How many times have you thought to yourself as you’re rushing out the door, grabbing a granola bar, and doing your mascara on the way to work, Man, wouldn’t it be nice to just work at home?
In the information age, a lot of employers and businesses are realizing that working from home is a real possibility now. There are a ton of jobs you can do from home, everything from tech support and customer service to writing, editing, and secretarial work.
Because there are so many and a lot of them are very specialized, I decided to put together a list of jobs you can do from the comfort of your home and where to find these jobs.
Some of the most popular home-based jobs are also a lot of fun, simply because they’re somewhat easy for the right people and you don’t have to waste time and gas commuting. You make your own schedule, are flexible enough to take breaks if you need to get something else done, and don’t have to take your lunches at specific times.
The 5 most popular jobs you can do from home are somewhat easy to obtain if you have the necessary skills. Someone with terrible grammar and spelling wouldn’t become a professional writer, right? So really think about it. What do you know a lot about? What are you skilled in? Can you offer this as a service and get paid for it?
- Virtual Assistant
A VA or Virtual Assistant is exactly what the job title implies – an online assistant to someone, their business, or specific assigned tasks. Virtual assistants can be responsible for answering e-mails, customer service, follow-up work, interlinking web sites, or other assistant-specific tasks. The best part is, as a VA you don’t have to get anyone else but yourself coffee. Working from home definitely has its perks!
How can you find a job as a Virtual Assistant? There are plenty of web sites to go to for this kind of work, and some to get you started are Craigslist and oDesk. For a job-specific site, check out Virtual Office Temps.
- Customer Service Representative
There are companies hiring customer service workers all the time online. Companies are outsourcing their call center work to save money by saving space. Instead of going in to a call center to sit at a desk and take calls, you can now do the same thing from the comfort of your own home. Companies like Convergys are always hiring call center reps to work from home.
I can tell you from personal experience that working from home is a nice perk, extremely convenient, and offers a great deal of flexibility. In some cases, even if you know how to do simple data entry, you don’t even have to have a college degree.
- Graphic Artist
This is a more specialized field, but definitely one that can be done from the comfort of your home. A graphic artist is someone who designs things like posters, business cards, coffee mugs, book covers, stationery, journal covers, and much more. Postcards, greeting cards, all sorts of design options exist out there – you just have to find the projects.
There are a lot of people who don’t want to pay a whole lot for these services, even though you do need a college degree to do this type of work. Once you’re more established, though, it’s more acceptable to ask for more money. If you have a passion for graphic design, art, color, and visually appealing work, this might be the right career for you!
- Writer
Every business, enterprise, organization, and company has a web site now. If they don’t, then they’re behind. But the web site also needs content – good content – if it’s going to go anywhere or serve its purpose, which is usually to get more customers or provide information about the company.
For writers, there’s never been a better time to have a solid writing skill for sales materials, web content, answering e-mails, and being the online chat help for a site. Writing press releases, grant proposals, white papers, business letters, and pre-written scheduled e-mails are all on the list of things a writer can do. People also hire ghostwriters for if they have a good idea for a book but aren’t writers themselves. You can also write essays, term papers, and other education-related material for cash.
- Consultant
If you have a specialty, consider yourself an expert on a given topic, or just have a lot of experience with something, you can become a consultant. Consulting work is basically sharing your knowledge with others for a fee – people will literally pay you for what you know.
Things such as self-publishing are rapidly growing and expanding, so people are independently putting their work out there in order to avoid having a big publishing house come in and take 90% of the profits with things like print on demand making that unnecessary. If you’re someone who has knowledge on something specific, you can become a member of a web site like LivePerson or Just Answer and have people pay you for what you know.
These are all very real possibilities and have the potential to make a decent living from home. I personally have made writing my career, and I thought that if I really want to be a good writer, I should learn to write as many different things as possible. Now that I know how to write a lot of different things and edit well, I charge for those services. I have to tell you… working from home is a blessing when you have kids to raise! That was the whole reason why I decided to do an online degree program instead of on campus.
