Become Financially Independent

Okay, so with over 200 websites under my belt,, everyone knows how much I love building websites. I total addicted to html and code writing, designing layouts, and writing up long texts. So I’m always on the lookout for new ways to expand my web-craze. Not long ago, a new web-host named Squidoo,  showed up. Of course, I jumped in as one of thier early members. But than when I found out that they were gonna let people build free websites on their network, and than pay you for getting high traffic, I didn’t believe them. I read and re-read their ToS trying to find the “catch” convinced they were a scam, but couldn’t find one, so I set out to building “lenses” (what they call thier web pages, built by members.
 
I’ve been building Squidoo lenses since April 2007. Today I just got an announcment on my Squidoo Dashboard. It said:
 
Payday, Payday! Here’s your Squidcash, earned from 06/01/2006 to 06/30/2006. Congrats, and keep up the great lenses.
 
OMG! My first payday from Squidoo! I can’t believe it! My lenses are actually making money! When I first startede doing this and I read that you could make money doing it, I laughed. I built my first few lenses just to see if I realy could make money by shareing info on my hobbies, but I didn’t think it’d work. As I got going, I quickly got addicted to building them, and now I’ve got about 40 lenses. I’ve been haveing so much fun here, that I didn’t even think about the money part of it any more. In fact, I forgot that I had come here to try to make some extra money! LOL! Than today they send my first pay-day to my PayPal account.
WOW! I’m making money for doing something I love doing! That is so cool! Granted it’s no get rich quick thing, they don’t pay much. But hey, every little bit counts. So far I haven’t heard of any members making more than $50 a month, and most seem to be makeing closer to $10 a month or less.
There’s on guy over there, who says he’s gonna build lenses until he’s either built one million lenses or made one million dollars, which ever comes first. Last time I checked he had over 400 lenses! WOW! He says he’s got a pretty steady income coming in from it, but he hasn’t told us how much he makes. I wonder if I’ll ever get that many on my account. You know, I prob’ly well. I mean, I’ve made 40 of them in 5 months, so in a few years I should have quite a few! LOL!
Well, it’s a start anyways.
 
So, now I’m wondering, are any of you guys on Squidoo? If so, send me a message or comment with a link to your lenses. I’d love to read what you guys have to say over there.

Work From Home, Is It Possible?

Everyone asks this question, and for those of you with this goal, you prob’ly find yourself asking it more than most people.


Yes, it is, and not really that hard to start either, though most find it hard to keep going. First you have to ask yourself, what is it you want to do?


The most successful work at home jobs are the ones you created yourself. Here are few examples of people I know who work at home:


My uncle started working at home in the 1960’s building clay bricks, and building houses for people out of them…today he owns a multi-million-dollar corperation that not only builds houses but also building brick churches, but he still runs the buseness out of his home, and he works longer and harder than the average non-home worker.


My mom worked at home too, she was a professional seamstress, sewing fancy dresses for little girls, christening gowns, and cloth dolls. At one point she bought her own brick and mortar store (the house next door to us) and was selling to summer tourists (in Old Orchard Beach we see an average of 2 million tourists each month), but the shop proved to be a bigger home business than my mother had expected. She had no time to sew the crafts anymore, which was her passion, so after 3 years, she shut it down and sold her items to other shops on consignment instead. Now she is hoping to build a web site and move her opperation online by next year.


My dad, he worked at home too, he was a rought driver for the local newspaper, delivering the Portland Press Herald, the Sunday Telegram, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times to over 1000 customers 7 days a week 365 days a year, with not one single day off for the past 21 years… his annual gas costs are over $5,000 each year, and he goes through 3 to 4 cars a year (rought driving is the number one killer of engines and transmissions) , his annual income was under $12,000 a year.


Another uncle of mine works at home, as a real estate agent. He at one point cliamed to own a multi million dollar alpaca farm in Austrailia. (I can’t verify that as I have never been to Austailia, so never saw the farm myself). Last I heard he had given up on the real estate business in favor of yet another work at home business he had set out to create. Don’t know the details on that, or if it succeeded or flopped.


And yet another uncle works at home, buying juck from yard sales and reselling it at flea markets. His income is average of less than $10,000 a year, but he does this as a side-line hobby. If he set out to do this full time instead of part-time in his spare time, he could easily triple that figure.


I work at home: I am a writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and I own a small press publishing house which I built myself from the ground up. As most writers/publishers know already, you are lucky if you break even in this business, making it a true job of passion.


So in answer to your question, does work at home exist?


Yes, it does, but it is not a get-rich-quick-scam-artist-work-at-home; that type of work at home well banckrupt you quicker than you can blink. REAL work at home is when you take a skill and use it to help those around you. If you are hired by a business, they pay you for your product/service. If you start your own business, you get paid when your customers pay you. It may look like a private or small business to the world, but it is in fact you working out of your home and thus working at home. However, it is hard work, long hours, no vacation, you get dirty, you get tired, and in the long run, not working at home would have been much less stressful and much easier.


In short working at home is not a get rich quick scheme. Working at home IS NOT getting paid to take survies.
Working at home is not, clicking on ads on Google.


Working at home is you getting a business lisence and setting up shop, either online or brick&mortar, and selling your product or services to your customers. Most people are not cut out for the hard labor and long hours of working at home, but for those of you who are, it’s the best thing you could ever do..



Remember:


Employers ask you to fill out a job application, and will ask for past job referances, your SSN, and your criminal records history.


If you did not fill out an application, you did not apply for a real job.


If you filled out an application, but paid for the application form, you got scammed!


and if you can’t find a business to work for: start the business you want to work for an be your own boss in your own home.


We know this, saddly from experiance.


Back in the early 1980’s my mom saw just such an ad in a magazine. BIG promises of lots of money. She sent the money in, for not one ad but 2 differant ones. The first promised big bucks for sewing baby bibs, the second for making beaded earrings. Both ads were pretty much the same: send in a certain amount of money and they’d send you the supplies, you make the items and send them back to them, they sell them. Simple, sounded great, my mom had at one time been a seamstress, she thought she could sew up a storm of baby bibs for a legit company to sell them. That’s what we all thought, we should have read the fine print…or rather, we should have taken a notice that there was no fine print to read! Or maybe that it was a P.O.Box and not an actual address that was listed in the ad, that should have tipped us off.


Well, the supplies came, most of it cheap junk that we could have gotten cheaper and better quality at a dollar store, my mom haveing been a profesional seamstress thought that useing this absolute crap to make these items seemed pretty stupid and unprofessional but, that’s the items the company used so that’s what they sent…alarm bells should have gone off than…we should have realized that no REAL manufacturer, is gonna use such poor quality supplies to make their goods.


Well, we (my mom, my dad, and me) set out to sewing baby bibs and beaded earings. Comes time to send the items back and low and behold, the P.O.Box had been cancled, the “company” turned out to never have existed, and we were stuck with a bunch of stuff we couln’t use or sell.


We learned a lesson. It wasn’t a very big investment, less than $100, but it was not money well spent…or maybe it was, because it taught us to look at these scams with open eyes and questioning minds.


We learned a lot of things:


We learned to read ads more closely.
We learned to question “companies” with ONLY a P.O.Box.
We learned to ask the company for a job application form.
We learned to ask for a history of the company.
We learned to do a background check on the company.
We learned to never pay money to get a job.
We learned to REAL manufatures don’t put ads in magazine classified.
We learned to that most manufactures only hire local residants, so that the employee has to bring the items right in to the factory to be inspected, before the company well accept and pay you.
We learned that REAL jobs assembling items for manufactures, are rare and few and far between, and that you could be on a waiting list for years before they need enough help to get all the way down to your name on their list.



Now we have the internet, and it seems that with it came millions more ways to scam people out of their hard earned money. Every day thousands of new Work-At-Home, Get-Big-Bucks websites are added to the net. A Google search will bring up millions upon millions of them.


When I look at these sites, with their promises of BIG MONEY. I laugh. You see I own more than 200 web sites, 12 fanlistings, and 13 private message boards. I know how to build a website, quite well, maybe not to proffessional standards, but pretty darned close, and than I see these scam sites: many of them are made useing Geo-Cities, Yahoo, AOL, Earthlink, and countless other “free home pages”. Right off the bat that fact alone should set off a RED WARNING ALARM in any person, but it seems that many people do not even notice this fact, and send their money in.


A real company that intends to pay you to work for them, would not be useing a “free home page”. A small craft shop run by the sweet little old lady next door, might use a free home page to sell her knitting and cloth dolls, but she wouldn’t be asking you to send money to make money…no she’d show you a picture of her dolls with a price for each one. The Goth girl down the road might use a free site to peddel her homemade velvet capes, while the Wiccan next door lists home made soap on her MySpace. These are people like me and you who are working at home and selling what they make. These people are legit, and you’ll notice they never ask you to pay for a membership before they allow you to buy their products. These people are small business owners working from home.


The free sites that ask you to spend money to make money… those are the ones you got to watch out for. Those are the scams.


If you see a site made by a free home page site, and offering you lots of money for doing next to nothing, run for the hills, because there is no company that is going to use a free web host to seek out workers. Not a single one.


My hope in writing all of this is that it well help you to weed out the scams from the real work at home jobs.


To all: Good luck on your goal.


~~EK

I’ve started, right now I am trying out various online sources of extra (suplimental)income. Here is what I’ve added to my list so far:

84 shops on CafePress
3 Zazzle Galleries
added AdSence to my blogs
joined Suidoo/created a few lenses

I have a publishing house, which I am just starting to get “online” (it’s been around since the ‘70’s but I treated it like a hobby, not a bussiness, now I’m treating it like a business)

I am continueing my pursuit of a retail career, and still doing the whole job interview thing around localy, but so far no job offers