Janaki is a housewife and a mother of two young children. Her husband is a Public Relations Executive in a private company. Every Indian housewife aspires to improve her family’s prosperity and standard of living and Janaki is no exception.

“Your articles are inspiring. I too want to be self-employed and earn money. I am ready to work hard and develop my skills. But, I do not know how to get paid work. Will anyone in the world trust me and give me some work?” Janaki asked me.

I replied, “Hundreds of readers have asked me the same question. My friends and I have developed a plan to help them. Now I will tell you about a few methods that will help you get work.”

“Please don’t ask me to pay anyone for getting BPO work. I have already lost Rs.5,000 on such get-rich-quick schemes,” said Janaki. I replied, “I have been telling people for years not to join such dubious programs. I will tell what you must do to get home based work. First, decide on the type of work you will do and learn how to do the work well. You can never be a Jack, sorry, Jill of all trades. Prepare a list of all people and companies that you know personally. Talk to them and ask them to help you find work. Do a thorough research on the web on how to find freelance work in your niche. Market your services both offline and online. Exhaust all available resources that will help you find work. The more resourceful you become the easier will it be to find work. Please tell me what you want to do as a home based BPO service provider.”

“I know how to use the search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo on the Internet efficiently to produce relevant results. I can help people save their time and energy by giving them useful, organized search results,” said Janaki. “Book authors and research article writers need a lot of information and reliable documents to support their writings. Thousands of authors hire people to search the World Wide Web and collect information related to the topic they are working on. Outsourcing such low level but important work helps the authors concentrate on their main work of writing books. If you have contacts in the United States or Europe, talk to them,” I told her.

“My mother is working in a social research organization. Her colleague is an American. I will talk to him over phone now,” Janaki said and went outside the room to call her contact so that the voice over the mobile phone was clear. She came back into the room after a few minutes and she was all smiles. “Good News! The American contact told me that recently Frederick Smith, a book author, had asked him whether he would be able to find someone who could do research on the Internet and collect information that would be useful in writing a new book. He asked me whether I would be interested in taking up the project and I said yes, yes, yes.”

“Congratulations, I would like to meet you after you complete this project successfully,” I told her.

Janaki met me after three months. There was brilliance on her face. Her eyes were bright and full of light. “I have been waiting for a long time to hear your success story,” I told her. Janaki said, “Fred wanted to write a book on business management. He gave me a list of topics, questions and keywords. He gave me a special template for preparing my search report. He asked me to search the web for the information he wanted, collect the most relevant results and summarize them. I worked for three months on the project. I worked from home at my convenience.”

“Did you go to any coaching classes to acquire special skills?” I asked her. “The work did not require any special skills. Average computer skills and pure common sense were the things that I needed for this project. Though sitting for long hours in front of computer monitor was a pain in the beginning, soon it became a pleasure. If I had not done this self-employment project and earned a handsome amount, I would never have believed your claim that any hard working person can work from home and earn money.”

“How much did you earn by working from home for three months?” I asked her. She hesitated for a moment and said, “It’s confidential. Please don’t tell anyone that Fred paid me Rs.1,00,000.”

Yes, it’s confidential. Please don’t tell anyone that Janaki earned Rs.1,00,000.