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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!

What is a Virtual Assistant?

According to Wikipedia, “A Virtual Assistant (or simply VA), is an independent contractor providing administrative, technical, or sometimes creative assistance to clients.” That’s a pretty good description, but I’d like to add that a virtual assistant might also act as a contracted personal assistant, travel agent, writer, and secretary.

On the Internet, virtual assistants are rarely regular employees and offered the advantages of a regular employee. I’ve never heard of a virtual assistant being offered an employee benefit package that included health care, for example. That doesn’t mean it’s never, ever happened. It just means that I’ve never heard of it, and it isn’t a common practice.

There are lots of advantages to working as a virtual assistant for both the employer and the virtual assistant. The employer doesn’t have to pay a full-time salary for a part-time job, and the virtual assistant can work for many employers simultaneously.

A virtual assistant is usually an independent business person who works for clients who need administrative, technical, creative, or secretarial services on a part-time basis. There are companies that match virtual assistants with employers who need specific skills.

Most virtual assistants are expected to have had some real-world experience, but not always. Today the use of virtual assistants is a growth industry, and many of the multinational companies are making use of virtual assistants, as more and more of their business comes from the Internet and more and more people with Internet skills are required.

Working as a virtual assistant is interesting and satisfying work most often. Hiring a virtual assistant has proven to be an economically feasible as well as a wise business decision.

The virtual assistant field is large and growing larger and larger today as more and more traditional brick-and-mortar businesses discover the advantages of conducting their business on the Internet and using virtual employees.

Work-at-Home Drop Shipping

A drop shipping work-at-home business is one of the easiest businesses to set up and get started on the Internet. It’s also one of the least expensive.

Wikipedia says; “Drop shipping is a supply chain management technique in which the retailer does not keep goods in stock, but instead transfers customer orders and shipment details to wholesalers, who then ship the goods directly to the customer.” That’s an excellent description of the process.

A brand new entrepreneur can go to a site like eBay and set up a business online without buying the first piece of the wholesale merchandise that they will sell at retail prices. Setting up a business online is, of course, not completely free. Nothing is ever completely free, online or off.

The new entrepreneur will have to pay eBay for advertising on their site. The basic advertising is not expensive as advertising goes, but it isn’t free, either. The new entrepreneur does not have to build his or her own website or pay a programmer to build one for him. He doesn’t have to get his own hosting company to get his website onto the Internet or sign up with an autoresponder service to communicate with his customers. All types of those needed services are provided by eBay and sites like eBay to the entrepreneur at no cost.

On the downside you know there is always a downside if there is an upside, competition is stiff. There are a LOT of drop shippers that work through sites like eBay. Don’t expect to get rich, and do expect to spend plenty of time working at making money. Nothing is ever quite as easy as it looks.

Setting up a PayPal account is required, but it is free. Basically, however, the advantages far outweigh any disadvantages. There is no stock to buy. There is no website to build or website services to purchase. The only cost is advertising.

Making Money Online Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the best-known ways to start an Internet business. Affiliate marketing is selling products that belong to others for a commission (a percentage of the selling price) or by making viable referrals (a potential customer performs a specific act such as filling out a form) to a marketer’s website.

Affiliate marketers do not have to have products of their own, although some of them do. An affiliate marketer basically represents and advertises products that are owned by or licensed by others.

Most affiliate marketers do have their own websites, but it is possible to represent products and services without having a website of your own. Without a website, an affiliate marketer simply takes out paid-for advertising (PPC, or Pay Per Click) on the search engines and refers customers to the marketer’s website directly from those advertisements.

With changes that have recently been made to the advertising rules by the search engines (Google in particular), it is very difficult now to do affiliate marketing without your own website, although there are those who are still doing it successfully.

A lot of information is available online about affiliate marketing, and affiliate marketplaces such as Commission Junction, Clickbank and Paydotcom, where you can make money selling other peoples products.
So you do not even have to have a product of your own to make money online.

Work at Home Freelance Writer

I heard of someone who made her living as a freelance writer out in the real brick-and-mortar world, and she did pretty well for herself. Of course, like any freelance writer, she got her share of rejections, but all in all she was doing okay. Then, she was in an accident, and was confined to her home for a long period of time. Her income became nonexistent.

In desperation, she went online and began looking for writing jobs that she could do from her bed and what she stumbled upon changed her life. She’s long since recovered from her injuries, and she could certainly return to her old life as a real-world freelance writer, but why should she? She’s making more money, in less time and with less hassle, than she ever made out in the “real” world; and she’s doing it from the comfort of her own home as a freelance ghost writer online!

You see, the Internet is a word-eating monster with an insatiable appetite. The Internet runs on words. Oh, video and audio have a place, but even those mediums require written descriptions and written advertisements and written press releases. The written word is what makes cyberspace work.

Businesses both large and small, and independent Internet business owners, need words, and they need a lot of them. Websites must be updated. New material must be added constantly, and these businesses and individual business people turn to online ghost writers to supply their need.

So here’s my point: if you can write, you can work from your own home as a ghost writer. Now, there’s a particular skill set that’s required of writers who write for the Internet; but the skills are pretty easily learned, and basically you just need to be able to organize information and put it into a readable form that is interesting.