Working from Home - How to Find Legitimate Paying Jobs

I spent more than a year looking and searching through the internet for work-at-home jobs. I was fed up with the strict rules and inflexibility of the corporate office jobs and wanted to earn an income from the comfort of my home. I persistently searched through the internet on a daily basis while I was receiving unemployment benefits. What I learned is that there are many work-at-home opportunities available through the internet. I began with a lot of writing projects and I became a contributing editor for suite.com writing articles for them on a weekly basis. I also wrote educational term papers and reports for students through another academic website. I published articles and several of my poetry for Web sites and books. Additionally, I did a lot of mystery shopping work as there are tons of online companies that provide mystery shops and survey opportunities. I did mystery shops for banks, automobile, apartments, grocery stores, hotels and many other industries. I earned as high as $50 on some of the shops but many of them pay higher than that depending on your location.

My main profession is in the administrative fields so I focused on that field while doing my online research but found others as mentioned above. I started by doing a search with key words like "work from home", and "telecommute" on several of the popular search engines like google, altavista and yahoo. Each search engine displayed tons of results but I soon learned that a lot of them were not legitimate or real paying work from home or many of them wanted some type of fee for the job. I was able to filter out the legitimate ones so I'm listing the resources so that you don't waste a lot of time like I did filtering through all of them.

I found that two of the best sources for finding legitimate work from home jobs are the freelance websites and the online newspapers. Most of the jobs listed in the freelance websites that I signed up for are legitimate work from home jobs and some of them list many jobs per week. I have worked for over 50 companies through two freelance work-at-home Web sites. I have a preference for the Web sites based on my field and the job categories that they offer and just the ease of using there Web site. Additionally, it is helpful to have a resume and profile with them. I would recommend looking through the online newspapers and freelance sites when looking for work from home jobs as I have found them to be the best sources for listing tons of legitimate work from home jobs.

I found my first work-at-home position through an online newspaper doing data entry after searching for about a year. I worked for them for about a year when the company went out of business. Subsequently, I proceeded to look for another work from home job since I enjoyed the first company I had worked for so much. I found tons of projects through two freelance Web sites. It took about a week to work on my profile, resume and skills set which is required on the freelance Web sites to apply for projects. It was also free at the time as I first applied in the year 2000 so I was able to apply for many projects for free in different job categories on the freelance websites.

One company based in Texas paid me as high as $20.00/hr working on several projects for them. The freelance Web sites has a feedback policy in which the companies provide feedback after each project is completed for them. I went permanent with one job so I decided to stop working for the company in TX. Please feel free to contact me for the newspaper and freelance/contract links that I have accumulated throughout the years.

The key though in seeking work from home is persistence and patience and being able to filter out the legitimate ones from the tons of work from home jobs being offered. However, there are tons of work-at-home jobs available.