What To Do When You Can’t Find A Job To Work From Home

So you want to work at home, but you can’t find a job. Maybe you can’t find legitimate work, and keep being tripped up by scams. Maybe you want to write, but you can only find grinder writing gigs paying pennies for pages. Maybe you just haven’t had the experience or connections to land some of the really choice work-at-home jobs you’ve discovered.

Time to give up, right? Put your dreams back on the shelf, see what you can do about a conventional job, and hope the commute isn’t too terrible?

NO! If you’re feeling discouraged, you just need to switch up your strategy. There is work out there for you. You just have to identify your strengths, your weaknesses, and build up a résumé while expanding and strengthening your skill base.

Get Some Experience… Any Experience

If you think your lack of work-at-home experience is holding you back, bulk up that experience by taking a more basic, lower-paying position to build your résumé. Check out sites like Fancy Hands or Rev.com. Rev will pay you to provide transcription, captioning, and translation for audio and video formats – very worthy work. (If you’d like to learn more about a career in at-home transcription, check out my post on it.) Fancy Hands specializes in providing US-based assistance to their customers, so you can get Virtual Assistant experience doing many different tasks. And then if you’d like to continue being a VA, you can transition into better-paying companies like Time Etc.

If you’d like, you can even combine work for several different companies or individuals – do some more flexible gigs like virtual assisting or some transcription with those that guarantee a set hourly wage like customer service. Mix and match, picking up new skills and experience to help you land your work-at-home dream job. Or embrace that freelance life, and enjoy working on different tasks each day!

Do you have specialized skills?

Maybe you’re very familiar and connected with the real estate business. Or perhaps you’re a trained chef, or you’ve worked extensively with animal rescue. Any skills you possess have the potential to land you work-at-home jobs – you just might have to get out there and create your own opportunities!

Taking your destiny into your own hands can be scary, but it definitely puts you more in control of your situation. Look up companies and publications related to your skill set, then pitch them on hiring you as an independent contractor. Show them you’re the writer or consultant or remote assistant or researcher they need!

Two of my favorite freelancing options for beginners are virtual assisting and writing. Both positions are open to those without a degree or years of formal experience. All you need is to be organized and persistent, with clean writing skills. And many of these jobs we’re recommending fall into those two categories, including customer service, social media management, transcription and captioning.

The ladies over at Create Your Laptop Life some really great specialized training in areas like Seva, WordPress and ClickFunnels (if you’re interested in working with bloggers or online business owners).

There’s a great demand for those with blogging-related skills on today’s Internet – skills like blog writing, social media management, newsletter campaigns, WordPress management, and more. You can also socialize with other writers, network and find leads through tons of websites and Facebook groups for blogger VAs and writers. In fact, Gina Horkey over at the HorkeyHandBook has a free beginner course just for writers.

Grab the free guides I’ve shared with you and work through the steps. If you’re serious about your hustle and building your business, Miranda Nahmias has a free 5-day client challenge that I loved. Every day they email you a new task to get you out there, taking consistent and actionable steps to land clients.

Many times in life, you have to get out there and make things happen. Don’t let anyone, including yourself, shut you down before you can get anywhere. Don’t be discouraged. Leap before you have time to second guess yourself!

And remember: sometimes you just have to take a gig that you don’t necessarily love in order to pay the bills – but that’s okay, and you don’t have to do it forever. You’re just building skills while you wait for your ship to come in. We’ve been discussing this in my Facebook group recently – feel free to join us, and find support and camaraderie!