Traci Feit Love (@TraciLove) is a freelance writer, small business consultant, and entrepreneur.  A Harvard Law School graduate and former trial attorney, Traci left the practice of law so she could work from home and spend more time with her family.  She writes about her experiences at The Breadwinner Mom.

A few years ago I was working as a trial attorney at one of the largest law firms in the world.  The pay was great, the people were great, and the work was interesting.  But something wasn’t right; I was tired all the time and I felt a lot older than I was.  In the spring of 2007, an opportunity came along that I couldn’t pass up – the chance to work from home running a small business.  I left the law firm and dove in.

As the sole full-time employee of the business, I was responsible for pretty much everything.  Marketing, operations, payroll, benefits – you name it, I was in charge of it.  It was an incredible education.  In less than two years (during which time I also had a baby!)

I more than doubled the business’ revenue and began to dream about launching my own venture.  I wasn’t sure exactly what that venture would be, but I knew I wanted to continue working from home so I could spend as much time as possible with my family.  I also knew I wanted to capitalize on my experience with small business management, online and e-mail marketing, writing, and sales.

I did some research to figure out what type of services I wanted to provide and then started my own company, Love Communications, this past March.  Love Communications provides freelance writing, marketing, and consulting services to other small businesses (and I’m proud to say it became a profitable venture in less than a month).  At around the same time, I launched my blog, The Breadwinner Mom.  The plan for the blog was just to connect with other breadwinner moms and share some of my personal experiences – a project that (I thought) would be totally separate from Love Communications.

And then an interesting thing happened: my blog’s readers started to ask about how to make a living working from home.  Essentially they said, “yes, yes,  this stuff about your baby becoming a toddler is all well and good – but how is it that you’re able to totally support yourself, your daughter, and your husband (a stay-at-home dad) without working outside the home?”  I began to realize that my business and my blog might turn out to be more connected than I thought.

In what I can only describe as perfect timing, Sparkplugging then announced its internship program.  It offered exactly the type of on-the-job education I thought I would need in order to get where I wanted to go with my blog and my business: helping other parents learn how to start and grow home-based online businesses that earn enough to support their families, so that they can spend as much time as possible with their kids.

I’m so excited to be one of Sparkplugging’s new interns, and look forward to learning from some of the best bloggers and entrepreneurs on the web.  I also hope to get to know as many of you as possible, so I encourage you to connect with me on Twitter (@tracilove)!

So we put together a big group “Wish List”. I gathered questions that everyone wanted to get answered, and then we split the task of writing How To posts that accomplished some fantastic goals for the participants:

1. Readers were able to showcase their expertise to the rest of the Sparkplugging community
2. The quality of the posts that were submitted was so high that they became ‘Flagship’ content on the participants’ own blogs
3. The final roundup post sent tons of traffic to the participants’ sites (and a year later continues to send traffic their way)
4. Readers who needed help with specific questions about online marketing, blogging and working at home got their questions answered from quality sources of information.
5. (Read :: this is advertising for the ‘cost’ of writing a post!)

So here’s how our crowdsourcing works

I’ve wanted to repeat this project again for a long time – it’s a ton of work but it’s so rewarding, so let’s help each other out!

1. Pick one of the following topics to write about OR suggest a topic
2. Leave a comment saying what number you are choosing or what topic you want to cover
3. Write up a quality How To post, or video blog it (posts must be new, and not previously published)
4. Either trackback or leave a comment with a link to your post by noon CST Wednesday May 21st

Engage in the conversation and get to know each other better!

On Monday I asked readers what they wanted to learn more about. Here are some suggested How To post topics, but feel free to add your own:

1. How to setup a landing page and funnel the information to a autoresponder?
2. How to leverage Twitter to help your business grow?
3. How to manage your time better while working in a home office?
4. How do I get out of the idea stage and to take the leap into getting paid for my work?
5. How do I break out of working too much because I live in my home office?
6. How do I discipline myself to work more because life is so distracting in my home office?
7. How can I drive more traffic to my site?
8. How can I increase the profitability of my business?
9. How do I know when to quit or when to persevere?
10. How do I leverage my blog into more consulting gigs?
11. How do I find the right business to run from home?
12. How do I start an Etsy/Silkfair shop?
13. How do I market myself as a freelancer/consultant?
14. How do I get started with email marketing?
15. How do I choose the best way to sell my products online?
16. How can I market myself online for free?
17. How do I get more RSS subscribers to my blog?
18. How can I build more community around my website?
19. How can I build my audience outside of the blogosphere?
20. How can I pitch mainstream media to get them to cover my business?

So now I turn it over to the crowd. Please pick a topic, suggest an additional topic, submit your articles, and we’ll have a blast learning from each other.

Again, deadline for submissions is noon CST Wednesday May 21st

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To: Jay [at] TheFreelanceNation [dot] com Subj: Wendy Rocks! (Ok, Jay rocks, because I would have NEVER made you put in a subject phrase like that! )

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