The last two months that I was pregnant with my first child, I was too regularly nauseous and bloated to be any good working as a counselor at a psychiatrist's office, and I decided to start off my maternity leave a little earlier than I had planned. It wasn't that I couldn't work; it was just that it became more difficult each day to hold myself together in public. It turned out that you can't quite imagine how vulnerable you can feel when you are pregnant and without a job - even when you have a husband pulling up the slack. You can see that there are expenses on top of expenses around the corner; what do you do? I decided that I would try a work-from-home job.
And as hard as I tried to look, it seemed like all I could ever come by were multilevel marketing schemes and acai berry sales scams. Why, I didn't even know it at first that a multilevel scheme could be a scam. I waddled around my neighborhood trying to sign people up before I wised up. A friend sent me straight after I had already signed eight people on. I went and gave them back their money. Was that ever embarrassing! The friend who sent me straight had more useful information for me - I could start a business contact center right at home. I was surprised that I had never actually heard of this. They actually have a new term for this - Homeshoring (I guess they thought it would be fun to make a play on "offshoring"). I got in touch with two of the most important names in this business - Alpine Access and LiveOps (there are others like West at Home and Arise too). Pretty soon, I was making $600 a week, easy. And I work no more than five hours a day. That's a better deal than I ever had working as a psychiatrist's assistant (somehow, that sounds like "magician's assistant" to me).
Certainly, any work-from-home job does come with certain specialized challenges of its own. Family doesn't really take your work hours seriously, and you are hollered for every now and then. And you do need a considerable grip over yourself while working, when you know you could just take a "two-minute break" to watch what happened on that soap opera and no one would be any the wiser. But there is little that can take away from the boon that is a no-commute job. This whole thing got me interested. But if there were other jobs that I could do from home that could be just as well paying, wouldn't that be great? A dot-com business does sound like it could be really hard work; while that's really a good way to look at it, it is possible to do a good and sincere job at it, and really make enough to support your family. Now running your own website and stocking up on merchandise can be an expensive affair. Since I was a new mother and I was always on the lookout for bargains in baby supplies, I found that I had a natural flair for the bargain in these matters. I have a little programming experience helping my father with his own Internet business selling garden tools, and I decided to set up a little diaper business.
I was lucky enough to get a line of credit with a supplier who took care of a little shopper's club a few miles away, and away I went. This one wasn't as quick or as easy as setting up a home call center. For the first year or so, I made no more than $100 a week. But my friends were intrigued by the possibilities; and pretty soon, I was holding classes on how to run your internet business. That's when the real money came in.
Speaking of starting an Internet business as a work from home job, did you ever realize that eBay supports a million sellers on its website, and to most of them, profits from their sales are their only income? It's easy to start your eBay auction business with just the used stuff that's in your attic. A friend of mine has her own eBay business selling cheap smartphones. She scours the back alley markets over town for cheap imports from China (phones with minimal quality and a month-long guarantee), and she sells them over eBay. She makes a decent profit, she makes sure that she states everything up front and rushes to take care of any problems customers may face, and she has thrived.
A work from home job can be your own little project to love and nurture. Somehow, you end up working better than you ever did.