Welcome to this week’s "WAHM-Articles E-zine." Every issue is packed full of reprint articles, inspiration and information for your WAHM business.

If you know another mom who works from home, or would like to, please forward this newsletter. We'd like to inspire her too!

WAHMspiration  Separating Fact from Fiction in Online Articles (Part 1)
Meet Our Writer of the Month Barbara Ryan
Featured Articles  by Barbara Ryan
Ruth's Activity of the Week A Mother's Day Gift
Denise's Weekly Publicity Tip
WAHM-Articles News Happy Mother's Day! Find out what special gift we have for our writers this month.
The Latest WAHM Reprint Articles

Garage sales can be a fun way to make some extra money. Do your spring cleaning and pull in some cash at the same time with  Money Making Garage Sales !

If you’re looking for a quality article to reprint in your own publication, or if you’re reading online articles to learn something new, it can be hard to decide if an article author is credible.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be looking at different ways that can help you decide whether an article is fact or fiction.

One of the first things to look at is the author’s name. Who wrote the article? It can be hard to believe an author who writes articles under a nickname or who doesn’t give a last name. Why should I trust someone if they won’t tell me who they really are?

There are some good reasons to use different pen names. Authors who write about various subject areas often use a different name for each subject they write about. For example, if I write about home business issues and about how to care for your horse, I might confuse my audience if I write for both fields under the same name. A reader could read one my horse articles thinking it was about her home business and end up feeling confused. In that case, it would be a good idea for me to publish my home business articles under one name, like "Denise Willms" and my horse articles under another, such as "D. L. Willms," to avoid possible confusion.

But no matter how many pen names an author has, each one should be a person’s name - not a business name or a nickname - and should always have a first name (or initial) and a last name.

A reputable writer will want to receive proper credit for the article by having his or her full name associated with it.

Blessings,

Denise Willms

Editor's Note: Choosing this month's Writer of the Month was a huge challenge! We had so many wonderful writers to choose from. Thank you to everyone who submitted their WAHM articles during the month of April. If you're writing and submitting articles online, you and your business are winning long-lasting rewards every month.

Barbara Ryan is a new author at WAHM-Articles, and we hope we'll get to read many more of her articles.

My name is Barbara Ryan and I have been working online for 3 years now. I started my first home business while I was still working full time. I turned my hobby of creating photo collages in my photo editor software into a business. After being told by friends and family I had created photo collages for, that I should start a business, I did a little online research and decided that I would do it. Cherish Collages was born in April 2004.

When I began my business, I knew very little about Internet marketing or home business. I basically just flew by the seat of my pants, learning as I went. I got a web host with a site builder and went to work. I was still working full time and had a baby to care for. In my free time I designed the website and scoured the Internet for online marketing information. What I discovered in the process was a huge WAHM community. If you want to learn, I quickly discovered, there are plenty of moms who love to teach. After my second child was born, I did not return to work. The cost of two children in daycare ate up most of my salary so it made more sense to stay home. This gave me the opportunity to concentrate more on my home business and help it grow. I became an official WAHM in November 2005. I added new products, re-designed my site yet again applying all the new things I learned about SEO and so on.

Being home full time has allowed me to make great strides in my business and I found myself wanting to help other moms find a way to make working from home their passion as well. The dilemma of the mommy wars, stay home or work does not have to exist; we can do both, stay home and work, by work from home.

This desire led to my next project, along with my good friend, Elizabeth Munro, we started an online magazine. Our magazine, Mom2Mom Magazine is an online magazine filled with mom relevant content written by moms, for moms. This May finds us publishing our second issue and we are very excited about what we have coming up in future issues as well. Being able to do something you love, that you created, and feel passionate about is the best part of being a work at home mom. My “baby” of the magazine is the On the Job section where we feature a WAHM every month. I always found inspiration when I found WAHM sites that had business profiles. I found it inspiring to read about other moms who were building successful businesses on their own so providing that to our readers is very important to me.

Being a WAHM is a challenge, with 2 online businesses to run, but I enjoy every minute of it and could not see myself not doing this. It allows me to have my own grown up focus and be a full-time mom at the same time.

As May's Writer of the Month, Barbara is profiled in our newsletter, receives a month of advertising space on our front page, gets 5 business building eBooks, and has a professionally written press release about her business.

May's winner also received a 1-year, family friendly classified ad on CWAHM.com. Since 2000, Christian Work at Home Moms, CWAHM.com, has been providing resources to help moms find a great work at home career and to help current work at home moms market their businesses at a fraction of the cost you'd find on other websites. Christian WAHM's can find everything they need here - from information to advertising to button and banner design! www.cwahm.com

Why Work From Home? Being able to work from home brings together the two most important factors for moms. Working from home means moms can be home with their kids and not miss the important moments and still be able to contribute to the family finances and focus on a grown up endeavor. Continue...

Building a Successful Website: Title Tags, Alt Tags, FAQ’s, Oh My! With the many easy to use website builder programs available on the market, building your own website is a great options for many work at home moms. The problem is, without experience, many moms miss important key elements, which directly affect the traffic their website will receive and in turn, their success. There are 5 basic elements that are easy to implement, but absolutely necessary to a successful website. Continue...

How to Determine Pricing for your New Product Determining your pricing strategy can be the most difficult step for a work at home mom. There are several things to consider in order to come up with a product price that allows you to make some money, but keep your prices in line with the competition. Continue...

Moms, Turn Your Hobby into a Business Is it possible to turn a hobby, something you enjoy doing, into a profitable business? It takes some research and planning and a lot of hard work, but it is possible. Continue...

A Mother's Day Gift

Mother’s Day is always celebrated the second Sunday in May in Canada. This year it will be on May 13th. On this day we honor our mother or other person who brought us up. At our house we like to make it a family time getting together to make it a special day for Mother, Grandmother and Great-grandmother.

The first Mother’s Day started during the spring celebrations in ancient Greece in honor of Rhea, the Mother of the Gods. Then England celebrated ‘Mothering Sunday’ in the 1600’s. The working poor often worked as servants for the rich and lived in the homes of their employers. On ‘Mothering Sunday’, celebrated on the 4th Sunday of Lent, the servants were allowed to visit their mothers.

In 1870 Julia Ward Howe wrote the Mother’s Day Proclamation in Boston in the USA. It was actually a protest by the mothers whose sons had died during the Civil War; a call for peace and disarmament.

A Mother’s Day observance was held during a church service honoring Mrs. Anna Reese Jarvis in Grafton, West Virginia and in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on May 10, 1908. She was unmarried and very close to her mother. She believed children often neglect their moms while they were still alive and wanted a special day to focus on showing respect for the whole family while strengthening family bonds. She supplied white carnations at the service because that had been her mother’s favorite flower. The carnation represented the sweetness, purity and endurance of mother love.

In May, 1913, the House of Representatives passed a resolution saying the President and all the officials of the federal government had to wear a white carnation on Mother’s Day. Later red carnations became the color to wear for a living mother and white to show that one’s mother had died. On May 8, 1914 President Woodrow Wilson signed the resolution for having a dedicated Mother’s Day.

Following is a simple, but very meaningful gift for children to make for their mother on Mother’s Day. Of course, if you're a mother reading this article, you will want to share it with your child’s father or other caregiver as a hint for your Mother’s Day gift.

Make a Book: “All About Mom”

Spend some time with your child asking her questions like: What is a mother? What does she do? What is the best thing she does? What do you like doing with her? Add other meaningful questions of your own.

Help your child print these questions out on white paper and illustrate them. If the child is too young to print, do it for her. Help her make a construction paper cover on which she can draw a picture of mom. Help the child staple the pages together to make a book, or punch holes and tie the pages together with a brightly colored ribbon.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Blessings,
Ruth Willms

Ruth Willms is co-owner of WAHM-Articles.com and author of the children's Christian fantasy novel, The Lion Tree. Our subscribers can reprint this article in their own newsletters or websites. Please email Ruth for reprint instructions.

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