Working from home seems to be the Holy Grail of jobs. Who doesn’t want to work from home? The jobs are advertised everywhere: On TV, in magazines, and all over the Internet. In almost all of the ads, very little work is ever shown as being done (I still haven’t found a job that I can do while having a two year old sit on my lap, despite the photo shots in these ads to the contrary) and flashy red sports cars seem to be much more important to the people running these ads than the time spent in front of the computer. Do a quick search online at Google, and you will get over 4 million hits for the phrases “work at home” or “work from home.” But once you start reading those sites, you will begin to see a common pattern emerge: Almost all of them are scams or MLM (multi-level marketing) schemes. Where are the real jobs? Surely there are real jobs out there that you can do from home.
The good news is, there are most definitely real jobs that you can do from home. They are hard(er) to find than the schemes, and I’m sure there are 99 scams for every real job, but if working from home is your dream, don’t give up. This is doable! Over the next couple of months, I will be spotlighting different jobs that you can do from home, and how to get started with those jobs.
But before we get to the details of the individual jobs, I wanted to do a brief overview of the job market in general, and what to expect if this is your goal. The very first thing that you need to do is stop doing searches for “work at home” jobs! This phrase is almost guaranteed to bring up 99% scams, and perhaps, if you’re lucky, 1% honest-to-goodness real jobs.
To bring up real jobs that you can really do and make real money at, do a search instead for “telecommuting.” The odds of finding a true job with the phrase “telecommuting” is actually very high.
So the next time you hit Google in search of a job to do from home, remember that the search words that you put in can make a huge difference in the results that you get back. But before you go trotting off to Google, please read on to my next blog, where I list some basic information about the most common work-at-home jobs available.