With general increased living costs in the UK on top of rising interest rates, it is becoming more and more expensive just to live. If you are thinking about starting a family the sad fact these days is that both parents often need to work to pay the bills. But increased childcare costs can often absorb most of the second wage that is brought into the household. Which is why being a stay at home Mum or Dad could be a solution to the problem.

How do you make a living from home?

The first thing to get out the way is the bad news: there is no ‘holy grail’ money making scheme, don’t believe anything anyone ever tells you.

The good news is that you can make money from home and lots of it, but it will take lots of hard work, an internet connection and a creative mind, but it is definitely possible.

This posting is not going to go into any great detail about money making schemes, just whet your appetite if you have ever thought about making money from home.

The internet is your best bet at making money from home but remember it is a very competitive market. If you want to make money online the key is to be niche, if you have an interest in something write about it on a blog try blogger.com as a good starting place it’s free and very easy to use. You can then add Adsense adverts to your blog and with some luck make money from the PPC (Pay Per Click Advertising) AdSense offers. Do that for a couple of months, if you are still interested in your blog and making money online then do as much research as you can on the subject of online money making, there is a wealth of information out there.
Some websites that I have found very useful and inspiring are: www.stevenpavlina.com www.netprofitstoday.com, www.doshdosh.com. They all have very useful and more importantly genuine information on the subject of online money making.

My most profitable online money maker
From my experience unless you can direct hundreds of thousands of visitors to your website then you probably won’t make much money from PPC. A better path to go down is Affiliate Marketing, (affiliate marketing is simple you send traffic to merchants sites i.e Boots.com if the visitor goes onto purchase something from the merchant you will get a percentage of the sale). There are lots of different UK merchants that use affiliate marketing. If you have a website or blog on a niche subject like fishing tackle, chances are most people on your site are interested in that subject. So if you can direct that traffic to merchants that sell fishing tackle with a bit of luck you could make a lot of profit from your visitor (well that’s the theory anyway)

If you want to read my full article on affiliate marketing then click here 

Money making schemes to avoid

Unfortunately there are still a lot of internet money making scams out there. So here are some things you should avoid, most of them are very obvious but unfortunately when money is mentioned people often let their guard of suspicion down, so it is worth reiterating.

• The first thing you read on the website states you can make £100’s per week or day for doing virtually nothing.
• It says “no experience necessary”.
• “Only work a few hours a day from home (in your pajamas) guaranteed easy cash”.
• “Places are limited so hurry”.
• The website asks you for money upfront first. You should never need to payout money first to make money online!
• And finally if it sounds too good to be true then it probably is.

Envelope Stuffing is probably one of the oldest money making scams in the book. The claim is that you can make £100’s or £1000’s per month working from home stuffing envelopes with promotional advertising for companies. The truth of the matter is most of this work is completed by machine these days at a rate far quicker than a human could ever manage.
If you do ever send off money to one of these scam envelope stuffing companies they will send you back promotional information about envelope stuffing, and probably ask for more money in return for full instructions, envelopes etc. This will go on and on and their main objective will be for you to get other people you know to sign up to the scheme, because that’s how the scam makes its money.

Home Product Assembly Another old chestnut, the scam asks you to send off money to sign up with the company in question, in return for your money they will send out information about how you can make money at home assembling products for companies and you will be paid for each successfully completed product.
In theory this sounds feasible but the problem is that you need to pay for the stock in the first place and only from companies that they recommend, which will probably mean that the stock is vastly overpriced and you could probably source it cheaper yourself. After you have assembled all your products you will then be asked to send it back to the company in return for your pay.
Subsequently you will then receive a letter with no payment, the letter will inform you that your finished products have NOT passed their quality control and have been rejected. Unfortunately nobodies ever will because there are no real buyers for the products you have assembled.
This scam is a bit of a double whammy because you have wasted money signing up to the programme in the first place and you have wasted money buying the stock to assemble.

My Golden Rule is – If a money making scheme asks for money upfront then be VERY wary, you should never need to pay for anything in advance. If it is a genuine money making scheme you will be making money for them anyway, and they would want as many people on the programme as possible therefore it would be free to sign up to.