I don’t think there can be any doubting the legitimacy of working from home while answering phones for a large established company that just wants to tap in to the more flexible, and usually cheaper, WAHM or retired market. A professional job without the overheads for the company or the travel costs for the telecommuter. The problems arise when the company isn’t in the FTSE or NASDAQ.

If ‘Bobs Gardening’ in Vegas wants an out-of-hours customer support agent he can put a post on a site like ours and reach the very people he needs. But is Bob evil? Will Bob take a months worth of your work and then decide to fire you without pay? Is Bob legitimate?

Here are a few litmus tests to use when asking are work at home jobs legitimate -

1. What kind of email is the job poster using? Is it a free gmail account or is it acompany.com? If it’s acompany.com check that the address has a website. If its a gmail or yahoo don’t fret, they may not want their company inbox jammed up, just send them an initial message or resume but after reaching the negotiation stage make sure you do so through their bona fide email address.

2. Once you’ve checked that their methods of communication are legit then check that the company itself is. You can go through government bodies to check credentials but this is usually overkill. Just google the company name and see if any red flags go up.

3. Get paid fast. The above suggestions are fine when working for people that have some sort of registered company, but what about those that need you most. The one-(wo)man-band that is juggling 10 different aspects of his/her business at once that desperately needs a flexible hand. They may only have a gmail account! The simplest test is to get paid early and often. If you’ve just started working for someone insist on getting paid weekly, or even daily, until you build that trust between each other. This way if Bob is evil you’ll only have lost a little time and cash.

So – are work at home jobs legitimate? Yes, but take a few initial steps to make sure your employer is the good sort, they’ll understand, and as the trust grows you’ll become their telecommuting right hand and there’s nothing like being indispensable.

hiremyparents.com – vetted & screened work at home jobs

The Wandsworth-based company lets parents book a workspace – a hot desk or meeting room – and a place in the on-site OFSTED registered crèche for their child, at times that suit their specific work requirements.  This flexibility will be ideal for independent professionals, entrepreneurs, freelancers, remote, home-based workers or employees who are able to work from home at least one day a week.

“Remote working is on the rise. We are creating a space where parents can work without the overheads of having their own office, while having their child looked after in the same building. This cuts down on the stress of trying to commute from work to collect children on time and it means they can spend more time with their child during the day,” explains Shazia Mustafa, the mother of two behind the brainchild.

“Most importantly though, it gives parents the flexibility they need. Most childcare establishments require a child to be booked in on fixed days every week, usually for a set number of hours. Parents often find themselves on waiting lists just to get their child a spot and often don’t get the days or times they need.  For people with varying levels of work, this inflexibility costs them a fortune, particularly as they still have to pay for the care, even if their child is sick and can’t go. We’ve taken away all of these problems by allowing parents to book space on a pay-as-you go basis,” she says.

Shazia also thinks it will be a great way for home workers to meet like-minded parents, share ideas, network and have more social interaction than they’d have if they worked on their own in a home office. And for mothers who aren’t sure what to do once their maternity leave ends, Third-Door gives them the child-free time they need to put ideas into action.

To celebrate the opening, Third Door is running a competition in which a prize worth £4,000 can be won including free Third Door membership, 30 hours of free workspace/childcare, a Business in a Box package (including logo, business cards, letterheads and website), 3 hours of consultancy with business experts, a smart phone and laptop – everything needed to start up a business.  To enter or to find out more about Third Door, go to www.third-door.com

Leanpub

Imagine that authors can actually make money writing books.

The way that Leanpub accomplishes this is to empower authors to apply Steve Blank’s Customer Development and Eric Ries’ Lean Startup principles to the process of writing and publishing a book.

Specifically, Leanpub allows authors to self-publish and sell their books–while they are in-progress. This lets authors determine if there is a market for their book and build a community of readers around their book. This community building is vital, since it not only helps authors build buzz around their books but also helps them get real feedback from real readers who are invested in the success of the book.

At Leanpub, we enable authors to publish early, publish often and listen to their readers.

The insight behind Leanpub is that the writers who are the best at doing this are bloggers, and that the best platform for writing a book is actually a blogging platform. So, we’re taking the world’s best blogging platform, WordPress MU, and making it into the best platform for writing and self-publishing books.

If the programme appeals to you then please sign up here and then we advise signing up to our step-by-step guide on the partner site. This will teach you everything you need to start generating a steady income from hiremyparents. Please check out the sign up page before sending us any questions by email, more is explained there, or please make a comment below.

TURN ON YOUR SPEAKERS

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHEfXnIvUeI

Yesterday we came out of testing and launched the hiremyparents Partner Programme that pays you to refer our great service and get paid. And this isn’t some 5% breadcrumb deal. We pay our referrers a massive 75% of all revenue created.

This percentage of sales combined with a no-brainer offer to customers means that one of our beta partners pocketed over $5000… in a week!

How? How?….How? – I’ll tell you.

Our PartnerResource Website (this is what’s taken the time) is chocked full of graphics, article, ebooks, emails, tutorials, reviews… everything you need to promote hiremyparents. If you don’t have the skills and knowledge to use these tools… no problem – we have put together a daily step-by-step to do course that will send you an email each day with ‘things to do today’ inside. Follow the steps and slowly build a revenue that will continue to grow and provide a residual income on auto-pilot.

This is no get-rich-quick scheme, we wouldn’t do that to our reputation! The bottom line is – if you don’t get your 75%, we don’t get out 25%! So we’ve made it as easy as possible to earn, and earn quick, through our programme with the kind of results that will ensure you continue to promote hmp into the future.

Take a look at the programme now. It’s available globally and there is absolutely no commitment necessary. If you feel it isn’t for you (ha) just walk away.

Any questions you have should be directed to Steve, your Partner Manager, at steve@hiremyparents.com, or, leave a comment below.

The final result? My best advice? Don’t. Specifically, you don’t.

I’ve spent years, literally, learning the fine art of SEO (search engine optimis(z)ation), if they had a degree in it (they probably do) I’d have a doctorate, and I wish I’d never started.

It’s a bloody nightmare. The degree of accuracy required combined with the mind numbing tasks involved means it’s a full time job, which means your real business suffers.

If you’ve got the resources – outsource it. Find some sallow faced, short sighted hermit to put everything in place and then change everything again when google or yahoo change their algorithms. You. You concentrate on the business.

If you’re skint then just do the basics. Go to google’s webmaster section and put a day aside just to get your head around the concept and the basic rules. Follow these rules as you add content to your site and you’ll be 80%’ish of the way there. To get 100% of the way just takes too much time.

The one thing that you can do to tip the odds in your favour, if you haven’t got a small army of SEO hermits, is to boost the quality of your content. Google’s (etc) one and only job is to ensure that their users, the searchers, find the most relevant results for their search.

If your content (blog posts are best) is good then web2.0 will link to it. When you have 10′s, 100′s, 1000′s of twitter/bebo/facebook/digg/mixx/delicious links pointing at your post google is going to think you’re relevant to something. Along comes the google spider and, if you’ve learnt the SEO rules, decides that your content is relevant to a given topic. Bang! Job done. Next time someone types in a phrase relevant to your site you will now be found higher up the search results – because your content was good.

• Concentrate on your skills and talents and reflect those in the content you post.
• Let surfers easily link to it via web2.0.
• Make sure you follow SEO basics
• Write some more quality content

hiremyparents will soon be releasing its ‘Luddite’s Guide’ series to members and readers of the blog. A completely free guide to getting the basics right for your website and getting the traffic it needs. Come back often for updates, or better yet, subscribe via email or RSS for news on its release.

PS – please make a comment or web2.0 me to practise what I preach.

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Take a look at the following tips on how to write online for a living:

Compare Different Writing Sites

There are countless writing sites online. Several of them are full of merit, others take some getting used to and the rest have as much potential of earning you a dollar as if you were to meditate on a stone until it turned into gold. Do your research before you start filling out registration forms and choose two or maybe even three sites to start sharing your attention. You can divide and conquer, but splitting your focus too much might just end up to be a waste of valuable time.

Realize that Freelance Writing is a Business

Freelance writing is so easy to jump into that it is necessary to issue a warning right out of the gates so those who are actually serious about making this a full time job are not fooled by the cavalier attitude of those that would treat writing as a mere hobby. It is definitely possible to make a full time income from writing online, but you must approach this goal with all the planning and energy of jump starting a home business to be successful.

Set Your Rates

Freelance writers need to decide early on what kind of rate they will be willing to write for. There are many sites that advertise lower paying jobs and online article sites may offer a share of ad revenue. It is advisable to have a mixture of both, since this protects you against fluctuations in one or the other.

Create a Freelancer Website and Blog

Every freelance writer should have a website and a blog. These two things are the marketing tools for your home business, because they display your crafty writing ability and also provide a means for interested clients to contact you for work. Think of your website as your storefront and your blog as your communication with your market.

Work on a Schedule

Finally, freelance writing does provide the lucky writer with the freedom to write from anywhere and at any time, but successful freelancers take this excess of freedom and mold it into a workable productive schedule. If you are a night owl, by all means work from midnight to four in the morning and rest during the day, but do it consistently.5 Freelance Productivity

Related Freelance Writing Articles …

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If you are interested in freelance writing you can get started before you are fully prepared.

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The freelance writer in home business requires you to have writing skills, good English, and the ability to write about different topics. You may like…

If you’re one of our members then you’ve probably noticed a few changes around the hmp site. It was good before but now it’s the best. And this isn’t an idle boast. We’ve listened to our members, we’ve combed the web and we believe we have brought together the very best resource on the web for anyone looking for a flexible life with a flexible income.

• Our job board now has over 600 flexible jobs on it, growing daily.
• Our new ‘Extra Income’ section shows the very best in instant income opportunities from around the web – vetted by our members
• The Library now has over $250,000 worth of courses, guides and software available for our members to download …and sell!

Combined with our expert panel, our member useable social network and customer service second to none we are ..the best!

Here ends the lesson.

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Recently

This is a particularly contentious issue with the UK economy in recession and the SME sector, the engine of the economy, struggling to cope. Over the last decade business has argued they have been burdened with increased costs and bureaucracy that stifles their competitiveness especially globally where companies in other countries do not have the same legislative overheads. Understandably, the main objection from business to this, albeit well meaning, legislation is it could further increase businesses costs, resulting in increased business failures at the worst economic time in the last 60 years!

So should SMEs be concerned about this legislation? Predictably the answer is not necessarily and solutions exist to assist businesses to adapt and improve the effectiveness of their key assets: employees. The working environment is more matrixed and objectives driven and the need to monitor every working hour is less relevant. The ones who look further will be pleasantly surprised at the business advantages that are readily available by embracing flexible working. Businesses can make significant gains if they take an open-minded approach to this change and use the technology available to provide transparency to managers, the right work-life balance to employees and continuity to customers. The UK economy succeeds with innovation and the creative ability of its employees to create new opportunities and provide better skills than other markets. A stressed employee who is struggling to meet strenuous work like balance is less productive and creative. It is in all company’s benefit to ensure the creative abilities are exploited through better support.

With the correct service partner, implementing a flexible working policy is painless and the financial case is very strong. Where flexible working has been implemented the benefits to businesses have been strong in terms of reduced costs, increased business flexibility, greater motivated and productive employees who are loyal to an employer who understands the demands of the modern work-life balance.

Robust and reliable technology exists that now enable businesses of any size to implement flexible working without requiring expensive in-house skills or capital equipment expenditure. High speed, ubiquitous broadband networks now make critical business services easily and reliably accessible from anywhere and allow any company to leverage the benefits easily, quickly and cost-effectively. The concerns raised by some companies on employee transparency, productivity and control are readily addressed without incremental increases in existing budgets.

The gains are large in terms of reduction in required office space, cost of travel to and from work, staff loyalty and greater productivity. For the companies that see the opportunity this may be the catalyst to realise that the solutions are there to create a more competitive business. With the right combination of robust, tested telecommunications services, targeted HR policies and training for employees and management, any organisation can transform this perceived headache into a competitive advantage.

In conclusion, yes the SME sector can cope. The key barrier to embracing flexible working is no longer technological or financial but cultural. Businesses who embrace the change will realise significant benefits, not only in the short-term but will be ideally placed for rapid grow as the economy recovers.

Natasha Davies writes for ellesys – provider of hosted and CPE telephony applications, conferencing and collaboration focused on the needs of a business.

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The thing is, it does work. Why do some people make a fortune and some don’t make money at all? Simply put, because the people who make thousands or millions in cash knew all the lies in this business.

So what are the big internet lies? Below are the biggest internet lies that you should know:

1. Starting And Running A Business On The Internet Is Expensive
Do you know that you can start your business with zero cost? You can actually earn your income by joining a very high quality affiliate program. Usually, as an affiliate marketer, your job is concentrating on marketing only. All the follow up, delivery of the product, answering questions from customers and so on are done by the owner of the programme.

Usually the ‘expensive’ statement often comes from people who are living in non-U.S/European countries, especially if the country’s local currency is weak compared to the U.S. Dollar. If it is not a currency issue, it is a vision issue. See and think small to get small. See and think big and your results will have a tendency to match your thoughts.

2. You Can Make Easy Money from the Internet
Most people believe you can make money overnight and by doing nothing at all. This myth is what sets the realistic apart from the unrealistic. You have probably heard of stories of how people make 5 to 6 figure incomes in the shortest period of time imaginable.

These stories might be true but did you know most of them had failed miserably several times before they made the real money? They learnt from their mistakes and moved on. It may seem as if some gurus are overnight successes with the wild numbers some people have brought in during a day or a week selling information or products online.
Some interesting facts about overnight success – it normally takes months if not years to realize. In other words, they prepare, they create joint ventures, they get ready and then build up anticipation for a launch – then BOOM it explodes!

3. You Must Know HTML, Programming And Graphic Designing In Order To Start Your Business
You don’t need to know all of these at all. In fact, one of the biggest shockers was the discovery that most of the biggest web gurus today don’t have the first clue as to how to build a web page.

These gurus earned more money because they knew how to reach people. They either outsource (hello?)for professional help or establish Joint Ventures with other individuals who can compensate for their lack of knowledge in any one of these areas.

As a matter of fact most successful people are true successes because they only focus their time on what brings them success.

If you want to create your web pages without having to learn programming, HTML and designing skills, just find someone else that can do it for you. There are many professional web designers you can find on hiremyparents.

4. On the Internet, There Is No Need to Know How to Sell
This statement has made people who hate selling attracted to the ads that read “no selling required”. Think for a moment; is there any logic at all that you can make money without doing anything at all? Usually these programmes are unworkable and some are run by fly-by-night operators.

In this business, don’t try to sell to other people. Instead, you inform your potential customers. Show people what their lives would be like with what you offer and you will have a sale without selling anything at all!

5. You Don’t Have To Build A Mailing List At All
Laughing out loud – that is like saying, “I don’t want to be in business”. Put this in your head, your mailing list is as important to you as the “Yellow Pages” is to a conventional B2B business.

“The money is in the list”. You’ve probably heard this from most gurus out there. But you should also have this word in your mind, “The money is in the relationship”. The idea of networking with people is unattractive to most who hate to sell.

Remember though, you are not selling anything. You are just showing people their life and how it can easily be enhanced by what you have to offer.

All the above are just some of the big Internet lies. Actually there are a lot more Internet lies you should watch out for. You have to be smart in order to really achieve more success than you could possibly imagine on the internet, and it’s as hard work as any conventional job, but if you crack it your potential client base is planet Earth.

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