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3 Real Jobs You Can Do From Home

3 Real Jobs You Can Do From Home
By Liz Pulliam Weston

Forget stuffing envelopes. There are actual wage-paying opportunities that can fit into your hectic life. Technology is opening up new career and job opportunities for entrepreneurs, parents and others who want to work in their own home. Finding and landing legitimate, profitable work still isn't easy, but here are a few venues out there to try:

Start a Web business:
Paul and Alison Martin, who met while they were students at Stanford University, decided to launch their own Web-based baby product business shortly after the birth of their twins, Ainsley and Sierra. The site was profitable enough to support the family.

"The most important thing is to have the mindset that you're going to make it work, that you're going to learn from your mistakes," Paul said. "It may take longer than you think. ... There were difficult times when we were wondering if we were ever going to turn the corner."

If you find a concept that works, you might make additional money teaching other people what you know. Tamaira Sandifer of Sacramento, Calif., launched a service called Fun Mail for Kids that sends customized packets, complete with stickers, personalized letters and crafts projects, to kids via the U.S. mail. Once that was a hit, she wrote an e-book, available for $25 on her site, to teach others how to run similar businesses on the Web.

As with any small business, it can help to draft a business plan. The Small Business Administration has a free business set-up guide at its site.

A call center in your home:
You hear a lot about companies routing their customer service calls to workers overseas, but a less-noticed trend is the growth in home-based call center workers. The number of such workers in North America has tripled since 2000, according to an estimate by research firm Yankee Group, with more than 670,000 phone agents in the U.S. and Canada now working-at-home.

Thanks to the Internet and better call-routing technology, more companies are finding they can outsource their order-taking, sales and problem-solving calls to home-based workers, said LiveOps CEO Bill Trenchard. LiveOps not only runs an outsource operation, but it provides the technology for companies that want to set up their own home-based call centers "since only about 10% to 12% of call center work is outsourced," Trenchard said.

Online Auctions:
The largest online auction site, eBay says 724,000 of its 72 million users are "professional sellers" who report the website as a primary or secondary source of income. Another 1.5 million say they supplement their incomes with eBay sales.

Barb Webb of Newnan, Ga., outside Atlanta, started her online auction career a few years ago by selling household items she otherwise would have put in a garage sale. The former corporate executive branched out by looking for bargains at local retailers and then auctioning them off for a profit on the site. In her best year, she cleared over $10,000 -- not enough to live on, perhaps, but not bad as a part-time job squeezed in between activities for her three kids.

Sellers also need to be mindful of their reputations, since bad feedback from buyers can hurt future sales, she said. Staying organized, using truthful descriptions and shipping items promptly are essential to a profitable auction business.

Webb also advises newbies to start slowly, particularly if they're buying items with the intent to sell them at auction. It can be easy to misjudge what people will want to buy, she said, while listing costs, the site's commissions and buyers who don't pay can eat into profits. "The best way is to bank some (profits) and then reinvest some," Webb said.

Liz Pulliam Weston is the author of the books "Your Credit Score" and "Deal With Your Debt," both published by Prentice Hall. You can visit her at: http://www.AskLizWeston.com

posted by Victor Lloyd Smith @ 11:22 AM