6 things a Stay at home mom struggles with

The struggles of a stay at home mom — 6 things a stay at home mom struggles with

The word stay at home mom evokes a lot of different pictures in peoples mind, for some, it’s a word used to describe women who don’t like to work but prefer to sit at home and watch movies all day in the name of looking after their kids. I really wish it were so but I do know now it’s not so.

Stay at home mom is a woman who wears all the hats there is in the home plus some more without having the attendant payment to show for it.
When a woman chooses to be a stay at home mom, it’s often a huge sacrifice she has to make in other to see that her home is well run or in other to see that her kids have the kind of training and nurturing that she desires.

Some women have been known to leave lucrative careers to become stay at home moms because the effect of leaving their lovely ones in the hands of other people to care for became too much to bear and therefore they chose that off the career ramp option to care for the most important people in their lives.

For some people it may make sense for others, it may not because after all is said and done, it’s the investment you put in your family that matters most.

Children don’t care if they are in the most expensive house or car or wear the best clothes, as long as their parents were there for them when they needed them most.So today I am going to share with you the 6 things that stay at home mom struggles with because I have been there too and I know what it feels like

–Feelings of Inadequacy:

If you are a first-time mom who just chose to stay at home, this may resonate well with you, that feeling of do I know what I just did? I mean I just left my well-paying job to stay home to take care of my baby. Sometimes you may even feel like even the mom job you are not doing so well at it. The truth may also be that at least for your paid job you were well trained but to become a mom, you had no prior training and yet you are expected to be perfect at it.

You feel inadequate because you are trying to cope with having to leave a career that once defined what you could bring to the table at home and then you also have to cope with the fact that your new job does not have any job description attached to it. There is no end to where your job stops, you are the nanny, caregiver, nurse, housecleaner, and any other thing that comes in between including cook, driver, encourager and the list goes on.

While you struggle with coping with all these issues, guess where your report card is shown, at places where you get some judgmental looks or comments for not getting your act together as a mom. From those who think that by giving your child the bottle, you are just being lazy, “every hard working mom should be able to breastfeed exclusively for the first 6 months of a babies life”, does this sound like a familiar jab?, well for me I tried it but it didn’t work, in fact I got sick before it dawned on me that everyone has to find what works for one in this journey of mommyhood.My first son loved the bottle, my daughter liked breastfeeding a lot, in fact, she refused the bottle and went straight to eating solids.

So what do you do with all these struggles that you are facing?.I would like you to know, that the first time you start as a new stay at home mom, it will seem strange to you just like when you resume your post on a new job, but with time, you will find your rhythm.From then you can then begin to try out new things and see what works and what doesn’t work, you can then decide to throw out what doesn’t work for you and choose what you are comfortable with. And who says that as you go along you won’t acquire the experience which you can package and sell out to new moms like you for a fee. For how to do that please read my post on how to turn your life experience into a money printing online business

Overworked and Underappreciated:

The interesting thing about being a stay at home mom is that you don’t have a specific work time, from the time your feet hit the floor in the morning time, assuming you had all night sleep which is often a mirage when your kids are between ages of 0-4 years.

Your work is almost like a round the clock work from fixing breakfast, lunch, and dinner to cleaning the home, running errands and shopping. You are practically at work even when others are having a break, no wonder you sometimes feel overwhelmed and overworked.

You may also feel underappreciated when you are not being praised for the work you do at home. Some husbands have been known to come home and say, “ honey what were you doing all day that my dinner is not yet ready”?.

No one understands the many times you have to calm a crying baby or break up siblings quarrels or even act as a judge and jury. It can make you feel like your energy is being sucked out daily, my little advice about this is to find that time to rest during the day, if it means putting the kids to nap in the afternoon and taking your own nap too to get your energy back please do so.

Of course, it may mean that some things won’t get done perhaps a scattered house or unfolded laundry, but like I always say, a grumpy mama is no good to anyone. So always find the time to tune off during the day and just relax. It may not necessarily be sleep, sometimes I find that just sitting and watching cartoons with my little ones helps me to relax. You can also choose to quit trying to have everything in the perfect place in other to feel alright.

Now if you are a hubby reading this, know that appreciation goes a long way to make a stay at home mom’s day better. A night off duty will be nice, a back rub here and a foot massage there will make a world of difference.

–The baby company only:

When you are a SAHM with a baby at home, the only company you will have is that of a kid, while that is lovely I mean who hates the company of her babies, but sometimes you want to have adult conversations. Where you to be working outside your home, you will often meet new people or at least converse with people like yourself but for a stay at home mom, it’s often baby talk all day long until hubby comes home. This might look good some days at least you have some time to think things through and strategize for any project you have on hand without any distractions. Unfortunately, this may not be the case always because the same distractions can come from children too.

So what does a stay at home do in this case, I say in any case be involved in online forums where you can discuss issues that bother you or vent on what you are going through. When time permits, pick up the phone and call a close friend or family member with whom you can spend time discussing with or exchanging ideas with, this will make you feel a lot better. If you are working from home as a blogger or doing any form of online business, belonging to an online group of people of the same challenges as you can help you gain a better perspective of issues you may be dealing with at that particular time.,

Finances:

This aspect of the struggles of a stay at home mom is very controversial, for some, it’s the constant struggle to stretch the money available to cover all the household bills, for some it may be that you didn’t even have enough to last you throughout the month. For some, It may be that you just have just enough but not excess to take care of some niceties that you are used to when you were working outside the home. While for some people finances may not be the problem but just the feeling that you are not earning anything at all and so you are a one income household.

Whichever divide you fall into know that there is a way out of it, working has been redefined so much right now that you can earn your income even while staying at home, if finance is a major issue for you, then consider ways of working from home to earn extra income.

Here are a few options to earn extra income from home. You can start a home business, offer your services as a freelancer from your home by signing up on platforms such as Fiverr, upwork or you can choose to work for other people from home which may entail applying for online jobs that you can do. Which ever way, you choose to do it, there is a way out you don’t have to feel like your finances took a nose dive and you can’t change it.

Sometimes you may discover that starting that home business was what you really needed to take your family off the 9- 5 rat race. If starting a home business is your thing, then consider reading my post on how to choose the right home business for you.

Feeling Left Out:

Have you ever gone for an outing where you bumped into an old school colleague or work mate and you started discussing especially pertaining to your field of study or work and you felt left out because a lot has changed without you being aware? This happens particularly when you are a new mom, for the first one year and especially the first 6 months its like you are underwater, your life is practically buried within fulfilling your babies needs, first-time moms can resonate with this better. If you carry on discussing you may feel like you don’t seem to know the trends that are even going on now, thanks to your new job, stay at home mom Lol, but seriously those feelings of being left out if left unchecked can begin to make you resent your decision.

But before you go feeling sorry for yourself or getting angry, understand that you need to remind yourself the reasons why you made your choice in the first place, and make peace with the fact that you may not know a lot of things that are currently going on in your former field of work due to your new position but you can begin to make amends by building and connecting with people who are on the same journey as you are and understand the challenges.

Keeping up with colleagues from your former field of influence may not be useful to you if you are not planning to continue in that line of career. Realize that you have changed career and focus on what you must do in the now to get you quickly ramped up on the new journey you are on.

It may mean taking courses to get you ready if you want to start a home business or even starting out without training at all that way you learn the hard knocks your own way.

Either way, you are gathering knowledge that will aid your journey as a stay at home mom who wants to work from home. If you have been brainstorming on ideas about different types of home businesses you may need to read my post on 5 posts that teach you how to make money online.

The truth is that being a stay at home mom doesn’t mean that you can’t utilize your skills in other ways to earn money. With the advent of blogging these days, all forms of knowledge are now monetizable.

For example, who knew that you could sell your knowledge on how to organize your home, take care of a new born, keep yourself fit e.tc. In fact, information that used to just sit with you doing nothing has become sources of income.The online media has made it possible to be able to share such information’s now and make good money from it.

Do you consider Blogging as one of the avenues to sell your knowledge online, then hop on over to my post on how to start a blog when you are not a techie and learn how to start a blog in as little as 2 hours.

–Need for time out

As a stay at home mom, there are times you just feel like you really want a leave, I mean people who work 9-5 have that opportunity of taking a leave to just go home and relax and recharge before going back to work. But for the stay at home mom, she doesn’t get to get that time off.

There are no leave days, where are you leaving to? , your home is supposed to be your leave escape but now you get to stay in it every day and it doesn’t look like it will make for a leave escape anymore. The good thing about this situation is that you don’t have to apply for your leave in other to take one. or technically you can apply to your hubby to take a leave from work and stay home so you could take the much-needed leave in other to refresh and recharge.

You can choose to go out that day with friends and just have a girls day out or better still visit a close family member whom you can relax in her house and feel like you are in your own home and on holiday without the attendant stress of having to care for your home.

Maybe you can go for a mini holiday to a nearby tourist attraction and just spend time alone, pampering and recharging yourself. Of course, there will be a time and place for family vacation but this little time out is for you alone, so you can be a better mother to your kids and give your best to them. Thinking of taking that mini vacation then try using Booking.com, they have excellent services for your vacation needs they have budget hotel rooms if that suits you.

Do you know of any struggles that a stay at home mom has to deal with, leave a comment below, it will be appreciated.

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July 15, 2017July 20, 2017

How to Choose the Right Work at Home Business

How to choose the perfect work at home business for you — How to choose the right work at home business

How to Choose the Right Work at Home Business for You

Creating a work at home business is a great way to balance your family life with your need to earn money. But, you need to seriously sit down and figure out whether you want a product based business or a service based business.

Both product and service based business sell a product but in one case the product is tangible and in another it’s a skill. In order to determine that let’s look at some differences between a product based business and a services based business.

Product Based Business

When you sell a product it’s usually a tangible item but with the advent of the Internet and digital products, the lines are being blurred. Today, you can offer digital products, courses, books, blogs, videos and information as your product as well as products you can touch like jewelry, art, and so forth. Don’t get tied up in thinking you must create the products. You can become an affiliate or reseller for the right products. To learn about affiliate companies that will easily accept you when starting out, read my post on affiliate network that will accept a newbie blogger.

Services Based Business

When you deal in services the client puts their faith in you and perhaps your staff to perform the services they hired you to do, depending on your skills and experience. These are things like bookkeeping, architecture, legal services; virtual assistance, graphic design and coaching services are all service based business.

You can combine both a service based business model with a product based business model on the Internet and have the best of all worlds. For example, you can promote a book and a course as a life coach offering your coaching services as your higher priced product over the books and courses.

In order to determine what services and/or products you want to promote in your work at home business take the time to do your due diligence.

-Make a List of Your Skills – It’s important to do an inventory of your skills. The first thing you need to do is to write down a list of what you already know how to do. Do you have computer skills, people skills, and knowledge that you can share with or teach others?

-Determine Who You Want to Work With – Do you love a certain group of people and what they do or what they stand for? For example, perhaps you are currently a paralegal at a law firm and you enjoy working with attorneys and helping clients who are dealing with divorce. You can still do that with your own work at home business. It’s important to identify the exact audience you want to work with whether you’re going to promote products, a service or both.

-Make a List of Things You Can Do for Your Audience – Once you have your skillset and audience determined now you can start figuring out how to solve their problems. Identify their pain points of the audience you chose, narrow it down to two or three pain points and then figure out how you can serve them.

-Match Your Skillset with the Services – A key in choosing products, creating products, and offering services is to match your skill set with what is needed to solve the pain points of your audience. When you take the time to do this you’ll find that your work at home business is going to be more successful.

Finally, once you’ve chosen your audience, and your niche within that audience and whether or not you’ll have a product or service based business (or both) you’ll have some other things to work out too. Ask yourself the following questions.

For more on choosing the right niche, get my Free e-book

How Much Startup Cash Do You Have?

The type of business you choose will be affected a lot by how much cash you have to get started. Service based businesses are a lot less expensive to start, depending on your skill set.

Digital products don’t cost much more to develop either, again depending on your own skills and whether or not you’ll need to outsource some of the work such as website design or product creation.

You can start a work at home business for relatively little money compared to a bricks and mortar business. You don’t have the high rent, utilities and so forth to pay for like a bricks and mortar business. Therefore, your startup costs can be a lot lower, but you still have startup costs.

-Business License Fees – You need to get a business license in most states and counties in the USA to run a business from your home. Usually, the cost is very low, so don’t allow yourself to be afraid of finding out the costs and rules in your area.

-Technology Costs – You may already own a computer and the technology that you need, but you may need to invest in some extra software too. Today you can “rent” software on a monthly basis which makes it a 100 percent write off like other direct expenses. For example, it costs $9.99 a month to rent bookkeeping software through Go Daddy. That is a cost you can write off as an expense.

-Contractor Fees – You may need to hire help such as marketing professionals, virtual assistants, web designers and others to help you get started and maintain your business.

But, there are also deductions you can count on when running a business from your home. If you can set up an exclusive area of your home to be the home office you can get quite a large home office deduction that makes everything even less expensive when starting a home business because these expenses you can deduct won’t go up, such as utilities, electricity, internet and so forth.

Another way of determining how much it will cost you to start up is by writing a one-page business plan. You can read how to go about that in my post: you don’t need a 100-page business plan to start one. In that post, you get a free template you can use to write your plan down.

Do You Like Being Upfront or Behind the Scenes?

Some people love the idea of their work at home business being all about them. They name their business with their own name, they are the business. This is common with life coaches, public speakers, and even doctors. They are the expert and the name behind their business. Others prefer to be more behind the scenes and not be a household name.

There is no right or wrong answer when it comes to this. What matters is that you are happy with your choice. Don’t try to push yourself into a position that you don’t like because it will make it hard for you to want to work your business each day. Be honest with your assessments about your tolerance for publicity.

Do not think that if you’re an introvert you can’t create an amazing home based business, you can. The Internet is the perfect place for that. Some very famous introverts are J.K. Rowlings, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. While they didn’t directly start an “internet based” business they all started at home.

How Much Time Do You Have to Devote?

Another important factor is the time it takes to do a business. A service based business essentially trades hours for dollars so you’ll need to have enough hours at a high enough rate to make the money you want to earn. With a product based business, you may be able to earn more without considering the hours as much.

However, with a service based business, you can earn money faster which is why combining a product based business with a service based business is a good option for many who need to start earning faster. For example, you can start with a book, and then offer a service described in the book. This works great with life coaches.

Answering these questions will help you identify what you can realistically do as a work at home business. Once you identify the niche, your resources, and narrow down what you’ll do to earn money in your work at home business.

In addition to these questions, it’s important to understand what goes into the business you want to start and that you have the skills necessary to do it.

Do Your Due Diligence

It’s important to check your facts before you get your heart set on any one business. Once you’ve matched your skills with your audience and identified their pain points now you need to dig in and do some more research.

-How Many People are In Your Target Audience? – This is an important question to answer because if there aren’t enough people in your niche to be profitable then you may need to choose a different audience. If you need to earn 100K a year, you need to know how many people you need to sell to.

-What Price Point Can Your Audience Afford? – In addition to how many people are in your target audience, you need to know how much they can afford to pay for your potential products and / or services. What is your offering worth to them and can they afford to buy them?

-Can You Earn the Profit You Need? – Based on the numbers can you become profitable? This is such a huge issue when starting any business. You have to perform an analysis, called a S.W.O.T. analysis, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Don’t leave a stone unturned in your research to choose the right work at home business. You need to know the good and the bad of each choice that you make before you even get started with your work at home business. While doing your research, consider making use of my Resource library.

Other Things to Consider When Starting a Work At Home Business

There are so many things to consider when choosing a Work At Home business to start. Because you don’t just want to start, you also want to earn a living at it. Outside of the logical things to consider mentioned above there are some emotional factors to think about.

-Do You Feel Passionate About Your Niche? – When you have your own business you have to be willing to live it and breathe it. If you don’t like it, and don’t have a true love for doing it, whatever it is, you will not be happy doing it and you’ll likely not devote the time and effort needed to make it successful. Ensure that your choices come down to something you feel strongly about enough that you can envision yourself doing it every day 40 or more hours a week, happily.

-Does It Match Your Value System? – You may not realize that you even have a value system. But, when you start thinking about the type of people you’ll work closely with in the new business, and their values and moral code, you’ll soon realize that it does make a huge difference. For example, let’s say you want to start a paralegal business from home. Do you want to work with lawyers who defend criminals or who help people through a divorce? If either of these ideas goes against your value system you won’t feel good about it.

-Is it Viable Long-term? – A huge issue with any business is determining whether or not it’s a short lived fad, or a trend, or whether it can hold up long term. There’s nothing wrong with cashing in on a trend, but you want your main business to stand the test of time and last for the next ten or twenty years.

-What’s Your Exit Strategy? – When you work for someone else, you have an exit strategy built in. You pay into social security and usually a company retirement plan and that’s how you live when you stop working. But, when you have your own business while you do pay into and can collect social security, you’re 100 percent responsible for the payments and setting up your own retirement plan. If you create your work at home business right, you can actually sell it for retirement. It’s a real, viable business and you should think of it that way.

Developing a profitable home based business takes just as much work to start as a bricks and mortar business. You still have to do the work by the numbers, and meet the requirements of the law. Plus you want to actually like what you’re doing in the end. After all, it feels good to go to work if you like it, right?

Otherwise, it’s just going to feel like another job that causes stress in your life and makes you want to run away. If you do the work necessary to choose the right business for you, you’ll love it, feel motivated every single day, and end up happier in the end. You’ll have true time and money freedom with the right work at home business.

To learn how you can make money from your work at home business, subscribe for my Free 5 days training on how to make money from your WordPress Blog

Be Honest About What It Takes

When you start any business it’s important, to be honest with yourself about what it takes to get things done. Keep track of the time, money and resources that you use so that you can project your future needs. Keeping the books balanced will help you keep your business on track.

-Time Freedom – Knowing how much time you’ll really need to spend on your business is important. If you only have 2 hours a day to spend, you’ll need to ensure that you pick the right business to be in.

-Money Freedom – Keeping track with a bookkeeping system is important because if you don’t have money to pay your taxes and expenses you’ll go out of business.

-Personal Freedom – One of the best things about a work at home business is that you can adjust the time you spend on your business so that it works better with your life. However, sometimes you have to put the business first. If you always choose family and friends over your business, your business will fail.

By understanding the myths about working at home, you know – the sitting on the beach with your feet in the sand while your business magically generates millions of dollars is a fantasy. Now you can set up a more realistic business model that will be successful for you.

Marketing Matters

No matter what type of business you choose to run from home, don’t be shy about it. Once you make the decision, be proud of it. Tell everyone you know about your new business. Teach other people about your working hours so that they respect your time, project the type of professional image that you want people to see you as, and don’t hide. For doubters, show them the money.

-Website – Home based businesses even more than bricks and mortar business need a website. That is your storefront. You need to create an awesome storefront to market your business.

-Business Cards – Make some business cards to help you get the word out in person and locally. You can put business cards on tables, bulletin boards and in the hands of people you meet every day.

-Networking – Don’t forget that you can network online too with social media groups and forums. You don’t have to walk up to someone in person; you can instead engage people online to network.

Running your WAH business can be very satisfying if you go into it with your eyes wide open. Determine the best business for you based on facts, not myths. Craft a plan of action to get your business up and running and be proud that you’re a WAH business. After all, if you plan it right, you’ll have the business of your dreams plus the time to enjoy your life.

If you desire to learn more about different work at home business ideas why not read my post on 5 posts that teach you how to make money online

If you loved this post, please share with your friends and leave a comment below.

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June 27, 2017July 12, 2017

What to do when your Blog is Hacked

The most heart-wrenching thing that can happen to you as a new blogger is for your site to be hacked. You will virtually break out in cold sweat, I know because that was what happened to me on Mother’s day this year when I checked my page and saw that I had been hacked by some bad guys. I said to myself here am I struggling to get page views and rank well on Google, I don’t get found by people who need me but by hackers.

Before my site was hacked, there was an international Brute force attack taking place then, where people’s computers were been taken over until they paid a ransom before it could be re-opened, I felt it didn’t concern me that much because I just started my blog and what could they want with my tiny Blog. But the world we live in has changed so much that we all need to be extra security conscious. When I started my Blog, I was just interested in churning out posts and promoting them. Trust me, security was the last thing on my mind, but hacking is the one thing that helps reset your priorities.

Not securing your site is like putting your goods in a store without a lock and key, you are virtually saying anyone could walk in and take your goods away.

After going through that experience, here are 7 things to do when your blog is hacked.

Calm Down and Think:

The first time you experience a hacking of your site, all sort of things will be going through your mind, for me, I was wondering does that mean I have to start all over to create all the posts that I lost? because once you are hacked, you can’t see your posts anymore. I can remember the first time I tried logging to see my blog from my phone, a black page just appeared on my Blog with the inscription Slowey kan, I thought it was some kind of advert, I had just implemented ads on my site then. But when I became suspicious was when the page won’t go way, I was like even if it was an ad it shouldn’t take more than a few seconds to go away, but there it was staring at me as if you can’t do anything I am here to stay.

I quickly ran to my laptop and logged in to my admin page that was when I saw some ugly script on my admin page that won’t go away. I refreshed my page and it was still there, that was when I literally broke down in cold sweat. My palms clammy, I began writing to my hosting company. When they saw the screen shots I sent, they were the ones that informed me that I had been hacked.

That was when I knew it was hacking that took place, I just kind of began to wonder what now?. How do I fix this? I wrote them asking what I should do, I was then told they will clean up the site and restore all the corrupted posts at no extra cost. I was quite relieved because I had Googled some company who promised to clean up my site at about a 100 dollar or so.

Write your Hosting company:

When you are hacked, the first thing you should do is to write your hosting company, they will give you some instructions to follow after they have cleaned up your site, that’s assuming your Hosting company is the type that offers to clean up your site after it has been hacked. I was glad my hosting company Jvzoo. went into action immediately to restore my site and within 24 hours they were able to restore my blog back except for 2 posts which came after the last backup they had of my Blog.

They also gave me a host of instructions to help prevent future attacks, I can’t be more thankful as I thought I had lost all my months of hard work and have to start over again. Thankfully I do not have to. If you had like to sign up with my hosting company click here Jvzoo.

I only had to restore 2 posts that came after that. Because I pre-write my posts on Word document which I keep on my computer, I was able to easily restore those posts.

Inform your audience:

My Blog was hacked on a Mother’s day, wahoo, they really got me, just when I had been promoting my Mother’s day post, people will get to my blog and can’t access it. Since I couldn’t possibly work on that Blog for a while, I decided to write to my email list informing them of what happened, I also sent the post directly to their mailbox, I don’t want them missing out on what I had put together for the Mother’s day celebration.

Restore your Plugins:

After your Blog is cleaned up, apart from the posts that have been restored, you will find that your Plugins are absent, your site is as good as brand new, with no plugins whatsoever, so you will have to start all over to add your plugins, the first I added back was my GA ( Google Analytics). Thankfully my page data was restored. The next thing I thought of was my social shares for my older post If I lost that as well, all my posts will have zero shares. Who wants that? if you are a new blogger, am sure there is a certain amount of satisfaction you get from seeing your share numbers climb, you wouldn’t want to start rebuilding that for any reason. That’s why I recommend using Social warfare for your share buttons. Because I was using them, as soon as I reinstalled my share buttons all my shares were back pronto. If I had changed I bet I would have lost out on the old posts. Click here to get Social warfare

I did try to use another share button but the functionalities weren’t so cool so I went back to using my Social warfare, I think they have one of the coolest share buttons by the way.

Start your securing your site immediately:

To secure your site here are things that need to be done

1-Scan your computer with the latest and updated antivirus and spyware, make sure its virus free.

2-Reset all passwords, including email passwords, database passwords, Cpanel passwords. Verify your email account from the control panel.

3-Your new password should not be simple, use a password generator to make a new password. Click here to get to a password generator. To ensure the strength is good, click here

4-Do not store your passwords in email client browser and FTP client.

5-Make sure you log off from your control panel after use, do not share your passwords with anyone or write it down anywhere, memorize it.

6-Make sure your computer does not have any keyloggers, click here to check

7-Install only Plugins that have good ratings and are from trusted source, you can read my post on Plugins to see what you should look out for when using a Plugin on your Blog

8-Ensure that all your Plugins and third-party applications are all updated.

9-Change pre-configured passwords to new ones that will be difficult to guess by an outsider.

10-Change your database password to a strong one using the resources mentioned above.

11-Do not re-use passwords, ensure also that you update your changed password on wp-config.php

12-Change your prefix table from wp_ to a new one, hackers often use this to inject their codes which cause malicious damage.

13-Change your admin login page from wp-admin to something else, if you are still using this default, the hacker’s job is made easier because they only need to guess your password.

14-Dont keep unused themes and plugins since hackers often use it as a backdoor to set up access to your site.

15-Change all defaults: Posts, comments, directories names, it’s usually easier when setting up WordPress, if you are already set up then you need to go to settings—Miscellaneous( in your admin controls) to change it.

16-Restrict the amount of Login Attempts anyone with admin access can do on your site, you can use a plugin to do that.

17-install the Plugin disable Xml-rpc on your site, this plugin supports jetpack in securing your website.

18-Do a peremptory scan of your blog once in a while, I recommend using wordfence gravity scan, its free and you can use it to determine the vulnerabilities on your Blog.

Get a Good Security Plugin:

Another way you can help secure your blog is to get a good security Plugin. I personally recommend Loginizer security Plugin because it has the following features:

-Recaptcha verifier

-Two-factor login verifier

-Passwordless login ability

-Disable xml rpc

-Ability to change your login URL

-Ability to change your wp- prefix

-Limits multiple login attempts

I also recommend Wordfence: Wordfence alerts you anytime there is successful login into your website. It also blocks out targeted attacks on your Blog.

Check for Broken or dead links:

Check all your initial posts especially the ones you have put on Pinterest for dead links. When I restarted my Blog after the hack, I discovered that some of my posts were turning up missing page link, so I repaired the links by editing it on Pinterest to reconnect them to the post on my blog.

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June 16, 2017July 12, 2017

How to start a wordpress Blog when you are not Techie

Blogging is a way to express your Niche business in a written format.In this post, I am going to teach you how to start a WordPress Blog even if you are not a techie person

To blog means to write about what you are passionate about, you get to meet people who are like you and are passionate about your niche and you are able to solve the problems they have then you get paid for doing it.That’s the summary of how a Blog helps you make money.

There are several other things involved in monetizing your Blog, one of them is Affiliate marketing, this is basically marketing products you have used or trust to other people, and when they buy due to your recommendation, you get a commission from the sales. If you want a checklist of affiliates that will accept a newbie blogger, get it here.

We are not going to dive into how to make money from your Blog as that is not the purpose of this post, now on to my post about starting a blog.

How to Start a WordPress Blog

Step 1: Discover your Niche

The first thing you have to do before you start a Blog is to discover your niche market. A niche market is a well-defined target market serving people with specific needs. it is usually the subset of a general market. the good thing about a Niche market is that it has its own group of people passionate about the same interest. For example, Paleo Food and Recipes is a niche because there are people who are passionate about Paleo food and are consistently experimenting and creating different kinds of recipes in that niche. For more explanation on how to find your niche please get my Free Ebook, I did a good job explaining how you can determine what your niche is about.

So if you have found your niche, and you want to Blog about it, then you need to start a Blog right.

The only thing is ahhhhh, you are not a Techie and you don’t want to get into a deepwater that you can’t swim in. Now Take a verrry deep breath and continue reading because I am about to break down starting a Blog into the bits and pieces that you can easily implement without much stress. It is not so difficult as some people make it seem. I will show you the easy ways to start one that will work for you. I am have always been someone who will say take one step at a time. Like a famous saying, how do you eat an Elephant: Start in bits and pieces.

Step 2: Choose a Domain name:

A domain name is your online business name, its like when you start a business and you want to name it, you pick a name and you go and register it as your own, right, well, in this case, when you choose the name you want your blog to bear, you have to check if it’s available before you secure that domain name by paying for it. So to check if your domain name is available please click here.

Now if your domain name is available, to be available means that of all the billions of people on this earth no one has secured that name, so if it’s available, you can then go ahead and to pay for the name to be secured. When you pay for a domain name, it’s your exclusive right for 1 year. No one else can use that name. It’s like staking your claim in a Goldmine, hahaha, just that this gold mine is online Business.

A domain name will usually cost you just about 10 dollars/year to secure. In choosing your name please make sure that it’s a name that relates to your niche market. Another tip, please choose a .com name. This is because sometimes you may like a name but its .com equivalent is not available so you may decide to use .net or .org, but it’s not wise because it’s the .com names that easily come up searches. Think about the auto suggestions you see on Google when you are searching for stuff, it’s usually your search plus a .com name that comes up. Seo is hard enough don’t make it harder for your site to come up.

If you want access to the Fast Track Module, a Hand holding series that fast tracks your Blog start up, Click Here

Step3: Get a Hosting Company:

So what’s a hosting company, a hosting company is like your landlord that you pay rent to provide you with an apartment where you get to live in. If you ever lived in an apartment before, this should make sense to you.

You pay your rent and you are a offered a bundled service for the apartment. When there are issues like leakages or a broken plumbing, you just inform them and they send their technicians to fix it. The hosting company apart from hosting your website, also helps you fix things when things go wrong.

Now when you are starting a WordPress blog, and you don’t have much cash at hand, its good to go with a hosting company that will offer you free hosting for a month. That’s what my hosting company did. Not only did they offer a one-month free hosting, you can pay on a monthly basis instead of paying on annual basis, that basically worked for me because I did not have much upfront cash to start with. To sign up with my hosting company click here.

Step 4: Domain name Credentials:

When you have signed up with your hosting company, you will get an email confirming you are now being hosted by them. After that, you now get your domain credentials, which is basically an email detailing your login and admin details. Please ensure you keep a copy of this email safe, you will always need it in your blogging journey.

If you have followed all these steps, congratulations you have secured your domain name and hosting, now on to building your WordPress Blog.

Step 5: Cpanel Login Details

The first thing you should do is to look at the login credentials sent to you, you will see your Cpanel login in details namely: a username, a password, and a URL, click on that URL to get into your Cpanel login page.

If you got it right you should get a login in page looking like this picture.

Type in the Username and password provided by your hosting company. Once you get into the Cpanel, it should come up looking like this. of course I am assuming that you are using my hosting company Jvzoo. Even if you are not, the steps shouldn’t be too different.

Scroll down the CPanelpage till you see the last rectangular block and you will see the various options given to you, click on the WordPress icon to take you to the Login page for your WordPress site.

Once you click on the icon shown above, it will take you straight to the login page of your WordPress site, once at the login page, input the email address or username and the password you used to sign up to the hosting company, after that, you should be able to start the installation.

If you are able to correctly install it, its really a no brainer and straight forward, your dashboard should come out looking like the picture below.

For a more concise step by step installation tutorial all in one video where you can watch and implement Click the link below. This video is all you need to get your WordPress up and running. It will take you by the hand in a step by step watch and implement functionality to help get your site running.

The WordPress Fast Track 2.0 is designed for the Newbie nontechie person that does not want to waste time watching hundreds of videos getting confused. Just click here and get your FastTrack to getting your site up and running.

Stop the wheels spinning and get to action point, click here to get it.

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June 11, 2017July 20, 2017

Affiliate Networks that accept a Newbie Blogger

Affiliate incomes are often the easiest way to start earning money on your Blog as a newbie blogger. This is because it is often about promoting other people’s products that you have used before, or you believe in. By promoting these products, you make money by getting a commission once you make a sale. This idea is used by many product creators to get people to market their products, It’s a win-win idea. For some of the affiliates I mentioned in my checklist, you can make up to 60% of the products price as a commission when you make a sale.

Affiliate marketing is one income avenue you can easily use to start monetizing your blog right from the beginning without creating your own products. if you are good on affiliates, you may even find it earns you a chunk of your Blog income before you start creating your own products.

There is one snag about affiliates though, not all affiliates will accept your application to be an affiliate of their products because they have their own specifications on the type of audience they want and the number of followings you have on social media. While that reason can motivate some people to go work on their numbers, it can also discourage some few people.

When I started my blogging journey, I thought I will be accepted on every affiliate network I applied to once I had my domain name and a few posts on my blog but it wasn’t so. I wished there was a list that could show me which ones will accept me and which ones will not so I could focus on applying to those ones instead of going through rejects. So I have created a checklist of some affiliate networks that will easily accept a newbie Blogger.