As the global recession begins to bite and become more profound more and more people are finding it necessary to look for alternative ways of earning money. This may be in addition to taking a lower paid job and needing to top up the income, or providing the sole source of income due to traditional jobs simply no longer being available in the area where you live. Nowadays many jobs can be undertaken from home. Some of such jobs can be article writing, virtual assistantship or administrative assistantship, data entry operator, telemarketing computer programming, website development, business coaching or even graphic designing.
In fact, the choice of projects that can be done from home is only limited by your imagination and dedication to market your skills. The days have gone when the only jobs available online were as comment posters. Now, one can even find few projects for accountants and engineers to work online at present, or even for those people skilled in various arts – such as photography or fashion designing, for instance – but, this could well change in the future. There can even be projects requiring experienced legal advisors. This is just one part of the picture that reveals an increasing trend for the skills that are marketable from home.
One of the most obvious advantages for the person working from home is the flexibility associated with being able to work in accordance with a time that best suits them and to work where they like: literally any time of day or night, and more or less anywhere you can hook your laptop up to an internet hotspot. Another advantage of attracting online work is that the provision of work invariably comes from business people in more affluent countries who can provide you with work at a considerably higher rate than that which can be obtained locally.
Despite the attractive option of working from home, this is no option and certainly not a short-cut to online riches. Freelance working is extremely hard work, probably with longer hours than a job’s offline counterpart: to be successful at freelance working you need to display integrity, honesty and have an appetite for hard work. It is not easy to get into these markets. In fact, it is probably no easier to get into the online job market than it is to obtain a job locally. However, when you do, the benefits are probably greater: more job satisfaction being the most important.
Top Freelancing Websites
If you would like to seek home-based jobs there is a range of websites you can become a member of. The sites listed below are well-established, trusted by both service providers and buyers alike, with thousands of users. Some of the best known websites include:
Scams
Scams abound on the internet so, if you are looking for work or are intent on developing your online presence in the freelance market, be very careful. So, despite the many and varied companies that offer work online, or working from home, it is as well to be careful. It is as well to be wary so, to help you avoid potential scams and to keep you safe from predatory websites, read on. Having maintained an online freelance presence on the internet for a number of years, I would advise everybody to be particularly suspicious if the company pushes too hard to sign you up and provide personal details: you should be asking ‘What’s in it for them?’ You also need to be suspicious if they ask for money up front in order to obtain either instructions or products.
Always ask a lot of questions: any potential, legitimate companies will be more than happy to answer all your questions and will be completely open with you. If you feel dubious about a company’s legitimacy, ask for references and check them carefully – especially the wording because if a company is trying to hide something it will be written in such a way that semantic interpretation could easily be misconstrued. Also do a thorough research about the company over the internet. Good companies have strong presence online with good testimonials. Another way of checking a company’s legitimacy is to ask for a list of other people who have worked for them: see if you can contact these earlier freelancers to see if they have been paid and what the company is like to work for.
As long as you take this common sense approach when searching for freelance work you should find legitimate work online without too much difficulty and develop a long-term association with companies that use your expertise and skills over and over again.
Deciding Factors:
The specific factors that maximize the prospect of acquiring an online are determined by:
If you want to obtain a continuous stream of quality work you need to be aware that the best buyers consider various factors during the selection process to find an appropriate service provider: Rate + Quality + Feedback or Reviews + Time quoted to complete the work. Quite often you will find that the winning bid may not belong to the cheapest bidder, or to that quoting the shortest time to finished product: the winning bid most often tends to be an equilibrium involving all the above-mentioned factors – a balance between all four.
Buyers who seek service providers usually carry out an interview of sorts, either by phone, email or through the medium of chat. This is to ensure that the service provider is able to bestow sufficient time to the project in question in order to get the job finished within the requisite time-frame. An interview is also ideal for the buyer to establish more detailed information about the service provider’s previous background – which, in the case of a job such as Legal Advisor – is essential.
Make sure your payment is guaranteed as these sites provide various methods by which payments can be guaranteed. This becomes more important when the buyer is new. If the buyer is an old established one, you may not need to worry about it much.
On completion of each project, the buyer and provider give feedback and rating to each other. The feedback and rating usually depend on Skills, Quality, Availablity, Communication and Cooperation.
For further information, explore the FAQs pages and use ‘Help’ of these sites.