Title: 
Work-At-Home, Freelance, Telecommute Are They Legitimate

Word Count:
1067

Summary:
Are there any real work-at-home jobs where you don't have to end up paying a membership fee to some website where you end up getting nothing? Take a trip with Mr. solochek as he uncovers the truth.


Keywords:
work-at-home, freelance, career, MLM, careebuilder, guru, yahoo, google, business opportunities, biz opp


Article Body:
You hear a lot about people making a lot of money working some MLM opportunity but the only problem with these are that you need to make an investment and you have to know a lot of people. I have a guaranteed income each month that covers my rent but I'm at home all the time and not earning any additional money. When my wife and i first arrived in Brunswick we applied at a lot of local businesses but the problem being is that at the present moment we only have one car between us.

I had signed up with Guru over a year ago but pretty much never had pursued it. Guru is a site that says you can make bids on freelance work. The only problem is that you can only have one active profile at a time. With Careerbuilder you can apply for retail sales positions, telemarketing positions, and whatever else gets your fancy. You can do all of this without limitation. I did receive an invitation in some junk mail last week about a low cost trial for a freelance site and i signed up and responded to as many ads as I qualified for.

I got zero replies so I canceled my membership. Otherwise it would have automatically charged my credit card for a full months membership and since I got nothing from the trial i was not about to keep the service. I then did some searches on the Net for articles about freelance, work-at-home jobs, telecommuting, etc. What I learned is that there are a lot of sites that will only give you the right information if you pay a membership fee. These sites are making money off of anybody who signs up but I almost guarantee that none of the members are actually getting and work from these sites.

I spent the day yesterday visiting any freelance work site that didn't charge any fees up front.  They may try to get you to sign up for additional services which have a cost but to look at and reply to jobs cost you nothing. Most of the responses i received though were from people trying to get me into some Biz Opp. Or only offering a job where your only compensation is commission after the sale is made.

I have tried commission only work in the past and at first you are all hyped up about the work. This is the same if you have ever signed up for one of theses MLM companies. After a while you get fed up when you find that you were the only person to get really excited about a certain product or Biz. The recruiter's for these opportunities are very good about getting you all excited about the possible money you can make.

I did respond to this one ad that went like this;
		Make $500 to $1000 a day Just by Returning Calls.
		Not MLM, No Selling, No Inventory, no Start up

It gave an email address that I replied to and today i received a phone call about it. The lady asked me a few questions like could i follow a specific business plan and after i responded positively she told me to call a certain number at 3:00 PM today. I called the number which was a conference call and you could hear all these other people on the phone talking about how they were now making six figures a year from this. Some of the people said that they used to be Police Officers, Teachers, Lawyers, and managers from other industries. What it all boiled down to was the reason they got you to make this call is because they wanted you to hear all the excitement from the other people which would then get you excited.  For a $3500 Pledge you would then get other people that would pay the same pledge placed underneath you. You had to advertise the prewritten ad and call anybody who responded.

To me this is like the old chain letter schemes but instead of getting an envelope in the mail you got an email. No product, no ebooks, no trials to anything. All you got was the satisfaction of parting with your money. They told me that if I didn't have the money to go a head and borrow it from somebody. There are so many of these programs out there on the Internet and it never ceases to amaze me how people can actually sleep at night after they have convinced other people to part with their hard earned money. I call these things Scams. No other way to look at it.

Now, i have found that there are some legitimate telework jobs out there. These are opportunities to work on the telephone from your home and actually get paid an hourly wage. I have received some emails today from a few of these companies and I have filled out their applications and gone through their training. The ball is now in their court but if these jobs end up not working out believe me I will not keep this bottled up inside me.

I have come to the realization that you need to stick with sites like Craigslist, Careerbuilder, and Monster and in the search box use keywords like Virtual Employee, freelance, virtual call center, work-at-home call center, or remote employee. Now there are some services out their that will post what you are looking for on a lot of job boards and this is fine if you have the extra money but please be careful with your money.

When you do a search on a site like Google or Yahoo the results that show up first in a box are paid listings. I am under the assumption that these results are MLM or some other type of Biz opp. Remember, any site that is charging a fee is probably only making money by charging you that fee. Guru at least lets you to bid on 10 jobs per month without paying anything. I am giving some though to creating a job board where freelancers will post their portfolio and a company that has a job would then look at thesite for a freelance person. The only money I would make would be from something like Google Adsense or by becoming an Amazon affiliate and letting them suggest books based on a persons search.