Just because you’ve left the workforce to be a stay at home mom doesn’t necessarily mean you can turn off that desire to bring in more income.  Your time and focus is now on your new baby but even with the constraints of taking care of the little one, there are still plenty of opportunities to make a few dollars at  home.  Try any or all of these to see which one fits your personality and lifestyle the best.

Selling on eBay is a great way to earn a few extra dollars.  It will take a short learning curve to get the hang of posting auctions, finding and prepping items for sale and concluding the first couple transactions.  Once you get the hang of it, you can scale up to posting a few auctions each and every day.  eBay is also a good place to unload any clothing or toys that your child has recently outgrown.

Writing for online article directories is a great way to pull in extra cash.  If you like to write and can create articles, you can submit them to Associated Content and get paid anywhere from $3 to $20 or more per article.  Be prepared for the payments to generally be on the low end of the scale.  AC is free to join and they even pay a little extra if your portfolio of articles generates a lot of viewers.  Some authors have thousands of articles and receive a check from AC each month.

The wide open field of internet marketing is quietly making some people full time salaries.  In a nutshell, you create an internet presence, like a website or a blog, and you either promote a product as an affiliate or you sell advertising on your site to individuals or networks (like Google’s AdWords – which is free to join, by the way).  The trick is not only putting the site together in the first place but in getting people to visit your site.

Google’s AdSense program is the other side of the AdWords coin.  You can earn a full time living by placing advertisements for products that you promote.  Be sure to start small, though.  You can get burned by a run-away ad campaign if you don’t have the proper controls in place.  If you’re good with numbers and spreadsheets, though, this should be right up your alley.

If you have the skills to go freelance in your chosen field, set up a profile at elance.com or guru.com and bid on jobs offered there.  Writing, copywriting, graphic design and web design are skills that will be in need no matter what the ‘economic climate’ is.

Money making ideas are not limited to what you can do online.  You could provide daycare or babysitting services for others in your area.  There are dozens of non-internet based home-based businesses like catering, interior decorating, direct sales and parties.  Accounting and tax prep, insurance and advertising sales are some of the more common ‘old school’ work at home jobs you can consider as well.