How I Found My Home Based Business Niche.By: Elaine Currie, BA (Hons) © The Hunting Venus Group
I found myself suddenly and unexpectedly unemployed after more than twenty-five years in
same job. Prior to this I had no ambition to own my own business. I had previously had vague thoughts that it would be very nice to be able to work from home, but I never had any idea of what I could actually work at. I have a computer, I am literate and can type at a pretty fast rate. Apart from these, I have no skills which I can see as basis for a home based business. I like reading and I grow all manner of plants from beans to cacti, but I couldn’t see anybody paying me to stay home and do any of these things.
If you had told me then where I would be today, and what I would be doing, I would have thought you were crazy. I would not have believed that I would own some websites (my own domain actually), be working from home and have published articles which I had written myself.
I searched for work, both on and off internet and more I searched, more downhearted I became. Sure, there were jobs about but they all required things I lacked: some wanted experience, some wanted much younger people, worst ones wanted people who were prepared to work long hours for peanuts.
I was regularly searching on Internet for opportunities for home work. I joined forums and read posts from women who were desperate to work from home, most of them had children and were unable to find suitable jobs to fit in with their schedules. It began to seem as if there is a great army of people all wanting to work but unable to find right opportunity to suit them.
I signed up with a couple of companies to get paid for reading emails, but reading a couple of emails each day is not way to make a fortune. I still read emails for these companies, but only out of sentiment (you will understand what I mean by this when you get to end of this story).
I picked up a couple of ideas which seemed promising and I tried them out. The first thing was mystery shopping, which sounded simple enough, and potentially enjoyable – well, getting paid to go shopping sounds good to me. I found many companies through searching internet and I applied to dozens of them; I wanted a full time job, not just odd shopping trip. Months went by and I heard nothing from any of these companies.
Fortunately, I had not been just sitting back and waiting for mystery shopping jobs to come pouring in. I saw advertisements for paid surveys, and it seemed that you could make a full-time income filling in surveys on line. There were many websites which advised that you should never pay a fee to join a survey company, and these sites displayed web addresses of various survey companies. At same time, I saw a lot of advertising by a company which promised access to an enormous database of best paying survey companies for a fee of only $35, which you would be bound to recover within a few days. Against my better judgement, I paid over $35 and was disappointed to find that many of companies in this database would accept US and Canada residents only. Nothing wrong with that, apart from fact that I live in UK. Of companies which would accept international residents, I had already signed up to most of them. I got precisely nothing back for my $35. The only money I earned came from two paid survey companies which I did not join through that database. To date I have received a total payment of £12. I have earned another £21 which is in an account which would only pay out if my total reached £50.
