I’m thinking of starting a website where good quality remote jobs will be posted for free. These will be screened and possibly allow you to rate the employers.

What do you think? Would you pay a small fee to view a legitimate work at home job? Would you pay a monthly fee to access all the work at home jobs? Post your comments below.

The first piece of advice I have is ‘Just ask‘! Many of us assume our bosses won’t let us work from home so we don’t even ask.

The second piece of advice is ‘Prepare‘. You have to prepare what you will say, and what you will do if he says no. Perhaps you can start with one day at home and show the boss how much work you get done. Then expand from there. You have to be willing to quit if he says no, so perhaps you will want to have another job offer in your back pocket first.

I found what originally worked for me was that I had to travel to another city each week for a project. Then over time I got tired of all the travel so when the contract was up for renewal I said I would only work remotely with perhaps a final visit at the end of the project. So the factors involved here are: establishing trust with the client, making yourself indispensable (there were few people with my skillset in this geographical area), and negotiating at contract extension points. So I committed to my initial contract. It’s definitely harder as an employee as there might not be much incentive for your boss to let you do this.

After I got used to working remotely I basically couldn’t go back to commuting. So I decided I only wanted to work remotely but would allow an initial on-site visit. Then to my surprise the client accepted and said I didn’t even have to travel to the site since other companies involved in the project were also in other geographical areas.

I recently bid on a project with another company and mentioned that I wouldn’t be travelling (a four hour time zone difference). The client was okay with it and we won the bid! So here are two examples where I obtained remote work without a face to face meeting, and for a new client to boot.

Also check out this article titled “How to Convince Your Boss to Let You Work from Home“.

However, when I checked one of my affiliate sites for membership sites I found that I had made $407.71 in November! I haven’t added any affiliate links to Ryan Deiss’ site recently so it could be from an older blog post or sidebar link. But actually, Ryan does a lot of ‘back-end selling’ where he sells lower priced items to get people into his funnel, then upsells them later. Some of the products are recurring so I might have to try marketing them some more!

Another thing to note is that for the Learn and Master guitar affiliate sales I didn’t do anything new this month. So the existing YouTube videos and blog posts are still working for me (and should for a long time to come). So you put in the work and hopefully over time you get the rewards off of the single effort.

So we have:
$313.22 my guitar product/membership sales
$9.98 back pain site
$37.94 adsense you tube videos
$407.71 Ryan Deiss continuity products
$1.89 amazon affiliate sales (guitar books, ets)
$19.80 share a sale Learn and Master (they have 2 different affiliate products)
$29.10 Wishlist Products (membership site plugin for wordpress)
$1 Sponsored Tweet! (advertiser paid me to do a tweet about Microsoft!)

So the grand total in November 2009 was……..$820.64 there’s been no money spent on advertising these affiliate programs…just sweat equity! This is a new record, yahoo!!!!

So other than buying my IT consulting e-book, what else can one do to get these types of remote work jobs?

For me, remote work came after developing a relationship with one of my clients. I established myself as a competent developer in a niche market. Focusing on a niche is key because this means that clients won’t usually have this type of expertise on staff because they don’t get enough work in the area to justify a full time employee.

Scale to remote work over time. Try to introduce the concept slowly over time, like one day a week for example. Get a bunch of work done on a sick day and show the boss how well you did.

Consider working out of town for a while. When working out of town, I went from flying home every week, to every two weeks. Then I eventually went to one overnight visit per month and then fully remote. Usually working remotely means getting access to a Virtual Private Network (VPN), if you need access to the company servers. So if you get it for one day a week, there won’t be any more work involved to scale it up.

Wait until the current contract is over and you get offered a contract extension. If you’ve established yourself as a good resource in a niche market, this is a good time to make the transition to remote work.

Be willing to walk away. If you truly want to work remotely then you may lose opportunities if you stick to your guns. When I stand firm and lose an opportunity, I think of it as retraining the client. If they always get what they want, they will never have to change their mindset to other possibilities. Maybe it’ll help the next guy.

Believe that working remotely is better for everybody and that you can get approved for it. Don’t underestimate the power of visualization and belief. If you go in to negotiations thinking they will never go for it, you will be right!

To learn exactly how I went from commuting employee to highly-paid remote worker (with actual stories from each job) check out my IT consulting e-book.

What seems to be missed by the reporters is that a monthly fee is a common offering known as a continuity program or membership site. There are many offers for an initial product which states that you will be billed on a monthly basis for access to a training or coaching program for example. Most of these sites explicitly state this on the sales page and usually on the purchase page.

There is also confusion about the use of the name ‘Google’ in the product title. This may be confusing to some, but there are other products such as Google Cash Detective. You have to understand that many systems that can make you money rely on having you use the Google Adwords system. This is where you pay to have ads show up beside the Google search results in order to get traffic to your site. Nothing wrong with that.

It’s one thing to not get what was promised, but quite another when the consumer does not notice that they will be billed each month in addition to the initial purchase. So make sure you are making this perfectly clear when you are setting up a system like this for your customers.

The annoying thing about this report is that it tarnishes perfect good products out there, and increases the reluctance of people to buy online in some cases.

At times I’ve been fairly depressed, wondering why I have so many issues with the typical work environment, when others seem to be okay with the situation. One of the key thoughts I had was ‘There’s got to be a better way.’ I’ve never accepted the status quo, which is good in many ways but also bad as you tend to be unhappy this way. During the last few years I started to work at home for my IT contracts and it’s worked out great for both the client and myself. I knew I was onto something!

During this time I’ve realized that I really enjoy working at home, as well as learning and sharing that knowledge with others. I like teaching and getting feedback from others. And to sell anything online these days requires teaching even if you do this via your own blog. I also wanted to work from home, be able to live anywhere (not dependent on major city for employment) and have more freedom. Freedom to take my dog for a walk during the day, take a nap and work into the evening if I want.

I can’t think of anything better than an online business, especially in the area of information and affiliate products. The online learning market is huge and growing exponentially. Distance learning even at universities is very popular – people don’t have to commute or quit their jobs to study online. Plus there’s no office space to lease, no equipment and no employees!

You can easily create your own information products such as ebooks, videos, software demostrations and podcasts and sell them online. If you’d like to learn how to do this I highly suggest checking out Teaching Sells which has just re-opened for a little while (a while back they closed their doors to new members for many, many months). I was a member of Teaching Sells until I absorbed all the content and got my own sites up and running.

You not only learn how to create content in a variety of multimedia formats, how to organize your content, how to set up your sites (or get others to do it for you), how to market your site online, how to outsource content creation or any other part of the business, and how to joint venture with others (even if you don’t have your own content – find an expert and partner with him or her).

One of the big benefits of teaching online is the scalability and potential for much larger income. If you get paid by the hour, say working downtown, or teaching music one-on-one, you will be limited by the number of hours in the typical week. By creating content once, you can resell this information again and again even when you’re sleeping!

Here’s a blog post about finding great content and avoid writer’s block. Once you have your idea, write without editing yourself first, then go back and edit later. This is one of the key secrets to great writing!

Building any type of business or getting more work requires persistence. In other words, there are a lot of mental challenges as you try to grow your income from home. In most cases you need to educate your market, by writing lots of educational content for them, or even selling your own (or other’s) educational content via how-to courses or membership sites. Here’s a great free guide (blog post) on how to get started being self-employed from ZenHabits.

Leo talks about whether you should quit you job or do this on this side. It’s a personal choice of course. I’ve chosen to do this full-time from home for various reasons, including the fact that I love working on my online businesses and writing so much I don’t want to do anything else.