That’s an important time in any home business. Getting started means finding customers (or for websites, getting traffic, which hopefully leads to customers) and earning some money off all the work you had to do to even start your business. It’s a difficult yet wonderful time.

In this case, this is just the start of the blog. This is where I’ll be telling my visitors about new and interesting programs, tools and tips too quick to create a new page on the website. I’ll also be talking about my own progress as a home business owner.

What experience do I have? I started out creating my first website several years ago; I don’t even recall exactly when, but more than five years ago. It wasn’t intended to earn money, as at that time I hadn’t even heard of affiliate marketing. I wish I had. I’d be in a much different place now if I had that kind of head start.

The site was nothing more than a creative outlet. It’s long gone now, so you can’t go looking. But one of my planned websites will probably be its cousin.

My next efforts came about because I took a website design course. I was just getting started in medical transcription (about three years ago), and people kept asking me how to get into it. Working at home is something so many parents want to do, so I created a website on that so I could just give people the address and let them read. Once again (arrgh!) I had not yet heard of affiliate marketing.

That website design course inspired me to try my hand at a website design business. I don’t do sites for others anymore, and one of my current projects is converting my design website into a tips on how to get your own website started. I have the domain name, it has some traffic, so why not?

It was shortly after that that I first heard about affiliate marketing. A couple of months later, I started my work at home website. However, I decided to give more of a focus to stay at home parents, since there are so MANY work at home websites out there. And so, Home with the Kids was born. That site is doing reasonably well for me, but over time I realized that people interested in home business have very different needs than stay at home parents or parents who want to work at home at a job.

This website is the result of a decision to split the two websites. Certainly I hope to have people going between the two, but I feel that I can best serve the two communities by splitting them. It allows me more focus in the newsletters, so each group gets what they want. And of course, anyone who wants both kinds of information can easily sign up for both.

Much of the information on this website comes from talking to people in these various businesses or from articles they have written. I write what I am able to learn about or have done myself. One of my current projects involves using datafeeds, so I talk about that in the affiliate section. It’s an interesting technology, with its own special challenges when it comes to getting ranked in the search engines. I’ve also worked at various forms of offline marketing, as that is the best solution for some programs as well as for some kinds of home business.

I hope you enjoy my website and my blog. I’m a mother of a lovely daughter (Ariel, 2-1/2) and a baby boy on the way (due mid-March), and I’m loving every minute this kind of business allows me to stay at home and be a mother rather than miss out on all those wonderful moments.