Site helps moms balance new responsibilities, work
November 16, 2000 BY FRANCINE KNOWLES BUSINESS REPORTER Chicago Suntimes

Stacy Perez grappled with a question that's confronted many new moms--whether to return to work after the birth of her child.

Concerned about how to effectively balance work and family, the Hanover Park resident decided to look for work-at-home opportunities and launched a new Web site to help other moms do likewise.

The site, Dotcommommies .com, is the product of her research. Since March, the site has logged more than 180,000 hits, Perez said.

"I started getting hits immediately," said Perez. "It's more [visitors] than I expected."

The site includes: * Links to freelance and membership sites that offer access to work-at-home job opportunities. These include elance.com, which allows job seekers to bid in auction format for prospective work; smarterwork.com, which offers services in several business categories, including Web design, translation and writing services; and friendsfromhome .com, which has jobs ranging from clerical to medical transcription.

* Information on marketing survey jobs and mystery shopping opportunities where workers are paid to appraise a retailer or hospitality company's products or services.

* A listing of books on the subject, including "Stay at Home Mom's Guide," "Mompreneurs," and "A Career in Virtual Assisting."

Perez said she didn't want other moms to have to start from scratch.

"Dotcommommies has allowed me to share my research with other moms, so they can make money at home and be home with their children," said Perez, who is on an extended maternity leave from her job working in accounts receivable collections.

Perez began researching work at home jobs shortly after the birth of her son Kyler, who turns 1 this month.

"I started off writing down everything on paper, looking at other similar Web sites, then I started researching how to create a Web site," said Perez. "I designed it from the ground up."

Perez has since launched a free weekly online newsletter, which includes information on work-at-home jobs. She said it has 3,500 subscribers.

Work-at-home assignments she's taken on include answering an 800 customer service line, typing to dictation and conducting online research.

She also generates income from more than two dozen ads posted on her site.

So far, Perez hasn't duplicated the salary she earned from her collections job. She said she's generating between $1,000 and $1,500 a month from the dotcommommies site.

But she's since launched two other sites--one on which she provides mystery shopping companies a place to post their assignments to shoppers and another site for her articles on how to become a dot-com mommy.

Her goal is to generate $5,000 a month via work at home.

"I think with the Internet there's more opportunities for moms online to make money because you can have the whole world at your fingertips," she said.

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