When starting out as a freelancer or someone working from home it can be quite difficult to find legitimate work that will pay the bills. Sifting through the false advertising and scams that plague the Internet and while it is like that for a lot of industries it is especially high in the work at home industry. They are trying to take advantage of honest people who want to work (many having lost jobs during these hard economic times) by hoping that in desperation they will fall for one of their scams.

We have all seen the advertisement to work from home doing data entry and make hundreds of dollars per hour. Now if this were true and as simple as they say I would be doing that right now, but it is not these scams are usually filling out surveys for almost no money or instead of pay you may get a coupon for some place you have never heard of. These places just use people to do their advertising work for free, do not fall for it if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. One last clue for recognizing an un-reputable work at home website; if you have to pay to work it is not a job it is a scam run away before they run away with your money.

If you are really interested in finding freelance work there are many websites that offer services for workers and employers. Some of the better websites for freelance worker are Odesk, Elance, ifreelance, and Go Freelance. Most of these sites are free although some do charge for an upgrade in membership, but they have legitimate jobs to bid on and apply to as well as many secure payment options.

While those websites are good many people have a hard time getting hired right away without first building up a reputation. Now there is another type of freelance websites that are out there; these websites buy and sell "gigs" these are usually between $5-$100 and you can post the work you would do for a price in that range. Some of the more popular websites are Fiverr, Gigbucks.com, Zeerk, Tenbux, and Tenyt. These websites are pretty useful as far as helping a freelancer get started and make some money. The only problem with these websites is that some of the people on there offer some shady things, (get 5000 pr7 back links to your website for $5) but if you offer a solid, valuable, and ethical product or service you could build up clientele as well as a good reputation.

Just remember when starting out as a freelancer or work from home that there is no get rich quick scheme, it takes hard work and dedication to successfully be an independent freelancer.