So you’ve been thinking of starting a business from home. You’ve got some skills, don’t have a lot of space for inventory, so you figure it might be a good idea to start a service business. In fact, it’s a GREAT idea – you just have to be prepared to get your business off the ground and balance all the work/life responsibilities that are on your plate.

This article is going to provide you with easy-to-follow tips to do just that, but first, if you still don’t know what type of service business to start, here are a few popular suggestions:

Ghostwriting for the Internet: Write articles, reports and other information for online business owners.

Transcription Business: Create written records of audio recordings, meetings and more.

Virtual Assistant Business: Provide administrative support, secretarial services and more for other companies.

It doesn’t matter what type of service business you start, there will be some challenges along the way. Here are some tips help you as you go along:

1. First and foremost, set your working hours and ensure everyone in your household is aware of them and respects them. If you happen to be a mother or have other interruptions during the day, there’s nothing wrong with setting aside smaller chunks of time where you’ll be working. This isn’t the “real world” work setting anymore – it’s better. You work at home and you can decide when you work.

2. As a service business, you have two very important roles. One of those roles is to provide service for your clients. The other is to FIND those clients and the time involved in this is something many service-providers don’t take into account. Ensure you have enough time for providing services and the marketing tasks for your business – or hire some help to make the most efficient use of your time.

3. Charge a fair and rewarding rate. Even if you charge your clients for each hour you work for them, there are many tasks (administrative, marketing, etc.) that you don’t get paid for. To set a rate that is worthwhile to you, you need to decide what type of overall income you desire and figure out how many hours total (all business activities) you want to be working. If you find you can’t charge a rate that is worthwhile, consider another business idea or target a specific type clientele that is willing to pay the rates you charge.

4. Be choosy about your clients. It can be tempting to simply take on any clients because you may need the cash. Unfortunately, bad clients can drain your time, suck up your energy and end up being more work than they’re worth. Resist the temptation to just take any clients because your business will be more fruitful in the long run if you work with easy-to-manage, low-maintenance clients.

5. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. If you find yourself taking on more clients than you can handle to earn more money, revisit tip #3 above. You may be concerned about giving your clients a good deal, but they actually suffer when you can’t provide the quality service they deserve. Instead aim for fewer clients, charge more and give them stellar service.

If you keep these things in mind, your transition to a work-at-home service provider will go much more smoothly. It’s not always easy and when you’re first starting out, it can be tough to find that balance and a schedule that you can work with. But stick with it and keep refining your process and you’ll find yourself owning a very rewarding business that you absolutely love.

Recommended

To get more at home business ideas, be sure to visit Just Add Sweat – they’re your source for step-by-step guides for starting your very own home-based business. You’ll find the guidance you need to get your business off the ground, find real-life success stories from women just like you and more.

Click here to go to Just Add Sweat

One of the ladies there now is a very sweet lady from Australia who has a really great online biz helping others to get started online.  Her name is Leigh Kostiainen and she is a mom of two young boys who operates her business out of a spare room in her house.  She has a sweet, lovely disposition and is quite genuine in wanting to help others get started.

There is so much information out there to wade through when you’re getting started trying to make money online and it is very easy to get lost – to the point of just giving up altogether! And I’m sure many people do give up!  Leigh wants to help people wade through the maze of stuff and get to making money!

She has a very simple 8 step system to guide you in getting your business up and running.

To find out all about it, click here:

8 Step Getting Started Plan

Who Should I Listen To, Lisa?

One big mistake that people just starting out online make is following and attempting to learn from, too many people. I definitely made this one. I’ve got my ‘chosen mentors’ narrowed down to just a few now and things are working a lot better. One of these awesome people is Lynn Terry, of Clicknewz and Self Starters Weekly Tips. Lynn has been working as an entrepreneur, most of those years online, for about 12 years now. And the really super cool thing about her is that she’s really nice and really approachable. The ‘OMG, Lisa – what’s wrong with you?’ part is that I’ve known her, followed her, since at least 2003. That is how long I’ve been a member of her forum, anyway. I have been listening to eighty-seventy-thousand other people, too, though! Now she is one of my few – and my head is not spinning quite as much as it used to!

Back to the question people ask me all the time – other stay at home moms that want to continue to stay home with their kids are usually who ask me how this all works. How do you get paid to blog? How does affiliate marketing work? How do you get listed in the search engines? I try to answer them, but, I think my answers come out disjointed. I try to start from the beginning, but, I always wind up zig-zagging and then I have to say, “Wait, back up a minute, before you do this you have to do that and it winds up being a dizzyingly circular talk! Ha!

How Do I Get My Own Site Up?

I did a few how-to posts in an effort to get started explaining things from the beginning – Lisa, how do you make money at home blogging? and Make Money Blogging – Part II. The first post will really help you just get started with your blogging. The second post offered some helpful resources for more research. Again, though, I don’t feel that I’ve explained things well.

But Really, Lisa, How Do I Get Started?

That is one thing that Lynn is really good at – explaining how, step-by-step, to do all the different things that we do. And she has a new post up, called, Starting A Free Online Business – that offers so much help to someone just wanting to get started! She just has a great way of explaining things! I’m pretty good at teaching little kids stuff, but, for some reason, I’ve really found it difficult to teach people what I do online. Lynn is awesome at that – the important thing is, you really need to follow the links within her post. She has written tutorials on just about anything and everything to do with internet marketing and she links out to them. Follow those links! Dig through her site! You will learn a lot from her!

Look at the categories of her blog on the right sidebar, also – you can dig through those to specific topics of interest to you. And if you can’t find something, use the search at the top right of her page. If it has to do with online marketing, I’ll just bet Lynn has blogged about it!

Seriously, when getting online, you need to be careful. There are some smooth characters in this arena that will win you over with their charm. All the while you think you’re learning the very best stuff from them, they’re draining your bank account or your paypal. Lynn is a REAL PERSON, not out to drain anyone’s anything. She is very smart in marketing, the online world, and entrepreneurship – you can’t lose stickin’ with her!

The people that have been asking me about my work fall into several categories: some have free blogs that are next to impossible to monetize (such as MySpace blogs), some have free blogs like Blogger blogs that can be difficult to monetize, and some don’t have blogs yet at all.

So at this vantage point, I think a great place to start would be tutorials about setting up your own self-hosted blog. And the funniest – and coolest! – thing happened as I was pondering where to begin. My friend, Amy, did the ‘beginning’ for me. Awesome! It was so weird, because, she and I hadn’t been talking about this at all. We both just had our minds on it. Which works out perfectly for me, because, she did all of the work. And work she did! She does such a great job of explaining all of this, step by step, and I am not sure mine would have been as detailed or as thorough.

So let’s get to it, shall we? Ok, Amy did a whole series on this, so to get the full meat of it, you will need to go over all four posts.

1. Getting Your Own Domain for Blogging – Part One
2. Getting Your Own Domain for Blogging – Part Two
3. Getting Your Own Domain for Blogging – Part Three
4. Getting Your Own Domain for Blogging – Part Four

This is a great place for anyone who is thinking of breaking into this field to get started.

Thank you, Amy – for doing such a great job!! I know my readers and I definitely appreciate it!