Work at Home Moms Talk Radio

Can you smell it in the air? The fog that rolls in this time of the year may seem a bit eerie and cold to some but for me it is a sign of spring that blankets with comfort of warm weather to come! If you ride down along the water front here near my home you can see the elegant beauty of this sign of spring.

That also means spring cleaning is near, I am not speaking of the general house cleaning although this is when we decide what stays and goes from the house at this time too, I am talking about spring cleaning your work at home mom clutter.

The idea about doing a spring cleaning on your work at home dealings is to clean out any unnecessary clutter that may be disrupting, hindering and/or holding you back from the next level of success with your business (es).

First you will want to start with your work area, the physical stuff:

• Go through your folders and files that you keep (if you keep physical files and notebooks like I do)


• Purge anything that is no longer a necessity for what you are currently doing.


• Throw out any lose notes; replenish pens, notebooks, organizer inserts (you can find some printable planners for free).


• Reorganize if needed the desk drawers and desktop.

We as work at home moms tend to keep a lot of files on our laptop or desk top.

Second task to tackle is the computer files:

• Delete anything that does not apply and is out dated completely.


• All other files you only reference once in a while save to a thumb drive or burn on a CD (I recommend a both in case one fails).


• Reorganize the files you have left and will keep on the computer in easy to access folders.

Now, I do this once a month but have known some to only clean their C: drive, defrag and computer backup couple times a year. During the spring cleaning do both of these. This is also a good time to make sure your virus ware is up to date and run a boot scan of it, if you don’t do this regularly that is.

Moving on let’s talk email! As work at home moms our emails can get crazy loaded. If you’re not labeling as you’ll find in Gmail or using folders as in yahoo, outlook express and various other providers get that in place first.

Once you got that in place the tedious tasks of sorting through 100’s and for some even 1000’s of emails will ensue and it is torturing…do it anyway! This will make your life so much easier and that is an absolute truth. Important client/customer emails depend on a clean and organized email box, so that they may be addressed promptly. A messy email box leads to lost emails, confusion and frustration.

Continuing with emails, take the time to forward all emails to one box. If using Gmail you can read here how to receive and send from all email addresses within your Gmail Account. Yahoo also has something similar and you can read about that in this in Yahoo Mail help area. Having a place you can receive and send all your emails from is such a convenience saving you a ton of time.

This is the basic clean up, you can stop here if you would like because just by doing these few things you should have freed up a ton of burdens and time. However, I prefer the deep spring cleaning which includes my actual businesses.

Starting with blogs, now a days’ work at home mom’s have more than one blog as they usually have more than one business. Ask yourself if you have abandoned any of your blogs or barely blogging on them? If you’re neglecting any of them, it’s time to ditch them, seriously. What is the use of having a blog, unless it is your personal one, if you can’t make it useful for your business? I am sure you think about it all the time which takes up creative time you can be applying elsewhere in your business. Purge your blogs; condense the content into the ones that you are using to make use of the content by reintroducing it to the current blogs readers.

Let’s talk product or services, are any of them not selling? Have you looked into why? The time is now to research why your stuff is not selling.

If it is just an over lubricated market of similar products or services you have one of two choices:

1. You can either revamp or discard this particular item you’re selling.


2. If it is the marketing techniques your using it’s time to rethink your strategy and try again.

How about affiliate marketing? How are your commissions looking? Take this time to also look into your affiliate memberships.

• Make sure you aren’t losing sales because of inoperable links because of changes, such as discontinuing of their items.


• Clean up any links no longer operable, the worst thing to have is a bunch of links going to error pages or redirected ones.


• It also goes with affiliate marketing as it does for your own items, if it is the marketing technique, you must rethink!

Don’t stop there, also check the following:

• Any and all links on sites


• Make sure all forms are working


• Check all pages and fix any coding issues making any of the pages off

You have now completed a spring cleaning WAHM style! Congratulations and enjoy you fresh clean work environment on and offline!

photo credit: James Nash (aka Cirrus)