Not long ago, when my son was about two months old, I began to feel confident in my ability to care for him. I started to feel like I could incorporate other things back into my life now that I knew what I was doing in the area of baby care. It was time to turn myself into a WAHM.
One of the first things that I did was conduct an Internet search to see what opportunities or ideas I could find. It did not take long for me to realize that moms (and dads) that are seeking work at home opportunities are the target of many scams.
As embarrassed as I am to admit this, I almost fell victim to one of these scams. I’m not sure if was really a scam but it definitely falls under the category of “paying money for something that you can get for free,” and in my mind that is not a good thing. When I Googled “work at home opportunities”, quite a few results appeared for freelance writing. Since I have always enjoyed writing, and believe that I can write well, I decided to take a look at a few of them. One of them got my attention and I read through all of the information. Before long, I was sitting there entering my credit card number and agreeing to pay money each month to access listings for freelance writing jobs.
As I excitedly looked through the job postings I noticed that all of them were links that took me to other sites to view the jobs. In order to bid on the jobs, I needed to sign up for the sites that the jobs were actually posted on, like Elance. I then realized that the sites that I was signing up for, so that I could bid on writing jobs were free to join, at least on a basic level where I could bid on a few jobs each month. Why, then, would I pay to access a web site with writing job listings when I could simply log in to Elance or some other sites to view and bid on jobs for free. Immediately, I called the web site that I had signed up for, cancelled my membership, and got a refund.
Next, I decided to look at the job postings on Elance to see what kinds of jobs were available. I’ll admit that I was a bit skeptical about what kinds of jobs I would be able to bid on with a free, basic membership and even more skeptical about whether or not I would be able to win any of the jobs that I placed bids on. Fortunately my inner optimist pushed my inner skeptic out of the way and I located some interesting jobs and bid on them. The rest is history.
Now that I look back on it, it is kind of funny that something that started out with me almost getting ripped off turned into something that I am succeeding at and enjoying very much. Unfortunately, there are many scams out there that can dupe even the most educated and well-meaning home business person. If you have stories about work at home scams or have paid for information that you later were able to get for free, please feel free to share your experiences with me.