sense.
So tap into your audience from your comments and later, your email list.
And finally, another way to figure out your audience is to guest post. Find blogs in your niche topic that accept guest bloggers and pitch an idea for a blog post.
If they accept, you can write the post, and at the end of the post, you have an author bio that promotes your blog and whatever you like!
By guest posting, you attract a new audience to your blog!
For example, if you have a homeschool blog, just type in Google, “homeschool blog write for us” to see which blogs accept guest posters:
But, did you know there are also blogs that PAY you to guest post? I know!!! It’s awesome.
Check out this post to get you started: 12 Sites for Moms That Pay $100+ to Write (Make Money Now as a Stay-at-Home Mom)
5. Start an Email List
Your entire strategy for growing your blog and income should rely on a strong email marketing strategy.
I know.
That’s a big term, but what it really means is you need to start an email list to attract the right audience so that they eventually fall in love with you and your blog and buy what you recommend!
Sounds easy eh?
So, how do you start an email list? First, you need to pick an email service provider.
If you feel that a business and income generating blog is what you want, you can invest in ConvertKit. It’s made for bloggers and makes it easy to set up sales funnels and segmentation.
If you use my special link, you can get a 30-day free trial! This is perfect, and you can get starting growing your email list during that time.
Once you’ve decided on your email service provider, the next thing is creating an irresistible freebie to offer to your readers.
This is also called your lead magnet.
If you need help creating that freebie, I have a free tutorial using Google Slides!
6. Create Content that Promotes Your Monetization Strategy
Here comes the fun and planning part.
To start creating sales, part of your strategy is to create content to promote what you’re offering. The easiest and best way is to create a blog post.
These are income-generating posts. They promote your affiliates or your courses or products.
But, they aren’t too salsey. So how do you do that?
First, create a valuable post with great tips to help your audience.
For example, let’s say you’re an affiliate for a chore app.
You can create a post on why children need to do chores as well as what your child does to help around the house.
Then you can offer tips to help your child do chores and include this chore app as one of those tips.
But, what if you have lots of things to offer? Many mom bloggers use Amazon Affiliates as their first affiliate marketing program.
You can promote practically anything that Amazon sells on your blog. Many moms do round-up posts or guides like a gift guide where you can include all of these affiliate products.
So, figure out your strategy for those income-generating posts.
For more help, I have a video on that!
7. Finding the Time to Work From Home
Ugh! The hardest part, right mamas?
How do other mom bloggers do this with multiple little kids running around them?
What I ended up doing, in the beginning, was only work on my business when my twins were napping or sleeping at night.
I didn’t wake up early; instead, I stayed up late (I’m a night owl). This worked for a year or two. Then my twins dropped their day nap!
A unicorn died that day 🙁
What I ended up doing was when my twins were settled playing or watching a show or eating lunch, I would work on outlines for blog posts and client pieces and share my posts on social media.
I saved answering emails and any future course lessons at night when my twins were sleeping.
Doing it this way takes longer to get your business up and running, but you’re DOING IT mamas! It is possible.
Here are 26 productivity hacks to help you blog more as a mom!
Another big help is batching my tasks. This means doing one task to completion. So, I pick one block of time and write all my blog posts for the week.
Then I pick another day or block of time to create all my social media graphics.
This makes bulking my content much easier.
Finally, another way I optimize my time on my laptop is to repurpose my content. This means turning one piece of content into multiple pieces of content.
I LOVE doing this!
For example, I can create an infographic for a blog post.
Or, a Facebook Live from a blog post!
There are lots of ways.
So know that you DO have the time to start a blog as a stay at home mom!
Have Fun Learning How to Work From Home
Blogging is a journey. Don’t expect to make money right away. For me, I hold the idea that you must know your audience first before you can offer a product to them.
So, have fun blogging and connecting with your audience! Learn the ropes of blogging and feel confident you can do this by having a mentor or learning from one blogger that’s done this already.
Now it’s your turn – tell me if you’re going to work from home and what your plan is. I want to hear from you!
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