Services similar to Yahoo! Answers are a great place to search for work from home jobs and home work ideas. The process: you register with the service and post your questions and members do their best to answer your question to help you. I would suggest you to go to the archive and make a search – I know there were a few similar discussions in the past. As a sample, here is a recent talk at MetaFilter where the website members share their experience about job search for work from home. What opportunities and options do stay at home moms have? Just a short summary of the discussion:

- become a booking agent (the reference to the story about the budget airline Jet Blue using booking agents who work from home).

- become an eBay seller (but it was a failure and the woman ended up taking a part-time job doing on-line tutoring).

- organize its client’s press clippings. This requires her to get up very early in the morning, read the local dailies and occasionally some trade mags, cuts the articles out, and then scan and pdf them.

- work for a call-center: there are tons of it. Most of the larger (and smarter) telecoms manufacturers have developed IP-based call center applications specifically to reduce the number of persons in a call center – which are the greatest source of overhead. Many clients are moving to this strategy because it’s easier to pay at-home call takers a little less, and the ancillary savings (insurance, lower turnover) make this a near no-brainer for call centers worldwide.

- do medical transcription, but it usually requires certification for familiarity with medical terms.

- become a phone sex operator (successful members are mentioned). But how ethical and legal is this?

- do proof-reading or editing documents from home, per page. They’re heavily used by international business men who aren’t confident in their written English and are willing to pay to have letters, etc. proof-read. They email you a bunch of documents, you edit them and return them, and they pay you something.

- contact career services at a university nearby and read up online at Monster.com, etc.

- do some translation work

In addition to work options the members share their success stories and failures and it makes your choice easier. For instance, you will be more careful about joining eBay (neglecting unlimited number of e-books how to become rich with eBay in no time and with no cent of investment) once you are through with this post.

[tag]Work from home jobs, stay at home job, translation, transcription, call center, sex operator, eBay, booking agent, career, employment, home job, home work[/tag]

Blogging is a popular way to generate income working at home. The essence of this business model: select a topic, write about it, cover it properly and collect advertising dollars.

As with any other business it takes time to learn and improve your skills in blogging, but it can be very rewarding. In this post I will cover the steps required to start and grow your blogging business.

1. Niche or topic selection. What are you going to write about? Here you should keep in mind both parties: yourself (you should be familiar with the topic) and the readers (they should find something in your blog, otherwise they will not read it). This should help you with your topic research:

• Alexa Top 100
• Google Answers: see what people pay for
• AssociatePrograms.com: check new programs
• Check stats at http://www.clickz.com/stats/
• Websites for sale: topics, traffic & revenue details
• WordTracker.com reports: what people search
• Check forum sections: need services/ will buy
• eBay.com What’s Hot
• Shopping.com consumer demand index; MySimon top searches (1000)
• 7Search.com top paying keywords
• Investigate affiliate networks
• Study high paying keyword lists
• Amazon: hot selling books (topics) and products
• ClickBank.com: subscribe to Affiliate Alert
• Find niche forums: explore FAQ, user’s signatures in posts
• Yahoo! Buzz Index, AOL Search: hot searches monthly, Lycos hot 50
• Google Zeitgeist
• Picks.yahoo.com/picks
• Del.icio.us (most popular tags), Slashdot.com, Digg.com: angles/ buzz/ trends
• Blog Buzz Index (search for stories rapidly propagating through blogs): www.technorati.com/pop/news/, www.blogpulse.com/trends.html
• Feedtser top 500: www.top500.feedster.com/
• Bloglines.com

2. Get a cheap domain name and hosting for your blog.

• I would recommend to check www.godaddy.com and www.moniker.com to acquire a domain name and hosting
• Mosr popular and free blogging software: WordPress, MovableType, Blogger.com, TypePad, bBlog, Nucleus

3. Blog promotion – the hardest part. You need to build a stream of traffic to your blog that will help earn your adv dollars. Your blog is new so do not expect much free traffic from the top search engine – Google (due to its ‘sandbox’ effect). You should focus on other traffic techniques. Hopefully this will help:

• PPC (pay-per-click search engines)
• Del.icio.us & other social networking websites – add your blog posts weekly
• Much good content
• Many quality links
• Viral marketing
• Press releases. Find angles monthly.
• Tests for $ (buy links; sites; expired domains; directory listings)
• e-Mail marketing
• Adv in e-zines
• Focus on getting FREE traffic from Yahoo!, MSN, other SE
• Return, loyal visitors: give a number of reasons to come back
• Adv at the related forums (where it is allowed): in your signature – the link to your blog
• Banner adv
• Classifieds (incl. Craigslist).
• Award sites in your niche (top 100 sites, top 10 sites, etc)
• Mega traffic mega quick: try to get your posts featured on the 1st page of www.bored.com, www.digg.com, www.slashdot.org, www.shoutwire.com, www.ebaumsworld.com, www.fark.com)
• Alexa top 100 most trafficked sites: need to discover ways to get your tiny traffic stream from them:

4. Monetization. What are the ways to collect money for all your efforts? It depends on the topic, but some combination of the below methods is a good approach:

• CPC – cost per click (top players: Adsense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, Chitika)
• CPA – cost per action (top players: Commision Junction, LinkShare, Shareasale, ClickBank)
• CPM – cost per impression (top players: TribalFusion, Casale, FastClick, BurstMedia)
• Link sales (top players: AdBrite, linkworth.com, linkadage.com, textlinkbrokers.com, text-link-ads.com)

5. An extra step (bonus): best resources that properly cover all described steps and help to be current on the development of blogosphere:

Problogger.net
Performancing.com

Just research each step and make blogging model a nice income generation business to enjoy.

[tag]blogging, blog, home businesss, home job, home income, self-employment, affiliate income, blog software, affiliate programs, website traffic, website marketing, promotion[/tag]

Most home business ideas are well known and properly covered at every website that deals with home jobs. What are those well-known home business opportunities?

• typing,
• data entry
• drop shipping (through eBay or your own website),
• completing surveys,
• surfing the web
• MLM
• Internet Marketing and Affiliate Marketing,
• stuffing envelopes,
• making cold calls

Also work for:

• freelance graphics designers
• developers
• website optimizers
• translators
• copy writers

In fact, the top providers of these jobs are listed at our left side bar. I have probably missed some – just remind me to complete the list.

And what if we try to extend that list and start a separate category of our blog – Home Based Business Idea Directory – where we will place some unusual ideas for home income generating. You are welcome to send us your ideas or to share your experience. I just ask you to submit working models – the ones that can really generate income. The ideas should be suitable to operate from home. The ideas should not be universal – what is good for some people can be entirely inappropriate for others. So, do not focus on this feature.

I have placed a link at our left bar (see at the bottom) for you to e-mail us your ideas. Probably, we will arrange a contest for best home business ideas – the winners will certainly get prizes. Let’s make a valuable directoty that would help us to earn our living from home (better if it would make us rich, but we should not lose our contact with reality).

[tag]home idea, home business idea, home based job, home based job ideas, business ideas[/tag]