A common solution for all such people is to earn an income while working from the comfort of their own homes. How can they go about identifying a work from opportunity that will succeed and earn them an adequate level of income?

Here are seven attributes of the perfect home worker opportunity:

• The company offering the work at home opportunity should be well-established, showing profitability over at least a 3-year period. There are so many fly-by-night and scam operators seeking to fleece people that the very first thing to confirm is that the business you are considering getting involved with is both reputable and profitable.

• The opportunity will allow you the flexibility to determine your own work hours. After all, one of the primary reasons for not being part of the 9 to 5 rat race is to allow yourself the independence to be your own boss.

• For most of us, the perfect work from home opportunity would not require that we have to pay a large sum of money in order to participate. While it is perfectly understandable for a company to ask new participants to pay an up front fee in order to ensure that they are really committed to making the business work, the amount of the start up cost should not be unreasonably high, and should bear some relation to what one receives from the company in exchange (e.g. products, real training, etc.).

• In a perfect world, you would not have to actually purchase inventory on an ongoing basis. Instead, the company would itself handle all aspects of your customers' orders, including maintaining inventory, shipping, processing orders taken by credit card, handling customer complaints and product returns. So your focus would be exclusively on making sales.

• So if your one major responsibility is to generate sales, how would the perfect work from home business reward you? What would be your compensation? Well, an ideal compensation package would reward you by paying you 50% of the sales price on every sale you make. This compensation would cover not only the initial sale that you were responsible for, but all other future purchases that your customer makes.

• Another important factor that can significantly impact the long term success of your home business is whether the company introduces new products on a regular basis. If the product line does not expand, neither will your business, as the market for existing products can quickly become dated, or can be overrun with competition. By continually introducing new products, the company assures not only its continued success, but that of its work at home distributors.

• And then there is perhaps the most important attribute a home business opportunity can have – a system for providing the home business operators with a steady source of quality leads. After all, without new prospects the home business cannot grow and you will be limited to hassling your family, friends and neighbors, and that can get old very quickly. The lead generation systems of most of the top home business opportunities usually involve some sort of mass media advertising (television or infomercial ads, print media campaigns, etc.) in order to create hot leads from viewers or readers. The very best opportunity would have a means for its home business owners to receive these leads immediately as they are created, without having time intercede between when the prospect expresses his interest in the product, and when he is actually contacted by the home business owner. The rule would be ‘strike while the iron is hot'.

So those are the seven characteristics of the perfect work from home income opportunity. Of course, locating the one perfect business opportunity is far from an easy task, but if you utilize the 7 touchstones set out above, you should be able to evaluate the opportunities that come your way in a logical and helpful manner.