Over the last few years though, authors have had many different doors open to them in the self publishing field. There are sites like Create Space, Lulu, or Blurb where you can upload your manuscript and cover and they will print on demand when someone wants to buy a book from you. I have used these methods along with adding all of my tutorials to the Amazon Kindle but I still felt like I wanted more control over the printing and a bigger share of the profit. So, recently I looked into book binding machines and how to make and sell my own books right from my own living room.

There are many different types of book binding machines and I spent days pouring over reviews, statistics, and trying to find out what machine would be affordable and easy to use for a beginner such as myself. I purchased the YourStory Book Binder and Laminator 375000 from ebay for just $53. This was a nice starter kit for myself but I found out that it was only good for certain things like photo books or short stories. My tutorials were not so great with this machine. It does come with hard covers for a few books, some laminating pouches, and enough materials for making a few books before you have to purchase more materials. It is the perfect choice for those of you who have little kids books you would like to print or even scrapbooks. But if you want to pull off a professional book that you can sell, this may not be the choice for you, as I found out.This also only allows you to print a book with a maximum of 40 pages and if you are using cardstock that turns into more like only 15-20 pages.

So, moving on, I decided to check out some more options. I was still pondering over all of the choices like the comb binder, tape binding, wire binding, staples, and the thermal(glue) binding options. Comb binding was good for doing reports and presentations and things like that for office staff,tape binding is a little tricky for the beginner I thought, wire binding was not what I thought would be suitable for my kids story books but perhaps my tutorials but I couldn’t afford to buy 2 different machines for each; and finally I decided that the thermal binding like the storybook binder would be great but I needed something more heavy duty and suitable for both my tutorials and storybooks that range in size from 24 pages to 100 with a few of the more expensive types being able to even bind up to 300 pages.

I finally decided on Thermal Binding Machine (399955) because it was affordable and could handle up to 100 pages which is exactly what I needed.

If you would like to read more about this product or to purchase it, you can click on the link below.

Thermal Binding Machine (399955)
publisher: Papermonster, published: 2011-11-01
ASIN: B003P20ICA
EAN: 4011335009619
sales rank: 31271
price: $49.95 (new)

In under three minutes you’ll have that desirable “book-look” for conventions, proposals, small reports and other small valuable documents with the New papermonster TB220 right at your own desk! Stylish, quick, clean, easy-to-use and decidedly modern.others will envy you!

While there is instructions that come with the unit for how to make your books, you may want to research more on how to market your book. I found this post useful when doing my own search and I can’t wait to get some books finished up so I can get out there and start sharing my stories! http://www.underdown.org/marketing.htm

I would love to hear your ideas and success stories for your own self publishing efforts. Leave a comment below so we can all learn more.

As stay at home moms, we are often looking for ways to make extra money from home. We may even have a job but it just doesn’t pay all the bills. What do we do then? In this post I will try to share with you some ideas for 10 Ways to Make Money on the Side so you can start feeling better about your situation in times where the economy is tough.

One of the great things about making money on the Internet is the fact that it doesn’t matter where in the world you live. You can still find a way to make money from home. While some work at home jobs take a little longer to pay out, others still can make you an income almost immediately.

1. Freelancing

There are many skills you can advertise to make money freelancing. If you are an artist and love to play with Photoshop, you can go to places like odesk or elance or even forums to find advertisements from small business owners who are looking for ecovers to be made for their books or logos for their website, or perhaps banners and ads for marketing their products online.

Writing is becoming one of the preferred choices for extra income and can pay pretty well if you know where to look and have seo experience. You can apply to be a regular writer for some content mills like Textbroker or Demand Media Studios or you can find private clients on freelance sites and internet marketing forums. Or if you want to build up your own name and promote products as an affiliate, you can start blogging with your own WordPress site. This may take a little longer to generate traffic and get sales coming in but if you choose some products that pay a nice commission, you can make as much money as you would like.

2. Doing Surveys

Some people will still argue that this is a dumb way to make money on the side and that it doesn’t generate enough of an income to bother but then there are some people who have stuck with it, put in the time in the beginning to get it all set up and working with many companies and now make several hundred dollars a month. I still do this occasionally and make anywhere between $20 and $200 a month working with 20 companies. Yes, it did take a couple weeks of signing up, filling out profile surveys that didn’t pay out at first but now it is all worth it and I can do them whenever I have free time.

3. Sell your gold

If you are just looking to make some extra money to pay off a bill(like Christmas time sets a lot of us back a bit), then you can sell your gold from a physical location in your town or from a site online. It all depends on what gold is worth at the time but if you have a bunch of stuff lying around that you don’t really wear anymore or no longer like, this is a great way to make back some money.

4. Selling Scrap Metal

This is also a good way to make some money on the side. This is more something that a man may want to do as many times you will need to go out and collect appliances and pieces of odd equipment from people and the side of the road. People often will throw things out because a part is damaged and they don’t know the value of the other parts, or perhaps they don’t have a car to take it to the scrap yard, or even know how to separate the materials to get the most money for all types of metal offered.

5. Mystery Shopping

This is quickly becoming a popular choice for those who love to shop. My sister did this a few times and had fun. You are given a task of going to a particular store or restaurant and ordering or buying something. You then need to write out a report regarding the service you received and the quality of the product you bought. This is how market research companies can inform manufacturers about how the public is feeling about their items or how companies can get a feel for how well their employees are understanding their items and doing their jobs. The pay is pretty good, and sometimes you get to keep the item you were reviewing.

6. Sell Your Photos

My other sister is a photographer and while she still has to work a full time job doing something else, with the ability to sell her photos from online sites she can still feel like she is following her dream. Different sites will set up the royalty rates but most are pretty fair. While you may not be able to make a full time income off your photos, every little bit helps right?

7. Sell Your Crafts

My daughter is an artist who loves to both draw and make things out of various craft materials. There are sites like Etsy where you can sell your stuff, as well as selling in local papers, at craft shows, or from your own website. While this too may not be something that could solve all your financial issues, it is a fun way to both get your name out there and feel good about people enjoying your creative expressions.

8. Sell Your Used Books

I have a ton of used books both fiction and from my school days and now there are sites online where you can sell your books at a reasonable price and free up some space in your home at the same time. Most of these sites will even pay for the shipping which is a real bonus! If you don’t choose to go this route, you could also visit college/university campus’s and see if they are in need of your old textbooks or even sell on Craigslist or Kijiji.com

9. Sell on Ebay

While this has been around for awhile now with most people at least trying it out, it is still a good way to make some money and unload all of your old items. If you run out of things to sell, you could always talk to some neighbors or friends to see if there is anyone who would like you to sell something of theirs. In this way, you get to charge a fee for setting up the auction, managing it and shipping the item out when it is purchased. Selling on ebay is a good side gig for money because you only need to spend a little time at the start, during the week for checking how it is going and for the shipping when it is over.

10. Tutoring or Teaching

There are several ways you can go about this. You can tutor one on one with school age kids, you can teach another language to both kids and adults, you can teach computers and the internet right from your own home, or you can even write a course outline and sell it at places like udemy.com. This is a great avenue for retired teachers or those who love to teach their specialties.

As a mom of four who grew up in a big family I often didn’t think about those who are new to being parents and have nowhere to turn. I recently started spending time on parenting forums to see what other parents are discussing and how I could help if possible. I was lucky to have been raised in a good family with a mom who was home and I learned many things about looking after children by watching and helping my mother with my four younger brothers and sister and a few of the other children my mom also watched.

While I do enjoy a few forums I found that Babies Base is a perfect one for young mothers who are worried about what they will experience all through their pregnancy and all the way up to how to deal with problems you have with rebellious teens. There is even a section on there for you to get advice about money issues or work related problems. It is nice to be able to find a community such as this where you can feel at home and everyone talks to you like you are all from the same environment and one big happy family no matter where you may live in the world. Because as we know, as parents, we often do come across many of the same issues with our fears and raising our children because while everyone is different, some things in human nature still remain the same.

If you are a new parent or know a parent who is struggling with some issues, the Babies Base forum is the perfect place to go to learn new things, find advice and find strength and comfort when you may need it while going through your troubles or dealing with your concerns.

I would like to know what you all think about parenting forums and if you have positive experiences, please leave a comment below. Until next time moms, give those babies a big hug and kiss, hold them dearly and treasure every moment you have with them. For as frustrating as parenting can be sometimes, children are so precious and funny and the best thing to live for.

See you soon.

There are many sites out there today that are offering either 50-80% of ad share revenues with you for your content, or paying per 1000 views. I will discuss a few of the sites, how they work and then debate whether or not they are worth the effort.

For those who are just starting out in the writing world, you may not know where you can get a job. Or perhaps you work for somewhere like Bright Hub, or another content mill that pays you upfront fees and you just want to get your name out on your writing as much as possible. These types of sites are excellent for that. There is a ton of traffic driven to the sites every day by the owners. If you have properly optimized your writing with keywords, chances are it will have a good chance of showing up in the search engines to be found.

If you are not a technical person or have no desire to have your own blog or website, these sites provide a home for your articles without paying a hosting cost or annual domain name fee. You do not have to try to fiddle with any html to get your adsense codes just right or any of that other techie stuff. You simply enter your article, keywords, short description and picture(optional) into the form and click to submit. A few hours later, your article is approved and up online.

I am going to give some examples here so you can understand the different systems that are available.

Triond- This is a relatively new site for me as I only started here in the third week of October. But, I like it. The community is active, I get new fans befriend me every day, and there are lots of comments left on my writing. This is the best site to submit poetry and short stories to as many of the other sites do not have that category.

I am not sure how it works for getting paid per view, but they track your views and every so often you get pennies added to the count. I think it is more based on what eywords in the articles get clicks from the ads, although it does not register as adsense revenue on your account. After you have submitted 5 articles, you can also place your own adsense code into the site form and have the ability to earn extra on your own adsense ads. I have not figured out how to put the extra ads on though(will research more and get back to you in another post).

They have a great tracking system so you can see where people are coming from after you have done your bookmarking and marketing.

At first it only looks like you are getting pennies for your work. This is why some people do not feel that it is worth the effort. I have 33 poems, and 3 short stories on there now that I have submitted since I joined Oct. 22nd.

My earnings to date? .30
(I can hear you now. What? for all of that work? Pleaaaase!)

But this is the way it goes. You need to submit an article a day, and the more articles you have, the more links you will generate and the more views will start to come in. Your pennies will turn into dollars and soon enough you will feel like you are making enough money to make it worth your time.

By using these sites, you also get to express your creative side, find friends from around the world, drive people to your main website if you want through your profile, and also get to make some extra money that accumulates every month on it’s own without you having to do anything more with each article.

Many people will spend hours, weeks and months posting to their own blog in the hopes that they will make affiliate money from links or Adsense ads on their site. But all of the marketing is left up to you. You could go months and even years with only seeing a few dolllars here and there. With posting to these ad share sites, you have the help of the main site driving traffic in, and all of your friends commenting and recommending your articles to others. This leaves you with only a minimal amount of marketing to do yourself.

Bukisa This site is great because it allows you to put up articles and such that you have posted somewhere else like Triond first. You do not make money from a share of the revenue but through pay per view. For every 1000 views you get you earn $3.77. Payout is at $10.

I have been on this site since Sept. 02 and have 77 articles on here. Some of my articles are not optimized, and others are not on topics that anyone wants to read so I only have maybe 30 so far that are getting any real views. I have made $1.35 so far so have not been able to cash out yet, but know that it is coming along ok because I used to make like a penny a day and now make up to .10 a day.

Still, I know, you are all thinking, how can you turn this into a living? Taking the time to write for barely anything takes time away from making real money. First off, I did not say this was a way to make a living. While there are some people I have talked to that make $1000 or more a month from this source, it has taken 3 years and several hundred articles for them to do so. It is a work in progress and a real way to build up a residual income for only about an hours worth of work in your day. That still leaves you with plenty of hours to write articles for upfront pay.

Once I have submitted my article for the day to both those sites, I do my social bookmarking. I will write another detailed post on that system and how you can even make additional income from that.

The key to making money from home with your writing is to find as many little ways as you can to make money doing what you may normally do anyways. I have found some of those resources and will share them with you. The more eggs you have in your basket, the more money you will be able to generate each month with less work each time.

Ok. this turned into a long post so I will end things here and carry on with some other thoughts for you at a later date. I have a ton of things to share so I hope you stick with me and keep coming back to learn more.

Try the methods out I have laid out above, give it a year and then if you are not making at least $200 extra each month, you can decide to call it quits. But you will never know how well you can do unless you try. Personally I find it motivating and encouraging to log into my accounts every day and see how many people are looking at my articles. This also provides you a way to find out what topics are more popular so you can write on those things instead of the stuff no one wants to read. Remember to optimize with keywords and you should do fine.

Not only do they have a ton of baby items you can sign up for, you can also receive freebies for beauty products for mom, car accessories for dad or travel deals for the whole family. I am sure you will be amazed at the treasures you can find on this site. You should do what I did and bookmark the site to go back to time and time again! Feel like playing games? How about trying out free online games on the site as well. My husband loves getting lost in the online games world.

New parents especially often don’t know what products to buy for their little one. Formula, baby food and accessories are expensive to test out and try if you don’t have to. With a site like this, you can merely sign up or download a coupon and cash in where applicable.

Here is a great one that helped me out a few years ago when my son was born. All you do is download the coupon and bring it in to the hospital when you go and deliver your child. Your hospital will then give you a Gerber backpack loaded with a ton of useful things to try out on your little one from diapers to formula and more. This is a great way to find out if your little one has any allergic reactions or health issues when using certain products on the market today without having to invest a fortune and waste it.
Free Gerber Backpack filled with samples, coupons and more!

I hope you enjoy your freebies and be sure to come back on here and let me know what your favorites were and why. take care now and until next time, keep those loved ones happy and cozy. If you want to try one more site too, then here is another link for you to check out with some other goodies. FreeCatcher.com The more sites you can find to benefit from the better I say.

So, what do you do? Most people do not have the time to spend trying out each and every one, and if a lot of them don’t produce, is it really worth your time?

I will give you a list of the social bookmarks sites that I use. I was until just recently spending the time to go to each site individually to post my bookmark but then found out that OnlyWire is a service where you can do it all at the same time with one click of a button after you have entered in all of your username and password info for each site you are signed up to.

There are 2 ways to use OnlyWire. One is, you can download and install the wordpress plugin for your own blog. Once you have done a post every day, it can then be posted to all the bookmark sites.

The second way is to log into your account on OnlyWire and do a post submission to the url where your article is located(Bukisa, Xomba, Triond, ect). You then click to submit and it runs through all of your choices of bookmarks and submits to them.

There are 48 bookmark sites that you can sign up for and enter your info for OnlyWire to submit to. I presently use 21 of them. I do not know the other sites and haven’t bothered to try.

Here are my favorite sites:

She Told MeThis site is actually not part of the group that OnlyWire submits too right now but it is a part of the tools on Triond if you post to that site. I find it is worth the effort to go to the site and log in on your own every day because you also get a share of adsense revenue from this site. There are not many social bookmark sites that have this opportunity to earn extra income.

XombaMany of you may already be using this to post your articles to. This is also excellent for posting your links from other articles. It gives you yet another option to earn a share of adsense revenue from your postings.

Stumble Upon Is the site that I get most of my traffic coming from right now. There are over 22 million people on this site just ready to go check out what you post.

Delicious is another top performing site for me.

Digg is another popular place to post although I have not seen very much coming from there.

Yahoo Buzz and Bookmarks-these are 2 different links I think. Not quite sure on that. I just submit to yahoo buzz mostly, only added the other one to OnlyWire the other day.

LinkedInThis is more of a social media site but it is good for posting links as well so that others can see what you are doing.

FacebookThe link I have posted here is for my Facebook. If you would like to add me, by all means, do so. This is a great way to post everything from your blog to the articles you submit on all the other sites.

Twitter yeah, click on the link and go ahead to follow me. I will follow you back as well. This is another every day post routine for me. I get quite a bit of traffic from here.

Mixx.comThis is a new one for me, I just started using it a few days ago so I do not have any stats on it yet.

Reddit.com This also is a new one for me but my friends from the WAHM forum say they have had good results from this site. So I added it.

If you want to take the time to sign up at all of the sites listed in the OnlyWire, it may take some time initially to get it all set up, but then once it is done, all you have to do is click for the one option in OnlyWire and it will go out to everywhere. I will probably add some more to my list from there as well when I get some more free time. I want to keep tabs on a few sites at a time so I can see what is doing the best and with which types of articles. If you add too much at one time you can confuse and overwhelm yourself.

Good luck! Happy Bookmarking!

When the last Google change happened and all of those sites got penalized with content mills getting dropped, a third of my income disappeared. I am a member of the wahm forum for years now and upon talking to most of them, I realized that there were quite a few moms affected. When you are working from home doing online ventures, you need to learn how to have a few streams of income coming in from various sources otherwise you could find yourself unable to pay rent or put food on the table any time Google decides to change the game rules.

The great thing about working online is the variety of ways you can make money. You can blog and promote affiliate products, you can write for people or company websites, you can try offers and complete surveys from numerous sites, you can join places like fiverr.com or gigbux.com and other related sites where you can post service offers clients can purchase from you for $10-$20. This is a great method of making money because these sites are free to join and post to, you do not need to have a domain and hosting(although it is good to have your own blog still even if it is is only a free blogger blog), and you can see what other people are offering and for how much.

Elance and odesk and the other freelance marketing sites are still good to go to when looking for work too but the competition there is a little different and you usually end up working for less than you may want to. For many of these types of sites as well, you also have to pay a membership price every month to be able to apply for the jobs.

If you would just like to apply for customer service jobs to work virtually or telecommute for companies than participating in sites like the http://wahm.com/forum and reading all the threads, you may be open to new jobs that you never knew were available.

Now a days with social media being such a great way to connect with people and find jobs, keeping up with the trends, learning new things and spending time each day to grow your business and skills are the main things you need to spend time doing each day. In this way you will be able to find jobs and secure them as you can and staying on top of things so that all your eggs are not in just one basket.

Well, I thank you for spending some time with me again after all this time. I do plan on being on here every week again as I used to be. I hope you will come back and join me as well. I would love to hear how you all have been and how you fared for income during this last recession and with all the Google changes.

My sister in law was wondering if I knew about any organic Kids Play Makeup that she could feel confident about and know that her daughter could not only dress up for Halloween as her favorite princess but she could use this product any time of the year for play or special occasions.

While I only have a couple of little boys now who are not really interested in wanting to dress up in makeup for girly things, I only wish they had had something this good for when my oldest daughter had been aged 4 to 9 and was into the dress up playing. As responsible parents, we should all do our best to try to find the best products on the market that are organic in nature and won’t cause unnecessary harm to our loved ones. Every year it seems like there is a product causing cancer or illness to both young and old alike. It is always nice to know that there are companies out there striving to put products on the market that will help keep us all safe.

Dear Nicole,

I hear you talking about PLR articles, but I’m a Virtual Assistant, not an Internet Marketer. I need clients, not content.

Why should I care?

Dear Virtual Assistant:

Thanks so much for giving me the opportunity to respond to your great question.

PLR content can actually help you to get more clients. And, I’ll explain how.

As someone who hires and works with a lot of Virtual Assistants in my business, I’ll tell you that I hire oftentimes based upon the knowledge that person shows just as much as what they “say” they can do.

For instance, let’s compare two Virtual Assistants (hypothetically – these aren’t real people).

Susie and Tessa.

I go to Susie’s website and she’s got three pages – including contact, services, and pricing. I look around a little and discover that Susie specializes in videos and multimedia. I think “hmmm… interesting” and then leave.

Next, I find Tessa’s website. She’s got the same pages on her website as Susie – contact, services, and pricing. It looks to me as if she also specializes in videos and multimedia. That’s not what I’m looking for, so I’m about to leave when I notice that she has a blog. On her blog, she’s got articles about how I can use video in my business and how to also use video to get more traffic and make more money. I’m interested. She obviously knows her stuff. I contact her to find out how she can help me to get more traffic with my existing videos – and to brainstorm more videos that I can incorporate into my business on an ongoing basis.

Tessa got my business. Susie did not.

Why? Because Tessa did some things right.

She showed her knowledge.
She demonstrated that she understands marketing by having a blog.
She made me think about my business.
She seemed like a person who I’d like to work with.

How does this apply to PLR content? Easy.

Susie could have had my business if she had purchased some great quality PLR content and published it on her blog. Of course, as always, I would recommend that Susie use the content as a starting point only and then add her own ideas and examples into it to make it uniquely hers. But, the important thing is that she could have had an active blog offering great value to potential new customers that showcased her talent and made people desperate to hire her.

And, she could have done it for under $20.

Would you like to boost your blog content, impress potential new clients, and become the recognized expert in your niche? Check out this great PLR site to get started. Be sure to sign up for the notification list so you don’t miss a thing!

Nicole Dean is the owner of www.EasyPLR.com – where you’ll find high-quality PLR articles sold in very limited quantities. The PLR articles at EasyPLR are professionally written and professionally edited — top quality at an affordable price.

When I first started planning for our trip, I realized that I would have to come up with plenty of things to entertain them with. This meant plenty of books, puzzles, movies and games for children that would be both educational and fun for a two year old and a four year old at the same time.

Now what types of toys do little preschool boys like to play with? And what types of games can keep them engaged for long periods of times? Well, I brought along their Melissa and Doug puzzles because these are excellent for both manipulation of little hands and durability of long rides due to the solid wood pieces. They have a few of those. One is an alphabet one with various animals,one is a race car counting magnetic puzzle, and the third one we brought was my little guys favorite with all of his cars,trucks, fire engines and helicopters on it.

Along with those, we also brought along some card games featuring their favorite characters like Calliou, Diego and Spiderman. This helped them to match shapes, colors, numbers and other objects with each other. And finally for some relaxing down time, we had a couple favored movies from Disney to watch on DVD when it was close to sleep time.

All in all, the boys did much better than I thought they would. With a few trips out of the car to run around in a rest area, they didn’t complain too much. All I can say is I was extremely grateful for the air conditioning in the car or they would have been too miserable to play with any of their games and toys at all. We look forward to our next trip now knowing that we can survive the long ride again.