So, You Want to Work From Home?

I have been a work from home, self employed, 1099 sorta person for the last couple of decades.  Independence is in my blood - it runs strong on both sides of my family.  We just don't do well working in a box, especially if that box is not of our own construction.

When our first baby was born, we determined to avoid day care, and resolved to do what it took to parent our children personally.  It wasn't always easy, but has always been interesting.  I've done all kinds of different things, taken on projects and work from home assignments that run the gamut from sales to real estate appraisals.

Over the years my business has morphed into freelance work, mostly writing, and other semi-technical creative projects.  Lately I have found myself with more time on my hands than usual.  Last week I set out to find some new clients.  I started where I always do - Google.


1. Months ago I signed up with www.oDesk.com..  I did make one really excellent contact via this site, which led to inclusion as a contributing author in a published book.  So, I would not count out this site entirely, but ..... 
The general feel of this site is that it is primarily towards non-US workers.  The pay rates are VERY low, like $5 per article - crazy -  kind of low,  and the ads often say things like, "strong English skills important".  It's sort of obvious that the hiring entities assume a large portion of their readers are NOT native English speakers.  Plus, the website owners are all in between the freelancer and the client via bidding, and paying for the services.  They take a percentage of every job that is facilitated through their site.  Not a bad revenue model for the site, but not the best for either client or freelancer.  In the future, I will probably skip these sort of sites.  There are a ton of them out there, if you want to hire a person in Asia or India to work for you for cheap :).

2. A while ago, Carolyn Cooper of www.SimplyHealed.com told me about www.HireMyMom.com.  She used the service to find her latest virtual assistant, and recommended them highly.  I must admit, I looked at the site, but then forgot about it until last week when I began this quest for clients. This site is very different from oDesk.com. 
They are geared exclusively towards women, primarily mothers, who want to work from home.  The service costs $39.99/quarter or $99/year for a mom to sign up.  The service is free for the hiring parties.  They let you look at a sample of the current job listings before you sign up, which I found very helpful.  The jobs are all reasonable, normal paying jobs for those living in America.  They have a pretty wide variety of job listings, from virtual assistants, to graphic designers.
There are only a handful of new jobs added each day, so a client search via HireMyMom.com could take a while.  I signed up for a quarter and we will see what comes of it.

3. I have been helping a friend with a traditional job search so, craigslist is a frequent stop for me.  They have a few listings a month for writing jobs.  Most of it looks pretty sketchy, but you never know.  I recently spotted a section for "gigs"  which translates to "temporary assignments" for those of us not in on the hip lingo of the music, or apparently craigslist world.  Anyway, found some viable possible projects listed there.  It's worth checking out in your city.  It's at the bottom of the list just under "jobs" and is broken down by type, such as creative, writing, talent, etc.

4. I found this FaceBook guy that scans ALL of craigslist every day and posts the freelance writing jobs, at FaceBook4FreeLancers.com.  In my book, he's pretty stinkin' awesome for doing all that work.  I hope he has a good revenue stream built in for all his work.  He certainly gets positive energy flowing his way from my direction for that service.   I have applied for several very promising projects via his postings.  What a great service!
In addition to the daily postings he puts out a summary every Tuesday - Morning Coffee Newsletter.  It's good to check over and make sure you didn't miss anything good in the daily postings.

5. Some other great sites with opportunity listing are www.freelancephotojobs.com  www.online-writing-jobs.com and www.virtualassistantjobs101.com.  They have listings from craigslist, careerbuilder, etc.   They seem to upload several times a day, if not in real time.  These sites are free, and easy to navigate. 

6. www.freelancewriting.com - This site offers a wealth of information about working as a professional freelancer.  Those of us who work from home can get kind of isolated.  A site like this can help you stay in touch and realize that you are not alone out there.

So, there you have it, a summary of my new client search education.  Not bad for a few days work.