10 Best Rated Online Jobs

The Internet has created a new venue for employment, but it can be difficult to pick out the best opportunities from job boards and listings. These 10 best-rated online jobs scored well on several national lists and provide a wide range of opportunities, from writing and blogging to teaching or assisting customers. Some positions may require specialized skills and college degrees, while others can be learned through experience and dedication.

Technical Writing

A technical writer creates manuals and guides for any product that needs instructions, from the booklet that came with your microwave oven to the online documentation for that new hard drive. Technical writers scored the 13th spot on "200 Best Jobs of 2010" by Andrew Strieber on CareerCast.com and the 28th spot on Money magazine's "Best Jobs in America 2009" list, featured in the publication's November 2009 issue and at CNNMoney.com. Precise language skills and an eye for detail are the main talents needed for this position, although each employer may require different credentials, from a college degree to previous experience.

Medical Transcription

The health care field offers a growing job market, and one top telecommuting position is medical transcriptionist, also known as a medical secretary. Since this job involves typing from a doctor's dictated notes and understanding medical terms, it does require training and certification. This career is listed as the 23rd top job with CareerCast's "200 Best Jobs of 2010" list.

Customer Service

From computer tech support to customer care hotlines, customer service covers a broad range of industries and skill levels. It can include taking reservations, hearing complaints or helping a client solve an issue with a service or product, and it can all be done over the phone or through the Internet. The positions of customer service fall into the fifth and sixth slots in "10 Best (And Real) Work at Home Jobs," an article by Melissa Ezarik featured on Yahoo! Finance, and was rated as alternative to traditional, nine-to-five work in "Companies That Will Hire You to Work at Home," an article by Patrick Erwin and produced by CNN.com and CareerBuilder.com.

Web Developer

Anyone who has ever spent time on a bad, crudely-made website knows how valuable a talented web developer can be. Creating and maintaining websites is a growing employment opportunity, since the Internet shows no signs of slowing down. This position is ranked seventh on Yahoo! Finance's "10 Best (And Real) Work at Home Jobs;" ranked 15th on CareerCast's list, and also landed in the top 100 of Money magazine's "Best Jobs of 2009" list.

Typist/Business Services

Typing and business services like resume writing, presentation making, and transcribing have been a mainstay of home office work for years, but now typists can serve customers worldwide on the Internet. The job is rated 60th with CareerCast, and the expanded role of "virtual assistant" landed the top spot on Yahoo! Finance's rankings and was mentioned in the CNN.com article as well.

Blogging/Social Media Expert

Writing for the web has become a new career path all its own in the last few years. While some bloggers continue to write their personal sites for free, others turn that experience into paid positions with companies, and blog about specific topics or products. Writing for social media like Facebook and Twitter is also turning into a paid gig, since companies want to have a presence in these interactive markets. Web writing scored the ninth position on Yahoo! Finance's list.

Translation Services

The world seems smaller since the arrival of the Internet, and translators help bridge international gaps in communication, converting documents, websites and other materials from one language to the next. Many translation and bilingual project opportunities can be found at FlexJobs.com and on the popular classified site Craigslist, and translators received kudos as the third listing at Yahoo! Finance.

Author/Editor

Writing and editing books and publications are part of another creative field that easily makes leap to the Internet. From articles to short stories, freelance writers and editors can work from nearly anywhere with a laptop and a wi-fi connection. While a college degree can be helpful, a motivated self-starter can also break into writing and editing, listed as number 74 with CareerCast.

Consultant

Consultants are usually people with years of management or corporate experience who decide to leave the structured world and advise clients around the globe through videoconferencing and e-mail. Consulting ranked seventh in "Top Ten Jobs for the Next Decade and Beyond," an article published on WorldWideLearn.com, a guide to online education, and eighth in Money magazine's list.

Teacher

With distance learning and online education growing, the role of teacher or instructor has gone from physical to virtual. Online teachers give assignments, grade work, and give feedback to their students through video or text. The position came in third in "7 Unusual Work From Home Jobs," an article by Carol Tice on AOL Jobs.

Top 10 Online Job Search Tips

While the popularity of online job boards puts millions of jobs at one's fingertips, it has also made the job applicant pool that much bigger.  For this reason, national job search sites and the Internet as a whole have gotten a bad rap from some industry professionals as an ineffective job seeker tool; on the contrary, the Internet actually can be a great resource for job seekers -- they just need to know how to use it. 

When it comes to a fruitful online job search, successful job seekers follow these 10 guidelines.

1. If you build it, they can come. 
Instead of simply posting your résumé on a Web site, take it one step further and design an easily-navigable Web site or online portfolio where recruiters can view your body of work, read about your goals and obtain contact information.

2. Check yourself to make sure you haven't wrecked yourself.
Google yourself to see what comes up -- and what potential employers will see if they do the same. If you don't like what you find, it's time to do damage control.

3. Narrow your options.
Many job boards offer filters to help users refine their search results more quickly.  You should have the option to narrow your job search by region, industry and duration, and, oftentimes, you can narrow it even more by keywords, company names, experience needed and salary.

4. Go directly to the source. 
Instead of just applying for the posted job opening, one of the best strategies to finding a job is to first figure out where you want to work, target that company or industry and then contact the hiring manager. Also, many employers' career pages invite visitors to fill out candidate profiles, describing their background, jobs of interest, salary requirements and other preferences.

5. Find your niche with industry Web sites. 
Refine your search even more by visiting your industry's national or regional Web site, where you can find jobs in your field that might not appear on a national job board.  More and more employers are advertising jobs on these sites in hopes of getting a bigger pool of qualified applicants.

6. Try online recruiters. 
Recruiters will help match you with jobs that meet your specific skills and needs.  Not sure where to start?  Sites such as recruiterlink.com, onlinerecruitersdirectory.com, searchfirm.com and i-recruit.com provide links to online headhunters for job seekers.

7. Utilize video résumés.
Video résumés are just one more way to stand out to employers.  Intended as supplements to -- not replacements for -- traditional résumés, video résumés allow job seekers to showcase a little bit of their personalities and highlight one or two points of interest on their résumés.

8. Run queries.
You run searches on everything else, from your high school sweetheart to low-fat recipes, so why not jobs?  Enter a query that describes the exact kind of job you're seeking and you may find more resources you wouldn't find otherwise (but be prepared to do some sorting).

9. Utilize job alerts.
Most job boards have features that allow you to sign up to receive e-mail alerts about newly available jobs that match your chosen criteria.  Or go a step further and arrange an RSS (really simple syndication) feed from one of these job sites to appear on your customized Internet homepage or your PC's news-reader software.

10. Get connected. 
How many times have you been told that it's not what you know, but who you know?  Thanks to the emergence of professional networking sites like LinkedIn.com, job seekers no longer have to rely on the old standby of exchanging business cards with strangers.  These sites are composed of millions of industry professionals and allow you to connect with people you know and the people they know and so forth. (A word of caution: When you sign up for online social networking sites, you are in a public domain.  Unless you are able to put a filter on some of your information, nothing is private, and it can be difficult to erase once it is posted.)

Some Online Jobs Options

There are many avenues to home employment on the Internet. If you look for jobs at home or work at home jobs on a search engine, you will find many Jobs at Home Websites with Job Listings. Some offer Free Membership and some charge a Monthly, Annual or Lifetime Registration Fee. Many offer Free Trial Memberships or Trial Memberships. Some jobs at home websites you will see on the Internet are: 2Work-At-Home.com, Bassador.com, HomeJobStop.com, Homeworkers.org, LegitJobs.net, SohoJobs.com, SpeedySecretarial.com, TJobs.com, Work-At-Home-Land.com and WorldWideWorkAtHome.com.

Staffing Services, No Fee Work At Home

However, there are also many more companies online offering home employment directly with no cost to you. Some of them are Outsourcing Services hiring home employees from their own websites. You will also see help wanted advertisements from temporary and permanent employment agencies looking for workers. You might consider employment agencies, staffing services, freelance websites, recruiters, help wanted classifieds or jobs search agents. An online search for virtual staffing services should provide many helpful online virtual staffing services that are looking for employees to work for their clients.

Outsourcing Services No Fees

You will find many more work at home opportunities on the Internet with Outsourcing Services. They already have a large clientele and marketing system and are looking for more employees to help their clients. There are call centers, customer support providers and customer relationship management firms that pay people for customer support work done from home, telesales specialists looking for salespeople, virtual assistant agencies looking for virtual assistants, data processing services looking for data entry typists and many other outsourcing services are advertising for employees to work online. You will also see many online Outsourcing Services that advertise editing services and recruit editors to work for their online services, or writers, typists, accountants, etc. Many temporary agencies and freelance websites also advertise for workers who will work on outsourced projects for them.