Guide to Working Online

An Online Worker Must Have:

• Basic English skills (reading, writing, and comprehension),
• Computer know-how (data entry, word, excel, and others), 
• Internet familiarity (email, google, chat, skype, and others), 
• PC or laptop (or access to one) with stable internet access,
• Online payment facility to receive earnings (PayPal, Payza, and others),
• Right attitude: Positive, motivated, willingness to learn new things.

Two Types of Online Jobs: 

• Telecommuting Jobs - In this setting, the company you work for allows you to do your job from the comforts of your home.  You get work instructions online and you likewise submit your work online.   You get all the benefits (and deductions) of a regular employee such as BIR, SSS, Philhealth, Pagibig and others.  Several BPO companies in the Philippines offer online or homebased job opportunities. You can work at home as a call center agent, researcher,  appointment setter, sales marketer, and others.

• Freelance Jobs - In this setting, you are not connected with any company and you can work for as many companies and get as many jobs as you like.  You can work full-time or part-time, get paid on per hour basis or per job done.  Most computer programmers and web developers, writers, researchers, web marketers, work on a freelance basis.  Disadvantages of being a freelance is job security and no health or other benefits.  You can find freelance jobs at Odesk.com, Elance.com, Guru.com, Freelancer.com, and many other similar sites.    

 Types of Online Earning Programs: 

• Get Paid to Write Articles - There are many websites who are willing to pay for a good article.  Some buys your work upfront ($50 to $500 per article), while others offer revenue sharing programs wherein you get a monthly share from the website's earnings in exchange for your regular article contribution.

• Get Paid to Write Reviews - You can write short reviews and get paid from $0.50 to $50 per review.  There are sites that buys short reviews (250 words up) about any product or service, you can even review celebrities and politicians and get paid for it.

• Get Paid to Blog - In order to get more online exposure, some companies are paying  bloggers to write about their product or service.  However, in order to qualify, your blog must be at least 3 months old and with good traffic (meaning many site visitors).

• Get Paid to Post Comments in Forums - Many websites are now offering this type of program in order to populate their forums faster.  Pay rates is from $0.02 to $0.20 per comment (minimum of two sentences only).

•  Get Paid to Do Microjobs - Microjobs are small tasks that you can do online, examples are sign-up jobs, wherein you register for a certain website and get paid $0.10 to $0.20 for doing so.  Other microjobs are posting in certain forums, commenting on blogs, tweeting a certain product, social bookmarking a site, and other similar tasks.  There are websites dedicated to this type of services and they pay online workers (microworkers) to perform these jobs.

• Get Paid to Socialize - Join and participate in social networking websites (similar to facebook or friendster) and get paid for your activities.  Other sites pays you every time you upload a picture or comment on other members' profiles, while others simply give you a share of the website's earnings for just being active on the site.

• Get Paid to Click on Ads - This involves clicking on website ads, your earnings depend on the no. of ads you've clicked. (I'm not really a fan of "click" jobs) You will not earn a lot here unless you have many referrals.

• Get Paid to Answer Online Surveys - In my experience, you CANNOT earn here unless you're a resident of US, Canada, UK, or other big countries.  Most survey sites give nice sign-up bonus of up to $30 but you can only cash-out if you reached $50 or higher, which is most likely not happening since on-going surveys are mostly limited to residents of above mentioned countries.

• Other Online Opportunities - More and more sites with interesting "income-generating" programs are popping up on the internet. Aside from those mentioned above, there are also "Get Paid to Read and Rate Articles", "Get Paid To Test Websites", Get Paid to Grow Your List of Friends" and many others. 

Now, that you have an idea about working online, next step is to decide which type of job are you going to concentrate on.  Set-up a new, separate email address for your online earning programs.  Also, it is best to start with just 2-3 jobs, set your goals, make a journal of your progress and assess yourself every week, add 1 job a week depending on your progress.  And most importantly, don't waste your time on a program that does not work for you.  

IMPORTANT REMINDER: 

Don't forget to sign-up for an online payment facility because this is where all your online earnings, salaries, and commissions will go to, this will serve as your "internet bank".  

The following are the the top 2 online payment methods being use nowadays, all of them offers FREE registration and requires no maintaining balance like most banks do. I suggest you register with them both:

1. PayPal.com -  Is the most widely used online payment facility. You can shop online and sell stuff and receive money through Paypal.

2 . Payza.com - Works the same way as PayPal (A Paypal alternative).  Some companies who cannot send payments via Paypal uses other online payment gateway such as Payza.com.  

Note: Other payment gateways include Neteller, Skrill, Payoneer, etc.. All these are free to register sites but they do collect certain minimal fees per transaction.

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Thanks for visiting!  ^_^ 

I'm always online and on the lookout for new internet programs, earning opportunities, and other fun helpful stuff that you can do online, feel free to bookmark my site and check back again for future updates.