There are lots of ways to work from home jobs and the Internet can be a great place to find those great opportunities. There are many places on the Internet where you can find these work from home jobs, but the best website that I’ve found is Craigslist.
Craigslist is a classified ad website that allows people from all over the world to post and peruse classifieds for free. In fact, Craigslist has been accused as the main culprit in newspapers going out of business.
Legitimate Work From Home Jobs
Craigslist has a strong core value of providing legitimate classified ads. The way Craigslist is set up, it’s difficult for a spammer or online marketer to automatically post large amounts of ads on Craigslist. Someone posting work from home jobs has to go and do it manually. This in addition to their flagging function tends to keep the spammers and scammers away from Craigslist and provides a safe place for real, legitimate work from home jobs and people looking for work from home opportunities.
There are scammers out there on Craigslist, but they are very few, and easy to spot. I’ll go into how you can spot a scammer later in this article. But on the most part, the proportion of scams in work from home jobs is relatively low compared to the legitimate ones.
How to Find a Work From Home Job on Craigslist
Here, I will go through the step by step process of finding good and legitimate work from home jobs on Craigslist. You might have to go through this process several before you find the one that’s right for you, but it’ll only take a few minutes of your time.
Step 1: Go to the Craigslist Website
Go to Craigslist.com. Craigslist will automatically read your IP Address (don’t worry if you don’t know what that means) and find out what city you’re currently located in. Then it will automatically send you to the local version of the Craigslist website.
For example, if you were located in Seattle and went to the Craigslist website, it will automatically send you to Seattle’s Craigslist as you can see in the picture below. Since you’re looking for work from home jobs, the entire world of Craigslist is yours. You can look for work from home opportunities in Chicago, Seattle, New York City, Charlotte, Atlanta, or Boston, even if you live in Portland.
That is the beauty of work from home jobs. You can go in later and look at different cities if you’d like, and I’ll go more into that later. In addition, if you live on the West Coast, that means you can get up at 5-6am work early and get off early to enjoy the rest of your afternoon to yourself.
Step 2: Go to the Jobs Section
General Jobs
Click on the ‘jobs’ link. Then to find the work from home jobs check the ‘telecommute’ and ‘contract’ boxes and then click the ‘search’ button. By narrowing the search to only telecommuting and contract jobs, you have a better chance of finding opportunities that are work from home jobs.
Job Categories
If you have a background in a certain area or would like to explore a specific type of work from home job, instead of clicking the general ‘jobs’ link, you can click on one of the more specific areas such as ‘business / mgmt’, ‘sales / biz dev’ or ‘admin / office’ to narrow your search even more.
Step 3: How to Find Good Work from Home Opportunities and How to Avoid Scams
There are many great, legitimate work from home jobs on Craigslist, you just have to know to spot them. In many cases, the opportunities will be from businesses and employers in your own local area, which adds to likelihood that it’s a legitimate work from home job. So, what should you look for in a work from home opportunity and employer?
#1 Description of the Company
If they don’t have a description of what type of company it is, then it’s probably not worth your time. There are 2 reasons why companies generally don’t describe their business. Number 1, because they are a scam work from home job. Number 2, or because they’re too lazy.
How can you tell the difference? If they’re a work from home scam, generally they’ll link to another website, and generally the website will have a name like “financial freedom” or “make $10,000 a month!” or something to that nature. If it has that sort of feel to it, it’s probably a scam or much harder than they make it out to be. These are not worth your time, and are probably not legitimate work from home jobs.
If the company is just being lazy, the description is usually brief and boring. This is probably a legitimate work from home job. But it may not be they type of company you want to work for. If they’re description is brief, so might their training and support of you once you get started with them.
The best work from home jobs are those whose companies have long descriptions, list a company website and list realistic earning potential. You should also look for what makes them different from other companies or if they’re a growing company. Growing companies are the best to work for, even if they start out small, because that means they have something new that is in demand and your future will be more secured. Legitimate work from home jobs are just that, jobs. Don’t think you can make easy money anywhere. In order to make big money in a work from home job, you’ll need to work, and if you don’t have a skill, it might require you to gain some.
#2 Pay Description
Make sure they give you some idea of what you’ll be making and how much time it will require. If it seems very easy, be wary. If it seems somewhat difficult but decent pay, it’s probably legitimate. Remember, if it was that easy, everybody would be doing it and the pay would not be good. That’s just basic economics. Who wouldn’t want to work from home and make $500/day? That’s not to say it doesn’t happen, but those are people who have some expertise and skill set that they can leverage. You can too, but it takes work and learning and experience.
For example, a reasonable pay for a work from home appointment setter would be either $10/hour or $15-20 per appointment set. Some industries that have a harder time getting appointments can pay up to $250 per appointment, but of course, you won’t get as many. If they say you can make $250K setting up appointments from home, it’s probably a scam or so difficult that it’s not worth doing it. This would not be a good work from home job.
#3 $0 Start Up Cost
You should have a computer, internet, and phone to start with, but most people reading this article would have that. Other than that, if the company requires you to buy anything or pay a fee, move on…it’s probably not a legitimate work from home job.
Step 4: Contact Employer
Just follow the directions the Craigslist post for work from home jobs lays out for you. If you want to streamline your efforts, have a generalize template of a cover letter and resume that you can quickly adjust according to the work from home job and you can copy and paste.
Look for employers that seem like they know how to work with work from home workers. How do you know? You’ll be able to tell right away. They’ll know what questions to ask you, they’ll tell you right away what they expect and what you should expect from them.
Generally, work from home jobs are independent contractor jobs so they’ll send you an independent contractor [http://sales-jobs-rep.blogspot.com/] contract to sign. They should also send you a 1099 form in January or February for tax purposes.