One thing I’ve noticed in running this site is that many people who want to work at home start their search with something like data entry. It’s easy to understand why. Data entry work at home jobs sound easy, can be done on the computer by just about anyone, at any time of day, and with kids around. You don’t have to worry about noise.

No doubt the high appeal of data entry work at home jobs is why there are so many scams in that area. It’s easy to fall for things that are too good to be true when you’re looking for the easy solution.

There’s a simple truth about legitimate work at home opportunities. They’re work. It may come easier for some than for others, but it’s still work.

Pick right and you’ll enjoy your work more, but an effort on your part is still required.

So what can you do aside from data entry if you don’t think you have any work at home skills, need a flexible schedule and can’t count on a quiet household? Are you just out of luck?

Fortunately, no.

You Can Do More Than You Think

Mostly that’s because most people don’t realize how many skills they do have. If you have office skills, for example, you may be able to find work as a virtual assistant. If you have transportation you might try mystery shopping, although it can be hard to earn a good living until you have a lot of experience in that field.

You might find a job where you can do research online, or where you can look up court documents in your area. There are writing jobs for those with excellent writing skills. There are lots of freelance writing jobs out there.

If typing is what you really want to do, go learn general transcription. It will take some time to find a general transcription job that pays well enough to be worthwhile, but it has fewer training requirements than medical or legal transcription.

Beware The Work At Home Scams

In all cases, you want to watch out for work at home scams. They’re out there in spades. This is especially true if you are looking for something as popular as data entry work at home jobs.

If any job sounds good to you, check out the company. Ask on forums about them. Search the company name on your favorite search engine with the word “scam” and see what comes up. Take some time to think about it. Really understand what it is you are getting paid for.

And learn what the common scams are in different work at home industries. There are common signs that will help you to keep on the right path.

For data entry work at home jobs, one common scam is to try to get you into affiliate marketing. But not the honest kind of affiliate marketing. The scammers want you to post ads about how you can make money posting ads on forums, blogs, and social media. Never mind that these are places that ads are rarely welcome and most of you posts will be deleted. Or that the ads will be selling the same information about ad posting that you got from the ad you followed.

There are ways to make money as an affiliate posting on certain kinds of sites. These ads usually give you the wrong way. The very wrong way.

In general, anything that promises easy money is lying to you. Most ways that you can easily make money don’t work for more than a few people. Even in the areas where some people legitimately do make big bucks online, such as blogging or making YouTube videos, most people won’t make much at all. The ones that make a lot have worked hard at it, even when it looks easy from the outside. Just something to be aware of, even if you don’t let it stop you.

Learn New Skills

Let’s say there’s a work at home job opportunity that has caught your eye, but you don’t have the skills for it. What do you do then?

My simple answer: Go get the skills!

There are lots of opportunities to learn new skills that will allow you to work at home successfully. Some options are free, while others cost quite a bit of money. Whether you can do it depends on what you want to do and how much you can afford to spend.

Take medical coding, for example. Solid training for that through Career Step will cost you a few thousand dollars. But, their training is highly reputable, and it’s a job that has fair demand.

If you want to become a virtual assistant, the Horkey Handbook is a good choice, and costs $247 as of this writing. The course provides a ton of information, including 58 lessons and more than two hours of video. It also offers a full refund for if you aren’t satisfied.

A virtual assistant will sometimes do some data entry work, but much of the work is much more interesting than that. And it’s usually flexible.

You Don’t Want To Limit Yourself To Just Work At Home Jobs.

That’s not quite true. You might want to limit yourself to work at home jobs. Many people simply cannot picture themselves running a home business. You’re limiting your options when you do that, but that’s a choice you make.

But thinking about a home business means opening your options up tremendously. It’s not all direct sales and daycare… although those aren’t bad options at all if they’re what you will enjoy doing!

Considering a home business means opening yourself up to risk. You might fail. You might lose money.

Then again, you might make more money than you would have with a job. You might end up doing something you really, really love.

In a home business, you have the control. You decide what you do and learn how to do it. You decide when you work on it.

If you don’t work hard at a business, of course, it probably won’t go anywhere and won’t be more than a hobby.

But consider! You can start a blog about your life. Start an affiliate site about your favorite hobby. Sell crafts you make. Work as a website designer or other professional.

None of these will guarantee you an income, big or small. But it’s a lot of fun to try. Love what you write about, and you’ll give yourself a better chance than blogging about something that bores you. Even if it doesn’t work, you’ll have fun trying.

While you still have to learn about scams when you start a home business, especially if you join an opportunity, you have much more control over what happens.

Much of my own online success has come from continuing hard work. Shortcuts have nothing to do with it. Low standards have nothing to do with it. Demanding a lot from myself does. When I’ve let work slide, my business has slid. And it’s hard bringing it back up.

You can do likewise when you decide to work from home, especially if you don’t limit yourself by thinking you don’t have the skills to succeed. These can be learned, even if you don’t get them on the first try. Keep working at what you’ve chosen to have your best chance at success.

The post Great Alternatives to Data Entry Work at Home Jobs appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

When you see ads and offers for data entry work at home jobs, they’re often really teaching you about how to earn money doing ad posting. All you have to do is pay for a membership or to download the course, whatever it is the site cares to call it, and you’ll have a chance to make big money, honest! Or so they say. But is this really data entry?

In my opinion, no, not at all. I would consider data entry work to be when you’re entering data specified by your employer into a database. That’s not what you do when you post ads. Usually you have to write them yourself, although sometimes there are resources to help you. Ad posting, as suggested by most of these supposed data entry opportunities, is quite simply affiliate marketing.

Let’s take a look at some of the common things they say.

List of 10,000 companies available, and none will refuse to hire you.

This usually translates to them giving you a link to Clickbank. There are a lot of merchants on Clickbank, and most have open affiliate programs, so you won’t be declined by an employer because they aren’t employing you or offering any sort of a job. You’ll be an affiliate marketer through Clickbank, not directly associated with or paid by the company which created the product you’re marketing.

Note that they aren’t maintaining the database themselves. They may have the Clickbank marketplace all nicely listed on their site, but they aren’t the ones getting merchants interested or dealing with the issues involved in having a database of that sort.

You’ll never have to sell anything.

Define sell. If you mean persuade someone to buy a product, then yes, you’re selling. How else are you going to earn affiliate commissions?

But if you mean sell as in process the payment for the product, no, you aren’t going to do that. Not handling payments is one of the great parts about being an affiliate.

You’ll never have to contact customers.

Sort of true, sort of not. If you place an ad somewhere where there’s an option to contact you rather than click through the affiliate link, some people will do that instead. Yes, you can ignore them, but it’s smarter to have an email template you can edit for their specific needs and try again for the click. They’re interested enough to contact you, that bit of extra effort could be worth your time. But you don’t have to if it’s not your thing.

Submit short forms for the companies.

In other words, fill out the forms for the ads you’re going to place. It’s common for these opportunities to suggest pay per click sites such as AdWords, but as that has become more challenging, they may also suggest posting ads on classified ad websites, forums and so forth. Not all may be welcoming of affiliate advertising.

Once again, you’ll probably be writing your own ads. Some Clickbank merchants are kind enough to write some basic material for you, but many don’t. Besides, if you used the prepared material you won’t stand out so well, and that can be a disadvantage if you ad is one of many on the page, especially if someone else is advertising the same product.

They don’t care about your typing speed.

This is one of the big hints that you aren’t looking at a real data entry job for an employer. Anyone who is going to pay you to do this work as work will care about your typing speed, as they want to get a ton of productivity out for what they pay you. A real data entry job listing will mention typing speed.

These guys don’t care because they’re talking about affiliate marketing, and you only get paid a commission if you make a sale. Typing speed is your own problem.

Earn hundreds of dollars for 15-30 minutes of work.

Or similar claims, of course. Even most affiliate marketers work longer than that to earn their commissions. There’s a learning curve, for one thing. It takes time to figure out what works for each product.

Most of these products will offer proof of earnings that will confirm it’s affiliate marketing through Clickbank once you know what to look for. Easy thing is the earnings screenshot, which is usually a screenshot of a Clickbank account.

Faking a Clickbank screenshot is ridiculously easy. This one took moments.

Trouble with that is you don’t know how those earnings came about. Clickbank has been working on that for products offered through their own marketplace, but in the past it has been common to use screenshots for sales unrelated to the method being discussed. Screenshots are also trivial to fake. They prove nothing. Videos can be faked as well.

What To Do If You Really Want to Do Data Entry or Online Typing

If you really and truly want to do data entry or a similar online typing job, it’s going to be kind of tough. These jobs aren’t entirely impossible to find, but they are difficult to find. There just aren’t that many companies out there hiring for these kinds of positions. I have a few listed on my data entry work at home jobs page, but it’s only a few because there are so few legit companies out there.

If you can cope with typing what you hear rather than what you see, consider general transcription as well. You may want to take a class on transcription just to get your skills built up, but general transcription doesn’t have the training requirements you see for medical or legal transcription in most cases, although many such positions still demand experience. You’ll be typing, it can be online and from home, and the pay rate isn’t bad if you have excellent speed.

What If You Don’t Mind the Idea of Ad Posting and Affiliate Marketing?

Done right, there’s nothing wrong with posting ads and doing affiliate marketing. It’s not the easy road to riches some imagine (how I wish it were otherwise!), but a good number of people do earn a living through affiliate marketing. It’s a part of my income I’d hate to give up, although I do affiliate marketing through my own websites, not ad posting. More fun to me.

Most important thing in this case is to find a legitimate resource to help you learn how to post ads… unless you’re up for the learning curve of puzzling it all out on your own. Even with help it gets expensive if you go the pay per click route, and the way things work with some sites now you may well have to set up your own website to link through, rather than linking directly to the product through your ad. That’s actually a good thing in the long run, but that’s another issue.

Don’t go for resources or programs that start talking it up as a data entry or home typing job. At that point they’ve already failed one important test, so why trust them to be up to date or honest about the actual work you’ll be doing, for yourself, no less. You want a resource that teaches you how to do the type of affiliate marketing you’re interested in because you want to do that kind of affiliate marketing, no data entry charade required.

The best resources are updated once in a while because rules change on the internet. That’s especially true if you do pay per click advertising such as through AdWords. You don’t want to have all your ads declined because you were given out of date advice on how to run your campaigns. Perry Marshall’s AdWords Guide has been a good choice for some time. Yes, that’s an affiliate link.

Whatever you do, don’t pick something that costs more than you can afford to spend. Keep it sensible, and when in doubt, start asking around.

The post Is Ad Posting Really a Kind of Data Entry Work at Home Job? appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

Here we go. I said I was going to try offering work at home job ideas each week, and here I am. I’ll be covering not only various job ideas, but some of the common signs of scams for a particular idea. And of course most work at home jobs can also be done as home businesses if you want to find your own clients or customers.

Data Entry

Data entry is one of the most commonly searched for work at home positions, at least if the number of people I get asking about it is any indicator. Trouble is, it’s also one of the most scam-ridden.

Qualifications/Training Needed?

Your typical legitimate data entry position will be much concerned with how quickly and accurately you can enter data. A required typing speed of 40-55 words per minute is not unusual, and they may have expectations on how fast you can key data too.

Freelance positions can also be found. You can seek data entry jobs with local companies or check out freelance websites. In these cases you may not be formally tested, but you’ll have to prove your skills if you want to keep getting clients and improving your income.

Job Duties

Type in data from documents. These may be scanned documents, and are sometimes challenging to read. You are paid on production, but may be required to commit to a schedule or a certain number of hours weekly.

Equipment Needed

Computer with high speed internet is often required.

Where to Search for Jobs

Data entry job listings at Home with the Kids
Craigslist (beware of many, many scams!)
Home Job Stop
Upwork
Guru
Hire My Mom

You may also want to consider Alternatives to Data Entry Work at Home Jobs.

Related Scams

As one of the more popular options for people just starting to research their work at home options, scams related to data entry abound. The skills needed for data entry are basic enough that many people feel they can handle it. Add in the uncertainty about what exactly data entry involves, and people get fooled easily.

The most common scam right now is probably telling you that filling out forms on Google is data entry. They’re really selling a pay per click affiliate marketing plan. That in itself is legitimate, but the way they present the information is extremely deceptive, as it’s not a job and pay per click marketing is very hard to learn for most people.

Not to mention that you may lose a lot of money while you try it. Better to go with legitimate sources if you want to learn any sort of affiliate marketing, such as The Super Affiliate Handbook or Perry Marshall’s Guide to Google AdWords. You’ll still most likely lose money on some campaigns, but at least these sources are upfront about this being a business, not a job.

The other version is related to the old envelope stuffing scheme. You pay for instructions on how to scam other people into sending you money to learn how to do the same thing.

The post Data Entry – Weekly Work at Home Job Idea appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

Many people who want a work at home job think of data entry first. It’s hardly a surprise. Data entry is relatively easy, doesn’t require a quiet workspace or much in the line of special equipment. And many people can quickly learn to type fast enough to qualify.

However this is also one of the most common work at home scams. Because so many people feel comfortable with the idea of doing data entry at home, scammers know they can get people to pay them for opportunities that don’t exist. It really pays to know what a real data entry job looks like.

There are a few common scams. One is to disguise a business opportunity as a job. This scam is really only a scam because it pretends to be a job rather than a business opportunity. People can make money at it, but there is financial risk involved and you most certainly are not an employee of anyone, despite what these ads claim. Would you want to learn how to run a successful business from someone who lies to you about it being a job?

The opportunity is generally affiliate marketing for various products through Clickbank. Often they recommend placing pay per click ads in AdWords and other programs. As I said, people can and do earn money at this. However it is not easy and if that is what you want to do from home I strongly recommend learning about it from an honest source.

Another common scam is to request you pay a fee to show that you are serious. The supposed work is filing in forms with names and addresses to compile address lists for advertisers. However these jobs can often be done much more quickly and easily by computers.

Real data entry jobs may not sound that different at the start. I know of one company that does have you type in customer’s information from forms they filled out. That’s because you’re processing rebate forms. This particular job is limited to the Tempe, AZ area as you must pick up and drop off your work each day.

The difference, of course, is in the presence of an actual job. The scams may sometimes send you work but good luck getting paid. The real companies should have reputations you can check and you should be able to find other people who have successfully done the work in the past or are even doing it now.

You should not have to pay to get the job. The job probably will have standard equipment requirements for all contractors or employees. The most common requirement, aside from that of having a computer, which should be a given, is that you have a cable or DSL internet connection. Most companies will not accept dialup or satellite connections. Check the requirements of each company to be certain.

Caution is indicated anytime you are looking for a work at home opportunity. The scams are far easier to find than the legitimate work is. However the legitimate opportunities are out there for those who take the time to hunt for them.

The post Understanding What Real Data Entry Jobs Are appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.