In today’s modern world, you can earn money without ever stepping into a business office. Just think about this for a minute – no more cafeteria lunches, no more tiny cubicles, no more lame office parties, no more bad-tempered co-workers and no more bosses looking over your shoulder. Instead, it’s just you sitting at home in front of your computer and, in many cases, working whatever hours you choose.
Q. Are you cut out for a working at home job?
A. The only person who can answer this question is … you. Before you leap into the work-at-home world, you need to think about how you are as a self-starter, how goal oriented you are and how you rank in terms of self discipline. If you rate yourself low in any of these categories then maybe working at home might not be for you.
Q. What are the major types of working at home jobs?
A. While there are many different types of working at home jobs the four major categories are.
- Independent contractor
- Remote worker
- Customer service
- Internet marketing
Q. What are independent contractor jobs?
A. Independent contractor jobs are those where you’re actually working on a contract that spells out your responsibilities, how long the job will last and how you will be compensated. These jobs tend to fall into one of two categories. The first is where you work through an agency but are basically in business for yourself. The second type is where you work directly for a company on a contract with no third-party involved.
Q. What are typical jobs for independent contractors?
A. There is really no typical independent contractor jobs. If you can name a type of job that requires a specific set of skills there is probably a contractor job that requires them. For example, there are independent contractor jobs for software developers, article and e-book authors, web designers, network architects, circuit designers, data entry, engineering, technical writing and graphic design. If you have good skills in some area you can probably find a job as an independent contractor that would require them.
Q. What do independent contractors earn?
A. Just as there are many different types of jobs for independent contractors; there are many different salaries. However, they tend to be higher for independent contractors than full-time employees because independent contractors are required to pay two taxes – one as an employee and one as an employer. But as a general rule, the more experience and skills a job requires, the more it pays. As an example of this, here are eight typical types of jobs for independent contractors and what they generally pay.
- Technical writer: $10 -$35 an hour
- Website designer: $15- $35 an hour
- Creative writing: $15 – $35 an hour
- Web design: $16 – $38 an hour
- Social media marketer: $16 – $22 an hour
- Email marketing: $4 – $33 an hour
- Personal assistant: $5 -$15 an hour
- Risk and reliability engineering: $250 /job
- Develop web-based Bitcoin Slot Machine: $1601/job
- Java/J2EE Developer: $9865/3 months
Q. How would I get a job as an independent contractor?
A. Just go to and browse job and project offers on any of the leading sites for independent contracting jobs. You should definitely check out Rentacoder, Odesk, Elance and Freelancer. But don’t stop with these four. There are others you will find if you search Google on the term “work at home jobs for independent contractors.”
Q. What are remote worker jobs?
A. Remote work is generally described as working from home or being a telecommuter. These jobs are different from being an independent contractor because you actually work for a company, complete with a manager, assigned hours and specific duties.
Remote work offers the ability to work from just about anywhere in the world. To do this type of work all you need is a phone, a high-speed Internet connection, the ability to email and some other at-home technologies. You can find remote jobs in just about any industry or career field. Some of the most popular of these jobs are administrative, customer service, sales and medical/health.
If you’d like to know more about telecommuting jobs, be sure to watch this video.
Q. What do these jobs pay?
A. Like jobs for independent contractors, remote worker salaries vary all over the board – depending on the skills and experience required. The largest number of remote worker jobs can usually be found in the customer service industry. These jobs typically average from $7.50 to $16 an hour. Some of the companies that hire customer service reps as remote workers include:
- Adecco
- CSC
- NCO group
- Apple (yes, Apple hires remote customer service reps)
- ACD Direct
- Voicelog
- LiveOps
Q. How could I get one of these jobs?
A. Many companies hire remote customer service reps. Here are seven sites that specialize in these jobs.
- www.indeed.com
- www.womenforhire.com
- www.flexjobs.com
- Apple.com
- www.odesk.com/find-work-home/
- www.teletechjobs.com/
- www.babytobee.com
Q. What about Internet marketing as a way to work at home?
A. Internet marketing can be a great way to work at home because there’s actually no ceiling as to how much you can earn. We know of Internet marketers that earned $5000 or more in a single day and others who regularly earn thousands of dollars a month. But there is a big but here. But it’s very unlikely that you’ll earn this kind of money right from the get-go. In fact, what’s likely is that you won’t earn much of anything for several months or even several years. As a rule, Internet marketing divides into these categories.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is where you create a website and promote the products of other companies – working something like a sales agent. The most popular form of this is to become an affiliate of Amazon.com where you could then promote any of its thousands of products. Three other websites where you can find companies to promote (market) include Commission Junction, Share-A-Sale and LinkShare. In all of these cases, you promote products with links to Amazon or whatever and then earn a commission when someone clicks on your link and buys a product. Amazon commissions tend to be on the low side as you would earn only 6% on the first 1-6 products shipped or downloaded in a month and 6% for 7-30 products. In comparison, companies you would find through a site like Share-A-Sale might earn you 10% to 15% on every product you sold
Information marketing
As the name implies, information marketing is selling information. This could be your own information or it could be information created by other marketers. As an example of this, the site www.clickbank.com has information products from hundreds of different people and companies. If you successfully sell these products on your website, you would earn commissions as high as 50%. Of course, it’s better to sell your own information because then you’d get 100% of the sale.
Drop shipping
This form of Internet marketing seems to have fallen a bit out-of-favor over the past few years but can still be a moneymaker. The way it works is that you choose a company that you want to work with and then sell its products on your website. When you make a sale you transfer the order to the wholesaler or manufacturer who then ships the product directly to the consumer. In effect, you serve as a retailer and your profit is the difference between the wholesale price of the item and whatever it is you can sell it for.
Creating and selling your own products
This can be a very lucrative way to make money at home because when you do this – as noted above – you get to keep 100% of the sale. This can be either information or an actual product. There are hundreds of people making good money by writing and selling everything from short reports to e-books. You could also earn good money by making and selling anything from homemade jam to wooden chests and from handmade jewelry to hand-carved toys.
Website marketing
This is a sort of misleading title because what it really consists of is building a website or websites where you display ads from Google and earn money every time someone clicks on one of them. This is called Adsense and they are the little five-line ads that appear on the right-hand side of almost every Google results page. Each time someone clicks on an Adsense ad on your website, you would earn anywhere from a few cents to several dollars. The biggest downside of AdSense is that you have no control over which ads Google puts on your site. They could be very appropriate or not so appropriate in which case you would earn very little if anything.
Q. How could I get into Internet marketing?
A. One very big positive of Internet marketing is that it requires very little money to get started. All you need is to buy a domain name at a site such as www.namecheap.com for as little as $10.95 and then find a company to host your site. We have used both www.GoDaddy.com and www.hostgator.com. Their costs are roughly the same or about $10 a month to host almost an unlimited number of websites. You could then use the free program WordPress to create your site. It is by far the most popular site creation tool available and makes it just about drop-dead simple to create sites. Plus, there are hundreds of free “plugins” available for use with WordPress you could use to make your site more effective and more powerful.
Q. How much could I earn with Internet marketing?
A. There’s a simple answer to this question – this sky’s the limit. If you have the smarts, patience and time you could earn literally thousands of dollars a month. But as noted above, this is not likely to happen right away. You may need to experiment with several different forms of Internet marketing and a number of different products before you get a real “hit.” But when you do, it can become an absolutely amazing thing called passive income. In other words, the money just keeps rolling in 24/7 whether you’re at your computer, asleep in bed or on a beach somewhere.
