making a living and homeseading in a small town

I have a daughter, SIL, and two grandkids who prospered in Soccorro NM on 55K per year and are struggling a bit in Portland at 100K per year. Maybe not struggling, but not fat and happy.

I bought 30 acres, house, outbuildings, 2 wells, with power and phone (came in later) and high speed internet for 30K with 3K down, here (southern NM) in Y2K. Contract sale, because the bank giggled when looking at the hippie built house. We built a new house, a new shop, new outbuildings, all from cash flow from our various businesses. All that, without making any local sales of any consequence. NOBODY comes here and buys anything. Almost no retail sales in our state. It all goes out via internet or sales calls we make on occasional sales trips to touristy areas, plus a few craft shows.

Many of our customers are crafters (we also make and sell tools for silversmiths, woodturners, etc.) and even in times like these, woodturners who make stuff like game calls are often selling 2K per weekend at shows. They DO have to travel to the shows, but they have fun and make money.

My suggestion wold be to develop a product or service that you can make exellent money on. If you have a string of, say, 30 accounts that you wholesale a product to, you are far more secure than with a job. If one of those accounts goes out of business or gets ticked at you, you can simply replace them or reduce your spending temporarily.If your boss does either of the same things, your are without an income until you find another job.

We moved clear across New Mexico ( North to South) when we moved here, and never lost a client. They didn't care where we lived, because we made a monthly delivery to the shops, covering two states. We never started our delivery run until we could deliver at least $1000 per each day we would be gone. That was roughly 1/2 our income, with the other half being fairly local deliveries. Average sale around $400. This is the touristy stuff, not the tools. The tools are always shipped, sold on the internet through Ebay and our website.

Also, always look at local natural resources. We had a gig when we lived in Southern Arizona where we harvesed dead Manzanita branches with forest service permits, cut it to size, bleached it and shipped semi trailer loads to a bird cage manufacturer for bird perches. Hard work, but the kids all helped and we could make up to $1000 per day for a few weeks out of the year. Then, we started selling it in the fall to flourist shops, which extended the time we could work that business. Then, the flourist shops started asking for other dried plants that "looked good and aren't buggy". It climbed from there. Missletoe from local trees at Christmas time we wholesaled to Christmas tree lots. Then some of them wanted 5 foot Manzanita trees so they could make artificial trees by adding rubber foliage. Whatever you do like that tends to keep expanding, and flourist shops are nice, happy people to work with and expect to pay for what they get.

Below is a linl ( or address) of a thread I started and pursued for a long time because it was so popular on a board i used to post on. I still get emails from folks who read it all the way through several years later. Anyone considering self employment on a shoestring should consider at least sampling it.....Joe

http://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb...nt-way-170955/

There are few people that sew or do alterations. Get in with a dry cleaning business and get set up to do mending/alterations for their customers. If you live close enough to enough small towns, you'll be surprised how many customers you'll have. Then you'd only have to deliver to one or two spots by using the dry cleaners as a go-between. It's easy to learn , takes little investment to get set up and you'd be working at home with very little overhead. My daughter does this in Idaho. A very small town and she can't do all the work that is offered to her. She is partnered with a wedding dress shop and does all their alterations. They also sell prom dresses so she's really busy right now. Her name gets spread around and with absolutely no advertising, she has too much work to do. She has 2 kids and is also taking college classes at the same time. She averages $16 per hour but actually charges by the alteration. Replacing a zipper or hemming - every thing has a set price. She usually sews 4 hours a day during the week and maybe 6 on Sat when her DH is home to watch the kids.

By a small town I do mean a small town under 5000 that is located at least 15miles or so from any other larger place. For example, Pelion and Gilbert SC have about 600 residents each but they are in close proximity to Columbia SC that people can drive there to work. Gilberts medin income is 47,000. Land prices there are not much cheaper than those lets say in any other Greater Columbia Area and sometimes even higher.
While I probably would not set out by myself with kids in tow, I do get frustrated with hubby at times to thin about this option and entertain ideas on how I could make a living by myself without sacrificing my dreams. I have been looking on craislist at properties that cost the least, that one could potentially afford, like 5 acres at 30,000. But still one has to make money to pay for this and by looking at our expenses, it makes it hard to imagine that I could do this. I have read all of those articles about living on 14,000 a year and I could totally do this, but again those articles are written by people who have their house paid off!

As a single mom in a very small town (not even a stoplight, just a 2-way stop sign) I have waitressed, bartended, cleaned houses, all sorts of things for an industrious gal to do. You just have to learn to bank money during the busy seasons for the not-so-busy seasons. Currently, my kids are grown and I work 3-5 days at a very small machine shop (I am the only employee), run a housekeeping service with a friend of mine and do screenprinting at my home. If you want it bad enough, have an imagination and are willing to do whatever needs done, you can make it happen.

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I am still confused about the whole affiliate program thing. http://www.centraliaej.com/index.html This is my Dad's website. He kind of suckered me into helping him with it, since he is not ... quite.... computer illiterate. I made a few simple HTML websites a few years ago for fun and he thinks I'm some guru. Great. I told him I didn't know what I was doing, and that my original forays into that arena netted absolutely nothing and that from what I could see that it only made money for.... well, somebody else and NOT ME. He was hoping to make a few hundred or so per month to make his Social Security check not be so painfully tiny. I told him to keep dreaming. So he bought some book off an infomercial (Dad, did you REALLY????), and then bought some $900 software from that book and infomercial (No, you DIDN'T!), and then he was plugging a hundred bucks here, fifty there for paying Google adwords and others like it, which I can't figure out for the life of me. I told him that the competition is just pretty fierce on those sort of things and that the big companies have bigger money to pay to make sure their ad gets on first, and that his will be Waaaaaaaaaay down on the line, and that most people are impulse clickers... they see the first page or MAYBE the second page and they find something and go with it. People on the web are impatient! Facebook advertising worked a LOT better, but they dinged him for advertising those smoke free cigarrettes and he shyed away from it. So I set up the page as best I could with my very limited knowledge, and I set him to work writing blog-type articles. He has gotten a little bit done. I figure that his articles about shoes would be just as dry as mine. I read some of his stuff, and he isn't as organized at his writing, but he is funnier, and it comes FROM HIM, which is way better.

So I am not so keen on those affiliate programs these days. My Dad finally stopped plunking money into Andrew Whoever, and just started plowing through and trying to understand how it works, which is all I was doing anyways and I tried to tell him that. Maybe he just needed a push. If you have pointers on Affiliates... I'm all ears.

As far as things that make money in the country. I am no expert at making money, and I have a hard time sticking to things because I've been a single mom for 12 years and now caretaking a man-child as well. My life is not my own, so projects that I want to do have to be centered around home and flexible.

We have had short term success making a little money or bartering for goods in a small town through Craigslist. I actually use Craigslist a LOT. I find free stuff on there we can use, like old fence lumber, or old windows for greenhouses. I raise a few rabbits, so I will occassionally even sell a rabbit or two and that buys a bag of feed. Yay. The best thing in demand was pigs, here. However, our place is small, just an acre, so large pigs were both too much for me as a short woman to handle alone, and they also killed the ground too quick, forcing me to move fencing more often than I could manage alone. Working the ground: good. Working the ground so fast I can't keep up with fencing: Bad. I went back to little pigs after I got run over again by the big pigs. That HURTS. Piglets were in big demand here in Western WA. At that time no one had any money, so I bartered for a bunch of fencing and lumber in exchange for a mature ewe, her whether, and my four big pigs of varying sizes.

My husband was blessed to find a fellow homesteader down the road that works as a carpenter. He does side jobs with him occassionally, but note that they run to the big city in Seattle area and spend the night, in order to make the money. For hubby, it was $200 bucks for two days, and he didn't have to drive.

We made garden benches, flower pots, birdhouses mounted on poles... I have rabbit compost coming out of my ears. I did housekeeping occassionally until I had to come in closer to home. I have done craft items and sold on Craigslist, Etsy, or Ebay. Again, these are all not huge money makers by themselves. There are lots of things that can be done, if you look around you and see what your resources are. That's my biggest thing is that I am so dirt poor and have been for so long, I tend to look at what other people throw away, or what I already have a lot of and I think... "How can this be used?"

For instance: I had bartered last year for a bunch of industrial boxes of veggies to feed the pigs. The pigs excreted out seeds, which sprouted up wonderfully in the hot piggy fertilizer. I sold them cheap, a dollar a piece, when they got to be about six inches high. I put the seedlings carefully into rolled up plastic bread bags, as I had hundreds of those as well. The same person that gave me veggies also gave me old bakery bread for the piggies. So I laid out pepper plants, tomato plants, and squash, etc. on boards laid on barrels and sold them for a buck a piece. People couldn't resist the dollar price tag, and I didn't pay one red cent for any of it, so it was all profit. It works!

I have seen people paint pet rocks, if you're a good artist. There's always something. After being stuck at home and stuck broke for so long, you learn to get desperate and think outside the box.

For us, you have to drive an hour each way to get to town, where the jobs are, and a lot of those are part timers and/or minimum wage. Even at full time, I would be gone twelve, fourteen hours a day to make 1000-1200 a month. $300 of that would go to gas. There IS no bus line to town, or at least not in a reasonable time frame or flexible. Plus, there is the extra expenses I would spend on my kid because I'm not there. Dinner would be bought, not fixed. Clothes would be bought in a hurry, not mended or made, or go to thrift store. I wouuld be stressed and mean as a snake. Been there, done that. Paid the ridiculous rent for a postage stamp sized apartment that I shared with my kid. Got up at 4 a.m. to ship her off to her Grampa's for the day, slid into home at o-dark thirty, and wondered why my kid was getting into so much trouble at school... Got into trouble with my boss for having to take care of my kid...

Ya, I was making more money, but.... WAS I???? At what cost?

For all intensive purposes, I live the life of a worthless bum. I stay at home with a high school kid and my husband picks up side work or occassionally, an actual full time grunt labor job. I do the animals. Our property is paid in full and we only have to worry about taxes. We are working on getting off grid, so when that happens we won't pay power or water, either. We feed ourselves. We barter or pay pennies for feed, or I scrounge stuff from Craigslist. We are remodeling our junker trailer house.

I go to bed and sleep HARD at night. I know RIGHT where my kid is.

Define "rich." That's all I gotta say.

you have the mechanics down, but the pages there are far from something someone would want to visit or share with a friend.

if you want a good example of a page that is really worth visiting AND makes affiliate money then check this one out

http://www.richsoil.com/cast-iron.jsp (not my site)

they make money with amazon, ebay, and others on there and it's super valuable info for the visitor

affiliate marketing is not a scam, many people are making good money from out on the farm using it, just like everything else, takes some time and some practice.

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ex-suburbanite, homesteading in Kentucky on 6 acres, learning as I go.

That's true, Google Adwords is extremely competitive. If you are trying to draw customers to make immediate sales then Adwords is cost-prohibitive. You will never pay for that placement at $1 per clickthrough, which is what you'll have to pay for the best targeted keywords.

The pitfall is in thinking that if someone else is making money off of those clickthroughs that you can also make money doing it. But some companies are doing it for brand recognition, not immediate sales. They have a large budget to keep their name in the public eye. You can't compete with that.

I found that I was getting about the same conversion rate (sales per unique visitor) with Adwords as I was getting from organic search engine visits, about 1 sale per 200 visitors. Even at 50 cents per clickthrough I would have been paying $100 per subscriber. I could buy all the subscribers I wanted on the open market for half that.

You have to look at advertising analytically. If you don't you'll lose your shirt.

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My great-great grandmother made a living as a seamstress. I work as a writer via the internet and have done freelance work for companies all over the world. A neighbor of mine is a welder and has more work coming to his farm than he can keep up with. Whatever skills you have use them to make a living, small towns/communities need those skills too and are much less likely to want to drive to the city to get them done. And like others said the internet allows you to make a living working all over the world without ever leaving the woods. Blessings, Kat

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Come visit Homesteading and Homekeeping at Whisperwind Farm

We live in a small town, pop 1,600. We live 23 miles away from a larger town and have developed a commercial bakery here on our farm. We also grow asparagus and blueberries and have a large garden for our own usage. We bake on 2 days a weeks and take it into town to sell to offices and such. We also sell at the farmer's market and pack it all into this larger town once a week during the summer. We do fabulous! And have developed it all - one loaf of bread at a time. We do not have our 46 acre farm paid for - we do however, have a regular pension to help us out. The blueberries aren't fully mature but the asparagus is. Great cash crop BTW....

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Be a fountain, not a drain!

^()^
http://tubbsfarmstead.com/

............I live in a small community about 10 miles sw of ft. Worth,tx ! I work as a gate guard , 12 hour shifts 7 to 7 , 3 days a week with a different schedule . Doesn't pay a whole lot but it supplements my SS which isn't enough to live on so I just keep working as long as my health allows . , fordy

One thing to consider, as a single woman with children living in a small town and working...it is OFTEN likely, that if your car dies, you may not be able to get to work and your job dies. Then you're stuck somewhere with no car, no job prospects and family services breathing down your neck.

In a larger town, there is more likely to be public transportation to get to that job that pays to get your car repaired. Your expenses will be more, but you will hold on to that job. You can even get TWO jobs! If you REALLY want to move out to semi-nowhere, use your city job, save money, educate yourself in something that will provide you a job in the middle of semi-nowhere and THEN move.

Mon

Mon