Abandoning The Job Search In Favor Of Self Employment And Work At Home Jobs On The Internet
Self employment has always been an alternative to a traditional job search. What’s relatively new is that for many people, the Internet is both the marketplace and workplace for their home based business. Many people are leaving the traditional workforce to work at home and earn money in ways that have existed for less than a decade.
New forms of self employment include paid online surveys, affiliate marketing using Google AdWords, and selling traffic generated through search engine optimization.
Filling out paid online surveys is a work from home business that many people are starting for less than the cost of a good meal at a restaurant. There are several hundred market research companies that pay participants to record their opinions in online surveys. They send invitations to participate in the surveys to people who have registered with them to show their interest. The costs to start up this sort of work at home business are very small. The initial investment of time to fill out applications at several hundred market research firms, on the other hand, is substantial enough that only very determined individuals actually build this into a viable source of income.
For many affiliate marketers, work and play are hard to tell apart. They send visitors to the websites of various merchants and are paid commissions when the visitors they send make purchases. Affiliates obtain the visitors from many sources. One of the most effective ways to quickly send a large number of potential customers to an online merchant is to use Google AdWords. This can work very well if it is done properly, but there is considerable risk of financial loss as is explained.
A few enterprising individuals obtain visitors for free from search engines such as Google and Yahoo and sell the traffic either as click-throughs to services like Google’s AdSense or to merchants, or both. Getting the maximum amount of search engine traffic is a process called search engine optimization. Software that does a very good job of automating many aspects of search engine optimization was introduced in late 2004 by Nathan Anderson.