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Work From Home: Is it a Myth? Is It Possible? Let's Find Out.
On this lens I shall explore the possibility of really working from home, what it is like, how to do it, and most importantly, how to avoid the MLM and other online scams.
Created on October 2, 2007
Last updated: August 4, 2008
Alternative Incomes
Working at home.
Home businesses.
Online income.
Can You Work From Home?
Work From Home, Is It Possible?Everyone asks this question, and for those of you with this goal, you probably find yourself asking it more than most people.
Yes, it is, and not really that hard to start either, though most find it hard to keep going. First you have to ask yourself, what is it you want to do? What is it you enjoy doing? What are your pleasure hobbies? The answers to these questions are where you will find what type of home business is right for you.
Do you like raising parrots? Than maybe you should think about becoming a breeder.
Do you like to sew by hand? Maybe you should think about doing alterations.
Do you grow flowers and make your own scented soaps? Maybe it's time you started selling those soaps to the public.
Do you write short stories? Get them published!
Are you never without a camera in hand? Why not start a Cafepress shop or a Zazzle gallery and sell your prints to the world.
Do you like to give advice and offer criticisms? Maybe you should consider starting a syndicated editorial column for a local newspaper? Or maybe DJ your own radio talk show.
Do you spend hours trimming hedges and mowing laws just to get it to look "just right"? Maybe you should take up landscaping.
Do you like to create gourmet pizzas? Maybe you should open a pizzeria.
Working at home, means taking something you are passionate about and sharing it with the public for a price. Your hobby, becomes your job and people pay you to do the things that you would be doing anyways.
Here is what a home business is not: A home business is NOT sitting at home waiting for money to come in. It is NOT mailing out chain letters. It is NOT putting out ads that say "call me and I'll tell you how to make money". Have you ever called one of those ads? I did. I wanted to find out what it is that people can possibly be doing that could make money from placing classified ads, so I finally called on and paid for the sheet of paper that told you how. Here is what it said:
- "Put up posters, flyers, and free classified ads, telling people to call you. Tell them that for $49.95 you will tell them how to become a millionaire with classified ads. When they pay you the money, give them a copy of this letter, tell them to make copies of it and do the same thing you just did."
That's it! That's all it said. For $50 you get a sheet of paper telling you to scam people the same way they just scammed you! THAT is NOT a home business. THAT is NOT working at home.
It costs money to start a home business, but not like that. It costs money for you to buy your office equiptment. It costs money for you to add on an office to your house. It costs money for you to buy materials to make the products you sell. It costs money, but you get a lot more than a slip of paper for that money, and when you are done, you can say: "Look at this, I own a home business now! I have these products/services to offer you."
The most successful work at home jobs are the ones you created yourself. Here are few examples of people I know who work at home:
A Brick Layer
My uncle started working at home in the 1960's building clay bricks, and building houses for people out of them. Today he owns a multi-million-dollar cooperation that not only builds houses but also building brick churches, but he still runs the business out of his home, and he works longer and harder than the average non-home worker. A Seamstress
My mom worked at home too, she was a seamstress, sewing fancy dresses for little girls, christening gowns, and cloth dolls. At one point she bought her own brick and mortar store (the house next door to us) and was selling to summer tourists (in Old Orchard Beach we see an average of 2 million tourists each month), but the shop proved to be a bigger home business than my mother had expected. She had no time to sew the crafts anymore, which was her passion, so after 3 years, she shut it down and sold her items to other shops on consignment instead. Now she is hoping to build a web site and move her operation online by next year. Delivery Driver
My dad, he worked at home too, he was a rout driver for the local newspaper, delivering the Portland Press Herald, the Sunday Telegram, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times to over 1000 customers 7 days a week 365 days a year, with not one single day off for the past 21 years. At he time, his annual gas costs were over $5,000 each year, (I'd hate to think want it would be with today's gas prices!) and he went through 3 to 4 cars a year (rout driving is the number one killer of engines and transmissions) , his annual income was under $12,000 a year. Real Estate Agent and Alpaca Farmer
Another uncle of mine works at home, as a real estate agent. He buys property at low prices, and than resells it at higher prices. He at one point claimed to own a multi million dollar alpaca farm in Australia. (I can't verify that as I have never been to Australia, so never saw the farm myself). Last I heard he had given up on the real estate business in favor of yet another work at home business he had set out to create. Don't know the details on that, or if it succeeded or flopped. A Treasure Hunter
And yet another uncle works at home, as a "treasure hunter". He looks though trash cans, dumpsters, and junk yards and buying "junk" from yard sales than turns around and resells it all at flea markets. His income is average of less than $10,000 a year, but he does this as a side-line hobby. If he set out to do this full time instead of part-time in his spare time, he could easily triple that figure. He could expand this business with an eBay store. Author, Artist, and Fashion Designer
I work at home:I am a writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and I own a small press publishing house which I built myself from the ground up and publish both fiction and non-fiction books. As most writers/publishers know already, you are lucky if you break even in this business, making it a true job of passion. In addition to books I also write scripts for a Danish publisher and I freelance writing articles for websites and e-zines.
I am an artist. I draw and paint in pen and ink, watercolors, acrylic, pastel, color pencil, marker, and crayon. I started my own online store, where I sell my art online. This is my #1 source of income.
I am a fashion designer and costume maker. At the moment this is a hobby, but I have plans to open a boutique.
So, does work at home exist?
So in answer to your question, does work at home exist?Yes, it does, but it is not a get-rich-quick-scam-artist-work-at-home; that type of work at home well bankrupt you quicker than you can blink. REAL work at home is when you take a skill and use it to help those around you. If you are hired by a business, they pay you for your product/service. If you start your own business, you get paid when your customers pay you. It may look like a private or small business to the world, but it is in fact you working out of your home and thus working at home. However, it is hard work, long hours, no vacation, you get dirty, you get tired, and in the long run, not working at home would have been much less stressful and much easier.
In short working at home is not a get rich quick scheme.
Working at home IS NOT getting paid to take surveys.
Working at home is not, clicking on ads on Google.
Working at home is you getting a business license and setting up shop, either online or brick & mortar, and selling your product or services to your customers. Most people are not cut out for the hard labor and long hours of working at home, but for those of you who are, it's the best thing you could ever do.
IMPORTANT!
Remember:Employers ask you to fill out a job application, and will ask for past job references, your SSN, and your criminal records history.
If you did not fill out an application, you did not apply for a real job.
If you filled out an application, but paid for the application form, you got scammed!
and if you can't find a business to work for: start the business you want to work for an be your own boss in your own home.
Plan Ahead
You can't just wake up on morning and say "I'm starting a home business today!", and expect to see money rolling in by the end of the week. It is that kind of attitude that causes 80% of all home businesses to fail in the first year.If you are a ballet dancer, you are not going to rush out on stage opening night and dance something that you only just decided on that morning! You will spend days, weeks, months, maybe even years practicing and planning, until you have your dance steps just perfect. Only after proper planning will the dancer take to the stage. Think of your business as a ballet dancer who plans out each step before she begins.
You got to realize that all businesses, no matter how big, started out as home businesses. How big can a home business become? Are WalMart and Microsoft big enough for you? They both started out as a brainstorm in the head of someone looking to start to start a home business. They both got bigger and bigger and eventually became huge cooperations, but you got to remember that they didn't start out as huge cooperations, they started out as tiny home businesses.
So how does one go from quitting your day job to starting a home business? One word: planning. You have to have a plan. You have to know what you want to do, why you want to do it, how you want to do it, and what you need to do to get it done. Write up a business plan, doesn't need to be anything fancy, just a list on paper will do. Having your goals written down is the first step to running a business.
Think of it this way: You can't make money off products and service if you don' even know which products and service you want to sell!
You also need to plan out who you want to sell to. You can't sell everything to everyone, so pick what you are going to sell and who you are going to sell it too, and focus on that alone. Is your target customer a stay at home mom with small children or a retired couple looking to travel the world? The stay at home mom isn't looking for travel shares and the retired couple isn't looking for the latest in book on teaching the ABCs. Want to sell Avon? There's a big difference between makeup bought by a teenager and makeup bought by a 30 year old business women. You got to know who your target customer is and what they want. That is going to be the most important part of your business plan, because it will affect everything from what you sell to how you sell it to your marketing campaigns, to how they are going to pay you.
Remember, even the smallest home business selling just 2 or 3 items a month off eBay, still requires planning ahead.
Beware of the Scams!
We know this, sadly from experience.Back in the early 1980's my mom saw just such an ad in a magazine. BIG promises of lots of money. She sent the money in, for not one ad but 2 different ones. The first promised big bucks for sewing baby bibs, the second for making beaded earrings. Both ads were pretty much the same: send in a certain amount of money and they'd send you the supplies, you make the items and send them back to them, they sell them. Simple, sounded great, my mom had at one time been a seamstress, she thought she could sew up a storm of baby bibs for a legit company to sell them. That's what we all thought, we should have read the fine print or rather, we should have taken a notice that there was no fine print to read! Or maybe that it was a P.O.Box and not an actual address that was listed in the ad, that should have tipped us off.
Well, the supplies came, most of it cheap junk that we could have gotten cheaper and better quality at a dollar store, my mom having been a professional seamstress thought that using this absolute crap to make these items seemed pretty stupid and unprofessional but, that's the items the company used so that's what they sent alarm bells should have gone off than we should have realized that no REAL manufacturer, is gonna use such poor quality supplies to make their goods.
Well, we (my mom, my dad, and me) set out to sewing baby bibs and beaded earrings. Comes time to send the items back and low and behold, the P.O.Box had been canceled, the "company" turned out to never have existed, and we were stuck with a bunch of stuff we couldn't use or sell.
We learned a lesson. It wasn't a very big investment, less than $100, but it was not money well spent or maybe it was, because it taught us to look at these scams with open eyes and questioning minds.
We learned a lot of things:
We learned to read ads more closely.
We learned to question "companies" with ONLY a P.O.Box.
We learned to ask the company for a job application form.
We learned to ask for a history of the company.
We learned to do a background check on the company.
We learned to never pay money to get a job.
We learned to REAL manufactures don't put ads in magazine classified.
We learned too that most manufactures only hire local residents, so that the employee has to bring the items right in to the factory to be inspected, before the company well accept and pay you.
We learned that REAL jobs assembling items for manufactures, are rare and few and far between, and that you could be on a waiting list for years before they need enough help to get all the way down to your name on their list.
Amazon Spotlight
Homemade Money: Starting Smart
Amazon Price: $24.95 (as of 07/13/2009)
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Release Date: 12/31/1969
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Scams On the Internet
Now we have the internet, and it seems that with it came millions more ways to scam people out of their hard earned money. Every day thousands of new Work-At-Home, Get-Big-Bucks websites are added to the net. A Google search will bring up millions upon millions of them.When I look at these sites, with their promises of BIG MONEY. I laugh. You see I own more than 200 web sites, 12 fan listings, and 13 private message boards. I know how to build a website, quite well, maybe not to professional standards, but pretty darned close, and than I see these scam sites: many of them are made using Geo-Cities, Yahoo, AOL, Earthlink, and countless other "free home pages".
Right off the bat that fact alone should set off a RED WARNING ALARM in any person, but it seems that many people do not even notice this fact, and send their money in.
A real company that intends to pay you to work for them, would not be using a "free home page". Now, it is true that a lot of small business and home businesses use free hosted websites.
A small craft shop run by the sweet little old lady next door, might use a free home page to sell her knitting and cloth dolls, but she wouldn't be asking you to send money to make money. No she'd show you a picture of her dolls with a price for each one.
The Goth girl down the road might use a free site to peddle her homemade velvet capes, while the Wiccan next door lists home made soap on her MySpace. These are people like me and you who are working at home and selling what they make. These people are legit, and you'll notice they never ask you to pay for a membership before they allow you to buy their products. These people are small business owners working from home.
The free sites that ask you to spend money to make money, those are the ones you got to watch out for. Those are the scams.
If you see a site made by a free home page site, and offering you lots of money for doing next to nothing, run for the hills, because there is no company that is going to use a free web host to seek out workers. Not a single one.
So What Places Are NOT Scams?
It is easy to make money online, the problem is, is that it's not always a steady income, it's erratic, you never know when the next "payday" is coming, and often it's not enough to live on, you need a day job besides, but that like others have said it takes a lot of time and you just don't have the time for both a day job and an online income.However, if you are willing to "go without" for a couple of years (plan on 3 years) and spend that time working on networking a building up a following and focusing on your chosen online path, than eventually, yes, you will start bringing in a good steady income.
For me, my online income comes from several places:
Squidoo
Zazzle
CafePress
Associated Content
Helium
Amazon
eBay
I am always on the lookout for more places to expand my online income with as well, so if anyone is bringing in a real income from a place other than those I've listed here, please let me know! Thanks!
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Make Money Reading Books
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Release Date: 12/31/1969
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To all: Good luck on your goal.
~~EK
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Entrepreneur's Notebook: Practical Advice for Starting a New Business Venture
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The Home-Based Bookstore: Start Your Own Business Selling Used Books on Amazon, eBay or Your Own Web Site
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work-from-home-income wrote...
An absolutely wonderful lens! Refreshingly honest content! Thank you.
Posted December 28, 2008
DebbieJohnson wrote...
Found your lens from dreamteammoney forum.
Very Well done!
5 stars for you!
Posted October 11, 2008
RufusQuail wrote...
Lots of useful information. Thanks. 5* Here is my review of the online bookseller book. It's worth reading. http://www.amazon.com/review/R3LW6PC2ZKBU7M/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
Posted September 16, 2008
clouda9 wrote...
Excellent reminders and triggers to get a person (moi' :) thinking about 'scam-proof' ways of making a living. Thanks for the share!
Posted August 04, 2008
AnnSieg
Hi EelKat,
Many people will do home business but they don't know how they are going to be scammed. Simply doing home business is not fare, apart from this they need to know how to avoid scams, and proper planning on their selected path. If they can know these parameters then home business will become very successful. Thanks for providing good stuff on home business.
Posted June 19, 2008
EelKat wrote...
It is easy to make money online, the problem is, is that it's not always a steady income, it's irratic, you never know when the next "payday" is coming, and often it's not enough to live on, you need a day job besides, but that like others have said it takes a lot of time and you just don't have the time for both a day job and an online income.
However, if you are willing to "go without" for a couple of years (plan on 3 years) and spend that time working on networking a building up a following and focusing on your choosen online path, than eventually, yes, you will start bringing in a good steady income.
For me, my online income comes from several places:
Squidoo
Zazzle
CafePress
Associated Content
Helium
Amazon
eBay
I am always on the lookout for more places to expand my online income with as well, so if anyone is bringing in a real income from a place other than those I've listed here, please let me know! Thanks!
~~EK
Posted February 26, 2008
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by EelKat
I love Eels. I love Bobcat. I am a Giant Squid and a Squid Angel.
I am an author and artist who rescues animals & raises Ranchus.
View my page on I...
