Here Are The 9 Best Stay-At-Home Mom Jobs

Supporting a family is expensive, especially on one income. Although many couples without children may both have the time to work full-time, caring for kids is a full-time job one it’s own.

You don’t even get paid for it either (although you can’t put a price tag on time with your kids).

But in this economy, many families have to make sacrifices: does one parent stay home to raise the kids while getting by on less, or do both parents work at the expense of precious time with the kids?

Like we said earlier, many moms decide that any earnings from employment are not worth sacrificing time with the kids. And so, it’s up to one parent to bring home the bacon for those families.

But just because you need to stay home to care for your children doesn’t mean you can’t make a little extra money or even a significant income.

There’re plenty of ways to start earning an income from home without taking your eyes off the kids.

In fact, you could start most of them today!

Keep reading to learn some of the best stay-at-home mom jobs.

Online Jobs For Stay At Home Moms

1. Freelance Writing

Freelance writing is by far one of the easiest jobs you can start right from home. It’s quite possible to launch your own freelance writing business today without paying a dime.

You don’t need a website, business cards, an expansive portfolio, or even experience to get started! All you need is a laptop and some determination.

But how do you land clients without experience, you ask?

There are tons of ways to do so, and none of them even involve networking.

First of all, ask your friends and family members if they are in need of a writer or if they can refer you to someone who needs one. Doing this isn’t as likely to land you clients as other methods, but it requires zero effort so you may as well spread the word.

There’s also cold pitching companies. Sending out cold emails offering your services is a scary thought for a lot of people, but the worst that can happen is getting a “no” or not hearing back at all.

You don’t even need real writing samples to send cold pitches. Once you identify the type of content your prospective clients produce, write 2 or 3 short samples and use these as your portfolio.

Your client won’t know the difference, but even if they do, they couldn’t care less about why the samples were written if you display decent writing.

Then there’s job boards if cold pitching isn’t your thing. Job board clients offer fulfilling work at decent rates. Your chances of landing clients are a little better on job boards since you know the clients on there are looking for writers.

If you want to take your writing business slowly, check out freelancer marketplaces like Upwork. They don’t pay as well as landing “real-world” writing clients and you have to pay service fees, but it’s much easier to land clients on Upwork since you know for a fact that they’re looking to hire some freelancers (kind of like job boards).

Overall, freelance writing is one of the most flexible and foolproof ways to make money while staying at home with the kids.

2. Blogging

If you love writing but don’t want to be responsible for meeting client expectations, blogging could be more up your alley.

Starting a blog is easy. Just grab a domain name, purchase some web hosting (web hosting is one of the cheapest things on the planet), and get a piece of blogging software like WordPress.

However, blogs won’t make you money overnight. You have to put in months of work before you can start seeing results.

As for what to blog about, you could choose anything. We’d recommend something you’re interested in with a smaller market than something that bores you to tears but has a larger market.

Now, sticking with what you like over what’s lucrative could make it take longer to build a large audience, but you’re much more likely to stick with it for the long term.

But if you still don’t know what you want to blog about, there’s a hot niche staring you right in the face: the notorious “mom blog”!

These types of blogs are exactly what they sound like. Moms of all experience levels and from all walks of life share their experiences as moms.

For example, some mom blogs help busy working mothers by giving them tips on how to balance career and family. Others mom blogs give guidance to new mothers who might be overwhelmed at the responsibility of caring for a child. Yet others simply share hilarious and memorable experiences involving motherhood.

Yes, there are a lot of stay-at-home mom blogs, but that doesn’t mean there’s no room for you. As long as you have unique experiences and advice to share, you can cultivate your own audience with a little effort.

But of course, you want to make money from your blog.

Monetization tactics for blogs include:

Ads – Companies advertise on your site, and you make money when readers click the ads
Affiliate marketing – You sell other people’s products through affiliate links and make a commission for each sale through your link
Courses/eBooks/other info products – Sell your knowledge and unique perspective as an online course, eBook, or other info product

Once your blog commands a bit of authority, you can add coaching and/or consulting to your services to pocket a little more money.

Put in the work over the long haul, and your blog could grow enough to become a full-time business!

3. Consulting

When most people think of consulting, they imagine corporate boardrooms, fancy suits, and lots of computers.

Although that traditional method of consulting still thrives, those types of consultants are usually dedicated to saving or making their Fortune 500 clients millions of dollars.

But consulting isn’t what it used to be, thanks to the internet. You don’t need to have a 4-year degree and fight your way up the ladder at a consulting firm to get a slice of the consulting pie.

As long as you have knowledge and experience in something (which we’re sure you do), you can launch your own consulting practice.

Even if you don’t, all you need to do is teach yourself a skill and start marketing your consulting services for that skill.

You could go with traditional consulting niches, such as

Marketing
Finance
Tech

But really anything can be turned into a consulting business. If you’re great at gardening, for example, you could offer consulting services to people who want to cut their gardening learning curve.

As a stay-at-home mom, you have a unique angle to sell your services. Going back to our gardening example, perhaps other stay-at-home moms are looking to pick up gardening. Blend your gardening skills with your experience as a mom, and you’ll connect with potential customers on a more personal level.

It might take a little bit of effort at first, but consistently deliver high-quality work and market yourself a bit every day. Consulting practices grow as you gain more clients and increase your own skills, and they can eventually provide a healthy full-time income on your time.

4. Social Media Marketing

Businesses are always looking for ways to expand their reach and make sales. Many of them have little to no idea how to manage their social media, let alone leverage it to make more sales.

That leaves you with endless opportunities to make money.

Similar to freelance writing, you can start selling yourself as a social media marketer/manager as soon as today.

Now, you can do this one of two ways: as an employee that works from home or as your own business. Each one has it’s pros and cons.

Part-time or full-time social media positions guarantee you a set amount of hours and work. Once you land the job, there’s no client prospecting, accounting, or other administrative tasks. You get to focus solely on your work projects.

The main downsides to the employee route are lack of flexibility and potential earnings.

Even if you get a flexible schedule while working for a social media agency, they still expect you to be available during certain hours. You might need to video chat into meetings and hit goals set by your boss.

And then there’s earnings. While working for an agency, you get a guaranteed paycheck, but it’s mostly set in stone once you’ve negotiated your compensation. The best you can hope for are some pay raises every so often.

Hanging your own shingle as a social media manager has a lot more risks, but the potential rewards are greater.

Most obvious are your rates. You have complete freedom to decide how much to charge, and don’t be too humble. Believe it or not, you can get away with charging a lot more than you’d think even with little experience.

Running your own social media agency allows for a more flexible schedule as well. Maybe you’ve to run some errands in the morning? You can put off your work until later in the day if it’s convenient. Hey, you could even take a whole day off in the middle of the week if you wanted!

But higher earning potential and increased flexibility comes with a price, namely your responsibilities.

You’re not going to have an employer withholding taxes from your paycheck, providing you a benefits package, or funneling you more work when you need it.

You’ll be running the whole operation, meaning you’ll need to start doing your own accounting, marketing, and tax-paying. These aren’t as hard to catch on to as they sound, but each one lays claim to a few hours of your week.

Of course, if you have an employed spouse who’s employer offers sufficient benefits, then you won’t even need to worry about insuring yourself anyways.

5. Proofreading

Maybe you enjoy the English language, but don’t want to put fingers to the keyboard for hours a day to make some cash.

Proofreading provides you a slightly less lucrative but simpler opportunity to work from home.

Obviously, you can’t charge as much for proofreading services as you can for freelance writing projects. There simply isn’t as much effort involved.

But that’s where proofreading shines as a work-from-home arrangement. There’s no planning, outlining, and barely any writing. You’re just reading through people’s finished pieces and polishing them up.

And still, you don’t have to charge abysmal rates just to land some projects. Proofreading is valuable to many businesses, as poor writing appears less professional and isn’t taken as seriously.

To land clients, you use the same methods as freelance writing and social media marketing. Starting on Fiverr (a site where most charge $5 for quick services) is a great way to build a quick portfolio and collect a few testimonials, in addition to a few fast bucks.

Then, you can head over to Upwork if you want to take it slow, or you can jump straight onto job boards if you’re ready to get some serious projects today.

However, cold-pitching your proofreading services might be more difficult than writing. It’s just harder to persuade companies they need to hire a proofreader if they haven’t explicitly asked for one, like companies you’d find in freelancer marketplaces and on job boards.

As always, you can seek out proofreading employee positions that let you work from home. Being an employee may limit your earnings and your flexibility, but you’ll get more time with your kids since you won’t have to run the rest of your business.

6. Stock Photography

That random picture you took of a beautiful sunset? The lush, vibrant looking forest you snapped a photo of on your hike? Multiple people might be willing to pay you to use those photos.

If you’ve got a knack for photography, you could turn your talent into a passive income stream by creating and selling stock photography.

In case you don’t know what it is, stock photographs are those “generic” photos you see in ads or blog posts. Some of the more famous ones contain people with exaggerated facial expressions or actions.

But you don’t have to take hilarious photos of people to do this. Anything will do! Keep your camera handy whenever you’re out and about, as you’ll never know when a good opportunity will strike.

Sites like Shutterstock let you upload these photos and license them out to others for royalties. Build up a large enough portfolio and these royalty earnings could pay you a small full-time income with no effort.

There are plenty of other apps and websites that let you upload and license your stock photography for passive income. Some even offer contests and challenges to top off your stock photography earnings.

7. Online Coaching

Online coaching is a great gig if you’re looking to make personal connections with people while making money from home.

Similar to consulting, you can coach almost anything online. The best subjects to coach in would be hobbies, interests, or talents of yours; but you can take a few courses in something new and then coach others in that subject if you’d like.

Online coaches can get away with enormous hourly rates, so don’t be scared to set your rates quite high. You don’t want clients who shop purely on price anyways, as they tend to cause the most headache.

The clients you want are the ones that recognize the value of your services; a high hourly rate infers that your coaching services are in demand and valuable.

Not to mention that these clients will have wads of cash to spend on you.

Coaching businesses can be difficult to get off the ground, though. To give yourself a head start, you could offer discounted services to people you know and collect some testimonials from them afterwards.

Once you have some testimonials, create a website and put them on there. Your website doesn’t need to be anything special; aside from testimonials, all you’ll need are a few basic pages about who you are and what you do.

8. Combine Some Of These

Every type of job we’ve covered can operate as a stand-alone income stream, but you could combine some of these to scale your income potential and add some excitement to your money-making endeavors.

Blogs are perhaps the most customizable when it comes to grouping these jobs together.

At first, you can monetize your blog through ads and affiliate marketing. As you become a better blogger and establish authority in your niche, these income streams will grow tremendously in size.

Then, you can pad your pockets by adding coaching or consulting services in whatever you blog about.

Or maybe you go the way of the writer. If you find yourself with some free time between writing projects, you add proofreading to your service offerings. It won’t pay as much, but it’s a great way to fill in the gaps during slower periods.

Frankly, you could combine almost everything on this list into one business if you’re willing. Here’s one way:

Sell yourself as an internet marketer to cover freelance writing, social media marketing, and maybe consulting too.

Start a website for your business and create a blog on it about either the services your offer or the niche you’re in to start building the personal brand side of your business. In other words, you’ll be growing an audience separate from your main clients who want to learn how to do what you do.

When the blog grows, you can help your audience out with product recommendations which you’ll monetize through affiliate marketing.

Then, you could offer online coaching services to your most dedicated blog followers if they want to learn from you. You could offer consulting to your audience as well.

At the end of it all, you’ll have one business with several income streams. Your main one will be your writing/marketing/consulting clients, but you’ll also have additional income streams from your blog’s audience and your coaching clients.

This is how a lot of online businesses run: they offer one or more services to clients, but they add more income streams by educating a separate audience on how to do what they do.

Don’t be overwhelmed; focus on one part at a time if you choose to go this route.

9. Graphic Design

Last on our list but certainly not least is graphic design. This job is great if you have a bit of an artistic flair.

Graphic designers can create logos, design marketing materials, and almost anything else requiring heavy use of images.

If you’re interested in graphic design but don’t have the chops just yet, take some basic courses in programs like Photoshop to boost your skills and increase your future earnings.

When you’re ready to get clients, peruse the typical marketplaces and job boards to build your portfolio. Alongside writing, graphic design is highly sought after in these locations.

After you have a few pieces, check out a portfolio site like Dribbble and upload your work there. Your portfolio will draw prospective clients to you and you’ll soon find your hands full with graphic design projects!

Cold-pitching is also a very effective client acquisition method once you have some portfolio pieces, as it seems much easier to wow prospects with visual art than with writing or proofreading services.

Overall, graphic design is one of the most fun ways to make money from home once you become decent at it. It’s one of only a few ways to be a well-fed artist instead of a starving one.

Things To Keep In Mind

Earning money without having to leave your kids alone or at a daycare is quite the convenient arrangement, but there are a few things to keep in mind.

First of all, understand the tax implications behind your income. If you’re working as a W-2 employee, you’ll have different responsibilities than if you were a freelancer or contractor. A good accountant can help you figure these things out once you’re making enough from your work.

Also, don’t worry too much about not having a degree relevant to your job. Businesses are starting to shift away from emphasizing degrees and care more about whether you can get the work done.

And no need to worry about lack of experience, either. There’re so many opportunities out there that it’s inevitable someone will take a chance on you. They don’t know you anyways, giving you a chance to thoroughly impress new clients despite a lack of experience.

Lastly, don’t overwork yourself in pursuit of more income. The whole point of working from home was to have time and energy for your kids; burning yourself out working 9 hours a day defeats the purpose of these flexible work arrangement. Scale back your workload if you need to.