Archive for Business

Making Money from Junk

I am sure you have heard or read stories about people who are making money from junk or er…stuff. During hard economic times many people sell stuff for cash just to make ends meet.

Garage Sale

There are many ways to sell stuff for cash. Used clothing or furniture stores will often take things on consignment. Of course, the store gets a cut of the profit too. eBay has been a huge success for some people and some have even created a part-time or full-time eBay business out of their endeavor to sell their stuff. Craigslist and garage sales are other popular ways to make money by selling things that have been sitting for years or that have some value to pull in some quick cash. For those who have jewelry to sell Cash for Gold may be the way to go for that, but it’s always keep your gold pieces in sight at all times – at least that is what we have been told. We had a friend who had a “Gold party” and knew a reputable person who bought gold in exchange for cash. That is the way we would probably sell gold.

We have never actually been successful selling our stuff. We sold a car when Robert was laid off or just after he went back to work. We’ve been trying to sell some used counter tops that have been sitting in our townhouse garage for oh… 4-5 years and NEW wall paper but hardly any interest in either of those things. I understand the wall paper as that’s very personal and unique but the counter top I figured would get sold to a someone who does rehabbing.

Garage sales have not been profitable for us either, then again we’ve only had one and it was such a bust my husband said NEVER again.

So how do people make money from selling their junk? I don’t have the answer to that, I only know they can and do. If you know the secret, I sure would love to be privy to it so we can sell some of our unwanted junk.


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Vamping Up Egg Production


Jr. vamping up egg production by helping collect eggs.

It’s been nearly six weeks since our hens started laying. I can’t tell you how much we have been enjoying our farm fresh egglicious treats! Our homemade waffles, pancakes and baked goods are so much more light and fluffy. It’s amazing. And the girls have been saying they notice a difference in how the eggs cook as well.


Our original flock of hens.

I was slightly ambitious and marketed our eggs right away and quickly sold out of them! Yeah, even before we had eggs to fulfill orders….but we have a waiting list in case anyone dwindles off! Incredible, eh? We even had someone stop by the other day and asked if we have eggs – that’s with no signage whatsoever except for the farm magnet on our van which only states our farm name and phone number…no products but I guess they can see chickens when they are out. ;)

All my marketing efforts were simply via email and we have a paid listing on Eat Wild ($50/yr) and Local Harvest ($25 suggested donation/year), but only one egg customer came through Eat Wild and she’s on our waiting list. Gotta love free to low cost marketing.

So based on this experience we will be increasing our flock for 2013 and have already started. We have a broody hen setting on two eggs now. It’s kind of an experiment because we came across two fertilized eggs while candling them so I decided it won’t do any harm in letting a hen sit on them to see what happens.

Broody hen update: The hens are sitting on the eggs but they don’t seem to be sitting on them consistently so I think we will be looking to borrow or rent an egg incubator to hatch out a batch of fertilized eggs. It’s kind of disappointing not to have one devoted hen unless something went wrong with the eggs or something. We may try again…we’ll see.

Candling to those unfamiliar is simply putting a light under the egg and slowly turning the egg to see if you find a dark spot, otherwise known as the fertilized egg. Candling is also used to detect any defects or cracked eggs.

Our hens have laid up to 17 24 eggs a day, then we had that cold snap and their production trickled back down to several a day. Then we (or my hubby did with Peanut’s help) winterized our coops since we will be over-wintering 32 hens/roosters and two turkeys and today we are back up to 15 eggs in a day. So we should be able to supply our egg customers with eggs this weekend. Yay! I am so excited to finally see our hens start paying for their keep! ;)


New flock of 100 red sex-links, not a heritage breed, unfortunately.

Please Note: this was written weeks ago and just kept getting pushed back. And last week we purchased a flock of 100 one year old hens, sooner than we thought we would buy more chickens, but when the opportunity came from an area family farm we know and trust and with people waiting for local eggs we just went ahead and did it. The “new” hens are giving us 60-70 eggs a day and I really need to get marketing them as a few leads fell through from our waiting list. I have a couple of leads to follow up on and we have an event on 12/15…but I won’t be taking two week old eggs there because our slogan is “Fresh. Local. Every Time.” and I don’t want to be accused of not having fresh eggs.


Turkey egg and yes, they are a brown speckled egg.

Brownie, our turkey hen, also started laying…but bah-humbug she’s not very maternal. :( Disappointing to say the least but we have a farmer friend who asked if one of our daughters would be interested in incubating turkey eggs for her and we’d split the hatch, which will be a very cool farm, homeschooling learning experience! Farmer C has heritage breed turkeys which is what we wanted to try next year so here’s to hoping it all works out and goes well. We might even try and incubate some of Brownie’s eggs as we do want to do Midget White Turkeys again. They are very yummy! We ate one for Thanksgiving dinner!


Tom and Brownie, our Midget White turkey breeding pair.

Tom, our turkey tom, is still strutting his stuff. ;) Every day this is what our pair of turkeys looks like with Tom following Brownie around.

So we are really vamping up egg production around here!

Oh and we finally got our electric fencing, but have yet to get the solar panel up and running. Technically we aren’t suppose to use the fencing or the solar panel during the winter or with snow, but we haven’t had any heavy snow yet….so we are keeping it up until the snow flies at least.


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Looking for Reviewers

I need some help and am looking for reviewers. With our farm sort of exploding (have to update you all) I need to do less reviews, though I love them, and free up some time to get things done around the farm, to take on more VA clients and grow this blog behind the scenes. Don’t worry I’ll still be writing and reviewing, just a little less frequently. Soooo….we need a couple more reviewers here at Faith and Family Reviews. Unfortunately it is an unpaid gig, though gift card (nearly the same as cash) opps may come across my computer that I may be able to pass along to you. No promises though on their frequency. And no, we haven’t got rid of either of our current reviewers/contributing writers, they are AWESOME! We just have some gaps that the three of us cannot fill!

Types of Reviewers We Are Looking For

The types of reviewers we are currently looking for:

  • Expectant Moms (none of us are expecting)
  • Moms with a baby or child under two (we currently have a huge gap here since all of us here have children over two years old!)
  • Anyone who loves to read (I love to read but I do not have time to review every book that comes through my inbox! Many of the titles we receive are from a Christian view point. Beware though you may end up getting sent books without even being asked, as this has happened to “Professor” and “Virtuous”.)
  • Anyone who is really interested in reviewing products


Requirements

Three main requirements are simply availability, dependability and commitment. I don’t expect you to accept every review I send your way but when you do accept a review, it is a requirement that it is completed. And while I don’t expect you to commit for life, someone who is going to be around long term is preferred above someone who is looking for a short term gig.

How to Apply

If you are interested at all please click the email button (@ symbol) in the top right hand corner of this page and I’ll get back to you with our basic requirements. Please include a bit about yourself, your writing experience, if any, don’t be shy if you don’t have any because once you get started the more you write the better your writing becomes…besides I’ll proofread and edit it! ;) If you do have writing experience, be sure to send links or samples of what you have written.

Hope to hear from some of you soon!


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The High Calling Review

I recently had the opportunity to read The High Calling newsletter. It is a weekly newsletter centering around articles about “every day conversations about work, life and God.” Below you will find The High Calling review that I wrote. I chose to review the October 24, 2012 issue.



The High Calling Review

The articles in The High Calling newsletter are short and to the point, almost leaving me with a hunger for just a little bit more. I really liked these articles in particular:

Gratitude as a Business Strategy by Dena Dyer was enlightening and encouraging as I thought about our little business ventures and I especially liked this:

Proverbs seems to agree, according to chapter 16, verse 25 (New Life Version): “The man who gives much will have much, and he who helps others will be helped himself.”


Stop Waiting for God to Tell You What to Do With Your Life
by David Rupert was something I could relate to and testify as true because there have been many times my husband and I have just taken what we call a “leap of faith” and God has assuredly met us on the other side.

I believe God joins us only when we take that initial risk. If you have a tiny twinge of passion toward anything, you have to jump right through it on your own. It is there that God will meet you.

The High Calling newsletter covers many topics from work, community and culture to family, faith and attitude. These subjects are covered in the form of articles, videos and audio. I encourage you to check it out and see what nuggets you find to inspire and encourage you.

Faith and Family Reviews reviewed The High Calling in exchange for an Amazon Gift card. While we consider it a privilege to receive compensation for reviews, our thoughts and opinions are our own.


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National Do Not Call Registry

Lately, I’ve been getting lots of unwanted calls on my house and cell phone. So, I headed over to the National DO NOT CALL Registry and signed up my phone numbers. You will need to enter a valid email address, they will send you an email for EACH phone number you register and you MUST click each link to activate the registry for each number. So, my fingers are cross this works. It’s so annoying to receive unwanted calls!

Editor’s note: It’s also worth having an unlisted/private number as well. It is a nominal fee each month for the additional privacy and the phone company does not include you in any phone listings on or off line. Since moving to our new home a year ago we have enjoyed a relatively quiet phone line since having an “private” number.

We also exercise caution when giving out our number, especially our cell phones. It’s not easy because you still have companies who will sell, rent or give out your number.


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Egglicious!

Yippee! Doing the happy dance! We got our very first farm fresh egg from one of our hens today – thus the title of this post…..egglicious! Our hens are officially 22 weeks old this week. We’ve been waiting and waiting. I was starting to get worried so I did a Google search and found a chicken forum (yes there are chicken forums too!) and some people had to wait up to 30 weeks for their first egg! To be honest that made my heart sag at the thought! That’s why this is a happy occasion!

In regards to our first egg, our oldest son asked if he could eat it! :-) Always thinking about food that one. I wonder if he remembered to eat it? He didn’t and he’s too late because our third daughter Oms named the egg and wants to keep it …slight problem(s) with that idea, but she’s cute for coming up with it. Think she named it Hammy.

Just so you know this is a very good sized egg for the first one…

Some pullet eggs can be very small and I’m sure we’ll have our share of them. I don’t know if any of you care, but I am sure we’ll be comparing sizes and trying to figure out which hens are laying the best eggs. For those will be the ones we’ll want to hatch out new chicks from! Hoping to start that in December once we figure out which hens are the broodiest (if that’s even a word), as the broodier the better they will be at hatching out eggs. If you aren’t sure what broody means, it’s simply how well a hen likes sitting on her nest of eggs.

Now, if only the other 30 hens would get “cracking”….heehee pun intended….and give us an egg, we’d be in business. Literally, because we should get about an egg a day from them, which of course may vary now that there’s less daylight. That means about 17 dozen eggs a week! Our girls want to have an egg business and I want an egg business so we will be working on rounding up not only eggs but customers too!

“I’m so excited and I just can’t hide it…” Name that song? And isn’t that an 80’s song all of you Momdotters/Brandcation attendees? ;)


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Fellowes Laminator Video Review

As a homeschooling mom, I have had projects over the years that needed laminating but I was rather frugal and settled for a roll of contact paper and a pair of scissors. It worked great for the first set of flash cards I made of the alphabet and numbers for our girls, but as the babies arrived and I became busier with children, the extra time I once had to sit and cut diminished, a laminator would have come in very handy.

Fellowes Laminator

The Fellowes Saturn2 95 Laminator is very small and compact. It doesn’t take up much space at all. A definite plus as I don’t have a lot of flat surface to store that and our printer. Right now it’s stored beneath my little table/desk, but we used it at the dining room table. It is also lightweight so moving from room to room it isn’t an issue at all.

The laminator came with 3 packages of laminating pouches 25 – 9 x 11.5 hot laminating pouches, 25 – 4.5 x 6.25 pouches and then 10 other laminating pouches, which I haven’t figure out what to use for yet. We used the smaller size to laminate a few farm stand signs for selling produce.

How it Works

The Fellowes Saturn2 95 is very easy to use. My girls have used it successfully. You simply put the item you want laminated between the pages of the laminating pouch and you slide it in the opening and wait for it to come out the other side fully laminated. Simple as that.


Laminator Review

We love it. It is going to be a great addition to our office equipment enabling us to laminate flash cards for the kids or signs for our businesses. There’s a photo story of how we laminated market signs above. I am pleased with the laminating results but not the type setting of the words. Those were off. But hey, it was our first time and nothing is ever perfect the first time around, right? Video review is below:

As for the laminating machine? It’s definitely a keeper. Wish I had it 15 years ago when I spent hours making our first flash cards.

Two thumbs up from me!

Faith and Family Reviews received the following product in exchange for writing a review. While we consider it a privilege to receive products to review, our reviews are our honest opinion and thoughts of the product.


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Blog Goals Carnival

Trisha over at MomDot has been hosting a blog carnival the past several weeks. This is the first one I have participated in. Thought I had better get some goals down on paper so to speak…maybe…just maybe I’ll attain them.



When I Started Blogging

When I started blogging it was on a private family blog on the back end of our online bookstore. It was for close friends and family to keep up with the children’s growth and achievements. A “mom brag place” if you will. That was back in 2006. I stopped blogging there in late 2010 when I started this blog. I also had a blog in conjunction with our online shop, but it wasn’t going anywhere; which led to me becoming frustrated with the whole thing. After we had shut our bookstore down the blog itself didn’t make much sense. My purpose in doing it was to connect with our customers, possibly make money (back then I was trying to make money with affilate links and only made pennies and lost money because I didn’t make the payout goal in time…frustrating to say the least). I also wanted to try to be an encouragement to other moms. Then there were the people lurking that I wanted to get away from due to personal reasons. Not that they couldn’t find me again, but I was ready for a new adventure. I wanted to do more product reviews because I enjoyed that sort of thing after having wet my feet with book reviews. I also wanted to hide behind reviews so I wouldn’t have to blog about personal stuff anymore.

But I’m over all that…it’s what fueled the birth of this blog.

Goals for Faith and Family Reviews

I’ll admit that in addition to wanting to do more reviews, I wanted to monetize my blog. Yes, I wanted to make MONEY. I’ve been working at home since 2005, but only making money from home since 2008. Our book business basically paid for itself and that was about it. When my husband was laid off in 2008, that jet propelled me into a working machine to earn money. I can’t say I am good at it but I am making some money and it helps pay the bills. The problem is it’s usually at the expense of time with family. Before all my children are grown and hate me for working so much, I want to work smarter, spend more time with my family and work less.

Blog Goals: Make money. Smarter with my time = More time with my family. Trips are extra perks.

Money Goals for 2012

One of my goals at the beginning of the year was to double my blog income. I think I’m half way there, at least some months. Now, I want to double what I am currently making.

I wanted to get a couple of ambassadorships. I have one, now to acquire another one.

I wanted to get more paid advertisers. I joined some ad networks, but only time will tell if those make a dent in my income or not. I’d like a couple of paid advertisers for my side bar once I clean it up a bit from old campaigns.

Goals for 2013

Establish some relationships with PR. It seems like I work more with blog networks than directly with PR.

Get my page rank up again, preferably by January 2013.

Create a blog “inner” circle where fellow bloggers and I bounce opps/ideas off of one another. Similar to what we do on the MomDot forum but on a smaller scale.

Possibly get into some consulting.

Defining Success

I know in some circles making money with my blog does make me a success, but to me success means something bigger. I want to make more money and work less. That means getting paid more for my time. Bigger jobs, more money, less time. I’d love to make enough to pay my contributors. That’s always been a goal of mine too.

Success to me has also been to be the best mother I can be. My children are part of the reason I work so hard. So if I can manage to raise my children to be good, God fearing, law abiding citizens, responsible and courteous, then I consider myself to be a success.

So how do you define success and if you are a blogger, what are your goals?


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Bloggers, Brands and PR

Thank You!

  • The Motherhood
  • Social Fabric
  • Mom Central
  • Kidorable
  • One2One Network
  • Revell Books
  • Litefuse

Many of you are blogging for a living or even part-time and know it’s a lot of work. It takes time to think of subjects to blog about, to craft the posts, to do SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and to promote the posts. Then there are the review opportunities which require time email reps or brands, to try, test and test again the product(s), take pictures, water mark photos, write down those thoughts and follow up with the reps or brands with links and final thanks. Same goes for event opportunities. This is how bloggers, brands and PR all work together to accomplish a common goal of marketing and getting either the company, brand or product and blogger exposure to a larger audience.

Without PR we bloggers wouldn’t have any of these opportunities. That’s why it is so important to say thanks and show our appreciation. I am a part of a blogging community that is really awesome. I have learned so much from the bloggers there. Not so long ago a group of them wanted to say thank you to the PR companies they have worked with, which you can view below. I missed out due to not getting anything ready in time, but for the purpose of this post, I just created the list above to give a shout out to a few of the PR people whom I have had the pleasure and privilege of working with.

You can read more about the bloggers featured above over at MomDot. All of their blogs are listed there.

Thank you PR peeps!

P.S. I have been meaning to post this and kept moving it for something else and I don’t know why when it was in drafts all ready to except for my shout outs and photo, which I still didn’t get to…


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Potatoes Are Ready! – Wordless Wednesday

Well, not just the potatoes are ready, we also have butternut squash, pumpkins, heirloom tomatoes, basil and mint ready too. The zucchini and summer squash have slowed down a lot and we still get an occasional cucumber if the children don’t eat it first.


Potatoes.


Pumpkins, butternut squash and zucchini.


Fresh, locally grown heirloom tomatoes.


Fresh, locally grown basil.


Mint.

The children set up a farm stand on Saturday and sold some fresh, local produce, along with organic lemonade (yep, we made it with organic cane sugar and organic lemon oil – from Costco…kind of defeats the purpose of buying local, eh?) While we may not have grown as much produce as we wanted, what we do have is yummy in our tummies! We even made pumpkin pie for Sunday’s potluck!


Lemonade stand.


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