I really would love to hear more. I have health issues that are making it really hard for me to do M-F, 9-5. I also am the caretaker of my dad.

I too would be very interested in some "from home" work. I love being retired and I am immersing myself in reading and art but would love to do some paid work also.

Those sound great, d. I'd love to work from home, too.

A friend sent me this site for freelance writers, it has a wide variety of publications:

http://whopays.scratchmag.net/

Wowser , MizGG, those are some shocking rates. No wonder the quality of some of those publications has gone downhill so much.

Well, some days I don't know that I would use the word "interesting," at least not as much as I used to, but I transcribe Immigration Court proceedings for a contractor.

293summer, are you a scopist?

I work from home. I do search engine optimization work, mainly for law firms. I like it and the pay is very good. I wouldn't work in an office. Not for me!

Writersblock ~ Sorry not familiar complete responsibilities typically of a scopist actually. I'm not a court report and do not attend the hearings in person. I download recorded proceedings of the hearings and type them in written format when one party appeals so it can proceed to the next level of judicial system.

Ah, okay, that's what some scopists do. Mostly they transpose the machine steno that court reporters do into legible English. So you transcribe audio/visual records?

From audio recordings only, not visual or from court reporters.

I'm a freelance editor and have worked from home since 1993. It was tough when our two children were really little (I had a nanny and would seal myself into my home office so I wouldn't interfere). By contrast, it was great when our daughter became ill (for several years) and I could devote myself to her care and work very late or very early, as her care allowed. Working at home allowed me to run the household, do all the after-school stuff, meet with friends, exercise when I wanted, etc. Now that our kids are out of school/in graduate school, I think about getting an in-house job. But it would be difficult to have a commute and hard to leave my beautiful home office overlooking the garden!

Here is the info for the search engine job. You do have to pass some certification tests and the testing is not paid (which is annoying).

https://www.leapforceathome.com/qrp/public/job/1

Here is the info for the SAT essay grading job. This also has training and certification but you do get paid for your time. If you have a teaching degree or live in certain states you may also qualify for other positions.

http://etscrs.submit4jobs.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=85332.viewjobs&CID=85332&notes_id=1

I do work for their competitor, d-gw. I've been doing it nearly since I retired. I work about 5-6 months per year.

Thanks, 293summer.

Beagles, I'm curious about how you got started with doing just SEO. I see plenty of jobs requiring it, but usually as part of being the marketing director or something like that.

d_gw, on an hourly basis, how does the pay for leapforce compare to the pay for exam scoring?

I work almost exclusively for companies that maintain websites for lawyers. They have other people who do the rest of the stuff, I just produce the content. I got started with the now-defunct Expert Hub and I now write for most of the big companies that provide this type of service. I just applied to them and since I have a law degree from UCLA and a media & communications degree, I happened to have the right combination of skills.

I also have private clients as law firms and I maintain their blogs and write new web content. But I don't do any of the web design stuff.

Thanks. That explains it very well.

Beagles, we have similar backgrounds but would up in very different places. I don't have any work from home to add, but was looking ti see if there were any ideas that might work for my sister. She has been out of the ofice for a while and unless she winds up with what was once my dad's business in the divorce, she is going to need to find a job. I think my SIL grades exams during the summer months.

My SIL fell into a work from home job that she loves and has been doing for 15+ years. She transcribes inspection reports for a yacht insurance brokerage firm. They used to send tapes, now I think it's online audio files, that she writes up, edits and organizes into formal reports of their findings which she then submits in a certain format back to the company.

She started out getting paid by the page, now it may be salary but it has become a real source of satisfaction for her. She is/was a SAH so this is supplemental income and at almost 66 YO she intends to keep doing it indefinitely. It's a great set up for both parties-they send the work to her, she does it within a set deadline for submission but on her own schedule and it gives her plenty of time to live a fairly stress free and comfortable lifestyle (errands, gym time, manage the household etc).

I left the corporate world (software company) early by choice and so did my late DH. No regrets.

From then, until few years ago, I was a freelance travel and garden writer. My best client paid $1.00 per word and I'd sometimes have $5k gigs. Some freelance jobs pay pennies. I was selective about taking on projects.

In 2012, I wrote a novel and in early 2013 (after many queries), had a literary agent ask me to "revise and resubmit" the romantic mystery by making it a thriller. She mentored me and it turned out to be a complete rewrite, which I completed in September 2013---but, then my DH got his terminal diagnosis, so the book has been on hold. Now that my renovation is complete, I'm ready to work on it again.