This month one of the home business ideas I want to tell you about is one that many women I know are doing successfully. That is becoming a Virtual Assistant.

A Virtual Assistant (VA) is basically an online secretary or administrative assistant, but you work for clients as an independent contractor which means that you need to take care of your own taxes and healthcare.

If you have computer skills, are able to multi-task and can dedicate a good portion of every day to being online and on your computer - you could easily build a home business as a Virtual Assistant.

There are many good job sites where you can bid on initial work. A general rule of thumb when looking for work at home opportunities is never to pay for work. This makes sense, and good job boards such as elance are one of the few exceptions I would recommend.

When I began working from home as a Virtual Assistant I joined a well known job board called elance. This is where I found most of my ongoing clients. Their rates have gone up over the years, but so has the amount of jobs that get posted there. In my opinion it is well worth the investment.

Most of you know that my husband recently joined me in working from home. We needed to acquire some new clients and decided get an elance membership (I had let mine expire over a year ago). As a testament to their service, within two days we were awarded three different small jobs and have already found two ongoing clients from that membership.

I recommend that you check it out, build a strong portfolio to include that lists your references, job experience, education etc. and purchase a membership. We went with a three month basic subscription which has more then paid for itself. This is a good starting point for finding clients and beginning to work as a virtual assistant and an avenue I personally endorse as viable.

Thanks for reading the FreelanceMom news - I hope you find some tips useful to you.

Best wishes for your business!

P.S. Check out the following articles for more information:
» Joining VA Organizations Has Many Benefits
» Tips on Winning a Virtual Assistant Position AND Keeping It
» Assisting You Virtually- How Virtual Assistants are changing the face of the workplace
» The Virtual Assistant

HOME BUSINESS TIP If you own your own website - you know the importance of promotion and search engine optimization. Here are some tools that I find helpful: Alexa Toolbar - The Alexa toolbar gives you an idea of the amount of traffic potential link partners have and also lets you submit your website as a related site. Read more about promoting with Alexa. WebCEO - I find this tool INDISPENSIBLE for checking the best keywords to optimize for, check my search engine rankings, compare my site to other sites, and optimize my pages. It's the best!

The Global Work Marketplace - The revolution of how work gets done
By Lori Redfield

Will cubicles be a distant memory for today’s workforce? Will the expense of office space and the tremendous burden of employee benefits be a thing of the past for modern day businesses?

The reality is, for thousands of people, this change has already occurred. Internet based 'Service Auctions' now abound where businesses can post their ongoing jobs or one-time projects to a global market of freelance professionals, a.k.a. - 'Service Providers'.

The service providers then bid on the work, adorn the bid with their 'pitch' and online portfolio and viola! What commonly takes weeks to accomplish and thousands of dollars in payroll and advertising revenue... can take a business as little as a day with no overhead costs at all.

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There Are Over 3 Billion Web Pages...Where Is Yours?
By Ann Rusnak

Search engines remain the #1 way people use to locate you on the Internet. Over the past several years, search engines have under gone some major changes. Many of the free ones are gone and indexing has become more sophisticated.

Yet, our web site has remained in the top ten ranking for the past 4 years with very little maintenance. I have a business to run and don't have time to play search engine ranking games.

First forget trying to trick search engines. This is a big waste of time. Search engines soon catch on and you'll lose that ranking or worse yet...get your site banned from the search engine index.

Secondly, forget about always being #1. Algorithms constantly change and it can become a full time job attempting to maintain a number one ranking. We constantly go from #1 to #10. As long as we stay on the top ten search results which is the first page of the search engine, I am happy.

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Work at Home Business Spotlight

11.03.04 (5:30 am)

[url=http://www.onlypunjab.com]Source : Business News Onlypunjab.com[/url] Many women dream of being able to stay home with their kids, and some get that opportunity. Some dads want to stay home with their kids, but very few get that chance. But even more rare is having both mom and dad stay home! That's exactly what has happened at the Johnson's house. John and Stephanie Johnson both stay home with their kids, and all because they finally found a work at home opportunity that really works. The Johnsons started looking for alternative ways to make money from home almost 10 years ago. After trying dozens of M.L.M.s, Network Marketing businesses, gifting programs and anything else they thought was worth trying, they found that they had lost over $15,000 in the process. "I was really discouraged," Stephanie said. "I really started to think it was just me... my self-esteem was rock-bottom... we had failed miserably at every business we had tried. I really wanted to be home with our kids, and I was afraid it just wasn't going to happen." That's when things started looking up for them. In September 1999, John had purchased a new fax machine. Somehow the Johnson's phone number ended up on a network marketing lead list, and they awoke each morning for the next several weeks to flyers printed out on the desk. One of them caught Stephanie's attention. She called and spoke with a guy from Washington state who told her about how he was consistently making $4,000 or more per week in a non-MLM business. He told her about the incredible value of the Coastal Vacations Travel Package, and how she could make $1,000 per sale. "I was skeptical at first," she said,"because of all the negative experiences I had before in multi-level marketing, but I really wanted to believe it was for real. I wanted to stay home with my son, Jacob, so badly... he was just 6 months old, and we really needed the extra income." The next problem was how to get started. Since Stephanie had been out of work since her son was born, things were really tight. "I knew it would take money to make money and, unfortunately, money was the one thing I didn't have." She said she was unable to sleep at night. She would stay up for hours brainstorming... trying to come up with a way to get the capital she needed to get her business off the ground. Then it happened. "I realized that it wasn't really the money holding me back," she said. "It was my lack of belief in myself. I felt so beaten-down by my past failures that I doubted myself. That was a huge turning point for me, mentally. There was no standing in my way after that!" The next day, Mrs. Johnson did some things that most people would see as rash... she pawned the title to their only car at the local pawn shop, and then she dragged all her livingroom furniture out onto the front lawn and had a yard sale! She had raised enough money to get her initial advertising set up. John was working long hours at that point selling home security systems door-to-door, and he usually got in well after dinner time. Stephanie decided the only time she would be able to get anything done would be after the kids were in bed. And that's exactly what she did. Each night, starting at 9pm EST, she would sit at the kitchen table and check her voicemail. She had decided to do fax blasting as her first marketing, since that was how the guy with Coastal had originally found her. SHe went into a search engine and typed in "free fax blasting" and picked a company to use, and they blasted her ad out the very next day. She had run her ads specifically on the west coast so she could work from 9pm to midnight while the kids were sleeping. "All I did was call people back that had left messages on my voicemail. I'd give them a website and a phone number, and that's it. By the end of my first week... I had 3 sales! By the end of my first month, I had 16 sales, and John quit HIS job and came home too! and that was over 5 years ago. We love being home with our kids. This is more than we ever dreamed we could do. We never imagined it would work out to where we could both be home." Stephanie is now a Level 2 Director with Coastal Vacations, selling the International Travel Package worldwide, and hosts her own team conference calls. She now serves on the Board of Directors that run Coastal, and she also runs a special Coastal Training website (www.coastalfreedom.com) just for her own team. She has personally trained hundreds of people who have wanted to learn how they could work from home with Coastal, and expects to be doing this for years to come. The Johnsons really enjoy their freedom. They now have 3 kids, and they homeschool the older two. Stephanie works her business 3-4 hours a day, and John no longer works outside the home. He simply watches the kids while she is on the phone. She earns enough through Coastal Vacations to pay all their bills (and then some) all by herself. They travel frequently and enjoy the relaxed lifestyle they now have. "It has been such a blessing for us. I think Coastal is the best home business out there. If we want to go out of town, we just go. We don't have to ask anyone's permission. We just go. The freedom is incredible... and the tax advantages of being self-employed are awesome! I think this is how families were meant to be... together." Working from home is a growing trend in the United States, and many, like the Johnsons, are finding new and more creative ways to make it possible. There are plenty of resources on the web for those interested in learning more about franchises and other work at home opportunities. A century ago, the majority of Americans worked for themselves. Since then, we have done exactly the opposite... most of us work for someone else. But with the current trends, it looks like the next hundred years may see us return to the way things used to be. People value their freedom. Working for yourself is one of the greatest freedoms we can have... the freedom to control our own lives.

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