Here are seven exceptional ideas you can put into practice right away. The choices and opportunities for working from home have expanded into an avalanche of potential. Yet when you are a busy mom, with responsibilities that extend into the stratosphere, it can be a challenge to come up with a specific idea you can consciously cause to occur.

Work from Home Strategy No. 1: Brainstorm your talents. Brainstorm your capabilities. Can you manage events? Can you write blogs? Can you sell real estate or tiny gadgets? The first work from home strategy is to get big with your choices. Ideally you will STOP reading this article, go over to your computer, PDA or a pad of paper and just line up word after word of what you like to do.

Work from Home Strategy No. 2: Now think again about your skills. What aren’t you seeing? What is your blind spot? Ask your friends “What am I really good at?” Consider what you like to do in your family gatherings. What role do you usually play? Some of my friends are so organized. They can execute an unexpected indoor birthday party for 27 at the drop of a hat, then say “I just don’t have any skills.” Well, that takes skill. See yourself in new ways.

Work from Home Strategy No. 3: Facebook.

Work from Home Strategy No. 3A: I guess perhaps you might want more detail. Facebook is emerging as a raging river with last word over 600 million people tapping into it every day. How many opportunities are going to blossom from that madness? I can’t begin to count. Learn how to make a Facebook Page and then sell that service to others. Sell a product with a Facebook Page. Discover the key to a successful Facebook ad. You’re going to hear maybe thousands of careers get created from Facebook.

Work from Home Strategy No. 4: Navigate Facebook with grace. Get what Facebook does and figure out how any of your efforts can be nourished with that platform. Just become savvy with it. I’m not saying I’m there yet, but the last tool I learned was how to make an opt-in box and post it on a Fan Page. If you’re not clear what an opt-in box is, that’s OK, we can talk about that in another article. The key is to get your arms wrapped around the huge momentum Facebook is in and embracing it verses resisting it.

Work from Home Strategy No. 5: Sales positions will always be good work from home positions, except that exceptional sales results occasionally involve face-to-face conversations. If you have any leanings towards sales, go for it and get training and really get into it. If you can sell hockey mom products, you can make enough money at least to play for all of the kids skates, for instance. If you can sell any one thing well, you can tap all of the internet traffic and “divert and convert.”

Work from Home Strategy No. 6: Become an expert at something. Become known as the go-to person on that topic. You can make a blog for free on your topic and place ads on that page. You can attract followers who want to know about your topic, from YOU, and then nourish them with opportunities that feed that passion (my blog Jobs for Busy Moms does just that, it is a lot of fun).

Work from Home Strategy No. 7: Let go of all of your limiting beliefs. The world has changed in the last six months beyond belief. Needless to say if you’ve been an at home mom for a few years, you won’t even recognize the world of work at home opportunities. There are millions and millions of opportunities. So, allow yourself to find some great ones. Get creative! Have fun!

For honest weekly opportunities that are designed for busy moms, you can check out my blog called Jobs for Busy Moms. Good luck!

The path to maintaining a lucrative job from home experience is paved with millions of distracting opportunities that can take you off course and waste your time and energy. How do you veer clear of pitfalls? Here are some of my suggestions:

1. Focus on your annual and quarterly income requirements. This will help you know if an opportunity will work for you.

2. Get clear on how much time you can commit to your business efforts. Take into account a completely different level of productivity than your life before kids. For a parent of school-age children, for instance, there will likely be drops in work schedules in summer and December. For parents of young children, count about a week every month for days when unexpected stuff just happens. This may show up as one or two days per week or a week here and there. A child gets sick, your spouse can’t help on a Saturday as planned, that kind of thing.

3.Get to know how much risk you are willing to take. Are you willing to be entrepreneurial? Start a whole new business or a line of them? Play with adwords and adsense on google to generate income streams? Or would you feel safer with data entry? Without judgment, stop for a moment and just consider what is right for you. I like some risk with measurable upside and I like commission-based work. Some people feel SO much better with hourly work, reliable projects, and assignments that are quite tangible and pay a specific amount.

4. Make sure you’re going to like what you’re doing. Identify your skillset. What do you want to contribute? If you forget about this and just “do something” you may dislike what you took on. I believe we have a natural tuning fork inside of us that resonates when things feel good, and tells us (if we listen) when things feel bad or off.

5. Avoid opportunities to pay to be given opportunities. There are exceptions, but in general, you can find data entry jobs and work from home jobs if you scroll and screen and look carefully. The exception would be paying for new tools to help you get things done, like cool new phones that do everything but stand on their toes and dance (and allow you to work from wherever you are whenever you want); or information products that help you learn something valuable.