Work At Home Directory Websites

Visit Hunting Venus.com Work At Home Directory
Finally got another article submitted for publishing. Had promised myself I'd send one in every six days to catch up a bit but just managed to scrape in after seven days. Still need to do some extra work to bring my average up to one per week but I'll keep trying.

Also finished the November edition of the monthly newsletter at last.

Here's the new article:

Work At Home Directory Websites - Are They Worthwhile?

Why use a Work At Home Directory? Well, it's simple really: A Work At Home Directory is the best Internet resource for finding a legitimate work at home opportunity. If you wanted to find a phone number you would consult the telephone directory so, if you are looking for a chance to work at home, a Work At Home Directory is the logical place to start.

The Internet is bursting with work at home opportunities of all kinds and it would be very time consuming to attempt to investigate these work at home opportunities by making separate searches for "Work At Home", "Home Job", "Home Based Business", "Internet Work At Home" etc. If you are looking for a work at home opportunity, you can make one search for "Work At Home Directory" and from that search you will have access to a whole list of Work at Home Directory websites each of which will offer you a choice of numerous different work at home opportunities.

By the way, if you are a newcomer, you might not realise it, but placing your search term inside quotation marks as shown here means that the search results will be more relevant. For instance if you search for Work At Home Directory without quotation marks you will get lots of other things you don't want such as links to directories for things that have nothing to do with work at home.

Make sure any Work At Home Directory you use is free. There are a few websites that claim to be Work At Home Directory sites that ask for payment in order to provide work at home information, avoid these, there is no reason to pay for information about work at home opportunities when you can get the same information free of charge.

If you don't really know what type of work at home opportunity would suit your circumstances, help is normally available at a good Work At Home Directory in the form of advice, articles and reviews relating to individual work at home programmes as well as topics about work at home generally. When you visit a Work At Home Directory, you will often have the chance to subscribe to one or more free newsletters. These newsletters might be on the subject of work at home in general or specific types of work at home programmes or related topics such as computer anti-virus precautions, free resources or blogging to name just a few examples. The free research you can carry out via the Work At Home Directory's articles or newsletters will be of considerable help to you in locating a suitable work at home opportunity. A good Work At Home Directory will welcome you to visit its article archives or subscribe to its newsletter and, by doing so, you will not be placed under any obligation to buy anything or join any work at home programme.

When you consult a Work At Home Directory, you will not be put under pressure to sign up for any programme on your first visit. When you land directly on a work at home opportunity's website, you will be strongly encouraged to join the programme there and then. The encouragement to make an instant decision might take the form of an annoying pop-up or the offer of a bonus or reduced membership fee in return for immediate sign up. This is, of course, perfectly understandable: the work at home opportunity websites are in competition with each other. The Work At Home Directory, however, will permit you to examine the features of all its listed opportunities without any pressure to sign up. A legitimate Work At Home Directory will suggest you make return visits whilst deciding which work at home opportunity might be most suitable for you. The owners of good Work At Home Directory websites invest a great deal of time and energy in locating up to date information and new programmes, so a Work At Home Directory will often be updated daily and return visits will be reveal new opportunities.

In summary consulting a Work At Home Directory provides the following advantages:

1. A reduction in the number of tedious searches you have to undertake.
2. A selection of varied work at home opportunities grouped in one place.
3. Access to impartial advice and reviews of work at home programmes.
4. Access to work at home related resources all in one place.
5. No arm twisting to sign up for a work at home programme without having time to think it over and make an informed decision in your own time.

These are five very good reasons why using a Work At Home Directory is worthwhile but number 5 is my favourite. This is partly because I don't like hard sell tactics but mainly because the decision to work at home can be either the best decision you ever make or a huge disappointment. You have to "plan to succeed" when you work at home and the planning and consideration stage should be allowed to take up as much time as you need so that you find the work at home opportunity that is exactly right for you.

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If you want to work from home on the internet but don't know where to start, visit my Work From Home Directory at Hunting Venus.com You'll find all the help you need.

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Bad Autosurf Week and Google Adwords Is The Pits

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This has not been a very good time for autosurfs. Titan Surf, which looked shaky from the beginning disappeared and then CGI Surf that had been heavily promoted announced it was closing and (to paraphrase) members need not expect to get paid.

This is in contrast to HOPS which was a great site where members always got paid on time. HOPS had to be closed down because Peter, the owner, became seriously ill. He had the courtesy to send an explanatory email to all members and the decency to arrange for all memberships to be transferred to Dad N Daves. Happily one of my favourite autosurfs so that was a relatively happy ending for me. It was also quite heart warming to see that Trish, the owner of Surf Down Under helped Peter sort out the closing down of HOPS. Further proof that there are some good guys working on the Internet.

I have wasted a lot of time recently trying to get to grips with Adwords. I've lost count of how many attempts I've made to get Google to work for me. I was so fed up today, I felt like walking out. Then I remembered I live here! Noticed on the Warrior Forum that I'm not the only person in the world to have problems getting an Adwords campaign to work. That made me feel better. Think I'll stick to things I'm good at instead of trying to master everything.




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If you want to work from home on the internet but don't know where to start, visit my Work From Home Directory at Hunting Venus.com You'll find all the help you need.

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Building A Successful Home Based Business

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Busy week but I finally submitted a new article for publishing today. This is it:

Building A Successful Home Based Business Seemed Like A Good Title For An Article But …

Writing articles is easy but deciding what to call them is another story and it is getting more difficult as the Internet is getting flooded by duplicate articles.


Building A Successful Home Based Business struck me as a pretty good title for an article concerned with home based business. Successful Home Based Business is a decent keyword phrase for the search engine robots and "successful" is on most lists of good words to use in advertising, so that should help attract human readers. Building A Successful Home Based Business is also accurately descriptive of the content.

I was especially pleased with this title because it occurred to me very quickly when usually it takes me longer to think up a title than to write a whole article. When it comes to choosing names, my brain just shuts down. It's always been the same, I can still remember the anxiety caused by having to choose a name for a childhood pet gerbil or goldfish . "Goldie" wasn't terribly original but it was the best I could manage for the fish and I think my mother eventually had to name the gerbil on my behalf. When it came to naming my children, the responsibility was almost unbearable: not only did I have to face the trauma of thinking up names, I had to try to guess if the child would grow up despising me for making an inappropriate choice. A name that suits a cute baby can sound ridiculous when applied to a clumsy school kid or, worse still, a moody teenager. It would be a lot easier if we could just call them "child 1","child 2" etc and let them choose their own names when they reach the age of twelve or so.

Anyway, back to Building A Successful Home Based Business. I had the article ready, I had the great title and then I received an email from the owner of Ezine Articles.com (one of the places I regularly submit articles). The email started like this:

"Hi Elaine,
Did you hear that we stopped accepting articles with duplicate titles?

This was a defensive move on our part to reduce the number of incoming non-exclusive rights article submissions. Now that all 86k of the articles listed have unique titles, that means that your future article titles may be rejected if it's already in use by another author... "

My first reaction was: "Oh, good", my second reaction was: "Oh, no". The second reaction was caused by the realisation that things are going to get more difficult for people who take care over their work. Thousands of articles on every subject imaginable are being added to the vast Internet library each day. The quality of some of these articles is dubious. Many Internet entrepreneurs are putting their metaphorical pens to their virtual paper and churning out poorly spelt, ungrammatical, pointless articles just for use as vehicles for their resource box. Some Internet entrepreneurs cheat by having articles ghost written and then publishing the articles as their own. Worse still, there are unscrupulous Internet entrepreneurs who use software to churn out articles that they then pretend to have written. Worst of all are the Internet outright cheats who stoop to copying someone else's article, claiming authorship and slapping on their own copyright notice.

The non-duplicate title rule imposed by Ezine Articles is an excellent thing and should cause the cheats some problems. My point here, however, is not to lecture on the evils of cheating. There is a saying: "All's fair in love and a successful home based business" (or something like that) and I'm not about to start my own anti-plagiarist cyber police force. My really big concern about this deluge of articles is purely selfish: I fear that the cheats have used up all the best titles and I'll never be able to think up a new one. I haven't yet submitted "Building A Successful Home Based Business " but I fear it might get bounced straight back at me for re-naming..

The email from Ezine Articles included some suggestions for inventing good unique titles. One suggestion was to increase the length of future article titles. I can see how this would work but, if the cheats keep on publishing at their current rate, we are going to end up with 95 word titles and people will lose interest in the article before they get to paragraph one. Any minute now, some enterprising Internet entrepreneur will announce that he has invented a "brand new, hot, original, one of its kind" tool for creating unique article titles "at the push of a button" which he will let you have at a "discounted price". In no time at all the Internet will be overrun with wannabe entrepreneurs making the same claims. As there is software that can do a similar thing with whole articles, titles should be very easy to manipulate. Maybe they will find a way of copyrighting titles that they can then hold to ransom. Imagine the stress of having to bid on ebay for the title you need for your new article.

Another suggestion was to change the order of the words if your preferred title had already been used by someone else. Obviously this can work well but there are going to be some ugly titles created by this anagrammaticall manipulation. If we take my short title as an example: "Building A Successful Home Based Business", we could rearrange that to make "Building A Home Based Successful Business" or, at a stretch "Building A Successful Business - Home Based" , maybe we could even push it to "A Successful Home Based Business - Building" or "A Home Based Business: Successful Building" but that's about the limit if we want our title to make sense. After this we will have to look at perhaps changing "A" to "Your" or adding "Easily" or "Quickly" in front of or after "Building A Successful Home Based Business". The length of the title is already starting to grow!

To search engine robots, the word order changing won't matter but to human readers it makes a big difference. "At Home Work" already crops up all over the place as an alternative to "Work At Home". The two phrases don't actually mean the same thing and the former phrase is so clumsy. People tend not to say: "I want to at home work". As a Google search term it's fine, it's also very popular and that's why it gets used, but it's not exactly good conversational English. Just yesterday I saw a website offering to help people to locate "an online home based job you can work at home as a successful home based business". What? Well, I suppose it does get the message over (just about) but it's not exactly easy reading. It's just a collection of keywords strung together in an order that barely makes sense and that is not the best way to communicate with other human beings. The addition of "part-time or full-time", "free", "from home","no risk" and "guaranteed" would make this just about the perfect title material. Then we could extend it with other popular words like "101 Ways" and "Top Ranked" and "Top Ten". It's easy to see how this small selection of words alone could be the start of a whole series of keyword rich article titles, it could run into hundreds. I'd better get on and write some articles to fit those keywords. Now, if only I had a piece of software that would rearrange the keywords into unique patterns…

You may republish this article only in its entirety and with the following resource information attached.

Elaine Currie has a Work From Home Directory
at her Plug-In Profit Site to help everyone who
wants to work at home:
http://www.huntingvenus.com

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If you want to work from home on the internet but don't know where to start, visit my Work From Home Directory at Hunting Venus.com You'll find all the help you need.

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My Plan For An Elite Article Directory

Visit Hunting Venus.com Work At Home Directory

Funny how little things can change your whole outlook.

After spending the best part of my weekend building a site map for my main website, I woke up today feeling completely disinclined to make my "30 second commute" upstairs with my morning tea and start again. The site map turned out fine, it just took about ten times as long as I anticipated. Now I plan to make a couple of smaller site maps for separate sections. The article directory definitely needs a map of its own and the new sections I have planned will also need their own maps. Suddenly, my life seems to be all about site maps and I have trouble putting the project to one side and doing other things.

Before ploughing back into site maps, I had a quick look at my mailbox. There I found of the usual number new sign ups for Empowerism, SFI and Magnificent Money. I only started with Mag Money a month or so ago and it is turning out to be a lucrative programme and they pay on time!

Anyway, all this is as it should be and any commission is welcome. The thing that really cheered me up was to see that I had earned a commission with Article Fetcher. This is also good! The point is that I have not done anything to promote Article Fetcher, it is tucked away on the innermost pages of my website and the fact that someone has picked it up means at least one person has got beyond my home page and it all seems worthwhile.

This also made me think perhaps I should do more to promote Article Fetcher as I use it all the time. I decided not to go ahead with getting Article Directory software. With Article Fetcher I can hand pick articles within seconds and build a quality directory instead of having a directory which is open to abuse.

Suddenly I feel an advertising campaign coming on. I'd better get these site maps finished quickly.


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If you want to work from home on the internet but don't know where to start, visit my Work From Home Directory at Hunting Venus.com You'll find all the help you need.

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Work From Home - Fun With Telemarketers

Visit Hunting Venus.com Work At Home Directory

A productive day! I've almost finished the outline for the new section I'm adding to my website and I submitted an article for publication. This is it:

Work From Home - Fun With Telemarketers

During the time I have spent working at home, I have encountered many telemarketers. That's how I found out about their radar: when I went out to work telemarketers always rang in the evening while I was trying to cook or eat dinner, now they ring during the day when I am trying to work at home.

A joke that arrived in my email made me realise that I am not alone in being less than fond of telemarketers. (In fact, they are on my list right up with lawyers and estate agents.) I'll be sharing a few tips from this joke with you throughout this article but, if you want to read all 20 of them, you can see them at my website on the same page as this article.

I can usually identify telemarketers immediately because they will almost inevitably open with "Good morning, madam. How are you today?" Nobody but a telemarketer would dream of ringing a person and addressing her as "madam". Presumably that is a marketing technique which is supposed to give the illusion that you are the customer and the telemarketer is there to serve you but it just gives me the idea that I should have let the answering machine pick up this call. The tip for circumventing the whole thing is:- As soon as you realize it is a Telemarketer, scream "Oh my God!" and then hang up.

It took me quite a while to get to grips with the constant annoyance of telemarketing calls. I was brought up to be polite but I eventually discovered it is impossible to get rid of telemarketers without resorting to rudeness. I don't ask these people to ring me up and try to sell me things I don't want: everything from jigsaw puzzles and books, through lingerie and cinema tickets to health insurance and mobility aids. As I (thankfully) am and always have been fully mobile, I don't understand the reason for the last one.

Actually, the telemarketer who was offering mobility aids was a great example of a bad telemarketer. His opening gambit was "Good morning, madam. I'm from XYZ Company, I expect you've heard of us?" When I replied "No." his response was a grumpy-sounding "I can't think why not". So, did he ring just to point out that I'm ignorant? When he hurried on with his script and asked me if I have any difficulty getting in or out of the house, I was tempted to reply "Only when I'm drunk" but I managed to bite my lip on that one: "no" is definitely the only safe word to use when dealing with telemarketers.

A better way of dealing with this type of call is the following tip:- If they say they're John Doe from XYZ Company, ask them to spell their name. Then ask them to spell the company name. Then ask them where it is located, how long it has been in business, how many people work there, how they got into this line of work if they are married, how many kids they have, etc. Continue asking them personal questions or questions about their company for as long as necessary.

Alternatively try this tip:- Tell them you are hard of hearing and that they need to speak up . . . louder . . . louder . . .

The telemarketers for mobile phone companies are the thickest skinned and most persistent variety of the species I have encountered so far. They also tend to have the strongest accents and I feel mean giving them a hard time when they are at a disadvantage to begin with. I always used to answer their questions in the hope that they would realise that I was not a good prospect for mobile phone upgrades. When I asked the last mobile phone telemarketer why he thought I might want to give up my virtually free phone deal and pay for line rental, he just started over with his script listing the number of free minutes of air time they would "give" me. The fact that I would not use the air time seemed to make no difference, there was nothing about that in his script and I had to resort to abrupt termination of the call.

Next time I'll try this tip:- Tell the Telemarketer you are busy at the moment and ask him/her if he/she will give you his/her home phone number so you can call him/her back. When the Telemarketer explains that telemarketers cannot give out their home numbers say, "I guess you don't want anyone bothering you at home, right?" The Telemarketer will agree and you say, "Me either!" Hang up.

The telemarketer who wanted me to switch to a new power supplier taught me a lot about the telemarketing profession. The power supply marketers who turn up on my doorstep, accost me in the supermarket or telephone me, usually baffle me with figures, blind me with science and leave me feeling I should sign up with them immediately. The last one to phone me happened to ring while I was in my office at home and I had my power bills to hand. The telemarketer asked me how much I paid each month to my power supplier and then assured me that he could save me 30% on my bills. I was impressed and asked how he calculated that figure. He informed me that he had a "chart". In an effort to finally understand the mysteries of calculating these savings, I asked the telemarketer to give me an exact breakdown of the amount his company would charge for my most recent electricity bill. He said he couldn't because he was not good at maths. As he had given me the price per unit, I found it pretty easy to calculate for myself but I couldn't understand why the cost came out higher when he had said his company charged 30% less. I'd barely managed to ask for an explanation when he hung up. This particular telemarketer taught me that telemarketers will tell you anything their script requires even if they don't understand it or know it is a complete lie.

This tip might help:- Tell them to talk very slowly, because you want to write every word down. Alternatively this might work:- Insist that the caller is really your buddy Leon, playing a joke. "Come on, Leon, cut it out! Seriously, Leon, how's your momma?"

Telemarketers should be treated like children at bedtime: use a firm tone when saying "no" and do not be drawn into conversation. I have tried ignoring the "How are you today" but that just means they launch straight into the script. Next time I am going to try "I'm so glad you asked, because no one these days seems to care, and I have all these problems. My arthritis is acting up, my eyelashes are sore, my dog just died . . . "

I've tried asking pointedly: "What do you actually want?" but the reply was "I want to try to save you money" (how kind considering we are perfect strangers). If only I'd received the telemarketer joke before this I would have said "I just filed for bankruptcy and I could sure use some money".

I've also tried "Are you selling something?" but they never fall into the trap of answering that one. For days when I'm not busy and fancy a little fun, I'm keeping a crossword puzzle on my desk. I'll ask every telemarketer who calls to help me solve some clues. I've made out a score card for me -v- telemarketers and I give myself double points each time I can force a telemarketer to hang up.

By Elaine Currie, BA (Hons)

You may republish this article only in its

entirety and with the following resource box intact



Elaine Currie has a Work From Home Directory
at her Plug-In Profit Site to help everyone who
wants to work at home:
http://www.huntingvenus.com




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If you want to work from home on the internet but don't know where to start, visit my Work From Home Directory at Hunting Venus.com You'll find all the help you need.

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Sick Of Article Directories

Visit Hunting Venus.com Work At Home Directory
After installing the free Article Directory from Article Dashboard on two of my websites, using two entirely different control panels, it still would not work. The advice I received was to have it hosted by their preferred host. This means that, for a piece of free software, I would be paying $10 per month forever (well, for as long as I wanted to run the Article Directory). I have seen this software in use but, when I asked the owners about it, it seemed that everybody had problems to start with and ended up using the software company's preferred host.

I decided that I would be better off buying Article Directory software and using it with my own web host (as originally planned). Coincidentally, I had received an offer for just this sort of software when I was looking at Article Dashboard, so I paid for Article Beach. I duly paid and uploaded it to my website without any problem. Then Article Beach turned into Article Bitch. I was unable to log in - it refused to accept the password it had provided to me. The instructions were unfinished: unfinished as in they stopped mid sentence in some places and made no sense in others. Worst of all, there was absolutely no help available. What a disappointment! I asked for a refund under the guarantee and was very p***ed off when I heard nothing back from the seller. After two weeks, I complained to PayPal and that brought me a refund within hours.

After wasting a couple of weeks on this project and ending up with nothing but disappointment, I am wondering if it is really worthwhile having an Article Directory at all. Maybe I'll just keep on the way I am, writing my own articles and adding other people's articles when I come across ones I like.

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If you want to work from home on the internet but don't know where to start, visit my Work From Home Directory at Hunting Venus.com You'll find all the help you need.

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