Work at Home OptionsThis post is a general overview of several things you can do to work from home. However, these are not the only options. Be sure to check the right sidebar under the heading “Explore This Site” for several other ideas.

Search Engine Evaluation

This is a non-phone job that you can do from home that pays pretty well.  You’ll earn anywhere between $13.50 and $15 per hour for search engine evaluation depending on who you are doing it for. There are four companies that hire for this. You do not have to have a college education or any experience doing this type of work to get hired. You must simply take and pass a fairly long, complicated test. Don’t worry, they do give you guidelines to read over and plenty of time to study. Leapforce, Lionbridge, Butler Hill, and Work Force Logic are the four companies who hire this type of work on occasion.

Phone Jobs

Not everyone can take on the phone work from home, but the pay is often good if you can. Most of these jobs require a landline, high-speed internet, up to date PC, and a headset. You also must be able to provide a quiet background, so doing phone work may not be ideal if you have small children or loud pets at home with you most of the time. The work generally involves customer service — helping people with their accounts, technical problems, and occasionally sales. The work will vary depending on the company. One thing to keep in mind is that you might have to submit to a background and/or credit check before being hired. If a background check is done, you might have to pay for it and not all companies will reimburse you that expense. But the work at home world is full of these opportunities. There are also a few that do not mind background noise (InteliChek and Pierce Eislen). Here are all the phone jobs I’ve posted about.

Writing

You can absolutely make a decent amount of money writing from home and you do not even have to be a professional to get started. I have a long list of content sites you can sign up with here, and many of them will hire you without prior writing experience. Freelance writing is a field that you can really grow in. Smaller paying jobs can eventually lead to higher paying jobs as you gain experience and get better and better. I have been freelance writing off and on for a few years now and I can certainly vouch for the fact that it’s possible to make a substantial amount of money doing it from home.

Transcription

Transcription involves listening to an audio file and then typing what you hear. It’s not as easy you think — you have to have a good ear and be able to pay close attention to detail. The work typically falls into three categories — medical, legal, and general. Most of the medical and legal transcription work involve some prior training since there is so much medical terminology and legal jargon involved that newbies may not know, but it’s possible to get in on general transcription without any past experience in some cases. Here is a list I recently made on good sites for aspiring transcriptionists.

Virtual Assisting

Virtual assisting is an attractive work at home option because the work is so versatile. You can really put your own individual talents and skills to to good use here and earn money for what you’re best at. The work pretty much involves whatever your client needs. You could be doing data entry, writing, making calls, answering messages, or managing multiple social networks. The sky is really the limit. If this sounds interesting to you, read the post I did recently on good sites for virtual assisting.

Tutoring & Scoring

If you have a college degree or a teaching degree, you may be able to get hired by some tutoring companies to help students with their studies virtually. Tutoring work pays anywhere from $8 to $12 an hour and it can be very rewarding. If you have a teaching degree, you might also be able to get a job doing some test scoring for different companies like Pearson and ETS. There are also some ESL tutoring jobs like Tutor ABC and Idapted that you can get with no teaching degree. The primary requirement is that English is your first language and you must be able to effectively teach it to non-native English speakers.

Flexible Work Outside the Home

Many people who look for work at home jobs are doing so because they need the flexible hours — not because they actually have to do the work at home. Courthouse Research and Merchandising are two fields you can get into that basically allow you to work whatever hours you want. Courthouse Research involves visiting courthouses and pulling public records that are needed for different reasons and then submitting the records to the companies you are working for. Merchandising work involves visiting different places of business and setting up displays, stocking inventory, and ordering items that have run out. You can read more about courthouse research here and merchandising work here. Mystery shopping is another field you might want to consider getting into, although in most cases I believe it’s just good for extra cash.

Extra Cash

For extra money, I recommend little side jobs like answering texts, forum posting, website usability testing, mail decoy work, and short task sites.

Other Work at Home Sites

There are some other sites out there similar to my own that offer work at home job leads, reviews, and ideas for extra cash. The ones on this list are all recommended by me. If you can’t find what you need here, maybe some of those sites will have something useful.

Good luck with whatever you choose to pursue!

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