Work at Home Moms Articles – WAHM Articles

During the weekends I love to get into my kitchen and do some baking and one of the things I enjoy baking are a variety of homemade buns. Two of the following recipes utilize frozen bread dough that you can purchase from your local supermarket. The third recipe uses homemade dough that you make yourself.

Here are 3 of our favorite homemade bun recipes.

Cinnamon Walnut Buns Recipe

2 loaves of frozen bread dough
1 cup dark Karo syrup
1 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons cold milk
1 stick of butter, softened
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 cup walnuts, chopped

Remove the frozen bread dough from freezer and thaw according to package directions. In a large saucepan combine the Karo syrup, brown sugar, milk, butter and ground cinnamon over medium heat until it’s nice and hot but not boiling. Remove from heat and stir in the chopped walnuts. Pull off small pieces of the dough from the loaf and place into a baking pan. Cover pan and let dough rise for 1 hour. Pour the sauce over the dough and bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for 30-35 minutes.

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If you want more customers and a more successful direct sales business, stop talking and start listening. Customers actually care more about being understood than about your products. By listening to their needs and wants, you will have their attention when you tell them about your products. When you have their attention, you will sell more products. More listening means more sales.

Most people are passive listeners. Passive listening means that you hear what a person has to say, but you do not react to it. Many passive listeners are thinking about what they want to say while the other person is speaking instead of truly digesting what the person is saying. In direct sales, your customers will quickly recognize your inability to listen and will most likely not continue as your customers. They want to be heard, and you can’t hear them if you are talking.

Successful people and successful direct sellers are active listeners. Active listening is a method of listening that places emphasis on the customer’s needs. Active listening not only focuses on the content of the message, it also focuses on the emotions underlying the message. Active listeners pay attention to words, tone, emphasis and body language. However, active listening doesn’t mean your reaction is to interrupt or cut someone off while they are speaking. It means that you listen closely and react to their message after they are done speaking. Leave your agenda out of the conversation until you fully understand the customer and have reacted to their wants and needs.

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How many times have you created your to-do list for the day only to make it to the end of the day and not have it complete? Maybe you’ve set a goal to grow your business, but can’t figure out how to add more time in your day to reach your goals. As a business owner you may feel you have to do everything yourself, but you need to realize it doesn’t have to be that way.

There are so many tasks you can have your Virtual Assistant do that will save you time. You’ll find you will have the ability to do so many more things than you were able to do before and you’ll be able to grow your business and reach success.

This weeks article will help you outsource tasks in your business so you have the ability to grow your business. Click here to read the article.

The Wordless Wednesday post I shared yesterday was for Momwebs. If you missed the picture, click here to view it.

When you’re in business it’s important to show your customers or clients you run a business and not a hobby. That’s why it’s important to host your own website rather than using a free site. It gives you the ability to build trust with your customer or clients.

When you’re looking for the perfect host, you need to consider Momwebs. They have superior uptime, quick and friendly support, and the prices are very reasonable. They have everything any business owner would want and then some, so you must consider them for your hosting needs.

Momwebs offers three hosting plans and four virtual private servers, so you’re sure to find a plan that works for you and gives you what you need, for a reasonable price. Hosting plans range from $15 a quarter to $20 a month and the virtual private servers range from $50 a month to $135 a month.

Last month I wrote about 5 Business Lessons I Have Learned and this month I want to share with you five more lessons.

1. Priorities
In any business, you have to know how to prioritize. You can be working in your business or you can be working your business and these are two different things. When you’re working in your business, you’re working on tasks that aren’t earning you money. When you’re working your business, you’re doing things to grow your business and to move it forward.

I know I have said and you have probably too, “I didn’t have time for it” and it really means you didn’t make it a priority. Now think about it, if you made it a priority, it would have been done. So, what do you do? You have three choices:

1. Make it a priority
2. Outsource it
3. Ditch it

It is that simple.

2. Time Management
Time management and priorities go together. In order to get the most out of your day, you have to be working efficiently. If it means you only complete two things on your to-do list between all the other family responsibilities you have, then it should be the two things that are the most important in your business.

I know having multiple streams of income is important to most of us. You don’t want to ever rely on one source so it’s easy to tack on new projects. When you add new projects to your plate, it means you’ll be subtracting time from what you currently have. It’s important to be aware of how much quality time you are spending on each business because it’s easy to push aside and “ignore” one or several businesses.

3. Evaluate Your Business
There isn’t any set time when you should evaluate your business. It’s on a day-to-day basis. If your personal life or other projects you have are negatively impacting your business today, you’re going to fix it now. Focus on your businesses that are profitable and remove anything that doesn’t hold your interest or time.

4. Partnerships
Business partnerships aren’t for everyone. There are a lot of pros and cons when it comes to co-owning a business. A valuable lesson I have learned is to always have a written business agreement, partnering up with a friend is not always a wise choice even though it seems to be the most logical choice and business partnerships shouldn’t be 50/50, but they should be 51/49.

Going into a business partnership shouldn’t be done on a whim. Take your time to evaluate how it’ll affect your current situation, be it in your personal and/or business life.

5. Learn To Say No
You can say no and it doesn’t mean you have failed. It’s knowing what you’re capable of and how much you can handle. Sometimes it may mean you have to decline a potential client, but so what? There’ll be more clients when you’re ready. It’s hard to repair your reputation if you can’t deliver on your services.

Bonus Lesson: Positive People
Keep company with positive people because toxic and negative people suck your energy. There are some people who can’t or don’t know how to turn negatives into positives. When you surround yourself with positive energy, you get more of it and more people that are positive in your life. All of this equals to more happiness and self-fulfillment.

Sophia McIntyre is an Internet Marketer, Article Marketer, Ghostwriter and founder of WorkAtHomeSpace.com, a free resource focusing on work at home companies and jobs, home businesses and other work at home related topics.

A mentor can come when you least expect it and that’s what happened to me when I first started my business. At the time I started my VA business I was working a direct sales type business and was not having any luck what so ever.

You see I’m not very good at calling people and asking them to look at what I do and join in. While I’m a great talker and I love to talk I’m not good at cold calls and trying to push something on others. It’s just not me in anyway. So with that said, I was looking for something new and different. That’s when I found my mentor.

I was on a social networking site called Ryze at the time. I joined a group that was for work at home mom’s and the lady that ran it was amazing. She was always posting wonderful things that would help the mom’s in her group. The conversations were wonderful and I learned so much from that site. I also found that the site owner was always willing to help and she was always full of encouraging words.

While she probably never knew this, she was was a great mentor to me. She was always encouraging me and telling me to go for my dreams. I trusted her opinions and one day I will see the success that she has. I will always remember those encouraging words and will keep them in my mind for the rest of my life.

This last week has been wonderful. I’ve enjoyed July so far and I hope you have done the same as well. There has been a lot going on, but as the old saying goes, that’s a good thing. The 2nd half of the year is well on its way and I sure hope it’s been a good one so far.

This week’s newsletter is all about saving money. I thought this would be fitting with summer vacations being planning. Since we can all use a little more money in our pocket when it comes to vacations, I just know these articles will help you do just that. The wonderful thing about these articles is you’ll be able to use them any time of year and not just during the summer.

The first article I’m sharing with you talks about frugal grocery shopping and who couldn’t use a little saving during the summer month. The next has to do with paying cash and I know that’s a good one. The final one we’re sharing has to do with saving money through could.

Please make sure to leave us a comment and tell us how save money during the year. We’d love to hear from you.

Did you know that as a home daycare business owner, you can deduct almost any Advertising Expenses as a cost of doing business in the year the costs were paid or incurred?

You certainly can! Just as long as they are reasonably related to your business and you‘ve got the paperwork to back it up.

This is NOT an all inclusive list of deductible Advertising Expense, but definitely worth further examination:

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Welcome to 2011. I hope it’s a great year for you. It’s official, 2010 is in the history books. We had a lot happen in 2010. Some good and some not so good stuff happened during this year. WAHM-Articles has been through a lot, but I’m hoping with the new year things will improve and will be for the good. I know Denise would be happy with the things I have in mind for this year.

I hope you have planned your year and have set your goals in place. I also hope you wrote those goals down and you know exactly what you need to do to make them reachable and that you’ll have the success you set out to achieve.

Goals are important personally and for your business. If you don’t set them in place and work to achieve them, you won’t know which direction to go and you won’t know what you want to reach. It doesn’t matter if you set one goal or five goals, you need to do it. If you’ve never set one, consider trying it with one goal and see how you do. Click here to read an article I wrote to help you set goals and achieve them.

We’d love to hear about your goals, how you achieve them, and what you’re tricks are to staying motivated. Please share them in the comments below.

Here’s to a wonderful and successful New Year!

The work at home moms blues. Do you ever get those?

I do. More often than I’d like, in fact. Which in a way, surprises me.  I’ve never had so much control of my life as I do as a home business owner. If something gets me down, I can put a stop to it!

But, in another way, I’m not so surprised after all… I’ll be blogging about that more this week.

I would love to get some input from other moms on this topic too. Do you ever get the work at home mom blues? Whether you do or not, I would really appreciate it if you could participate in my brief survey here.

To thank you for your time, everyone who participates is entered to win a free one-month 125×125 button ad space on WAHM-Articles.com. (You need to supply the button ad.) I’ll be drawing the winner March 22, around noon MT.

I really look forward to hearing what you have to say! Who knows, maybe I really am the only one who sometimes feels down about working at home. And then again, maybe we have a lot of encouragement to offer each other!

Here’s the link to the survey again.

~ Denise