Bizymoms.com website started as a tool to promote your book. What inspired you to write the book “The Stay-at-Home Mom’s Guide To Making Money From Home”?

Liz: After falling for a work-at-home scam, and later starting a personalized children’s book business that lasted for about a year. My self-confidence level was at an all time low. I was very discouraged and wondered if this work-at-home mom thing was just a dream, or if I could really make it happen.

Now considering myself a writer, let alone an author was not something I ever thought about doing. English was not something I got A’s in. But I got this idea that there needed to be a book out there for someone like myself, that gave instruction and inspiration in starting my own home business.

So I took matters into my own hands and decided to write this book. I took several writing courses. One class was a basic writing course at an adult school. I also took an online writing course on how to write a query letter. And it was at that class where I wrote my query letter for my book idea.

It was also online that I found a posting from an editor saying they were looking for parenting book ideas. I had no idea who the publishing company was, and it said just that, “looking for parenting book ideas.” So I emailed and she wrote me back. We talked on the phone and she said to send a book proposal. I ran out and bought a book on writing a book proposal and several months later signed a book contract.

How has Bizymoms.com grown since it was started? What do you say are the main accomplishments of the website?

Liz: Wow, has it grown. First off, I taught myself HTML and did the site myself for awhile. AND you can totally tell. It’s fun to go to alexa.com and check out what my site used to look at. When I started out I didn’t even have the URL bizymoms.com.

The site started off with like just a few pages and now has over 700 pages of resources.

I couldn’t have done this alone let me tell you. Two women have been very instrumental in the success of Bizymoms. Jen Czawlytko soon was hired to design the site and later a Joyce Gowens came along and became Bizymoms community producer. These two women have made sure Bizymoms has stayed online no matter what. There were some ups and downs since 1997 in all of our lives. Fortunately there was always one of us around who kept everything going.

Back in August of 2005 I sold Bizymoms. It’s the best thing I could have done. Believe it or not, the business part of business…is not something I enjoy. So in selling it I’ve been able to stay with Bizymoms and do what I love like writing and motivating people to follow their dreams.

Because of this there is a lot more resources available to Bizymoms now and we can create better resources to help moms work at home. One of these resources is our career kits. We now have six different home business career kits and we plan to have a new one come out each month.

March 2006