If you’ve ever dreamed about working from home, this could be the best time for you to take the leap and start a business that allows you to make extra money while staying at home.
In fact, more and more Americans are turning to self-employment to keep their bills paid. More than eight million Americans primarily work from home and more than 17 million people spend at least one day a week in a home office.
Working from home provides you a number of advantages including relief from stressful commutes, a flexible schedule, and an unlimited earning potential.
Here are five home-based businesses that might help you escape from the confines of the traditional office:
Catering Business
If you love cooking and enjoy hosting dinner parties with all of your friends, consider starting a catering business. Use your culinary talents to cater parties both large and small, or other special events that require a large amount of food preparation. Work with a variety of foods offering a large menu of specialty dishes, or choose to specialize — such as authentic Mexican food or French haute cuisine. Gina Pace of Inc.com notes that picking a specialty within the catering field can give you an edge in the market.
Freelancing
As a freelancer, you’ll need little more than a computer, a telephone and a set of specific skills depending on the type of service you offer. Freelancing offers a lot of flexibility and offers great potential for making money from home; sometimes, the money you earn can far exceed the salary that you could make in a 9-to-5 job.
No matter what the job market is doing, freelancing offers a consistent base of opportunities. Here are a few freelancing careers for you to consider:
- Writing, editing and proofreading
- Graphic design
- Public relations
- Translation
If you want to choose a creative profession to freelance in, be prepared to show samples of your work. Create a website that showcases your work, or put together a professional portfolio that’s easy to send to clients when the need arises.
Virtual Nursing
If you’re a registered nurse who’s tired of working hospital hours or have grown weary of the daily commute, keep in mind that specialized software and computers supplied by pharmaceutical companies, health-related organizations and insurance companies, now allow nurses to work from home. April LaJune, a writer for Yahoo Voices, explains that with the onset of new technologies, these companies are among many customers that hire nurses to answer patient questions by telephone or email explains. Virtual nursing’s flexible hours keep you connected to your profession while you work from home.
Virtual Concierge
People are so busy these days that they need people to help them with the simplest tasks. If you have good organizational skills and are willing to take on any task, make some great money as a virtual concierge. Similar to a hotel concierge, a virtual concierge takes care of everything that busy individuals need. You’ll pick up laundry, shop for clothes, make dinner reservations; you may even be asked to track down 100 red roses for a marriage proposal! As a virtual concierge you can work for a service like VIP desk or work for yourself. Either way, it’s a great way to start building a successful business and bring in additional income.
Sales
One of the oldest ways to make extra money from home is by selling items through a direct marketing company like Avon or Mary Kay. Direct selling is a $30 billion industry, and it can be a great way to earn some extra spending money. Sell a company’s items directly to your clients; this allows businesses to cut out the brick-and-mortar stores, saving them a ton on overhead costs. If you’re motivated enough, you can make a little money by simply selling these items to your family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues. The secret to making this type of home business a success is having an established network of potential buyers ready to make a purchase.
If you think that working from home would be a welcome place for a second or primary job, then you’re not alone. Thankfully, there are a number of unique opportunities that you can take advantage of. Working from home offers more freedom and a stronger sense of pride for the work that you’re doing. So find something that makes you happy and figure out a way to turn it into a profitable home business.
Photo Credit: Wikimedia
These are all great. Sales takes on a whole new dimension in the age of Ebay and Amazon stores. Of course, opening yourself up to the internet adds another layer of risk, but there’s also a bigger market there.
I love freelancing because not only can you make money from home, you can make money from anywhere you have internet. You get so much more freedom when doing so.
Ebay’s a great way to earn money from home. First clean out your unwanted stuff from around your house and garage, and what doesn’t sell on ebay can be Craigslisted. Then cruise yard sales in good neighborhoods on Fridays and weekends for good quality things to sell at a profit on ebay. Run a yard sale twice a year, spring and fall to blow out any items which have stubbornly refused to sell. You’ll make money, help the environment, improve the American balance of trade (better to buy used than new stuff made in China), have some fun and sell only to those who really want your items. Please do not go into selling Avon, Mary Kay or Amway and think you’re going to make your fortune. For many of these pyramid sales things you have to BUY a kit or supplies. Then you have to alienate / annoy / harass your friends and family into buying over priced junk they don’t want and would not buy except you’re pressured them into it. After your family refuses to buy more from you, you have generally reached the end. The only people who make a lot of money at this pyramid stuff are those who buttonhole lots of others into signing up new sales people. They don’t call it “pyramid sales” for nothing.
^^^^^^ All of this
Essentially, working from home makes you your own boss. If you have a generally proactive approach to life, there is a good possibility that working from home will be successful. It has been my experience that those who do well as their own boss are as demanding on themselves as any boss for whom they ever worked. I would suggest to any who want to try a different approach to earning a living that they read “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”. Thanks as always Len for giving us alternate ways of viewing the situation.
Many people want to make money at home and they want to find a work at home job to do it with. Ultimately what happens is they become frustrated as they search from website to website looking for the right job. This brings up the question, why are work at home jobs so hard to find? In this article we will take an honest look at this problem.
1. First of all you should know that most of the opportunities to work at home are not actually paid jobs. This is true because most employers do not know you and have no control over the work environment when you do it from the comfort of your own home.
If you realistically think about this, why would someone pay you an hourly rate when they do not know if you are really working or not? Therefore many of the opportunities to work at home are actually in the form of business opportunities where you work for yourself.
2. There really are some companies looking for people to work from home. This phenomenon is known as telecommuting and does provide an opportunity for people with legitimate skills to get paid working from home.
This benefits both the company and the worker because the business does not need to provide a space for you to work from, and as an employee you do not have to get up and drive to work every day.
Many companies now will offer work at home jobs that include an hourly rate and benefits. These benefits can include paid vacation, retirement plan, and health insurance.
One such website or you can visit is Tjobs.com. They match employers looking for workers with employees who are looking for opportunities to telecommute. This works out very well for people who have skills such as sales, customer service, website design, and other categories.
3. Another thing I want to talk about is websites that present themselves as work at home jobs doing data entry, taking paid surveys, and typing at home. Generally these websites are trying to sell you information on how to get involved in this type of work.
There are companies who will pay you for your opinion, or to do data entry and typing. The websites that are selling you the information deserve to be paid because they have taken the time to develop a list of companies for you to contact.
In the future work at home jobs will become more readily available. Until that point you need to be conscious and only deal with reputable companies before spending any of your hard earned money.
There are many ways to make extra money in your free time, but there are very few that are as easy as filling out a couple surveys. A few hundred dollars a day can easily be earned just with the click of the mouse because your opinion counts.
Paid survey companies work with major corporations to organize and provide opinions from everyday consumers. As a result of your valuable feedback, you can earn quick money. Some questions are multiple choice, while others may require some writing. Either way, it is entirely possible with the right survey program to earn and extra $200 a day.
This is not difficult work. If you have a job with a computer, you can quickly complete a few surveys during your lunch break. If you don’t mind having a laptop in front of you while you unwind and watch TV at night, filling out a survey or two can be done between commercials.
Pay ranges from anywhere to $5 – $50 a survey, which is typically determined on the length of time it takes you to complete the questionnaire. Once you get bored with those, there are options to get paid to watch movie trailers, and some times you can have a little fun by getting paid to test drive cars.
As long as you are at least 18 years old, anyone can start making money by filling out surveys right away. It’s a great way to put extra cash in your pocket and cover basic living expenses. After all, who wouldn’t want a couple hundred dollars a day just for giving their opinion?
If you are from one of those royal families of the Middle East, then this discussion is going to be of no interest for you. For others, earning money online has always been in the wish list. In today’s world, almost everybody is looking to earn some money in their spare time, working from their homes. There may be variety of options, but not too many really beats Online surveys in flexibility or intellectual satisfaction. Online surveys, especially paid online surveys, have become very popular with the people coming from different background mainly because of its various advantages. With Internet being available to everybody, online surveys are viable options for those who cannot live their home due to various constraints.
The advent of the Internet has drastically changed the way this world lives, conducts business, and expands its social life. It has also changed the way we have dreamt of our professional careers. Just a couple of decades back, a work-from-home job profile was practically inexistent. But then, with Internet came a lot of newer opportunities, and online paid surveys is perhaps the best among them.
If you are not employed with a firm, you are perhaps in the business of doing business. And any business will invariably require an upfront investment. The new genre of online job profiles has broken away from this scenario. With activities like online surveys, you can be self employed without locking in investment. This is perhaps one of the most important factors that make online surveys a particularly irresistible one for most of us.
If you love the structured life of an employed person, if you are not comfortable with slight variations in monthly cash inflows, online surveys is certainly not for you. However, if you cherish independence and want to be your own boss, online paid surveys is something you cannot give a miss. Additionally, one of the major highlights of online surveys is that you need not be highly qualified. The profile that online survey companies generally look for before they offer online surveys to any member is that the concerned person must be have interest on a wide variety of subjects.
Rarely will you find a coin that does not have two sides. Similarly, even the best and the safest of earning avenues do have a possible flipside. Be careful – there are many fraud online surveys websites that will try to rob you of your hard earned money. If ever you are tempted to join an online surveys listing site that require a substantial subscription fees, think twice. You should keep in mind that online surveys require no or minimal investments. Online paid surveys will give you money and not take any from you. So, do not let any body take undue advantage of you.
Everybody I’ve talked to that has start using the Internet eventually asks the question: How can I make money online? And for most people, they never learn what they need to do in order to make a couple hundred to thousands of dollars online.
Everybody wants to make money online, but very few people know where to start. For most people it comes down to having to learn advanced skills that they never have time to master, resulting in the feeling of helplessness about making money online.
Luckily for me, I found an easy way around that about a year ago. Instead of trying to learn crazy web languages or graphic design, I started search for nontechnical ways to make money online. This led me to taking paid surveys online.
One of the great things about the Internet is that it can connect people and companies almost instantly, and companies have found out about it. Companies have found that they can receive almost instant feedback about their products, services, or ad campaigns through the Internet. This is called market research, and before it used to take companies hundreds of thousands of dollars and many months to find average and sometimes outdated data.
Now, companies have a direct and almost instant link to people that use their products, and will pay people to help them speed up their market research. When I found out about it, I was a little skeptical, but I decided to try my hand at it anyway.
What I found was that I could make decent money just by filling out online surveys for an hour or so, everyday. It was surprisingly easy since I could do them while chatting on Facebook or after my kids went to bed, so I figured I would give it a month and see how much I could earn. At the end of the month, I was so excited when my first check came in the mail for $638.28!
After a few months, I built up a reputation so that survey companies would give me even higher paying surveys, giving me even more money. Overall it has been a very smart choice that fits into my lifestyle, and hasn’t required me to learn anything advanced computer skills. If you are trying to make some extra money, give online surveys a try.
So how does it work?
1. Find a website that has a large survey database.
2. Sign up with a few sites, 3-5 to start then add more to receive more surveys
3. Start taking surveys, simply fill out accurate information. They usually take 10-20 minutes per survey.
4. Cash out and receive your payment either with PayPal or by mail.
Best or all, you don’t need to spend any money, there is no risk or scams, and the sites are free to join. If you are looking to earn some extra income, surveys seem to be one of the best ways to go.
Sincerely,
Adam
If you start a catering business form home, look out for your first visit from the local health department which will close you down for not having a restaurant kitchen and they will fine you. The local legal caterers will sick the health dept. inspector on you because you are undercutting their business since you have no overhead. Many years ago you could cater from your own kitchen. Today health regulations including having hot water at a certain temperature, three sinks and many other rules which the home kitchen does not provide. You can not cater legally from a home kitchen. Also if a person gets sick eating your food (Or gets sick and blames your food.) you can be sued. You can cater successfully and legally if you borrow or rent a commercial kitchen such as from a church or fire house.
Make that “from home”