Work Ideas for Stay at Home Moms

If you've been searching the internet for work ideas for stay at home moms, you may have come across internet marketing.  Although you can be an affiliate for a specific product and just send traffic to the affiliate page that they will give you, the process works a lot better if you have your own website.

Internet marketing is one of the best work ideas for stay at home moms because it's totally flexible in terms of timescale.  You can do something such as choose your niche and a bit of keyword research, then go and hang out the washing.  Return to your computer and do some more keyword research, then pop into the kitchen to prepare the dinner and back to your desk again - see what I mean about flexibility.  But we're running ahead of ourselves here; this is what you need to do.

1.     Choose a niche which interests you or one which you know to be profitable.  For a first timer, I recommend the former.

2.     Do some keyword research (more on this later).

Now there are more choices to be made; you can pay for a domain name and hosting for your website, which is quite inexpensive or you can get free hosting.  Some of this free hosting means that advertisements are automatically shown on your site, which are of no benefit to you and which may be completely irrelevant to your niche.  Alternatively you can get a free blog at Blogger.com or a free account at Squidoo where you can create what they call lenses (actually pages).  However, you need to read the terms of service at both these sites very carefully as Blogger will delete your blog if they perceive that it has been created solely for the purposes of advertising and Squidoo have some subjects such as weight loss which are completely taboo.  Check before you waste a lot of hard work.

If you pay for a domain name and hosting, you have far more control over what your pages contain.  I use a host called hostgator.com which is quite inexpensive, starting at $4.95 per month.  If you pay for hosting, you do need a domain name which you can also acquire through hostgator.com at a small annual fee.  Your domain name should reflect the name of your website which in turn should contain profitable keywords, which brings me on to keyword research.

So, onto keyword research; there are free keyword research tools such as the Google Adwords Keyword Tool or , a very good tool is Keyword Elite.

Whichever tool you're going to use, there are a few rules to follow:

1.     Don't go for top level keywords like "childcare".  These received hundreds of thousands of searches and the competition is huge.  Your keyword tool will give you lots of other suggestions such as "childcare for working moms", so start with the ones at around 5000 searches per month.

2.     Next you'll need to check the competition.  Type your chosen phrase into Google in quotation marks and you will see how many web pages are targeting the same keyphrase.  I would keep a note of those with under 50,000.  If you prefer to use Yahoo search, target those with under 20,000 competing pages.

3.     Use the long tail keyword (keyphrase) with the lowest search to competing pages ratio as your website name and check whether the .com domain name is available.  If it isn't, try .net or .org or failing that add another word to the end like "secrets".  You can also try using hyphens between the words in your domain name, although some experts don't recommend this.

If you want full training on choosing your niche, keyword research and how to attract traffic to your website click here to visit Liz-e-Biz.com and sign up for the Internet Marketing with Liz free course.