Those with no special technical skills can make honest money writing short articles to help feed the insatiable demand for fresh material needed by webmasters to maintain search engine raking. Working as freelance contractors can pay about $2 for rewriting existing material and $4 to $10+ for original 450 word articles written order. Most people pick up work at freelance connection sites, like elance, or through article writing brokerages.

Essential skills include fast accurate typing skills, to make decent money you should be able to knock out a pack of 10 articles in a day. An ability to artfully incorporate specified key word phrases as well as producing engaging magazine quality copy will help secure the better paying contracts. A downside of working on the internet is you are a member of a world wide pool of competing talent, many residing in 3rd world countries with low costs of living.  Those with a 1st language mastery of American English grammar and culture should emphasize these advantages in their resume.

Here are a coupe of general writer resource sites that should help you get oriented:

PoWar Writing Career Center be sure to check out their Jobs Section.

The Burry Man Writers Center resources for a worldwide community of writers (with an international flair)

About Freelance Writing .com is a freelancer blog

Writing Job Brokers who will provide you assignments

Blog Posts for Sale is a small writing broker, any one have experience with them?

Here’s a review of 26 sites that pay for blog posts

One pitfall writers have to be aware of are bid requests that require sample material, these ban be bogus offers designed to collect dozens of samples for use without compensation. One broker who’s practices have been questioned is contentcurrent a broker claiming  a 1000+ writer force, requests a full 500 page article sample as part of the application process, this mini review and it’s comments criticize the operation.

The Paid to Forum Post community, a sister site of  contentcurrent, non-the-less may be worth a visit.

Freelance Connection Sites with a emphasis on writing

odesk is a major general freelance site with some 2000+ writing jobs

Get a Freelancer another general freelance site listing 1500+ writer jobs

Sunoasis Jobs for Writers, Editors, and Copywriters

Writing Careers ,com amasses some 1500+ freelance writer jobs from various sites.

FreelanceWriting.com a writing job news aggregator.

Other Methods to Write for Money

AssociatedContent pays about $4 for quality articles of your choice, there are residual benefits for popular articles.

DayTipper reportedly pays $3 for each published tip.

A way to create a little residual income is to create a revenue generating blog, there are numerous free hosts that split the advertising income, here are 30 Adsense Revenue Sharing Sites for Residual Income and Link Building.
If you make some headway doing freelance work, you might consider some course material…

One course I liked, the Freelance Article Writing Secrets Course by Kenneth Rearden containing  5 1/2 hours of recording showing how to build a business and multiply your returns, unfortunately seems to be out of print.

Some commercial writers resources

I’ll leave it to you to evaluate these more affordable selections (found on affiliate sites)

Overnight Writing Income – Hands Down The Best Guide For Beginners.

You Can Make Money Writing – Making Money Online With Simple Articles That Almost Anyone Can Write

Writing Rituals For Marketing Writers & Copywriters -  Teaching how to maintain a writers mindset.

Get Paid To Write On The Internet - How To Get Paid With Very Little Or No Experience!

Write Where The Money Is – Fire Up Your Income As A Freelance Writer

Other forms of competition article writes face include private label rights (PLR) packages of pre-written articles,  some of these web site start kits authored by writing crews in India, are very inexpensive, there are compilations of 80,000 articles sell for pennies an article. Unfortunately, these stock articles do little to improve a web site’s ranking, due to search engines devaluating these unoriginal  “duplicate content” pieces.

Solution to the duplicate content problem include hiring someone to rewrite the articles or automated text re-writer programs, referred to as article spinners. The output of these text manglers is often barely readable gibberish though the latest spinners  intelligent use if thesaurus and grammar rules make more passable text.

Making the Big Bucks

To make a real living one probably has to move beyond piecemeal article assembly. Kenneth Rearden describes making $125 an hour in his article writing business by setting his own site supplying quality customers with premium articles, article packages using labor saving style templates and outsourcing.

Creating your own blog may not provide immediate returns, taking perhaps a year of development and regular article writing to produce a blog that with luck will have a big following that merits decent advertising revenue, from that point you can collect passive income with a moderate upkeep effort.

Highly paid writers do copywriters for marketers, creating engaging persuasive copy for web site sales pages and emails, the big names make thousands for single sales letters that are part of million dollar marketing programs. Frank Kern & Yanik Silver are copywriters who teach their techniques, for a price.

You won’t get rich, but if your 13 years or older, with no special skills, you can make a little recreation money in exchange for sharing your contact information with marketing companies.  Always hungry to find new potential customers, companies offer a bounty for new customer leads, some paid “find new customer” services will share their bounty with you, the new customer. One of the better known services is CashCrate.com.  For starters they will pay you $1 for filling in your detailed profile. Even the under 18 crowd limited to only free offers and surveys can exceed the minimum $20 monthly payout,  doing surveys for 50 cents a pop.  If you are at a point where every dollar counts, it may be worth giving up some anonymity to the marketeers.

One precaution you have to take before joining CashCrate.com, get a ‘disposable’ email address to which you will have the various advertisements (junk mail) will be sent to.  DO NOT give out your primary email address.  Google gmail is a popular free email service. Here’s a review of the top 18 free email services.

Although most solicitations will come thouugh email, t’s also best to give out a secondary disposable phone number, if you have one.  Register your phone number with the National Do Not Call Registry to stop most telemarketers.

The pay to install toolbars etc., that you are asked to download may not be worthwhile. While not doing anything illegal, some just collect usage statistics, others may add popup window advertisements…most annoying.

GPT (Get Paid To…) sites like CashCrate.com present various activities such as survey taking, game testing or product evaluation as the chores your being paid to perform, while the reality is in most cases, your personal contact information is being collected for a marketing company, with Cash Crate and you sharing the commission for bring them a new prospect.

CashCrate.com also had promotional deals with about 20 major online stores, for example Cash Crate for example members save 5% on your their online Walmart purchases.

For Credit Card Owners Who Want to Spend Some to Make Some to Make Some

In addition to the simple lead collection offers, various product trials or sales are offered 18 and over CashCrate.com members who have a credit card.  Some of these offers can turn out to be a good deal. Products offered in TV infomercials are sold on the internet as well, in place of paying for TV air time, web site operators are pain a commission for finding new customers

Does the Shamwow guy have you considering a purchase? buy a set of ShamWow towels through CashCrate.com and you will receive a $6 rebate from Cash Crate. (bear in mind that like the typical infomercial product, the $19.95 (+S&H) product actually ends up totaling  $32.90 ($19.95 + $7.95 + $5.00 for separate handling of purchase and bonus)

Asleep at the wheel exploits: Like the mail in rebates that have become popular with the retail stores, many of the offers you will encounter have a an initial low trial/sample charge that will be followed by higher charges later, if like the rebates, human nature has causes you to forget to mail in the rebate or cancel the product trial.  The marketers come out ahead by playing the odds that many customers will slip up, DON’T be one of them. Keep good records, mark those trial end deadlines on your calendar.

You can get the same Video Professor, sample DVD for a $6.95 shipping fee offered in te infomercials, and receive a $25 kick back from Cash Crate, who is getting a finders fee considerably larger than the $6.95 you are paying for the sample. Bear in mind that like the old Columbia Record Club offers, this sample is setting you up for a continuity program in which your failing to decline the automatic followup charges will result in your being charged full price for the sample DVD,  followed by a larger DVD bundle.

Read the fine print in each offer, particularly if a credit card purchase is involved.

The most tricky complicated deals are the various gift offer involving products or gift cards worth $100 to $2000. Before providing them any information, be sure to examine the bottom of the page, most offers detail your requirements to collect the gift there. They all require multiple product offers commitments, some ‘free’ trials some purchases or subscriptions that might add up in the long run. The larger offers require you refer 1 or 2 other households to also complete the offers before you can collect your reward. I don’t know the percentage of applicants that manage to complete all the required offers without getting disqualified for some technicality. I believe some do, be sure to read the small print at the bottom and click the information links there before committing to one of these combination offers.

Those promoting CashCrate with a more optimistic tone, exhibiting big payout checks are getting a piece of CashCrate’s income from every new productive member they recruit. They are’t earning the big checks doing surveys.

Like the amazing 18th century chess playing machine “The Turk” that won nearly every match, but turned to have a hidden human operator, the instructions you issue to the Amazon Mechanical Turk are executed by humans the “Artificial-Artificial Intelligence” behind the Turk.

The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk)  provides human workers to perform micro tasks. The most common tasks pay 1 to 10 cents, some better paying HITs at the moment include: Write a quick 110 word response to a web page article for $0.30,  Create a 9 minute audio to text transcription for $0.79, Re- Write An Article Of At Least 500 Words for $1.00.

While most of this work is done by people in the 3rd world, some middle class Americans tackle these chores like a crossword puzzle, perhaps collecting a stunning 45 cents for an hours labor.

To have a look, go to Amazon Mechanical Turk, click the link:  View Them Now.
If you want to learn more about how turking is done, spend time on The Turk Nation Forum.

Here’s a more detailed description of Turking provided by ,chickenmeister a member of the forum

Mechanical Turk is a service that Amazon provides, where requesters can post tasks (called HITs – Human Intelligence Tasks) that workers can do. These tasks are usually things that an automated system wouldn’t be able to do well or efficiently.

There are a wide range of HITs. Here’s a short list/summary of the types of tasks:
- audio transcription
- gathering data off websites
- writing articles
- fill out surveys
- tagging images
- transcribing data from images
- posting comments on blogs/youtube videos/forums
- bookmark sites with social bookmarking sites (i.e. Digg, etc)
- answering questions for answer/question services/websites
- pretty much anything you can imagine

I generally categorize HITs into two categories — the quick and easy, and the long and tedious. The quick ones pay a lot less (typically 0.01 to 0.10), but you can do them much more quickly, and there’s generally several thousand of these available. The more difficult ones pay more, but they can take hours to do. Doing either of these will generally work out to be about the same, pay/time-wise.

The process generally goes like this:
- requesters post the tasks
- you browse the list of tasks, and find one you would like to do
- you can preview the hit before doing it
- if you like what you see, press the “Accept” button
- you can perform the task
- there is a time limit assigned to all tasks, but usually there is plenty of time
- once finished you submit the HIT
- the requester will review your work and accept or reject it
- if accepted, you get paid

The payments are transferred to your Amazon Payments account, from which you can transfer to either your bank account or an Amazon.com gift certificate.

I generally average about $10 per day, but it’s been kind of slow lately, so it’s probably less right now. I started in late June, and I’ve accumulated $325+ so far.

Dateline’s work at home scam investigation aired in early April, (the full program available online), examines more cases of fake jobs obtained over the internet from what appeared to be major legitimate companies, like like Staples, Compac Computers and Goldman Sachs.  One of an endless various scams perpetrated by Nigerians that all capitalize on banks adding to the depositor’s account, prior to the funds from the counterfeit checks “clearing” .  Never wire a “surplus” or “fee” payment via Western Union until the check’s funds have transferred. (I would never wire money to strangers, under any circumstances)

For more info, check out the FTCs guide: Giving the Bounce to Counterfeit Check Scams

The Dateline program revealed a more sophisticated addition to the scam, hiring “payroll clerks”, individuals who use standard check creation software to unknowingly produce counterfeit checks, using bank account numbers provided by the scammers, one woman had sent out hundreds of checks totaling over $750,000 before realizing she was a puppet.

Fraud is said to be one of the top 5 sources of income in Nigeria, Dateline played an excerpt from a popular song:  I go chop your dollar

“Oyinbo man I go chop your dollar,
I go take your money and disappear
419 is just a game, you are the loser I am the winner”

Some Basics:

• Most legitimate jobs don’t require you to pay “application
  processing fees”,etc. up front.
• Protect your personal info SS#, etc. as well as your money until you confirm the employer legitimacy.
• Find work that utilizes your skills, be skeptical of employers that don’t ask for qualifications.
• If you have a passionate interest but no clearly marketable skills, consider capitalizing on your knowledge Blogging about and e-marketing in your hobby/recreation area.
• Pay attention to your common sense. If it sounds too good to be true…

Finally the FTC caught up with the operators of 6 sites, imposing a $4.9 million judgment: they charged consumers from $47 to $129 to access their “members only” Web sites with their “money-making secrets.” Their advertised programs either did not exist as represented or did not offer quick and easy money with little time or effort as promised. here’s the complete FTC story.

One site shat should be helpful workathomenoscams.com exposes some scams. The site may not be totally up to date.

Our friend at Work At Home Careers .com produced this video tutorial on techniques for researching a company.

The Work At Home Careers guy ironically advises Not googling for opportunities, using the search phrase “work at home” it’s too much of a magnet for scammers, your better off searching for more specific work such as Telecommute, Virtual Work, Home Office, Flex Work or Remote Work.

Besides hanging onto your wallet, you also have to protect your ethics, some people are recruited into conspiring in fradulent activities, like the pay to click jobs in which you are assigned to click on advertisement links. Clicking advertisements with no intention of buying is defrauding the pay per click advertising clients, to generating undeserved income for the hosting web site, or to exhust the advertising budget of a competetor with fruitless visits. These activities do pay in some cases, but it may get you blacklisted, hurting future business persuits.

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Of the 50+ sites examined about 5 had legitamate lists, not laden with commercials were found. They are listed below, note the lack of any real Consensus among them.

allbusiness.com    each with a short paragraph description
1. Medical transcription
2. Accounting
3. Child care
4. Assembling and selling custom gift baskets
5. Making and selling candles and crafts
6. Catering
7. Medical claims billing
8. Freelance typing jobs
9. Publishing e-books
10. Online affiliate programs

education.yahoo.net
1 Administrative Services Manager
2. Computer Systems Analyst
3. Database Manager
4. Public Relations Specialist
5. Paralegal
6. Probation Officer
7. Web Design Professional
8. Desktop Publisher
9. Medical Transcriptionist
10. Virtual Assistant

jobs.aol.com
1. Web Software Engineer
2. Financial Planner
3. Public Relations Professional
4. Interpreter or Translator
5. Account Executive, Inside Sales
6. Freelance Writer, Technical
7. Property Manager
8. Graphic Designer
9. Medical Claims Processing
10. Travel Agent

isnare.com
1. Customer Service
2. Telemarketing
3. Transcription
4. Web Design
5. Writing
6. Graphic Design
7. Sales
9. Teaching/Tutoring
10. Consulting

ballslist.com
1. Medical Transcriptionist
2. Tutoring
3. Pet Care
4. Communicate All That You Know  coaching
5. Webmaster
6. Childcare
7. Sell for Companies
8. Manage Others Paperwork / Life
9. Ebay Sellor
10. Travel Agent

And a partial list from   joliet junior college
Advertising Sales Agents
Customer Service Representatives
Computer Software Engineers
Meeting and Convention Planners
Market Research Analysts
Technical Writers

A scam report site mentioned a page we omitted, that declared “we have investigated ‘over 278 online jobs’ ” and picked the best 10,  apparently the first listed there is a known scam.

This site is a bit more oriented toward self employment, such as affiliate marketing, rather than the virtual employee model. The former has a long term potential for high income, though the latter affords a better chance of making a living or supplemental income in the short term.

If you have marketable skills with a track record, in design, writing or programming. Register with one or more online employment agencies, such as Artisan. or those mentioned in freelancewriting.com Programmer types can check out this  list of web dev. oriented freelance agencies. Craigslist is still an unbeatable free resource. Bear in mind you will joining the world wide outsource job pool, if you have native american writing skills, be sure to talk it up.

It may sound odd coming from a site named for a popular web search phrase workhomebusiness, your better off not googling phrases like work at home, this brings up a lot of the scammer sites (and some good), better search for specific work using terms like: Telecommute, Virtual Work, Home Office, Flex Work or Remote Work.

One site offering solid advice is Work at Home No Scams .com

Work at Home .com is the biggest single source of info. I have seen.

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