Staying at home with young children is a tough job all by itself, but many stay at home moms either want or need to earn a bit of extra money while they are watching the kids. Starting an online business is the perfect way for a stay at home mother to help contribute to the household income while still providing child care for young kids and babies. There are a variety of different businesses a stay at home mother can start online, depending on her field of expertise, hobbies, the amount of time she can devote and any special skills she might have.

Crafting For Cash

One very common online business that many stay at home mothers choose to pursue is selling handcrafted items online. Items that are made by hand are extremely popular right now, and there are a number of websites which allow people who make handmade crafts to list their crafted items for sale. For a stay at home mother, setting up a domain with a web presence explaining her crafts and her process and then linking to her online craft shop is a great way to draw interest to her crafted items.

Self Publishing For Money

Self publishing is one way that stay at home moms can make a nice amount of money without having to work constantly. Short stories, nonfiction articles, recipes and all kinds of other texts can be formatted and converted to electronic book formats and sold on certain websites. By charging a minimal amount for these items, such as a couple of dollars, buyers are drawn to purchase the items. The same file can be purchased multiple times, so the person selling the file continues to make money on it despite it only needing to be created once. This same method also works when creating customizable files that can be sold on crafting websites. PDF files for invitations, paper crafts and other goods can be made along with customisation instructions, with the same file then being sold repeatedly for continued profit.

Freelance Graphic Work and Writing

If a stay at home mom happens to have a special talent such as graphic design or writing, they can make some extra money by joining any of a number of websites which offer the opportunity to write articles or design graphics for money. These websites allow stay at home mothers to work at their leisure, whether their free time is early in the morning, late at night, or somewhere in between. They also allow stay at home moms to engage in a trade that they enjoy and are good at, keeping them involved in a field they may have once worked in or plan to work in again in the future. There are many other tasks that can be done via websites that offer freelance work, such as coding, transcription and photography. If a stay at home mother has a special skill, chances are she can find a way to turn it into freelance employment.

Direct Sales

There are hundreds of direct sales companies and each of them have something new and different to offer. You can sign up for little to no cost with some and a slight investment with others. If you like food and think you can sell it, try out companies like Wildtree, which is something I do on the side because I love their products.

Check out this article for even more ideas for making money at home!