If you’re looking for jobs you can do from home, you’ve come to the right place. Where we used to share daily job leads here on our site, we now focus more on educating you about work at home jobs for moms (and others!), as well as sharing tools for productivity and success. From time to time we do still share work at home jobs on our main Twitter feed though, which includes everything from freelance writing gigs and social media jobs to attorney jobs and work from home pharmacist jobs!
Gone are the days of stuffing envelopes (were those gigs even real?) or seamstress jobs, as we live in a time when a number of respectable careers can be of the home-based variety. On the days that we do share leads on Twitter, we’ve found that searching for jobs you can do from home isn’t nearly as hard as it once was. Yes, it takes a little know-how, but with the tips we’re about to share you can begin searching for your own work at home jobs today.
Finding Jobs You Can Do From Home
There are a ton of places to search for freelance work on the web, including bidding sites like Upwork.com. While we don’t have anything against bidding sites, we mostly use free job boards and and so we’ll focus on these. Some of the best places to find jobs you can do from home include:
Mashable’s Social Media Job Board (you may also find jobs you can do from home on their general job board)
HootSuite’s Social Media Job Board
Then, of course there are the usual haunts like Monster and Indeed where you can use filters to search for jobs you can do from home.
A Word About Craigslist Jobs
While many scoff at finding jobs you can do from home on Craigslist, you’ll find that we source a number of the leads we share on Twitter from there. This is because much of my own success in finding new clients has come from Craigslist and I have very few bad stories to tell. In my entire 10+ years as a freelancer, I’ve only not been paid once (and that was at the very beginning when I was still learning the ropes) and have mostly had great experiences with craigslist jobs.
Here’s a little tip for you: Don’t search for jobs you can do from home on an actual Craigslist site, but use Google to search for Craigslist jobs, instead. Sound a little puzzling? It’s not. Actually, it’s very simple. See, if you search Craigslist’s sites city by city, you’re missing most of the opportunities available to you. Remember, you work from home (or you want to!), so there’s no reason to limit yourself to a particular location. I literally have clients as far away as Amsterdam who could care less where I live as long as I can do the job.
How to Search For Craigslist Jobs
Here is the exact search term that I start my Google search with (I keep it bookmarked):
writer -floppy -insurance -automotive -service -room -screenplay -comedy -cd -film -intern -roommate -share -dvd -song -actor -actress -script -apartment -type -desk site:craigslist.org
You may highlight, copy and paste this exact search term or you can modify it in anyway that you see fit. I often start with “writer” and then perform subsequent searches using other terms like “social media”, “remote position”, “remote job”, “work at home”, “work from home”, “freelance”, “distributed team”, “telecommute”, “data entry”, “contract job”, etc. You don’t need quotes if your leading search term is a single word (i.e. writer), but you definitely want to use quotes if it’s more than one word (i.e. “social media”). Also, the minus sign before each keyword tells Google to eliminate any results with those words in them, which I find useful in sorting through a lot of the results I don’t want to see. There’s some CRAZY stuff on Craigslist, so you’ll for sure want to use this filtering method, too!
The most crucial part of this search string is remembering to add
site:craigslist.org
so that it will pull everything from all of the sites across the nation.
More On Searching for Craigslist Jobs You Can Do From Home
Once I’ve pruned my search results, I narrow it all down to a specific time frame by clicking on Search tools at the top of the results page and then clicking on the Any time menu, which will offer a number of time options or allow me to customize my own. This also comes in handy since, if I don’t find a lot of gigs to apply for in my first search, I can come back later in the day and just search by the hour. In addition to checking the Past hour option on the pull-down menu under the Any time tab, I usually also pull the Sorted by relevance menu down and change it to Sorted by date, which will give me the most recent listings first. I confess to feeling a little giddy upon finding a good lead that was just posted 20 minutes ago! 🙂
Don’t Let “Telecommute” Fool You!
Most listings for jobs you can do from home will be very clear about the offer within the ad itself. On Craigslist, don’t be fooled by those who pre-select the “telecommute” option in their listing as these aren’t always work from home jobs, though. I’ve had the feeling for a long time that some employers don’t really know what the word means, which can be frustrating. I’ve literally seen bartender and truck driving jobs listed under telecommute options. Here’s to hoping that someday Craigslist will replace their “telecommute” box with a clearly stated “work from home” option, instead.
Still, most jobs you can do from home will say so in the ad. For those who don’t, you can read between the lines. If a listing says that you must have the latest computer operating system installed or that you should be comfortable communicating via Skype or something along those lines, these are good indications that it is a work from home job. Ditto for scheduling your own hours, setting your own rate, etc.
ABC – Always Be Checking
The best time to look for new clients and jobs you can do from home is when you are already at capacity and don’t necessarily need a new gig. I say this because, as a freelancer, your clients can sometimes come and go in a snap. That new startup that you love working for can go belly up tomorrow. Or that client that you’ve had for a year or more can suddenly decide to assign your services to someone in-house. My point is that, as a freelancer, we can never get too comfortable with our client list, so it’s a good idea to always have your feelers out there just in case. Submit your resume, take those interviews and keep the spotlight on yourself! If you have to turn jobs down, do it…but that’s a heck of a lot better than having no offers at all when your income takes a dive!
How Do You Find Freelance Work?
Do you have a certain technique for finding freelance work? Know of any better places to find jobs you can do from home? Hope the methods shared here are useful to you and feel free to comment below if you have questions or need additional help.
