I have been a stay at home working mom since 2004. I used to work in a call centre doing tech support before I decided to stay home and have a baby. I still wanted to work, so I started my own virtual administrative business.
I graduated from Toronto School of Business in 1998 with a Small Business Management diploma, so I was confident in the knowledge I could succeed. I also had 9 years of administrative assistant experience I could rely on when selling my skills to prospective clients.
I set up a simple site that advertised my services, then I spent hours creating flyers to post in my neighborhood, endless more hours posting my ads on free classified websites I found through Google searches, and set up my complete home office.
I found work doing various customer service jobs like taking orders for restaurants such as Swiss Chalet, a couple telemarketing jobs, typing out manuscripts and school papers for clients, and a few other odd jobs. I soon found I wanted a different kind of online job, so I decided to expand into the ecommerce world.
It is tough to go on your own. There is no one to help you out. You have to take care of every aspect yourself. I taught myself internet marketing. I almost quit in the process. I am not put off by very many things, but taking on the daunting task of learning internet marketing by myself, with no direction; no one to tell me who to trust when looking for proper mentors to guide me through, was downright scary!
I learned how to make professional looking websites, researching templates, learning html and java script, finding clipart, uploading images, setting up an ecommerce shopping cart so I could process orders through Paypal, and so much more.
Hours of researching, calling, faxing, and emailing, to set up wholesale accounts for bulk product orders. Finding dropshippers for products I am not physically able to keep in storage. The list seemed to go on.
Now on a daily basis there is still the updating and maintaining of my website to make sure all products are available with the correct inventory count, processing orders as they come in, responding to any emails from customers, processing returns, getting the advertising out to Yahoo and Google, creating my bi-weekly newsletters for two different websites and then sending them out to everyone who has opted in to my email list, and writing articles to submit to the article directories to further enhance my traffic.
I recall a conversation I had with one of the mothers I meet with on Wednesdays for our "Work At Home Moms" group. We were discussing how people respond to us when they find out we work from home and do most of our business online. There are a vast many people out there who are under the impression that we don't work as hard as the average Joe who has a job outside of the house. I needed to write this article to inform others that work at home mothers most often tend to work harder than outside jobs. While we maintain our business at home, we still manage to do the laundry, watch the children, clean house, and make dinner. I work so much my husband often wonders when I will ever stop.
We do have real jobs, and we do work real hard. We just happen to be our own boss.
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