Many people share the dream of working from home. No getting up early to travel to a job you dislike, no working late at a place where you really don’t want to be. No more commuting through a billiard or heavy down pours though tons or early morning traffic or traveling home in bad weather in the evening's bumper to bumper rush hour. No more sitting in a cubical or standing on an assembly line. No more fancy attire or makeup or fancy hair styles. No more rushing down your lunch because you have to rush back to work. No more pain in the 'bee-hind' boss. The idea of never punching a clock again sounds like the perfect job to almost everyone.
The concept of working from home is not new there are companies that have allowed their employees to work from home for years. Some people work from home one or more days a week and computers have helped make working from home even easier.
Working from home appeals to stay at home moms, retirees, anyone between jobs, people who are tired of the job they have, disabled or physically challenged workers, college students or anyone caring for an elderly parent or ill family member.
There are many types of stay at home jobs available and we will talk about a few of them here. One such work at home job is telephone services that’s provided by such companies as:
These companies provide services to airlines, financial institutions, catalog retailers and even the IRS. Chances are when you call an 800 number, you’re talking to someone sitting in the comforts of their home - or India.
As an agent you can set your own hours working about 20 – 25 hours a week. You can add hours during the holidays if you wish to make some extra cash. You can also or work late nights, midday or a combination. Qualifications for an agent are:
- High-speed Internet access
- A land line so you can handle calls
- A quiet working area – ringing doorbells, the television, crying babies and barking dogs in the background are strictly forbidden.
IDC a research group predicts that by 2010 the number of home based phone representatives could reach more than 300,000 as more companies recognize the financial savings of using home-based agents instead of operating expensive call centers to handle customer service inquiries.
Other places to look for work that can be done from home are freelance marketplaces. These websites are where thousands of people go each week looking for people to do work for them. There are many different types of jobs, such as writer, web designer, secretary, book keeper and so much more. Don’t think you have the skills? Don’t let that stop you from checking it out. There are many companies and individuals looking for people to do jobs for them and many will teach you how to do the jobs they need done.
Here are just a few companies offering work at home jobs:
Ever thought of opening an online store? You can open one for as little as $16 dollars a month. Here are some of the top online places to open your store:
- Ebay - is one of the best online stores you can own for it’s price, a mere $16 dollars a month. What they give you for that $16 is more then enough to build a very successful online business.
- Yahoo! makes it easy - 35% off for a limited time!
- Sell on Amazon
- another great place to open a store and start an at home business.
You can also get items from tag sales or ‘take it or leave it’ areas at your town or surrounding towns transfer stations – which is just a fancy name for city dump. Don’t be turned off by this, you’re not going to go dig through those high sea gull infested piles of garbage. Not only would you look pretty silly, you'd smell really bad also. You’re going to an area where people bring things that are too good to toss out (at least they think so) and they don’t want to bother selling it. And you won’t believe some of the things you’ll find there. There are people that hang out at these stations on the heavy dump days and they pick up some really great stuff – for free.
Don’t want to do tag sales or ‘take it or leave it’ areas? Ran out of things around the house to sell? Well you can always do ‘Drop Shipping’. This is when you purchase items from a wholesaler and the wholesaler ships the item to your customer. First you advertise the item on your website, Ebay or blog. When someone purchases the item from you, you pay the wholesaler the wholesale price for the item and pocket the difference and the wholesaler ships the item to your customer. Sweet.
Drop shipping is an article and a half all by itself and way out of the scope of this article so I won’t get into that much here. Just be aware that you can have a very profitable business using this method. I will explore this topic in further detail in another article.
These are just a few ways to work from home online and make really good money. Although there may be others, I believe these to be the quickest and simplest for anyone that’s not really computer savvy. Don’t misunderstand me when I say ‘quickest and simplest’, if you want to have fun then they can be just that. However if you wish to build a real business that either supplements an income or earns you a living, there is no ‘Get Rich Quick’ scheme, you have to work at it. So don’t waste your time and money looking for one.
I’d also warn you to stay away from any website that offers a ‘Complete Internet Store’ which is the website and all the products to sell. These typically don’t work because they’ve sold them to thousands of others and you’re all selling the same thing - which is usually cheap crappy stuff no one wants anyway. Most importantly the site can’t be optimized for the search engines so it’ll never ever be found by anyone. It’s just going to sit there never getting any customers. Although this very easy way of opening a web store may be tempting – don’t do it, it’ll be a total waste of your money and time.
With some research, hard work and persistent dedication you can create a business that will allow you to 'Work from Home Forever'.
