A quick Google search under the words ‘work from home’ yields about 2,640,000,000 hits, but the serious applicant quickly discovers that at least 2,639,999,950 of them are scams or sales pitches that require an upfront investment.

Too often ‘work from home opportunities’ turn out to be thinly disguised commercials for online universities, at home courses or coaches, bogus employment agencies, or some other product or service that promises big money for working a couple of hours per day in the comfort of your own home—after you pay them.

The bad news is, you can’t really get rich working a couple of hours per day in your own home. (OK, never say never, but basically, the chances of this actually happening are infintessimally small.)

The good news is, working from home is not as hard as all that. Finding a real work from home opportunity has never been easier than it is right now. You just have to get out there and do it.

In fact, many traditional corporate jobs are being transformed into subcontract work and work from home arrangements at this very minute in order to save on labor costs and in order to accommodate professionals who want more flexibility and more convenience in their working lives.

Temporary workers and subcontractors are in a much better place right now than women who are looking for traditional jobs, but this trend is not all roses—definite drawbacks accompany the myriad rewards of being your own boss or working out of your own house. Even so, if you really want to work from home, this is an excellent time to start. You will find you have lots of choices, and that it isn’t as hard as you imagined.

Finding a real work from home job requires the same basic skills as a traditional job search:

1. Assess your professional skills and your schedule.
2. Market yourself.
3. Network.
4. Start working from home.

Sound too easy?

If anything, compiling that list was probably more daunting than finding a work from home job.

Women For Hire

By 2007, I’d been working in corporate call centers for over five years. I had not been able to get myself off the phones no matter how well I did or how hard I tried, and I was massively frustrated. I noticed an article about Womenforhire.com in one of those supermarket women’s magazines and checked the site out, not expecting much at all.

To my surprise, Women for Hire turned out the be an excellent work from home resource. You can literally spend hours at this site taking tutorials, looking around, searching the job boards, or exploring links to companies that specialize in legitimate work from home jobs for women.

Some of the top categories listed at Women For Hire include online tutoring, online writing and research, virtual assistants and concierge services, tech support, translation, and at-home customer service. The site lists dozens of links to the websites of companies that specialize in hiring work from home professionals directly. You can also find practical advice on how to set up your own website, how to start a home-based business, and lots of ideas on home-based businesses that are easy to start.

You can expect to make between $8 and $15 per hour right away at most outsourced work from home jobs. Some of these jobs have limited benefits (basically they are a form of temping), but many do not.

Most concierge and customer service jobs also require you to provide your own computer, your own internet connection, a land line phone, and a headset. Many households already have access to all of these tools as a matter of course, but if you don’t have them, you will have to spend your own money to get them. Most of these employers will not withhold taxes for you. You will have to do that yourself too. It isn’t that hard.

Home-Based Businesses

While a number of companies do specialize in temporary or per-project assignments for work from home employees, many women prefer to simply identify a skill, service, or product and start offering it locally or online. Once you decide what what you want to do and why someone else should hire you to do it, then it’s just a matter of getting that first client, and then the next, and then the next, and so forth.

If you are good at what you do, or if you are offering a service or product that is in great demand, you may well find that clients begin to seek you out via word of mouth. One of your former clients tells someone about your work, and that person tells someone else, and eventually you get a phone call or an email that results in a new project and a new client.

When I worked in garden centers in my 30s, I worked for myself on the side. It wasn’t hard to get work: It was hard to keep saying no to work. I saw lots and lots of women working for themselves from April through October and they barely had to tack up a flyer or post a phone number. Why not? Because planting and weeding is hard work and lots of people want it done but don’t want to do it, and they don’t want some sweaty strange guy in their yard either. (Not that sweaty strange guys are bad, but rightly or wrongly, some clients are nervous about them and prefer a woman.)

Service oriented work is often like this, so if you are a good gardener, cook, housekeeper, exercise coach, teacher, musician, writer, or whatever, chances are good that if you just start doing what you do and letting people know you’ll do it for money, your phone will soon be ringing and your email box will soon be full.

Today I write web copy and promotional pieces for various clients, and many of them do come to me by word of mouth. I am not getting rich, but I am making as much as I ever could make working in a call center, and I’m having way more fun. I have time and room in my life for creative projects and creative people, and my days are less stressful and less aggravating. Work is no longer about drudgery and clock watching, it’s more a part of who I actually am, and I like that.

Pros and Cons

Working from home sounds like a dreamy proposition when you’re trapped in a little grey cubicle and being micromanaged by a sadist in khaki pants, but it isn’t all roses. The truth is, you have to work from home, not just be at home and collect paychecks. Many women discover that creating a workspace and maintaining boundaries so that they can actually accomplish outside work while inside their homes is more difficult than they thought it would be initially.

The ‘pros’ are pretty obvious, I think: Do more of what you love, work in your pajamas if you want to (although you may find you don’t want to), define your own hours and your own schedule, earn as much or as little as you want, and so forth.

Weirdly, the ‘cons’ can be the same as the ‘pros’, though few people anticipate that drawback:

• Make as much or as little as you want. If work isn’t your favorite thing or the work you’ve chosen is not really something you enjoy doing, you’ll find lots of opportunities to not do it, and you’ll soon end up much poorer than you were when you were confined to a cubicle. On the other hand, if you are a driven, ambitious person you may have trouble ending your work day. The temptation to be at work ALL the time will be strong, and you will burn out quickly and your family will be irritated with you.
• Work in your pajamas. Or better yet, don’t. The trouble with this one is that after awhile it drives down your self esteem and you become isolated and depressed. Writers and bloggers are especially prone to this hazard. When you work at home, alone, you have to build social contacts into your day yourself, and you have to make an effort to maintain a professional network and a professional appearance. Comfort can degenerate into despair pretty fast if you don’t maintain human contact.
• You can be your own boss. Yes, and withhold and pay your own taxes, drum up your own projects, solicit your own work, keep track or your own appointments and meetings, and purchase your own benefits. All of these things are possible and not as scary as they sound, but you have to do them. No one will take care of this end of it for you, and if you don’t track and report your income you end up in a mess. My advice? Hire an accountant and let her handle it. Good accountants are worth every penny. (Or, BE an accountant for other women who, like you, work for themselves!)
• You can do what you love. Yes and then it will be work, not love. Seriously, some days you will resent doing what you love for money when you could be doing it for fun. These moments will be fleeting and neurotic but you will have them. People who do not get paid for doing what they love will occasionally accuse you of ‘selling out’, whatever that means. Be nice to them if you can. They probably work for your old boss. Oh… and don’t say I didn’t warn you. 
• You still have to do things you don’t want to do. Every day won’t be a religious experience. Especially in the beginning you will take projects that do not thrill you and you will ALWAYS encounter clients who are less than charming. Working for yourself doesn’t protect you from unpleasantness.
• If you work at home for an employer, you’ll make less than you will at the same job on site. Over time the amount of money you can earn may increase, but in general, if you do customer service or concierge work out of your own home, or if you write for net marketers or websites or services, or if you do almost anything else that involves sitting in front of your computer at home for a third pary, you will make a couple of dollars less per hour than if you were to do the same exact thing in an office as part of a ‘real’ job. That may change in the coming years, but for now, it’s just kind of the way it is. That’s why so many corporations are shifting to this model. It costs THEM less.

Despite all of these drawbacks, working from home can be a really good situation for women. Especially if you’ve been recently downsized or laid off from a professional position, doing similar work from home is a good way to keep your resume and your life interesting and active, while generating the income you need to make it until the next ‘real’ job finally appears. If you’ve been let go from a job you hate, working from home can be a way to discover what you love and to try out new things at a pace you can handle.

For many women, working from home quickly becomes such a good fit that they never enter the job market again and never want to enter it again. Women tend to have soft skills men lack (see the video clip above) yet sell themselves short when it comes to confidence in their own abilities. In other words, many women have all the qualities of a great entrepreneur EXCEPT the confidence. But confidence can be learned. To some extent, just doing it is the only way, so why not try? Throw yourself in the pool. You are probably a better swimmer already than you think.

For a few women, working from home grows into an enterprise so successful that they eventually have start hiring others instead of looking to be hired. You might be one of those women.

Wouldn’t that be a nice change of pace?