Sometimes, you can be overextending yourself without even realizing it until someone else brings it to your attention. I had no idea that I was doing it until I had an appointment with my midwife today. We are actively working on preventing my blood pressure from going up during this pregnancy because that was an issue with my first pregnancy, and we are approaching the issue from a few different angles. I’m exercising regularly, I have made some dietary changes, and I have incorporated some vitamins and supplements into my daily routine. Anyways, today she asked me to describe a … Continue reading →

There are ten more minutes left of Thanksgiving, so technically I am working on Thanksgiving albeit just a little bit. We hosted Thanksgiving, so even though I had done quite a bit of food preparation and cleaning yesterday there was a lot more to be taken care of today. Fortunately, I had the foresight to take that into account when planning my work schedule. I decided that one hour today (thanks to the odd hours I keep it is really more like early Friday morning) would be a reasonable amount of work to do. As I sit here still stuffed … Continue reading →

Tomorrow is my favorite holiday, Thanksgiving. I love the idea of dedicating an entire day to reflecting on things that we are thankful for and spending time with loved ones. In fact, one of the things that I enjoy the most about it is that the arrival of Thanksgiving gets people in a grateful and appreciative mood before the actual holiday as well as during and after it. Today, I would like to join my fellow bloggers Richele McFarlin and Stephanie Romero in expressing thanks for my home based businesses. My two home based businesses have given me the freedom … Continue reading →

Yesterday, I found a case of CDs in my car that I had not listened to for a long time. As I flipped through it, I saw a couple of CDs that I had not listened to since I was in law school, about seven years ago. Since we had a little bit of a drive ahead of us to go to the grocery store, I put one into the CD player just for old times’ sake. By now, I am certain that you are thinking “What does this have to do with home – based business?”. As the CD … Continue reading →

Last year was my first holiday season as a fully self-employed home-based professional. Since it is that time of year again, I am thinking about all of the specific things that I can be thankful for in regards to working from home during the holidays. By far the most obvious of these blessings is not having to request time off of work for Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, or Christmas. From the time that I was a teenager until I became self-employed and home-based, I have always had at least one job each year that required working one or more shifts on … Continue reading →

My colleague, Stephanie Romero, wrote an article yesterday entitled the Top 5 Most Depressing Jobs. Apparently, a host on a talk show read an article about which jobs were the most depressing. I found the article quite interesting because Stephanie is a great writer and picks lovely topics and because I had one job on the list and currently have another listed. The first most depressing job was working at nursing homes or child care facilities or child care homes. I ran a home day care for years. I have even written a manual about starting your own home day … Continue reading →

One of the challenges associated with working from home is something that many home-based professionals joke about with their friends who have traditional jobs outside of the home. People who do not work from home may joke with us about working in our pajamas or being able to catch a nap whenever we feel like it, but sometimes having your bed so close by can truly pose a challenge. While home-based professionals do enjoy the benefit of not having to rise early to commute to our workplace (unless we rise early to do our work) or come home late after … Continue reading →

Yesterday we discussed responding to your customers through Facebook. Being responsive, having engaging status updates, and tagging will gain help you grow your page. You will have to continue to do all of these things to sustain growth. In addition you can create a community and offer exclusive content to help boost your fan base and keep fans as customers. Create a Community You want more to build more than a page you want to build a community. This may sound like a lot of work but the more engaged you are with your customers the more fun this process … Continue reading →

With winter on its way, I am once again very thankful to be a home-based professional. As much as I have been careful to avoid the subject of winter because I did not want to acknowledge that it was in fact on the way, I can no longer do so. A few inches of wet, heavy snow has already fallen here in New Hampshire, where I have been for the past few days. That wet, heavy snow (or a car accident related thereto) has caused a power outage at the hotel where we are staying – and a whole lot … Continue reading →

One of the wonderful things about being a home-based professional is that some types of home-based work can be done at places other than your home. Today, I read a story on Elance about a person who was able to travel to Ecuador for six weeks because he works online. Perhaps even more fascinating than the fact that this person was able to travel to Ecuador and experience an entirely new place and culture is the fact that since this person works as a freelance writer, he could even relocate to Ecuador permanently if he wanted to and still have … Continue reading →