Can You Actual Work from Home?

Now more than ever people are looking for ways to work from home for free to generate desperately needed extra income. Unfortunately many people look at their computer and ultimately the internet as some great and daunting unknown. That if they only crack the secret code that they will be able to make tons of money without doing any work. That is not the reality. If you are willing to do work and invest some time you can work from home for free.

The easiest way to get started making money is to find freelance work. Don't let the term "freelance" deter you. It is just a fancy way of saying temporary work. In the current tough economic times that we are in, companies are aggressively looking to reduce their operating costs by employing temporary workers that work off site. By doing so they don't have to pay for extra office space, phone lines, computers, health benefits and so on.

I can speak to my own experience on this matter. I primarily work for myself but have always taken on freelance work to supplement my income when I had extra time in my schedule. It was never that lucrative because to be honest I wasn't aggressively going after it. The past two years I have actually needed to turn down freelance work. Currently companies would much rather take a risk on someone working off site on their own computer than even hiring a part time person in the office. The payroll taxes alone that a company needs to pay on a part time person is reason enough for them to go with a freelancer.

You would be surprised how many different types of jobs are available other than just data entry for people to do from home. Take some time and write down what skills you have that may be marketable so you can work from home for free. It doesn't necessarily need to be office skills. Here is an example of job a friend of mine did that required little or no skill that they did from home and didn't pay any of their own money to do. This freelance position that she did was for a marketing firm. It was calling on building contractors for a major tool manufacturer. All that was being done was asking them about a dozen non-intrusive questions on if they would have interest in certain products at certain pricing. At the end of the day she could make the calls whenever she wanted and was able to make roughly $20 an hour. It didn't cost her a dime to do and was very little on effort. That is what most people are looking for when they are looking for work from. Was it glamorous? No. Was it fun? Not necessarily. But it was real and legitimate. Imagine if all of a sudden instead of watching television for 15 hours in a week complaining you had no money you all of a sudden had $300 bucks in your pocket. The only skills required for this position was the ability to dial a phone and speak the English language. According to her, a couple of people doing this work could barely do both and made money.

Now how did she find a job like that? That is the real beauty of the internet. It is so easy to reach out to hundreds if not thousands of potential employers who need your skills, whatever they may be. Take that list of your skills you put together and start doing some searches. Try to stay away from terms like "work from home", "free jobs "and other buzz words. The reality is anything that shows up will be some type of system you have to pay money for or an outright scam. Just go to your search engine of choice and type in your individual skills. Of course you are going to run into job listings on the main job boards, but you want to look for the individual posting at the small company. That is the key. You want to connect with the opportunities were it is probably the owner of the company that is interviewing people for the open position. A great place to start is your town's small local newspaper's website.

Let's say you find a position for a customer service person for a local landscaper. If you have the skills, appropriate experience and references, it is not a hard sell for them to hire someone on a freelance basis. Technically all they would have to be able to do is forward the customer service calls to your home line and give you a company email address that you can access from your home computer. Any cable and phone service has that for free. Instead of them having to pay someone $14 an hour, payroll taxes and all the other costs associated with someone coming in. They can pay you the same $14, give you a 1099 tax form and get rid of all the overhead. You have just saved them a lot of money.

I can't say this will work all the time but you will be surprised how often it does. If you just put together a resume and a letter that pitches the idea of them hiring you remotely and on a freelance basis.

Give it a try. What do you have to lose?