By: Stephen Kreutzer

Working at home is very popular. As with anything that is popular there are people out there who like to try to scam those looking for work at home jobs. Scams can sometimes be hard to recognize, but if a person knows what to look for they can raise their chances of not being caught in a work at home scam. A popular way to get taken by a scam work at home company is when they ask a person to pay them money.

The first key that a work at home opportunity may be a scam is that the company asks for money up front. This is also something that can be confusing because some legitimate companies ask for money, too. The main rule abut paying money is that if the job were not work at home would it be reasonable to pay money up front to work with this company. If it is a job where the person is required to keep an inventory of products than it is reasonable to pay something upfront for the inventory. However, if the payment is for administrative fees that is a red flag. A work at home job is like any other job. Nobody would pay a company to process their employment papers, so it is unreasonable for a work at home company to request payment for this purpose.

What usually happens when a company is running a scam by asking for money up front is that the hopeful work at home employee loses their money and gets no real job in return. Many scam companies try to use the trick that they will refund the money after a person has worked for them for so long. Once a person pays the money and begins working for the company they learn there really is no refund. In these cases the work at home employee usually also finds out the job duties are completely different from what they were originally told. The whole concept is the scam company makes their main income off potential work at home employees, not through a real business.

Almost any good reference on working at home will mention not to ever pay money for a work at home job. It may seem like common sense, but can be confusing for someone who is new to the work at home industry. Many of these scams seem real and also come across as a way to make big money fast. This type of money scam is the biggest of all work at home scams.

Article Source: http://www.ArticleJoe.com

Stephen Kreutzer is a freelance publisher based in Cupertino, California. He publishes articles and reports in various ezines and provides home business tips on Home Business Roundup.

By: Audrey Okaneko

If you want to work at home, step one is understanding the options available to you.

Let’s start with some basics. There are only TWO things you can do at home, yes, only TWO.

You can telecommute or you can run a business. That’s it, TWO.

Telecommuting - This means you have been hired by an employer, and that employer is open to having you work at home anywhere from a few hours a week, to full time. Some folks will work mornings in office, afternoons at home. Afternoons at home, allows them to pick up their kids, start dinner etc, all while working also. Some folks work every other day in office. This allows them bring work in, drop work off, be available for meetings etc.
You are an employee. You are either paid per hour or per week.
The sentence I see most often posted is “I want to work at home, so I have more time with my kids”. Find some folks who do telecommute. Their kids are in daycare, as they need to work. They also end up putting in more than 40 hours per week as they want to make sure they put in their 40 hours and make up for those trips to the store, the trips to pick kids up etc.

Telecommute positions are very tough to find. Most employers are not willing to have employees working unsupervised. Reason is, just look in office. Truly, how many employees give a job their all? How many work hard even when the boss is away? How many come in a few minutes early and leave a few minutes late on a consistent basis? Now let’s compare that to how many make personal calls? How many take a few extra minutes on their lunch? How many stand around the water machine chatting? How many day dream and don’t produce as much as they can/should? So, most employers are not willing to allow employees to work at home.

Again, speak to some folks who work at home. Ask them point blank what they did to get this job. Most will tell you that they had worked for a long time prior to this arrangement. They will tell you that they know their job inside out. They will tell you that they work over 40 hours per week. They will tell you that they do get “lonely” working all alone. And they’ll tell you they do go into the office frequently.

There is no book of companies that allow telecommuting. I’ve seen many many ads for folks to buy a book that is supposed to contain the names of companies that allow telecommuting. Those employers who have allowed telecommuting, have done so with an existing employee. My sister telecommutes for HP. But she had her degree in computer science. She has had tons of company training and she worked there 10 years. So putting HP down in a book and telling you that they hire telecommuters is misleading at best, an out and out lie at worst. And you have to pay for that book.

A business - To start there are only TWO things you can sell. You can sell a product or you can sell a service. Look around YOUR town. What do the businesses in YOUR town sell? They all sell either a product or a service. A home business will be no different, you’ll sell a product or a service. If you want to sell a service, look within. What are your skills? Are you proficient with a word processor? If so, you can consider selling your word processing skills. Remember, proficient means near perfect. I can use MS Word, but I could not sell it as a service.

Have you done bookkeeping or billing before? If so, this again, is something you can sell as a service. Are your kids older, in school all day? Consider an errand service. Heck, there are many days I feel I live in my car LOL. I always have books with me as I’m forever waiting for someone or something. Do a web search for errand services and view what others are offering and at what fees.

Are you an expert with a sewing machine? If so, offer tailoring and mending as a service. I am only 5′2″ and both my kids are 5′. We need everything altered. I would love to bring it to someone’s home versus having to go to the dry cleaner, change in their icky little bathroom etc.

Prefer to sell a product? You have a few choices, yes, only a few. You can make the product yourself. You can purchase from a wholesaler, or you can purchase from a direct sales company. That’s it, only those few choices.

If you wish to make the products, again, look within. What hobbies do you have? What crafts can you make? Some folks sell hand sewn or hand crocheted items. Some sell homemade soaps and lotions. Some sell homemade jewelry. Are you able to do this?

You can contract with a wholesaler. Look up ________ wholesaler in a search engine. The blank is for whatever product you want to sell. There are wholesalers for just about everything imaginable. Want to contract with a direct sales company? Go to www.dsa.org They have a large database of their members. Their members range from cosmetic companies, to toy companies, to clothing companies and everything in between. You don’t need to pay to access this database.

Now for some scams. Home assembly is a scam. There are exceptions. Occasionally a factory that makes items will advertise for local employees. You’ll go to the factory, fill out the application, meet with them, and get hired. There will NOT be a fee. You’ll drop off and pick up finished products. Assembly at home jobs found on the internet are SCAMS. Don’t believe me? Find me just two people who do this and make money. Just two. From anywhere in the US. Just two

Transcribing and medical billing are the next areas where the scam artists prey. These are both legitimate professions, however in order to be hired you must have education. The courses offered online may or may not be legitimate. What I can tell is they DO NOT find you jobs. What they do is send you listings from the yellow pages of your city, with doctors names and phone numbers for you to call. If you have a personal doctor, contact him/her. Ask for a consultation. Even if it’s $100 for the consultation, that’s $500 less than the software you might be considering buying. Ask your doctor about his/her medical billing. Do they use someone at home? Would they hire someone who had never worked in office before? See what YOUR doctor tells you. If this is a career you want to pursue, contact your local junior college, local trade college or local business college.

The final scams I want to mention are the process orders, and data entry at home. All those ads for mail from home, order process from home etc are all a variation of the same scam. You pay money. You get directions to place ads like the one you answered. You then receive a percent each time you scam the next person. You TYPE or PROCESS their ORDER. Nice play on words huh? If in fact, typing at home, assembly at home, processing orders at home were legitimate, don’t you think we’d read more about folks doing this successfully?

So, while you do have many options of what to offer to others, there are also many scams out there waiting to take your money.

Article Source: http://www.wahm-articles.com

Audrey Okaneko has worked at home since 1983. She can be reached at audreyoka@cox.net or visited at www.scrapping-made-simple.com

By: Nell Taliercio

1. An attractive layout that is easy to read and follow.

Recruiters and hiring managers are busy people. They are often reading hundreds of résumés in a day so they don’t have time to clean up your résumés formatting.

If a hiring manager opens your e-mail attachment and the lines are out of alignment (usually from using the “tab” key) or if the font is too large/too small, they will likely hit delete and move on.

Instead of using the “tab” key and the underline function, try to use tables with borders and shading elements to design your résumé. When you e-mail it out, it will retain its original format.
“I would recommend that jobseekers educate themselves and become Microsoft Word experts. Knowing Microsoft Word inside and out will save a lot of time when it comes to the layout and design of a résumé.” Jennifer Anthony

2. A clearly defined goal.

It is imperative that a hiring manager know what position you are applying for and what you have to offer them. Don’t leave them guessing and don’t assume your cover letter will stay with your résumé. Make sure they can glance at it and within seconds know what you have to offer them. Here is an excerpt from a writer’s résumé:

EXPERIENCED WRITER

Accomplished writer with 15 years of experience developing excellent materials, including experience in magazine, newspaper, and corporate writing. Versatile and capable, consistently adhering to deadlines and keeping projects on target. Proven ability to use writing skills, communication skills, and interpersonal skills to succeed in independent and team initiatives.

3. Skills Summary.

There are many types of skills you can list on your résumé. Focus on your job specific skills and your technology skills.

Here is an example for a legal transcriptionist:

§Type 80 WPM
§Legal Terminology Knowledge
§Microsoft Word
§Corel WordPerfect
§Express Scribe
§FTP Knowledge

4. Honesty.

There needs to be a trusting relationship formed in a telecommuting situation. How does the employer know that you won’t lie about how many hours you worked? How do they know you will not steal confidential information? There is no guarantee. However, I can guarantee the trusting relationship is gone as soon as you lie on your résumé and you will be disqualified from the position.

Consequently, it is not in your favor to extend your old employment dates or to inflate your job titles. Companies are hiring sophisticated research companies to investigate your background. Don’t think because your supervisors are all long gone, that your record is gone too. There is always a human resources department or a payroll company that processed your paychecks. And when all else fails, they will ask for pay stubs or old tax records for proof of what you wrote in your résumé. DON’T LIE.

5. Keywords/Buzzwords

Many companies are using an automated system that scans your résumé for the qualifications necessary for the specific job opening. If your keywords and industry buzzwords are missing, your résumé will not be selected as a match from the company database and a real person won’t even look at your résumé.

Take a few moments to read through the job description to pick out the keywords used. Look at trade publications and other vacancy announcements for the same type of job to find frequently used buzzwords in your career field. Make sure to incorporate these words into your résumé so yours won’t get lost in the database.

For more assistance on résumé writing in general, follow these helpful links!

http://www.telecommutingmoms.com
http://www.resumeasap.com
http://resume.monster.com

Article By:

Nell Taliercio is the owner and founder of www.telecommutingmoms.com– which is a leading resource website with work at home jobs and everything a telecommuting mom would need. Come visit us today!

By: Roberta Sedycias

You might be wandering the reasons your web site is not getting much internet traffic. After all your web site took lots of financial and human resources, but unfortunately like so many web sites, it is quite unknown and as a result it does not get enough internet traffic to make it financially viable.

Did you know that about 80 percent of all web site traffic originates from search engines? Yes, it is true! Listing near the top page of search engines and obtaining the attention of your target audience should be a main priority for any web site internet promotion.

And the good news about this is that improving a web site position in search engine pages may be done for free. How? Using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.

There are many ways to promote a web site. Some promotions are paid and some are free. Among the free ones, the search engine optimization techniques enable web sites to become search engine friendly. In other words, it makes website pages to accept the search engine crawler in a friendly way. These techniques will be some of the steps one will have to use to obtain a better position in search engine’s pages, when searching for specific keywords, related to services or products offered by a web site.
Search engine optimization steps for a web page:

Title:

The html Title tag is a very important element and must include the most important keywords or phrases, which best represent the products or services offered by the web page. It should not contain more than 60 characters.

Keywords:

The html meta Keyword tag should have all the keyword phrases which best represents the products or services offered by the web page. Avoid repeating keywords and bad use of capital letters. It should not contain more than 250 characters.

Description:

The html meta Description tag is a description of the web page, which will be displayed by the search engine. Make sure it contains keywords phrases. Avoid repeating keywords and bad use of capital letters. It should not contain more than 200 characters.
Keywords in Headings:

Keywords in Headings tags (h1) will be interpreted by search engines as being an important keyword relevant to the web page, and it should be looked for and indexed by the search engines.

Web page text:

It is a good practice to include informative text one every page, using natural language and appropriate keywords. It should contain more than 200 words. Informative text should be placed in the html Body section of the web page.

Keywords in Alt Tags:

Every html picture “img” tag should contain an ALT tag with an appropriate description. Keywords should always be used when appropriate.

Keywords in Anchor Tags:

Every html hypertext link “a href ” should contain a TITLE tag with an appropriate description. Keywords should always be used when appropriate.

Robots.txt file:

Make sure there is a robots.txt file in you web site directory. This is a text file created by the webmaster, which will guide the search engine´s crawler when indexing a web site.

There are some cases in which one might not want to have some web pages indexed. This way thru the use of robots.txt, one will have control over which pages will be indexed and made available to the search engines.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /data/

HTML code validation:

Search engine’s crawlers become more efficient when indexing web pages with no html errors. Beware that some html errors can make search engine crawlers to give up indexing web pages. So it is recommended for those web pages to be indexed, there should be no html errors.

Links:

Links are very important to search engines. The quality of links and whether it is reciprocal or not, are important factors in evaluating the importance of a web page. Links from web sites with higher page ranks are a plus.

Registering with Directories and Search Engines:

It is very important the registration of a website with directories and search engine web sites. It is a way of telling the world that your web site exists. Avoid using automatic search engine/directory registration.
Search engine optimization has become a very important set of procedures which helps web sites to become more relevant to search engines. To obtain an increase in internet traffic will take some time. It probably will take some kind of additional promotion too. But anybody in need of higher internet traffic, free search engine optimization might be considered his first option.

Roberta Sedycias
IT ConsultantThis article is under GNU FDL license and can be distributed without any previous authorization from the author. However the author´s name and all the URL´s (links) mentioned in the article and biography must be kept.Article By:

This article can also be accessed in portuguese language from the News Article section of page PoloMercantil

Roberta Sedycias has a bachelor degree in Business Administration and over 20 years experience in systems analysis and computer programming. Currently working as IT consultant for www.PoloMercantil.com.br

By: Lori Redfield

So you’ve done it! You’ve poured your heart and soul into the perfect design, the perfect concept, THE perfect website. Don’t stop there.

I have seen countless websites - perfectly good websites sitting out there on the web, looking pretty - but not being seen. Here are some strategies to implement - over and over again if you want your website to be a success.

First of all, please! Provide content. Give your visitors a reason to be there and a reason to come back. It truly helps if your site’s focus is something you are passionate about. It is very difficult to succeed with a website you threw together solely because you thought it might ‘make you some money’. You’ve got to care enough about this baby to work on it constantly - even if it ISN’T making you money. So choose a topic that won’t bore you and in which you consider yourself a teacher. You’ve got to offer your visitor something. They aren’t coming to view your paid ads.

Once the site is created, make sure that you have good meta tags on every page. You’ve got to have them. The search engine spiders feed off them. They are a breeze to make. You can find free tools all over the place to help you make them. I use the meta tag creator at http://www.anybrowser.com, mainly because I like to support the site. They offer quality resources for free to their users. Even if you are getting a resource for free off of the web, you should realize that the webmaster benefits from you using it. You become one of their statistics - one of their visitors who find the site useful. The more useful a site is, the more it is frequented, the higher value is placed on advertising space. So support sites you love - go there often. If you don’t have any particular page set up as your home page on your browser, choose a site you respect and use it as your home page.

See, really I believe one of the secrets of success is generosity. If you covet your resources you close yourself off. If you fear your ‘competition’ instead of embracing them and networking with them, you cut yourself off. So take the time to support other sites and network. Network at least once a day. Set your mind to it. If you see a site that you love, write the webmaster. Tell them what you love about it. There is nothing better then a note from the ethers appreciating all that you have been working on for months. You never know what can come out of these notes. Make suggestions. Tell the webmaster (or webmistress) that you are interested in reciprocal linking, but that you would really much rather go a step further with them. That a reciprocal link really doesn’t do justice to the amount of respect you have for what they are doing and offer to exchange articles with them, or newsletter ads - anything. Make some friends!

Ideally you should rent Wordtracker from http://www.wordtracker.com and research the keywords in your meta tags before you create them. Wordtracker is a miracle! It’s very cheap to rent for a day (under $10) and it lets you research the words you feel are key to your business and see how many people actually search on those terms, and how many competing sites out there are using those terms. Now that’s valuable!
A word about metatags: One tag that used to be considered crucial, the keyword metatag, is now considered pretty much useless. Most of the search engine spiders have stopped looking at this tag. Adding it won’t hurt your site. In fact there are a few search engines such as Tehoma that still read it. But it definitely doesn’t carry enough weight as it used to.

Because the keyword meta tag is ‘dead’, what we need to do is integrate our keywords into the Title tag, the Description tag and probably most importantly, into the text on the site. You can also add some keywords to the alt tags on your sites images. But remember, your visitors will see whatever you have written there when they mouse over your images so keep the message brief and professional and don’t over-do it or your site will look bad.

Once you have your metatags created and inserted into every page on your site (being sure to use a different ‘title tag’ for every page. Go ahead and start submitting to search engines and directories. That’s the first step. Please note that I said FIRST step. Too many people stop there.

The next thing to do is reciprocal link. If your site allows it, set up a directory or some form of a reciprocal linking page. Every morning, sit down with a cup of tea and search. Search for sites that you would like to exchange links with. That’s crucial. You don’t want to add links to YOUR site with just anyone. Their site needs to be worthwhile. Something that you WANT to send your visitors to. This is much more about integrity then it is about ambition. Keep your integrity and you will have something that people will be loyal to. Also - search for sites that will let you add a link WITHOUT reciprocating. That is where it pays to have a site with integrity. People will actually WANT to link to you simply because they want to offer the resource to their visitors.

Google and other big search engines rank sites according to (amongst other things) their link popularity. The more you can get links to your sites out there, any where - the better you will find that your search engine results are. Here is a trick for finding sites to link with. Go to http:www.google.com and do a search. Say you sell cloth diapers. You will search on, ‘add diaper link’ or ‘add baby link’ or ‘add WAHM link’, etc. You will be shocked at how many sites come up in your search. It’s fun!

Don’t ever consider yourself done exchanging links. You may set it aside for awhile, but do pick it up again. It can never hurt.

What CAN hurt is linking to sites with a low Google rating (below 3) from your site. I highly recommend surfing with the Google toolbar AND the Alexa toolbar. Pay attention to the ratings of sites that you are considering exchanging links with. It can never hurt your search engine results if someone links to you, but it CAN hurt your results if you link to them. You may be willing to compromise if a site is particularly good. Why? Because, A. you want to support good sites and also offer excellent resources to your visitors and B. because chances are if it is a good site - the Google and Alexa rankings will only get better.

Another fun trick is to pay attention to your Alexa bar as you are surfing on sites that are related to your website. You will see that Alexa provides links to related sites on the toolbar as you are surfing. Imagine if people were seeing YOUR link up there! You want that! So take the time to submit your link as you surf. If you are on a site that relates to yours, tell Alexa about it. It only takes a minute to submit it and a second to click the email they will send you. The results won’t be immediate - but they’re ‘in the bank’.

One other promotion strategy I want to share with you is writing articles. Like this one! Write articles on what you know about. What you care about. Or what moves you. In just the same way as you searched for ‘add diaper link’, now you will do a search for ‘add article link’. Submit your articles all over the place. Good webmasters are often too busy to write their own articles and they LOVE to publish good ones on their site. You heard me! They will publish YOUR article on their site. They won’t pay you. but they will include a short biography at the end of the article with a link back to your website. Now THAT’S what I call payment! Free traffic that you earned! Someone read your article, recognized that you had something to offer to them and decided, based on the merit of what you have written that they want to know more about you.

I promise you - if you take these pieces of advice to heart, put them into practice and have a good time with it. Your site WILL increase in popularity. I wish you all the best luck with your promotion efforts and hope that you become excited enough and savvy enough to be one of the lucky folks who really are able to earn a living doing what they love.

Article Source: http://www.wahm-articles.com

Lori Redfield is a Freelancer and Internet Entrepreneur. Visit her website, FreelanceMom.com for more information and work from home jobs.