Angela Wenke 2.0

I’m featuring Angela Wenke of Frugal WAHMs Talk Radio.  She is a busy graphic artist and web designer with a great love for other Work at Home Moms.

Angie, when did you first decide to look for a way to work from home?

My youngest daughter was diagnosed with asthma when she was 18 months old, and in the beginning she was in and out of the hospital and my position as an office manager was suffering, finally after my daughter had been admitted for a week my Boss fired me. At that point I had to take a serious look at my life, what was more important me working or me staying home and caring for my sick daughter. The answer was clear and it was then that my husband encouraged me to take my love of making graphics for friends and family and make it into a full time online business.

How did you sort through your ideas for a work at home business?

Well for me it was pretty easy I had a talent at creating and drawing graphics and it was a fun artistic outlet for me, and I knew the demand was there for my work. It was just a matter at that point of how do I make this a reality?

Where did you look for inspiration?

A lot of times when I get stuck and I don’t know what to draw or create my youngest daughter and I will brainstorm with a pencil and paper and start drawing our graphics that way. My youngest has a real eye for helping me, she will be like “Mommy I think you should add this or remove this or why not change your graphic to look like this” so my youngest daughter is my inspiration and she appreciates that I ask her opinion.

Is there anything that you’ve tried that you would say didn’t work for you?

When I first started out I was just paying money out everywhere where I saw they offered affordable advertising. Unfortunately I did not do my research and wound up throwing away a lot of my advertising on money that had little to no traffic on them and of course this did not help draw traffic to my site.

What do you love about what you are doing to work at home today?

I love being there for my kids, anytime that they need me. The freedom of being able to catch a school play or performance or sporting event. Also the pride that I took a dream of building my online business and made it into a reality,

How are you applying Web 2.0 tactics to your business?

Oh yes with the ever changing internet services and social networking sites I find it is so important to stay on top of technology, Now twitter for me took awhile to get the hang of, but I am proud to say I am now hooked on it, But I love reading WAHM blogs and sites and listening to WAHM pod casts to help me stay on top of better ways to network my business, meet new clients and people to network with, Also staying on top of all the changes to the latest new program or technology that is available for us to help promote our businesses.

What are your hopes for the future?

Right now I am hoping to simply expand my sites from my graphics site to my Frugal Pod cast. I would love to start receiving more products to reviews from companies for our pod cast, and also hire on a staff member of two to help me fill orders on my graphics site.

What advice would you give a new work at home mom?

The most important piece of advice I always give is this when you are first starting out to build your business have realistic expectations and realize that it may take a year or two to truly establish yourself on the internet and that for those two years you may not see a large profit margin as you will have advertising and setup costs. By being educated on informed and pushing forward and not giving up, you can have a successful online business. One other piece of advice is to network with other work at home moms in your same field, work at home moms are wonderful for offering advice, help and assistance and just being there if you need a sounding board.