The old WebChamber.com web site had a number of Member Committees that served as the basis for the new Public Forums. There were a number of committees that have not (perhaps yet) been created on the WebChamber.com site. So the question is, "Why did we create this forum?"
While the public view of WebChamber.com was inactive over the past couple of years, we had a continuous flow of questions about work-at-home opportunities. Many of these inquiries were about members of WebChamber.com. People wanted to know if their offers of work-at-home opportunities were legitimate, or if they were a waste of money - or worse yet, were they outright scams.
Frequently, after we answered the initial questions, we were then asked questions of advice. How do you know if an offer is valid? Do you know of any companies offering work-at-home opportunities? How can I get started?
Clearly, there's a huge interest in opportunities to work from home, and we would really like to help everyone who wants to pursue these opportunities.
It became clear that there were different ways one could work from home. The first, most obvious way was based on the requests we received. Some companies offer opportunities for you to work from home performing various tasks that the company would like to outsource. Frequently, they pay for services based on units. Create so many "things" and get paid so much. Research, type, surf, or perform some other task a certain number of times, and get paid a certain amount of money. This type of opportunity is very attractive, especially for someone who wants to make some extra money on the side without the additional burden of a full or part-time job or trying to start your own business. Unfortunately, this high level of desirability also attracts scam artists looking to take advantage of people and steal their money.
The second way to work from your home that we identified was to start your own business. There are countless people all over the world who do this, and they're providing equally countless types of products and services. Running your own business, however, has a much higher level of complexity. There's accounting, marketing, sales, and all kinds of things in addition to the actual work you choose to do.
And finally, there is telecommuting. This is where your employer offers the opportunity (sometimes grudgingly) to work either full or part-time from your home. This is very popular among the employees, but for the most part, employers remain skeptical. They have a certain comfort level when they can see you working at your desk. Unfortunately, they lose that comfort level when you're working from home. This is despite the apparent evidence that home-workers are more productive. Who knows? There may also be a certain level of jealousy. Why would they want to let you work from home where they're having to drag themselves into the office every day?
We would like to address these types of work-at-home opportunities and the issues and challenges they face, and see if we can't help in making this dream a reality for those who wish to pursue it.
If you have some thoughts you would like to share on this topic, please visit the Discussion Boards in this forum and get started.