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The Work-at-Home Business Trend

Opening a small business out in the brick-and-mortar world is expensive. You must build, rent, or lease a building, and the location of the building is very important. If you’re selling retail, then you must be located in an area where people go to shop; and even if you are selling a service, you still must be located in an area where your clients can easily find you. You must have signs painted and erected. You must get permits and insurance. You’ve got to have utilities turned on and telephone lines installed. It’s not cheap at all.

The alternative of opening a small business online is far, far less expensive. You’ll need a website, but even hiring to have a website built will cost only an itty-bitty, tiny fraction of getting a physical building built. You might need business permits or licenses depending on where you live, but you won’t be required to carry insurance. You’ll have to advertise, of course, but advertising is an inherent part of all businesses. You’d have to pay for advertising for a business out in the “real” world, too.

So many types of businesses can operate just as well online as they can off-line, and that includes retail sales businesses. People DO shop online. You can sell insurance online, because people shop for insurance online. You can operate an accounting business online because people hire online accounting firms.

Of course, there are a few businesses that simply cannot be adapted to the online market. Your barber must have his barber shop. Your dog groomer can’t bathe and clip your dog online. City services provided by police, firefighters, and garbage collectors can’t be provided online. We aren’t ready to ditch real-world business, but a great many jobs, businesses, and services can be provided online, and opening an online business is simply easier and far less expensive than opening a business out in the brick-and-mortar world!

Avoiding Work-at-Home Scams

You know how when a traveling carnival comes to town, the thieves and pickpockets seem to be not far behind? The same principle applies to the Internet. When a topic is hot, the scam artists and crooks are right there to take full advantage of the unsuspecting and the naive who want to participate.

Working from home is a hot topic on the Internet. It has been for quite some time now, and it doesn’t show any signs of cooling off. It is actually getting bigger all the time. The crooks and scam artists have had time to really hone their crafts. Everyday, hundreds of thousands of new people go online looking for a way to make a living by working from home, so these crooks have a fresh and unsuspecting group of “marks” to choose from daily.

There are all kinds of scams out there, and since the Internet is generally ungoverned, there isn’t a lot anybody can do about it. Oh, the FCC tries, but the Internet isn’t just contained within the borders of the United States. The Internet is all over the world, and trying to govern it is basically an exercise in futility. There’s no agency to protect you from the crooks that roam the Internet trying to take advantage of those who want to work from home, so you have to be your own guardian.

You must always ask yourself one basic question: “Does this offer sound too good to be true?” If it sounds like it is too good to be true, it most likely is. Nobody is going to pay you to stuff envelopes; machines do that now. Nobody is going to pay you to let them use your bank account to get money out of a foreign country.

Do you really expect to make ten thousand dollars in 7 days, or have a million dollar Internet business up and running in one month? Or do you think that if you just put up the instant web sites the money will just come pouring in overnight while you sleep?

Good use of good common sense would put the crooks and scam artists out of business. Don’t fall for their ploys.

Work-at-Home Blog Posting

The word, blog, is actually a combination of two words: weB and LOG. There are some very popular blog sites on the Internet today. Everybody who is anybody or nobody has a blog. Famous people have blogs, and so do those whom no one has ever heard of. Businesses have blogs. Blogs are all over the Internet.

Blogs can be about any subject, and there are blogs about almost every subject that you ever imagined, and probably a few about subjects that you’d never hope to imagine. But there is one thing that all blogs have in common no matter what the topic: posts. Without posts, blogs are nothing. A blog is a series of posts. Posts are all a blog consists of and somebody some human has got to make those posts.

Changing website content is one of the major factors that search engines use to determine the value and relevance of a website and thus the order in which the website is displayed in natural results returned for a search.

So, because the order in which a website is listed results in a direct effect on a business’s bottom line, there are companies out there who actually PAY people to post to the company blogs.
What would you rather do, post to your own blog and make nothing, or get paid to post on other people’s blog?

Now, you aren’t going to get so rich that you can buy your own tropical island by posting to blogs, but you can make a little money,
working at home, posting to other blogs. Usually companies pay no more than a few dollars per post and require only one post per day or even only one post every other day. So there’s no big money to be made here.

Still, a few dollars is better than no dollars. There are Internet businesses that specialize in managing blogs, and these blog management companies hire bloggers.

Work-at-Home Insurance

Some online employers make group insurance available to their employees, but not many. Most online employees are independent contractors. Their employers do not withhold income taxes, Social Security, or Medicare payments from their paychecks. These employers don’t offer group insurance options, either. When you earn your living at a work-at-home job or at a work-at-home business, you’re basically self-employed, and you’re probably going to be responsible for acquiring your own health insurance policy. Private health insurance can be very, very expensive. The difference between monthly premiums for like coverage between group policies and private policies is huge. There may be legislation this year or next that will help cut the cost of health insurance for the self-employed; but it isn’t written yet, and it takes a long time for the government to actually take action. You need health coverage now, and you really can’t wait for Congress to get around to helping you. Fortunately, there really ARE a few options. The first thing to do is to go online and find a quote insurance site. There are several. These sites can help you compare coverage and cost. All insurance is NOT the same, and it doesn’t all cost the same. You can check with professional organizations you belong to, or with your labor union if you have one. Often organized groups opt for getting group insurance coverage. Some parents had health insurance through the farmer’s co-op for many years. A discount health card is another option. Although discount health cards are NOT health insurance cards, they can help to lower the cost of visits to your doctor and decrease the cost of some common medications. The bottom line here is that you’re probably going to have to pay more for health insurance than you paid when you were an employee and had access to group insurance. But there are steps you can take to lower the cost.

Work-at-Home Bookkeeping

Actually, work-at-home bookkeeping has been around longer than computers. For a long time now, small business owners who couldn’t afford and didn’t need a full-time bookkeeper have employed work-at-home bookkeepers. These small business owners have simply dropped off their receipts and bank records to their work-at-home bookkeepers, and the bookkeepers have taken it from there.

With the advent of the Internet, the demand for work-at-home bookkeepers has increased dramatically. The fact is that work-at-home businesspeople employ work-at-home businesses for their business needs. Those who have online businesses don’t hire secretaries, they hire virtual assistants. They don’t hire a bookkeeper to come to a brick-and-mortar business because they don’t have a brick-and-mortar business. They use work-at-home bookkeepers to keep their business records online.

Accounting software has made the work-at-home bookkeeper’s life easier, whether they are keeping records for a small business in their hometown of for an Internet business on the other side of the world. In the beginning, bookkeeping software was clunky and hard to use.

Apparently, the people who designed those early bookkeeping programs had never actually kept books, but since then the software has steadily improved, and today there are several excellent programs out there that bookkeepers can use to keep financial records for businesses from microscopic in size to huge, multinational-corporation size.

There are bookkeeping programs that include payroll records of all kinds. There are programs that are so sophisticated that they will accurately figure profit and loss and fill out required tax forms. Can you tell that I am impressed with the bookkeeping programs that are available today?

The fact is that every business, even those who don’t make a profit, MUST have financial records. The demand for work-at-home bookkeepers is huge, and the demand is growing every day!