Working from home jobs – selling online

Ideas for working from home.

Irina Gray talks about working from home online and juggling business and family:

Hi Irina, can you start by telling us a bit about your background please
Sure! I am 38, and I’m working from home juggling business and family at the same time. I am Russian by ethnic origin, but I was born and grew up in Turkmenistan which used to be part of the Soviet Union but now an independent country. I came to UK to study, following which I had several jobs with a number of companies – big and small.
During this time I also started a family and decided that having my own business working from home was the best way forward. Over the years, I have had several online-based projects. At the moment, my main project is helping customers to improve their health via healthy nutrition.
 
How do you combine working from home with looking after your family? 
It is not always easy but my husband is a great help. We both try to spend a lot of time with our son.
In fact, I teach my son a lot about my business in general – what we do now and our plans for the future, how we plan to raise funds to expand our business and so on. So he is quite “involved” and it doesn’t always feel like I have to separate work and family life from this point of view.
It is a new business, so I often work during week-ends too. It is crucially important to have support from our families if we want to make our home-based business a success.
 
You work on a couple of projects – how easy do you find it to juggle them?
It is not easy, and ultimately something has to go. I am currently focussed mostly on just one business as working on several at the same time becomes very challenging. We have to ask ourselves what our real passion is, and follow it through to its successful implementation.
 
What is it about working online that you like?
The best thing about working online for me is an incredible level of flexibility that I can afford in my life. I set my own targets, define my own schedule and just work towards it.
Working online gives me a lot of mental freedom – to look around, see what other people are doing, “meet” some outstanding personalities from around the world and make valuable, meaningful connections. In my opinion, this is hard to achieve in an office environment.
 
Can you explain the concept of drop-shipping please?
Let’s say you want to sell some goods to your customers but you don’t want the hassle of purchasing them wholesale, having to store them and post them to your customers.
You can find a wholesaler who will do all these functions for you. You can even put your brand name on each product.
What *you* can do while working from home (which is what I do) is create your own brand, do all sales & marketing, customer relationships, article writing, manage your own shopping cart, accept orders and forward them to your wholesaler for fulfilment.
 
How do you see your future?
I can see myself making a reasonable living by working from home and helping others to achieve their health goals and introducing them to a wonderful world of superpowders. I can see people coming to my site for personal inspiration and support as well as health tips and ideas.

Irina runs Kill Tiredness Now, offering practical solutions for constant tiredness and promoting superfoods for energy. She is kindly offering 10% discount on all products in her shop to Work from Home Wisdom readers. Just use the code WORKFROMHOME during the checkout process.