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WAHM in OttawaWhat is a WAHM in Ottawa? A WAHM is a Work at Home Mom. Are you interested in becoming a work at home mom? Would you prefer to stay at home with your children? Are you presently on maternity leave and dreading going back to work? Are you a stay at home mom in Ottawa who wants to make a bit of money and contribute to the bills? If you answered "yes" to any of the above questions, then you are not alone. Just the other day I (Louise) was speaking with a friend who was due to give birth to her second child. She was explaining to me that she really didn't want to go back to work after her maternity leave was over. She wanted to stay home with her children. I know a lot of women in Ottawa that feel the exact same way. Some of my friends don't want to leave their children with daycare providers for 8-10 hours per day. They want to spend more quality time with them and not just on the weekends. Some of my friends can't afford to put 2-3 children in day care. It wouldn't be worth it for them to go back to work. Their pay cheques would go straight to day care. Some of my friends are already stay at home moms but they want to bring money in to help contribute to the expenses and bills. Some of my friends that are staying at home already want to find a new hobby. It is because of my friends who are mothers in Ottawa that I have created this page. I have already told them and now I want to tell you about a possible solution. I say "possible" because it may not be for everyone. This page isn't just for mothers in Ottawa though – it could be for any woman (or man) who wants to work from home. I am dedicating it to my friends though who are mothers here in Ottawa! I have to warn you in advance that this is a bit long. I tend to be a bit long winded sometimes but I felt it was necessary to really explain to you the purpose of this page. First off, let me tell you that I am not a WAHM. I work full time out of the home. However, I do also work on this website which is like a part-time job. My husband, Richard, works shift work sometimes and often has to work weekends. I don't – I work regular Monday to Friday hours. I found that I was getting a bit bored when he was at work (especially during the cold, winter months in Ottawa) so I contemplated getting a part time job to a) learn a new skill b) keep busy and c) make a bit of extra spending money. Unfortunately, getting a part-time job away from home wasn't an option because we only had one car which Richard needed for work. Also, we had just recently welcomed a little puppy into our home so I didn’t want to spend so much time away from him. Having a puppy is "sort of" like having a baby (please Moms, don't be upset with me for saying that). It is just that with puppies, just like with babies, you need to spend lots of time with them and you need to watch them constantly. So, we discussed finding a job for me that I could do from home. The only one that I had ever heard about was stuffing envelopes from home. I wondered how many envelopes I would have to stuff to earn a couple hundred dollars. Yikes – I imagine it would be plenty. No thanks! That is when I did a search online. I typed in "work from home" and "jobs at home" into the search engines and I couldn't believe how many websites there were. I didn’t know what to do. Who were we to trust? So many of them promised that we would "get rich quick". We doubted that very much. So, after searching for a couple months, we heard about something called "Affiliate Marketing". A friend of a friend had been doing Affiliate Marketing and had built a few websites and was very successful. He quit his day job and was working full time on his sites. Even though my intention wasn't to quit my day job (I like it too much), the thought of having a profitable website did appeal to me. That is when we started doing searches online for Affiliate Marketing. Over and over again we kept coming across the same name…Site Sell. We read about the program and we liked what we saw. However, we still weren't convinced. How did we know that this wasn't a scam (along with the millions of other sites out there)? It is hard to explain how we believed that SBI wasn't a scam. We just felt that their product had a huge amount of tools that we could have never figured out on our own (i.e. like telling us where we ranked in the search engines etc). You have to understand that we knew nothing at all about building a website. We never took computer courses in school – we just knew some of the Microsoft programs and how to "surf the net"! We wanted a program that would take us by the hand and lead us through the entire process step by step. A few different pages caught our eye:
The next step was to choose what to build a website on. We thought long and hard about it and came up with a few different ideas. Finally though, we settled on building a site about Ottawa. We are forever telling friends and family who don't live in Ottawa about our great city. We have hosted a lot of visitors over the years and we love taking them around to the various sites and attractions. I am in my element when I am planning our visitors' trips to Ottawa! We thought that it would be a lot of fun to make a site for visitors to Ottawa and even touch on subjects that residents would be interested in too (i.e. wedding planning, buying a home etc). I am a natural born planner so I loved the idea. I won't go into great detail about our site but I did want to say that it is now over one year later and our site is doing really well. We are also having a lot of fun. I say "we" because it really is a joint effort between Richard and I. I tend to do more of the work on the computer and he is my sounding board. I love bouncing ideas off of him. He also has some pretty great ideas himself. That wasn't too long was it? So, now about YOU…yes, you! Does it sound like something you would be interested in? Two of our friends, who both happen to be Moms, are going to try it. I am not sure yet what topic they are going to do their site on but I am sure that they will do well. They both have the passion and the desire to succeed! I am so excited for them. What topic are you an expert on? What do you like to talk about? Do you have any hobbies now that you would like to share with the world? You could talk about your love of photography or how to maintain your garden. You could create a site about something you are very passionate about like animals, a band, an author etc. If you want to know more:
Good luck to you and when you do have your home based business up and running, let us
know. We would love to check it out!
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