Many people say that they want to work from home for a living, but when asked what they want to do, they usually have a vague answer.

“I'm interested in making money online” or “I want to work from home'' are all inadequate answers. For example, if you want to own your own business, do you want to buy a franchise? Do you want to start a business from scratch? If you want to make money online, do you want to start your own Nigerian scam letter? Or do you want to sell on Ebay? As you can see, all of these are ambiguous statements, that in the end, offer no real path for a person to find a home-based career option. If you want to work from home, you need to know what skills you have to offer, and you need to know what jobs are available, and... you need to have a plan.

If you really are interested in working from home, you should be able to adequately answer this question - “What kind of work do you want to DO from home?”. Here are a few things you should consider when you're considering a work from home lifestyle: family life balance, industry, occupational titles, and long-term goals.

Examples of industries include advertising, banking, education, health care, law, human services, telecommunications, and sales. In addition to your immediate job target you should also be thinking about long-term career goals. You do not necessarily have to know exactly where you want to be five years from now, but you should have a general picture of an occupational interest for the next few years – and if there is a home-based option available for that. For example, many businesses will hire home-based CPA's – but your salary will never go up. Would this lead the way to creating your own virtual CPA practice?

In order to know how your abilities and interests can be put to best use in the job market, you need to become familiar with occupational titles – what employers call certain jobs (e.g., Tax Accountant, Travel Nurse, Home Agent) There are many resources you can use to locate specific information about occupations like the Occupational Outlook Handbook Online, or just a quick look at http://Monster.com. You'll want to plug these job titles into the common job search engines to find out more – using words such as 'home-based' – 'telecommuting' and 'home office'. Unless you have to meet with people face to face, or you're in an industrial career, chances are, there is a company out there available to offer you a telecommuting position.

To conduct an effective job search campaign, you need to consider and specify the geographic location where you want to do the work. While jobs exist almost anywhere, it is clear that economic activity is sometimes concentrated in particular regions of the nation, which means more employment opportunities than ordinary are available there. This is true for telecommuting opportunities as well. Often, there will be “virtual offices” that will employ anyone across the United States. Decide if your job search will include national, regional, or local employers – if your employers are local, there's a chance you will come into work from time to time.