5 Legitimate Work-From-Home Jobs

We live in tough times. Those who are not unemployed are under-employed. Many people agonize between taking a second job and family time. My goal is to share with you some legitimate work-from-home jobs that will allow you to earn extra income for your family from the comfort of your own home on your schedule.
Many of these examples I have personally used to add extra income to my household when needed. I am not going to focus on starting an online business in this post (although, for the diligent there is money to be made in blogging, Adsense, creating your own products, selling on Ebay, and affiliate sales.) Instead, I want to introduce to you a few reputable work-from-home companies that will pay you for your work. All of these will send 1099’s for tax purposes.

If you are looking to find your own freelance writing jobs sites like Elance and Odesk have thousands of writing jobs posted. Or if you decide to stick with the corporate world, here are some job sites to help you find a job.

 1. Demand Studios

They have many different employment opportunities that range from Writers, Editors, Title Editors, Filmmakers, and more. They are usually hiring for certain positions at certain times so you have to keep your eyes peeled. I have made several thousand dollars in article writing and title editing. I even got my wife into doing title editing and earning extra spending money. As a writer you can make between $7.50-$20.00 per 150-500 word article. I usually write about two articles an hour (that’s $30.00 an hour at $15.00 an article). You do not have to be a prolific writer or have a background in writing to get accepted. Most articles are in a “How to” format. So, if you are the type that enjoys learning something new and then explaining it to someone else then this could be a fun work for you. Most of their content goes on eHow.com or LiveStrong.com.

Let’s say you have a trip you want to take in a month. Just decide how many articles you would have to write a day to reach your goal. They pay by Paypal every Wednesday and Friday. There is no payment threshold that you have to meet either. If you have money in your account, you will get paid. They currently have thousands of titles to choose from in the system and you can reserve up to ten at a time.

2. Live Work

This is mostly like a running projects board for a company called LiveOps (which I will discuss later on). Live Work has many different projects that you can bid on. Many are data entry and task-oriented. You work as much as you want. I once worked on a Dictonary.com project and was paid for every definition and source that I put in the system. There really is a wide-variety of work available there.

3. Leapforce

They are a vendor for Google. Once you are accepted in the program you log-in to the Google interface and rate websites. Google wants their searches to be relevant. They use human raters to rate whether the content is worthy or spam. At the time of this writing, they pay $11.50 an hour.

4. Textbroker

This is a great place to earn extra income if you want to write on simple projects. They pay is much less, but the projects are easy to write on. I once wrote several 150 word articles for someone that was creating an Extreme Sports website. The work was fun. I simply wrote a short bio about different professional athletes.

5. Liveops

If you want more human interaction, then you might want to consider LiveOps. LiveOps is an at home call service that you dial into while in the comfort of your own home. You will have to make a weekly schedule, but you will never have to commute anywhere. All calls are inbound from people responding to infomercials and you basically take their ordering information while being logged into the LiveOps system. They pay is around $9.50 but you do earn commission for different products sold.