In today’s world there are so many more options than just working in a cubicle or behind a cash register. Maybe you are a teenager and you’re having a hard time finding your first job, or perhaps you’ve been recently laid off, disabled, or you’re a stay-at-home Mom and do not have the opportunity to work outside your home.
Whatever the case, if you want to set your own hours, work at home, and possibly have some fun then read on! We go over some of the best online self-employment opportunities here.
As with any of these at-home positions you will find key benefits and drawbacks.
Let’s take a look at some of them.
Key benefits include:
Can you think of some other benefits?
Drawbacks may include:
What other drawbacks do you see or have experienced?
If you find that working at home is for you, here is a list of opportunities you may want to consider:
The need for At-Home Call Center Reps is growing. This is a job opportunity with long-term growth potential. This type of at-home work involves answering in-coming calls for companies and can range from taking customer product orders to answering questions, or scheduling appointments. Many companies will allow you to work at-home as little as fifteen minutes a day to full-time hours each week. Some companies may want you to do the calling. It all depends on the needs of the company you work for. Always ask questions about the work involved and never pay any upfront fees to get started. Legitimate call center companies will pay and train you.
Some requirements for this type of work may include:
Optional but often necessary requirements are sales skills and data entry knowledge.
Some Equipment that is needed:
I tested LiveOps which is a Virtual Call Center. The registration process was quite easy. You have to fill out your basic contact and background information, take a reading comprehension test and record a voice audition. You do all of this online. If you are interested in trying out LiveOps start here
Some other Virtual Call Centers you might want to check out are West at Home (to apply), Working Solutions (to apply) and ACD Direct (to apply)
Online business owners need to drive more customers to their website to ensure a steady stream of potential buyers. Many business owners do this through blogs. Keeping content written for a blog is very time-consuming so many blog owners turn to freelance article or ghost writers.
This is where you come in! You can offer to write articles (from 400-1,000 words depending on the need) for small websites or blog owners. Usually you can get paid $10 to $20 per article, sometimes even more.
If you decide to become a ghost writer you will not get the credit for writing the article. You get paid to write articles for other people and they will put their name on the article.
Here are some categories you could write for:
Basically, you need to have experience and expertise in your chosen category. But that doesn’t mean you need to be an expert. What are you good at? What hobbies do you have that you could write about? Do you have a good writing style? Are you able to teach someone else what you know?
How do you find places to submit your work or bid on projects? Craigslist is a very popular site to find writing jobs. It is free to post a job and free to find one too. You can search in your local area or nationwide. Here are some other popular sites you may want to check out as well.
 
Many people enjoy running their own business from home. I was a computer consultant for years working out of my house. I taught classes at the local college but studied and wrote my lesson plans from home. I was and still do occasional web design work and all of that was done from home. There are a lot of freelance at-home opportunities if you look for them and you don’t want to be limited by the jobs you can do in your local area. The internet provides so many more opportunities.
One website you may want to consider is Guru.com. At Guru.com companies post freelance jobs and as a freelancer you can bid on them. Once you register and fill out your profile, submit a quote and once picked, work on projects. You get paid once the work is done. If you are just starting you may have to bid low to get a project but over time you will be able to raise your prices. As of this writing they had over 5,200 projects to bid on.
Basic membership is free but the asic account cannot upload Package Deals or a Video Profile. Their Services page will give you the breakdown of fees for their paid package deals. Once you login you fill out your profile and can also upload photos, your resume, samples of your work and videos. Guru.com charges all professionals either a 5% (Guru and Guru Vendor accounts) or 10% (Basic member) Project Fee.
Although this could also fit into the Freelance article writing category it encompasses so much more. They have all kinds of freelance talent categories including:
These are just some of the categories and I encourage you to visit their website and find the category that fits your talent and job skills best.
Etsy is an online marketplace similar to eBay but it is strictly for the buying and selling of handmade goods. If you have a talent for making anything from pillows to clothing, jewelry to baked goods, dog collars and everything in between then you can sell them on Etsy.
From their website:
“Our mission is to enable people to make a living making things, and to reconnect makers with buyers. Our vision is to build a new economy and present a better choice: Buy, Sell, and Live Handmade.”
Instead of buying something that is mass produced you can buy something on Etsy that doesn’t exist anywhere in the world. They have over a million visitors looking to buy and they are growing fast and it is free to join. There is a 30¢ fee to list items and a 3.5% fee on sold items.
If you don’t already have one, you should set up a PayPal account because it is easiest way to accept payments on Etsy. It is free to set up a PayPal account. Of course, PayPal takes a very small cut of the money you earn but without a service like PayPal you would have no way of taking online payments so the fee is worth it.
Once your items sell you have to ship them to your customers. If you use the post office you can get free USPS Priority boxes sent to your house. Just sign up online and the postal worker in your area will deliver them in about a week. You can sign up by going to USPS and clicking on Supplies.
When you sell online you should get a separate email address just for selling. It helps you keep your sales emails separate from your personal emails. There are many places to get a free email address.
While this is not really a job or career and you won’t get rich by filling out surveys, it is still an easy way to make some quick cash. Companies will pay you to fill out brief surveys or try their products. Usually you will make between $5 and $10 per survey and will often receive free product samples to test out. The key with paid surveys is to sign up with as many paid survey companies as you can. The more surveys you take the more money you are going to make.
These companies want to find out what you like and don’t like. They use the collective information and statistics from the surveys to help them decide who to market their products or services to. Large companies can spend millions on product research before putting them on the open market. They are willing to pay for your opinions and ideas to help them to figure out how to market their product.
It doesn’t cost anything to sign up to fill out surveys. Make sure you are using reputable companies though. If you are in doubt ask friends who take surveys for referrals or look for messages boards online where people are talking about taking surveys.
You should also set up a separate email account just for taking surveys to help you keep your personal email from getting mixed up with the survey email.
Here are some legitimate survey companies to get your started:
Of course, I think the best benefit of working at home is sitting at my computer typing away with my fuzzy slippers on while I watch the Ellen Degeneres show. And, yes, I do get up and dance!
Do you have any other suggestions for home-based employment? How do you make money from home (legal methods only please!!)
(By) Wendy Limauge authors several blogs including the The Computer Lady Online and Shopping Gems.
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Filed Under: How-To ¦ Lists of tools
Tags: finding a job, freelance, make money
You’ve described some great opportunities and povided terrific links, some of which (freelancing, surveys) I already use, but you left out the entire category of home-based direct selling businesses. Even though you sign on as a representative or consultant for a chosen company, you are essentially self employed because you are working with the supplying company and not for them.
The Internet has made direct sales and network marketing into a whole new game and hundreds of fun, legitimate and inexpensive options now exist for those who want or need to work from home!
Thanks for your mention of “home-based direct selling”. I am interested in pursuing one (or more) of these opportunities. Can you recommend any good, non-scam websites? Thanks. Nancy
I have been in direct sales on and off for about ten years and have personally worked with some great companies. No scams - just good business opportunities that a person can start for a reasonable price.
I think the key to finding a company you want to stick with is making sure that you LOVE the products being sold. If you aren’t your own best customer, you’ll never make it.
I sell scented candles because that’s where my passion lies. Here is my website: http://candlesfromhome.biz
If candles are something that you love, too, check us out and drop me an email I’d love to tell you more about what I do!
If you don’t see your self selling candles, what product do you think you could sell? Through my online networking I have met women in just about every direct sales company there is - from books to toys to food to jewelry to anything else you can probably think of! I’d be happy to put you in touch with someone from a company that sells something you can get excited about.
Or, you can check out the member directory of the Direct Selling Association and see if there is a company listed there that interests you:
http://www.dsa.org/forms/CompanyFormPublicMembers/
You can search by name to see if a company is a member of the DSA (my company is!) or you can search by product to discover new opportunities.
I hope this gives you some idea of where to begin your own research. Best of luck to you!
PineCone Research
We have made the decision not to accept recruits through general referrals nor will we be posting recruitment on our website. We will be posting banner ads on various unspecified web sites from time to time throughout the year. This is so we may better target more specific groups needed to meet the needs of our clients. Unfortunately, this is our only way of accepting new panelists at this time.
Thanks for the update about Pinecone Research. That is actually similar to what I received back from them today after I contacted them.
This is my response from them:
Thank you for your interest in PineCone Research! Currently we are not accepting new members through general referral nor offering membership opportunities from our website. Throughout the year we will be posting new membership opportunities via banner ad (and a variety of other methods) on various unspecified websites for residents of the contiguous US. This is so we may better target more specific groups needed to meet the needs of our clients. Should you come across one of the PineCone Research membership opportunities, feel free to sign up with us. Until then we appreciate your patience and understanding, as this is our only way of accepting new or returning panelists.
Thanks for providing a hype-free view of telecommuting and work at home online opportunities Wendy
Good job!
Thanks for stopping by Makeuseof.com Kelly and for taking the time to read the article. I know it is quite long but I wanted to make sure to cover the topic completely and provide content that had real value. ~Wendy
This is an interesting post Wendy. Newer heard about virtual representatives, it is like call center job from comfort of your home.
Wendy,
I started a new business recently that lets people who have an online presence get paid by their audience on a per-minute basis:
http://www.speak-tome.com
I think it is another category for legitimate online self employment. You do need to have an online audience, however. Please take a look and tell me what you think.
Excuse me but I do have a question, I am interested in the “work at home” field of work. I am having medical problems which makes it hard for me to “goto work” but I do have skills in Customer Service” and would love to do something during the day. Are they all legit? I know this is probably a silly question, but I just wanted to know. I was ripped off once with a medical billing “work at home” payed $25.00 to get the software and all I got was the software, they never told me that I had to go out and get my own clients. This is why I asked, thank you in advance
John
John - Absolutely - as far as I know everything I wrote about is legitimate and the key to any true work-at-home opportunity is to make sure YOU aren’t paying anything out of pocket to earn the money. If you search online with keywords phrases like ”virtual customer service opportunities” or maybe “telecommuting job opportunties” and also check places like Craigslists as I mention you will find the work you need. ~ Wendy
It’s great to finally see a website which promotes the great benefits of legitimate work at home programs instead of the all too common supposed real work at home websites which point out the fraudulent work at home scams like envelope stuffing while promoting the same companies like envelope stuffing that are scams.
These types of website could care less about workers so don’t be fooled. Do your homework and you’ll be rewarded with the best and most rewarding employment ever, work at home!
Buyer rather worker, beware. We are one of the few legitimate work at home companies that do exist. We don’t promote scams. What we do is pay excellent sales commissions on products and services to those that have the drive to be a success. Making great money is work but, it can also be alot of fun!
Unfortunately there are people in our world that think there is easy money to be made for exerting very little effort. Those people deserve exactly what they get which is to get scammed. My point is that it works both ways. People that have determination WILL succeed while lazy bums will get scammed.
Thanks you for what appears to be a great website!
Sincerely,
Michael Heart
http://www.sizzlefromhome.com