Understandably, there's no shortage of people who want to make their living from home. Many parents want to be able to stay at home with their children while contributing to household expenses. Others want to ditch world of long commutes and corporate politics. Still others have disabilities that may prevent them from working a 'regular' job.

Regardless of reasons, "work at home" is undeniably a hot topic. The International Telework Association and Council (ITAC) states that 19.6 million teleworked in Q3 1999. By 2003 that's projected to be a whopping 137 million worldwide!

Two ways to pursue a career from home are to either telecommute for an employer, or start your own home based business.

As editor of three newsletters, I regularly come into contact with people looking for at-home work. A large percentage of them prefer to work for an employer -- they like idea of having well-defined responsibilities and a regular pay cheque. They're not interested in ups and downs of building a business.

Thus many websites have sprung up claiming to offer telecommuting jobs. While it's possible to land one of these highly competitive positions, it's certainly not easy.

One of problems is simply oversaturation of market. Many people seeking at-home work are looking for clerical or administrative jobs; yet when I look through posted telecommuting jobs, I see primarily technical positions available. That said, would you be willing to go to school to get an education that may improve your chances of landing a work-at-home job?

The sure route to home business wealth is to think "multiple," as in multiple streams of income. You can easily develop new income streams if you do two things:

* find new ways to get customers; * add new products or services for sale.

Devising multiple streams of income should be a regular part of your strategic planning. I recommend you think hard about it at least every 90 days.

1) New Ways to Get Customers If your main source of business is Yellow Pages, for example, what happens if your phone goes dead tomorrow? Your business goes dead, too. It's happened to others. It's happened to me. And it WILL happen to you one day.

You can _easily_ avoid this migraine-waiting-to- happen!

How?

Set up at least two other sources of new business to support your main one. Start today. Here are some quick ideas:

* run low-cost classified ads in your local newspaper (or another paper, if you're already doing this); * give a seminar once a month and watch new business roll in -- you can literally "speak and grow rich" this way; * pay for Web site traffic from GoTo.com, Sprinks.com or another pay-per-click search engine; * start REALLY cultivating referrals from existing clients -- tell them how much you enjoy working with them and ask for names of friends who might want free information from you.