Carl Bradford

Do you recognize these frequently used terms?

Home based business
Home business employment
Work from home
Make money at home

These are just four examples, but they are the root of many, many searches on the Internet every day around the subject of work from home ideas.  Of course adding words before and after these terms are also used, but most searches on this subject has some combination of these words.

How many searches are conducted you ask?

I did comprehensive research in Google on a variety of these and similar terms and the number of searches per month totaled 16,375,800!

And, I doubt I covered nearly all searches; it’s just these were the most obvious and doesn’t take into account similar searches conducted on other popular search engines.

So Whose Searching?

The reason is that recently I’ve been asked many times to comment on making money from home.  It seems to be this increase in interest ties with the search results I just mentioned.

And I should add, the individuals that were asking were very often individuals accustomed to earning high 5 figures and well above.  This includes many who were earning $200K and above.

The reasons for their interest are many, but chief among them seems to be more long-term financial stability, greater time freedom and creating additional streams of income.

In quiet a few cases, these individuals had lost their corporate America jobs at least once and sometimes several times through no fault of their own.  Reductions in force, acquisitions, mergers, downturns in business have often been the culprit.  In most cases losing their jobs had nothing to do with poor job performance.  Because of that, they want to better control their own career destiny.

I’m currently conducting a brief survey on this subject and if you’d like to participate, just click on this link.

What’s Often Misunderstood?

In order to earn an income at home, do you get a job working from home (home based employment) or do you get a home-based business (home based business startup)? The two are very, very different and for our purposes it’s important to distinguish between them.

Even before I can lay out the criteria that will show you how to evaluate earning an income from home (in future blog articles), it’s vital to define both methods so you know which one will best fit your needs.

Further, the criteria that you’ll use to evaluate each of them, is not the same. In fact a lot of the negative comments that are often associated with this subject occur because someone pursued a specific income opportunity, let’s say for example, a work from home opportunity and discovered the opportunity is really a home based business. What has resulted is a ton of misleading advertising and scams such as the “legitimate home jobs” sites that promise to get you work from home in return for a fee.

Sometimes the person offering one or the other of these methods does not make it clear up front; and that is where the mis-communication frequently occurs. It is very often how an opportunity is marketed that makes people believe they are a scam.  And some are just that – a scam, yet there are many, many others that are very much legitimate.

It’s a shame that many people are turned off by truly great legitimate ways to make money from home because it was presented to them initially as one thing and then turned out to be something else. Immediately their “scam alarm” goes off.

I prefer to present things as they really are. If it’s a business then call it is business.  If it’s a job working from home, then just say so upfront.

Going Forward

I believe that I have a unique perspective on this subject and feel qualified to lead a discussion with my readers because not only have I been recruiting candidates for corporate America for over 40 years, I personally have worked many years as a typical company employee in a Human Resources leadership role.

However, for most of the last 20 years I have earned my income in a home based business environment as a recruiter, consultant and trainer.  I have both relatives and friends who do the same and most of us earn a comfortable 6 Figure income doing so.  Like, me they create multiple streams of income so that when one stream weakens, others are there to make up the difference.

I’m going to continue blogging about working from home and home based businesses for awhile because I think it has merit and apparently many of you do as well, judging by the many inquiries and emails I’ve been getting.

Stay tuned as we begin to dig deeper into this subject and explore some work from home ideas.