Will Work from Home

So blogger still hates me, my access is pretty on and off, this is the first time I've been able to get on this week, so I have a few drafts I've written I will see what I can get up and going, so I may be posting a bunch of things in the next few minutes from the last week or so:

March 9, 2011

I decided to give a try to some of these on-line "work from home" deals. Most of which are clearly scams, which I think is really sad, unemployment is at an all time high in this country so people are often deperate to make money, and some of these offers sound pretty legitimate so I can see how people fall for them, and start investing a bit of money in this "small home business" which they think they will get a return on in the future, and end up loosing more money when they can least afford to do so. These things are one thing in a good economy when a lot of these "home businesses" are just used as tax write offs, but right now, it's kind of heartbreaking.



I did some reading on affiliate marketing, which is basically making money off your blogs, there are a couple ways to pull it off, be a good enough blogger that people are really interested in reading your blog, then going out and doing a lot of publisizing, and marketing yourself. People have legitimately made money that way, to do it, I would need to spend more time making a theme or something that would draw people to my blog (which frankly lmeans starting a new one), and then definitely doable I think, but an awful lot of work. The other way of doing it is creating web-sites that are really just about advertising and driving traffic, so you capitalize on a bunch of high traffic "words" people frequently search, get high up on the google list based on those search words, and then instead of offering really any content, you are just a middleman guiding people to the sites they really want and getting paid by the site for each person you send their way. Again some time involed in reasearch, set up, and buying you own websites, but once you get going it is a business where you start building and can eventually make some money. Lots of information out there to help, just work from home and get a name of a company that does this, you buy their ideas, and then start web sites that say "real reviews of company X", post a review which is just a way to get people interested, and then post a bunch of ads to other stuff as well. Do a few of these, use frequently searched phrases like "work from home", "at home jobs for moms", "legitimate work from home oppurtunities", "is work from home a scam", work to drive your site higher on searc engines, and basically as you start getting paid for every click, you can bring in some money. Definitely doable, but it frankly seems unethical to me (don't know exactly why, seems wrong to take money from peopl just to find what they could already find if you weren't in the way making them go through first, not illegal, but pings on my business ethics meter).



Quite a few businesses like that, one you buy into marketing those deals you see when shopping on-line "get $250.00 Chili's gift certificates by answering some questions". Those are all done from small business marketing. If you've even tried (I did once from work) you basically get a bunch of offers (like sign up for Netflix, get free credit reports, sign up for Napster), and you have to sign up for each fulfill a basic requirement, and you get a gift certificate. So you sign up as a marketer, and the sponsors offer you say $250.00 to get 5 people to sign up for the offers. So you figure, if I pay 5 people $20 to be part of the 5, that's $100.00, so I clear $150.00, and the people each get $20+ whatever is in the offer. Not bad, there is some money to get made, but you have to be dilligent about finding people (you can buy into websites full of them). Plus if you are the people making $20 (much like multi-level marketing that is where you start, before you work directly with the sponsors) you have to keep good track so you aren't loosing money. For example on I saw was a first offer for Netflix, first month free, $9.98 a month after that, Netflix bets that you won't cancel (which frankly you probably won't Netflix is a pretty good deal I love their instant streaming video, well worth the money) so you sign up, then "free credit report" which is good for 30 days, then they charge a monthly fee, Napster again a pretty good deal, a book club which if you play it right you get 5 books for $5.00, plus buy one to complete your deal, and sign up to get emails from JCPenney's. So you do that you get $15,oo profit (taking out the $5.00 you spent to join the book club) a free month of Netflix, Napster, 5 books, and free credit report (as long as you keep track and go in and go through the hoops to cancel, which is what they are counting on you not doing). Doable but if you want to make say $200.00 a week (which isn't going to make you exactly rich), that is a lot of offers to keep track of to make sure you cancel every month. I joined on, I get so much money for each offer I join, and then I get $.20 for each email I read. So everyday they send me about 10 emails, which is $2.00 for reading them, and then an additional amount for each offer you complete. I've been doing it for a week, so far I've earned $12.00 just for reading email everyday (for $1.00 you can download their toolbar, so the emails are kept and read there instead of sent to your own email, they just send a message to your email when they pay you). So far I've made about $30.00 if you take out what I've spend, which is $15, one offer was for a cookbook club, buy 5 books for $5.00, and then you need to buy 2 in the next two years, but could buy one right then at a discount. So I bought 6 books for $15.00, and then the company is giving me $10.00 back so 6 nice cookbooks for $5.00 and I have to buy one more in the next 2 years which I would do anyway. I love cookbooks, but so do other people I know so I have not only a couple for me, but some nice gifts for $5 (so pretend you didn't see this if you get a cookbook for a gift). I got 10 emails today so that is $2 (they send you a check everytime you get up to $30.00) then I did one offer, which was to buy an entertainment book, which i generally buy anyway, they are $35.00 at Barnes and Noble (but do pay for themselves even at that), they had a 17 for 17 sale for St Patrick's Day, $17 a book fo 17 days (so if you buy them and don't already have them, that's a good deal alone), with my offer, and paid $17 for the book and then get a $10.00 rebate from the company, so my Entertainment book will be $7.00 this year, that will pay for itself if I only use 2 coupons. I got $6 for signing up to be a Nielsen family, the company that does T.V. ratings, this one if for on-line use/ratings. Every month I do it, I get points towards prizes, and entered into sweepstakes, and I don't have to do anything other than sign-up.

Which leads me to the final big "at home" moneymaker often on-line, which is "make money filling out surveys". There is no possible way you could earn a living doing it, but you can legitimately earn about $200 by doing it a couple hours each day (which I have, I can do that when I have insomnia instead of say blog weird stuff). Each of the survey sights I signed up for I got $1.50, last week was a bit overwhelming, but there are at least 4 that I really like. The ones that pay straight cash I think are harder because more people, but the ones with points, are pretty good. My favorite I've been doing for years, but is by invitation only (Pinecone Research), and I've been getting $5-$20 checks from them each week for about 4 years, if you ever get a chance to join, do so, it's ot a lot but it adds up, $5 check has bought me milk and eggs in a pinch more than once (in fact I usually keep the checks until I really need them like that). AOL surverys has a great rewards program, isisos (something like that) has a fun program, survey points for prizes, and then everytime you do a survey, you get to play a game for chances to win a iist of prizes, so far in 2 weeks I have 125 entries into a sweepstake for a Kindle, which is kind of fun. In fact so far I've entered about 500 sweepstakes, and as I know from when Rob spent all the time doing them, eventually you can win something. My favorite so far is a site (can't remeber the name) that does points redeemable for adventure and travel. If I spend about 1-2 hours a day there, I can earn about 10,000 a day (most survey's are 4000 points, but I've had a few that are 9000 points by themselves, and they have a bunch of mini-surveys that you can make quite a few points as well if your daily surveys don't make up what you want), then you can accumulate the points and redeem for trave and adventure. If I can actually do that everyday for the next year, I should be able to get enough points for 2/4 day park hopper tickets to Universal Studios (Jake is dying to go to Harry Potter World), $500.00 in hotel gift certs (a lot of Marriott gift certs, and I can still get the "friends and family rate" with my friends), and $300.00 in food vouchers (in fact one of the vouchers is an "Orlando Kids eat free" which is $50, but lets kids eat free at a bunch of chain restaurants while you are on vacation). If I can actually pull that off we would have everything earned for a nice trip except I would have to find an airline deal. I hope I can pull it off as it's the only way I can think of that we're going to be able to do something like that at this point. I can definitely fill out surveys (even though they get a bit boring) for a couple hours a day for that. :)

Finally there are a few home agent customer service businesses that are pretty interesting, instead of contracting with an individual company (like for example Marriott) you contract with a company, and then they contract to clients. So it's like a company such convergy's but you work from home, and you have a lot more control over the businesses you work for as well as the hours. A couple have pretty tight credit requirments but there are two with good reputations that only require a background check, and that sounds intriguing to me. So I'm looking into those, the only problem right now is that going that direction I need to have a "home office" which means I need to actually have something that qualifies as long term housing. So far that is the most exciting idea for me in job searching. I've already got a lot of experience in all sides of call center servi, including setting up a home agent program. The hours are completely flexible so no only are you setting owr hours during the day (so I could only work while Jake was at school, and then pick up a few more hours in the evening or on weekends as needed), but there are no minimum hours, so one week I could work 40 hours, but the next week I may only work 30, or 10, which would be helpful with my health issues. Seems a little too perfect, which is why I'm reasearching if it's actually as good as it sounds.