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]

Internet home jobs sector is notorious for a high percent of scam programs and websites. It is an easy way to get free labor force online and it is a hard task to find and punish the scammer. So, pre-screened and recommended services and sites are really valuable.

Data entry jobs are popular among home job seekers. But where to start the search keeping in mind all those scam stories?

I would recommend turning to freelance sites that list data entry jobs and that have some service provider rating system to protect you from scam.

Example:

Rent a coder

Another way is to address the companies that deal with data entry business.  Gaye Laing was kind enough to share a list of reputable companies that provide data entry jobs.

The list:

Axion Data Services
Cypher Litigation Coding
OnSite E-Discovery
DionData Services
CyberSecretaries

The list is certainly not exhaustive, but it gives you some food to digest and some way to go. I will publish extra pre-screened companies as soon as I find them.

[tag]data entry jobs, data entry, home job, contracted work, home based[/tag]

While I try to cover miscellaneous home jobs I made up my mind to provide a more systematic approach to our posts. What kind of home job categories is out there? I could count three despite of my hard efforts to count more all jobs I could think about would fall into one of three categories I could define:

1. Freelance: contracted work (outsourcing). You find a short term (as a rule) job provided by some outside employer who pays some fixed amount (or fixed hourly rate) for your services.

Samples: web design, data entry, transcription, translation, forum posting, link building, blog writing, etc.

2. Telecommuting: long term job for some employer. The only difference from a traditional job is that you work from your home, probably with occasional visits to the company office.

Samples: any job you can do from home and office.

3. Home based job: your own business. You sell your service or products for yourself. As you do it from your home most home based businesses are in this way or another PC focused.

Samples: eBay business, drop ship stores, affiliate marketing (i.e. dropshiparea.com), crafts, photography, etc.

Certainly, you can combine all three types in your work (as I try to do with dropshiparea.com) to maximize and diversify your revenue streams.

[tag]home job, home based job, freelance, business, telecommute, outsourcing,  contracted work[/tag]