Imagine a world where you work from the comforts of you own bed. No getting up early, no shaving – heck, you can have breakfast while briefing your boss or serving customers. Just imagine. (No this isn’t a samsung ad!)

That world could be yours for the taking. Similar to the familiar off-line employment, this involves getting an online job, that you can do from the comforts of your bedroom or wherever. Some of the jobs include: chat room moderators, webmasters, data entry clerks, email processing, and customer service.

Basically, look at yourself and identify what you can do well and then sell yourself to prospective employers. Typically, it would pay if you have some fairly well developed skills as such skills are probably needed by someone somewhere – that’s good for you. I would advise that you treat online employment as a form of freelancing, as it is improbable that you will find very long-term employment online. This implies that, like all freelancers, you are a one-person team and should therefore strive to develop all-round skills needed to operate in this way. That is, you need to do your own marketing, accounting, management, and so on.

Naturally, this means that you should go ahead and create you, the brand. This brings in an amount of professionalism and paints a good picture of you making you seem credible, reliable and professional. Possible employers will definitely be impressed as there are many, many shoddy freelancers out there. But there are also very many well polished freelancers so you best do yourself a favor by being thorough. You will need a brand name (your name or something else), logos, business cards and a website. (If you’re serious, the website is essential.)

Great Freelancing resources can be found here.

Getting Work

Don’t quit your day job yet, getting well paying online jobs can be challenging! The best(and safest) source of online employment comes from your family, friends and/or associates. Identify those amongst your contacts who may be interested in hiring someone who’ll work from home i.e tell people you are now available. However, as this blog is about the internet I won’t digress and go into that. 😉

You can find online jobs at:

1. Right HERE. I’ll periodically surf through the sites below and post truly online (work from anywhere) jobs on this very blog. You may want to subscribe to my blog or sign up for free email updates to make sure you don’t miss anything!

2. Craigslist
3. Pro Blogger Job Board (blogging jobs)
4. Rent a Coder (programming and tech jobs)
5. Get a Freelancer
6. Krop
7. 37 Signals Job Board (or gigs)

Tips & Advice Regarding Online Jobs

• Be professional. Apply with a resume and cover letter just as you would do when applying for any other job.
• Don’t put all your eggs in one basket – you are now a freelancer and should strive to have as many options open as possible.
• That said, do not expect $50000 per year – it probably won’t be that much. Therefore, be careful when deciding to quit your day job, only do so when you already have a reasonable online income. After all, you don’t even need to quit your day job as you can do both, at least for a while.
• As I said earlier you need to develop all-round skills and be prepared for quite a bit of multi-tasking. You are a one-man team, remember? Since you can do all that, alone, why not create the job yourself? Setting up your own business, in my opinion, is the best way to go. Think about it – no deadlines, no boss…
• As with all other things, do not forget about your family and friends. Get off the computer once in a while and spend some time with real people. This helps, trust me.

Getting Paid

Unfortunately, chances of getting scammed online are pretty high. Chances of getting problems receiving your payment are even higher. So, how do you deal with this? I’m no expert but I have identified two simple ways:

• Make sure everything is clearly defined and understood from the very beginning. That means your obligations(what are you doing and to what extent or quality) should be clear and the employer’s obligations(how much to pay and when) should be clear as well.
• Keep extensive records of everything. These can be handy if things turn ugly as you can point out to agreements in black and white.

Freelanceswitch.com has discussed this, in detail, here.

More resources:
NorthxEast