Being a mother is tough enough without the added stress of juggling day care schedules and babysitters, but you really need that second income. More and more often, working mothers are making the decision to quit their day jobs, and work from home. Working at home offers a flexible schedule, lets you be available when your children need you, and gives you the potential to decide your own income based on the work that you do. If you're considering making the move from 9-to-5 to a work from a home business of your own, here are three of the most popular options. Is one of them right for you?

Reseller Web Hosting

One of the newest wrinkles in the Internet marketing world, reseller web hosting, can be a work from home business that offers excellent earning potential with a minimal financial investment from you. All you need is a stable internet connection, a reseller hosting account, and some internet and marketing savvy. You pay for a reseller hosting account that entitles you to X MB's of space on the web company's servers. You then place your own logo and name on their templates (or design your own), and sell that space out to others for a profit. Think of it as subletting virtual space.

Startup Costs: Reseller hosting accounts average $29.99 monthly to $199 monthly, depending on space, bandwidth and services.

Skills: Enough web hosting knowledge to provide answers to customer's usual questions, and marketing skills to fight in a fiercely competitive field.

Strategy: Find a niche market. The Internet is a huge sea, and little fish tend to get lost. Pick a niche to target with your marketing, and build in inducements to that niche.

Internet Storefront

There are so many different ways to sell products on the internet that it's almost scary. Whether you sell products that you create yourself, use a storefront to do drop shipping, or create a portal where others can sell their own products, internet storefronts can be a very profitable way to work from home. Like web hosting, though, the market is fiercely competitive, and you'll need a good strategy to get noticed.

Startup Costs: Free to $100s depending on hosting company and licenses.

Skills: Organization and marketing skills are the two major skills you'll need here. There are low-cost ways to find professional site designs, and many companies that will drop ship. People order from you, you order from the company and the company does the rest. You don't need to maintain an inventory, and in some cases, the company will even do all the billing and collection, and send you your profit.

Strategy: Pick a market and target it through search engine optimization, link exchanges, targeted email newsletters and other promotions.

Affiliate Marketing

According to Fortune magazine, targeted online advertising is the hottest growth industry in the high tech world, with annual revenues approaching $5 billion dollars, growing at 40% annually. Why shouldn't some of that end up in your pocket? You can work from home to create a steady income stream from affiliate ads and marketing as long as you have a good internet connection, and a web site that attracts attention.

Startup Costs: Under $20 monthly for web hosting and internet access. Add on search engine submissions, and search engine optimization services later if you need to.

Skills: The ability to create a good, focused community or personal web site, and the marketing savvy to pick the right products to promote.

Strategy: Create a focused web site around a niche subject, and optimize it for search engines. Community web sites work especially well, since forum posts and blogs create new content frequently and invite search engines back to visit often. Join an affiliate ad program which will place targeted ads on your web site based on the content, or choose one that will allow you to pick the ads you want to appear on your site.

About the author:

Michael Law is editor at 1steliteworkfromhome.com ( http://1steliteworkfromhome.com ), a Work From Home Directory Resource.

1steliteworkfromhome.com is a resource for anyone looking to find work from home job information and discover ways to work at home.

This article may be reprinted or published without the authors consent as long as the "About" and "weblinks" are kept intact.