Technology has made many jobs more practical to allow people to do at home. Customer service is quite popular as long distance rates have dropped, it becomes easier for businesses to route calls as they please and VOIP becomes more practical.

Just as with any work at home job, expectations of employees and contractors are quite high. If you understand what is expected of you before you start looking for work you will be prepared to go through the steps to get hired.

The first challenge is simply finding that job. All work at home opportunities are quite prone to having a huge number of people applying for them. Be prepared for these things to take some time. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve had two of their employees contacting me to ask about listings on this site. One asked me to really try to get the word out, so here I am.

The work is B2B appointment setting. I have the details listed with the other unresearched job leads, but truth be told Blue Zebra has been around a while. That was just the place I have for a long job listing like that. They have 10 openings right now.

[tags]work at home job lead,blue zebra,appointment setting[/tags]

My kids are pretty creative. Most kids are, really, if they have the opportunity. Fortunately it doesn’t take much to give them the opportunity.

The first thing to do is just turn off that television. While many of my daughter’s fantasies stem from things she’s seen on TV, not all off them do. Her favorite princess, Rapunzel, comes from the fairy tale (not from the Barbie movie, which she has never seen). On the other hand, Handy Manny from the Disney Channel is her imaginary friend.

My second rule for encouraging children to be creative is to just let them be. My children play with their toys with little interference from me. This means they get played with sometimes in ways I never would have expected, but the kids are having a blast. Read the rest of this entry »

Blogging is hot. You can find ebooks about it, read about it in major magazines or even hear about it on television. But is it for just anyone or just the lucky few?

Much depends on your goals. How soon do you need to be earning? How much do you want to earn? How much effort are you willing to put into blogging?

Just about anyone who can write reasonably well can earn some money as a blogger. I don’t mean you need to write well enough to become a published author. Blogging is often done in a very personal, conversational style, which is something most people can manage. Just write as though you’re talking to a friend. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, I know, I’m talking nonsense. And if you don’t run a website you won’t understand much of this. In fact, if you do run a website you may not have come across this problem.

Basically, I was having a problem with PHP session IDs appearing in a few of my URLs. No idea why, and they didn’t come about in all directories.

I did some research and finally found out how to get rid of the dratted things. You see, having session IDs appear in your URLs is not nice to the search engines as they make it look like you have a bunch of duplicate content. Each session looks to be a new page to the search engines. Yes, it can get pretty ugly. Read the rest of this entry »

These days there are many possibilities for people wanting to work at home. Just about any job that doesn’t require face to face interaction has the potential to be done from home. Yes, that includes accounting and bookkeeping jobs.

There are a couple ways to find these kinds of jobs.

The first is to look for companies that hire people to do this kind of work at home. Many prefer that you live within a particular geographic region as some parts of the job may require meeting with your clients.

The second is to look for your own clients. Many small businesses would rather hire an individual to handle their bookkeeping and accounting than do it themselves or hire a regular employee for the job. Read the rest of this entry »

I love this time of year, but oh! It is so good to be done with Christmas.

We had a really good time. Had to wake the kids up in time for church on Christmas morning because we’d been out late at a family gathering Christmas Eve. Ariel has finally decided that she doesn’t like getting clothing as a gift, and every time she unwrapped some she said that was a silly gift. Gage wasn’t always all that enthusiastic about unwrapping gifts but a few did get his attention quite well.

Lots of time just visiting family too. Spent Christmas Eve day with my mom and sisters, Christmas Eve evening at the aforementioned family gathering with my husband’s side of the family… extended family in this case. Church Christmas morning and opening presents at home, then off to my inlaws for opening presents there and Christmas dinner. Read the rest of this entry »

The deadline is approaching. You can’t put off the last of your Christmas shopping much longer!

Gift cards are a great last minute gift, and very easy to get. You can buy Amazon.com gift certificates off their site or get them from stores.

If you buy gift cards in person, however, be very careful. The latest scam involves thieves looking at gift cards in the store and writing down the card number. Then they can call to check the balance, using the information they took once they find out there’s a balance.

There’s a simple way to avoid that scam: Don’t buy any gift cards where the number has been visible to the general public in advance. You don’t know if someone has written that information down already. Read the rest of this entry »

I finally finished the first step of the big update to my work at home jobs section. There are now more jobs listed with brief descriptions for each company. I’ve also added new categories, such as blogging, translation and voiceovers.

Now, many opportunities to work at home are actually independent contractor or freelance positions. Very few companies hire you as an employee when you work at home. Just something to keep in mind. And a few of the opportunities I list are job marketplaces rather than actual jobs.

I’m just ecstatic to be done with that part. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been COLD here lately by southern California terms. But the kids seem to be enjoying it.

We have one of those turtle shaped sandboxes. Most of the time it is filled with sand, but a while back the kids got the bright idea of putting some water in it. Then the rain we had several days ago added to that because it wasn’t covered.

Well, for the past few mornings it has thoroughly iced up. Every morning we head out at about 10 to see how much ice there is. Even that far into the morning, there’s often a good 1/16 to 1/8 of an inch of ice in there. And the kids have a blast breaking through it, taking the chunks and throwing them onto the patio to watch them shatter. Read the rest of this entry »