I was talking to my sister on the phone the other day. She was telling me about working extra hours so that she would have some more money for the holidays. That got me thinking about how challenging that can be in business.

Sure, a lot of businesses do better around the holidays. People do a lot of shopping at this time of year. If you have the affiliate links to the right products or sell them yourself, it’s a great time.

But if your business doesn’t pick up on it’s own, it’s not as easy as working a little overtime to earn extra money. You have to find new ways to bring in that money.

1. Offer a special deal on your own products.

If you’re selling and people just aren’t buying enough, try a special deal. Dropping the price is popular, but you could also do a joint venture with another marketer and have a discount when people buy both products.

2. Take on some freelance work.

If you have the extra work time use it to earn extra money. You can find work on eLance, the ProBlogger job board, SheLancers and other places.

3. Make use of any private label products you’ve been neglecting.

Especially if you’ve already bought it, why aren’t you making the most of your private label library? Many online marketers have a bunch of private label stuff they just haven’t gotten around to using yet.

Need a fast way to add private label articles to a blog? ZipPoster can handle it. It’s not something I’d do on a main site, but maybe a minor one? It’s a simple WordPress plugin that takes your text private label articles and posts them over a period of time for you. Add in a plugin such as WordPress Affiliate Pro to automatically add in your affiliate links to the articles, and you have a very quick (probably low quality) site.

Better, of course, is rewriting the private label articles enough to make them more unique, but if you don’t have the time sometimes the quick way is sufficient. Just don’t plan for it to stick around forever if you aren’t putting some extra effort into it. And you may not earn anything from the site. But if you have the stuff lying around, it’s a fairly small risk to take.

4. Don’t buy any ebooks that promise you will get rich quick.

Nah, won’t earn you any money. But that’s better than wasting money.

5. Join a focus group.

While it can be a bit difficult to find a focus group you qualify for in your area, they pay pretty well for the amount of time they take and Find Focus Groups makes it a lot easier. The opportunities are listed by listing date, not by the day the focus group will take place. They appear to be finding these mostly on Craigslist.

6. Sell your photos.

There are a variety of places you can sell your photos as stock images, such as PhotoShelter and StockXpert.

Is anything guaranteed? Nope. But the more ways you try, the more chances you have.

Despite the promises some people will make you about running a home business, it’s not all rainbows and kittens. And even once you start doing well things can go awry for a time.

Just call it learning experiences.

You can take the best instruction on how to build a home business out there, follow it to the letter, and still have things not work. Or they work for a time, then someone (often Google) changes the rules and you’re in a tailspin, little to no money coming in.

I’ve gone through a few of these. That’s why I’ve been working so hard on having more than one income stream.

Some of my income peaks have come at exactly the times I’ve needed them, such as when my son needed Doc-Band helmets to reshape his head after he had craniosynostosis surgery at 3 months old. The insurance only paid for half. My income somehow jumped up just nicely enough to let us handle that.

Then it just as mysteriously dropped.

Actually, I know why it dropped, in part. Great rankings in just one search engine do leave you very subject to the whims of that search engine.

When my husband was laid off, once again I managed to drive my income up, a bit more deliberately this time. Odd thing was that the week before his new job started my rankings started back down again.

Since this was more deliberate, I’ve been able to hold onto things better. I have a broader base of traffic coming in. Still, it would have been nice to hold the peak a while longer. Say a number of years longer.

Even though the lows are frustrating, I’m keeping in mind that each low is a bit higher than the one before. That’s because I’m learning with each one.

The more you understand about why things go bad for a business, the better you can work around the problems. This isn’t something you always pick up from ebooks, especially if what the ebook taught you is what changed and caused the drop in the first place. This is what you learn from experience.

What’s the Best Way to Get Experience?

I mentioned multiple streams of income. I love multiple streams of income. But until you have some idea as to what you’re doing, they’re probably just a distraction. Doing too much slows down your learning curve, and what might have been a drizzle of trouble with your business can turn into a downpour if it all crashes at once.

It’s often smartest to start with one focus. One site. One marketing tactic. Master that first, or at least get pretty good with it.

Once you’re comfortable, start adding on.

I generally try adding in marketing tactics first. You can start with pay per click for the quickest start, then do blog commenting to start getting search engine attention, then Squidoo lenses, article marketing, Twitter… in whatever order works for you.

You Can’t Stop All the Rain

No business will ever run perfectly smoothly, no matter how many streams of income, how many types of traffic you bring to your site, things can go wrong. That’s just life.

But the more you learn, the better your chances are. The harder you work, the better your chances are.

And if the rain’s falling hard enough, maybe there’s a new opportunity. Could it be time for a bucket?

I’ve been enjoying using Twitter these past few months. It’s an interesting way to meet people and to generate some traffic. Not a ton in my case, but some. Meeting people has been working better for me.

Twitter is highly social, a sort of instant messaging to a group, but you never know which of your followers will be paying attention at a particular moment. I’ve had interesting conversations with people who I know pretty much nothing about, aside from what they’ve posted recently on Twitter.

But yesterday I started seeing discussion on a new service, called Magpie. I put a nofollow on that link, folks, because I really don’t like the service. It’s just not what using Twitter should be about, even if you do other kinds of marketing there.

You see, it’s a service that puts ads into your Twitter stream.

If you’re marketing your own site or products, that’s one thing. But adding in someone else’s ads just strikes me as over the line and a great way to lose followers. I’m already seeing people say they will unfollow (link shows people’s thoughts on Magpie as well as what I think are Magpie tweets) anyone who uses that service to send them ads, and honestly, I don’t blame them at all. I’m likely to do the same.

Might hang around long enough just to see if people let it get obnoxious.

Really, I can’t see this as being worth anyone’s time. I know it will be easy to sign up, but do you really want to annoy people who decided to follow you because you say interesting things?

If you want to earn money from your use of Twitter there are better ways to go about it. Use affiliate links for products you really love. Mention your own sites. Above all else, keep it real.

Your followers on Twitter grow to have certain expectations from you. They quickly learn who does nothing but self promotion or promotion of other products, versus who has something interesting to say. Go ahead and market, but be sure it’s interesting.

Otherwise, you’ll soon be talking to yourself.