Wendy Piersall :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

It’s been good to participate in Blog Action Day this year and the focus on Poverty has produced some amazing posts and some very moving testimonials around the blogosphere.

Understandably, a lot of what has been written is about poverty in underdeveloped and developing countries.

Sparkplugging CEO Wendy Piersall reminds us that even in our richer, developed countries there are people living in and struggling with poverty, something that she has experienced personally.

People ask me about why I am so dang passionate about helping people start a business or become self-employed. While I find it fascinating, rewarding, challenging, and intellectually stimulating, the biggest reason is because of my past: I have eaten at the Salvation Army, lived out of my truck for 6 months, and when I started my first business, I was a single mom living in my parent’s basement.

That reminded me that, as well as looking at what we can to support efforts to tackle poverty in other countries, we need also to have a thought and take some action for people in our own countries, our own neighbourhoods. If you are a formerly successful, happily married businessperson who thought life was looking good and are now sleeping in your car, I would imagine you would not be immediately consoled by hearing that people in developing countries were doing it tougher.

Wendy lists thirty six sites, including this one, where people can get high-quality advice and ideas, free, for small and home business, together with a list of Government agency and other sites with resources.

If you are one of the many people around the world who are wondering, in the light of the current economic meltdown, how you are going to ensure you and your family are spared the evils of poverty, Wendy’s list would be a very good place to start.

What’s more, the comments feature on most blogs and the willingness of most bloggers to engage in conversation with their readers, via the comments system, mean that you have more than just texts to read. You have a community you can choose to belong to. A community in which there are many people who, like Wendy, have worked hard themselves to provide for their own and their families’ economic stability and prosperity. Real experts, not theorists in ivory towers.

To Easton Ellsworth who has labored mightily to bring us Blog Action Day 2008 and poke and prod us to participate, and to all my blogging colleagues who have posted about poverty and about what can be and is being done about it, my admiration and my thanks.

In this fast-moving world, a business name or the name of a blog can be quite good or even excellent for one phase of a business’s existence but in need of a change as circumstances change and the business owner re-calibrates her business aims and understanding of her market. The blog site formerly known as eMoms at Home is a case in point.

Those of us who have been reading Wendy Piersall’s very successful eMoms at Home blog knew that the blog, having already acquired an impressive group of bloggers with a variety of expertise, was about to have a name change. It has had that – the new name is sparkplugging – and more. The site has been re-designed and re-planted, the purpose and ambit re-phrased.

In spite of the old name’s focus on “e-mothers” working from home, I never found the site or Wendy’s posts to be focused exclusively on that group or in any way unwelcoming for others of us. It was in fact of good general interest to others, males included, and people without children at home, with probably the common thread of being interested in how to work effectively from a home base. And especially how to use the available technology, such as blogging, better.

The site is now very different from the one I discovered however long ago, with Wendy blogging away on her own. There are now Business Channels and Lifestyle Channels, with a battery of bloggers covering a range of topics, from coaching to craft businesses, from freelance writing to kids activities.

It’s still, and very much, about working from home, but more electrifyingly, so to speak, now that its new name is – sparkplugging. As the site’s About page tells it: