Being able to work from home offers all kinds of benefits including flexibility of working hours in many instances and still be able to look after your family or attend to other commitments without having to go out to work 9-5 and travel long distances.
The problem, though, is that when looking for work at home jobs there are some scams out there which you need to avoid.
Some of these companies are just looking to take a fee of you and either pay you nothing or so little that it isn't worth the time you've invested in it.
Avoid any work at home jobs and opportunities such as stuffing envelopes with a requirement for an upfront fee from yourself.
These are very often scams.
If you are a good writer you may wish to volunteer your services as a writer on freelance sites such as Elance or Rentacoder.
You will find webmasters require content and lots of it, so if you're a great writer there will be no shortage of work and you could earn around $5 per article or possibly even more if the articles are particularly specialized.
Once you get busy, you will be able to crank out each article in around 15-20 minutes so that's an income of around $15 an hour while you are working.
When looking at work at home jobs and avoiding scams, if you take the time to educate yourself in promoting other people's products you can make a very tidy sum with high payouts in many instances.
The beauty of this is that your income will keep increasing over time, whereas if you just do a work at home job, you will have to keep working 'x' number of hours to achieve the same income, week in and week out.
There are no shortage of products available on the internet to promote and top companies such as eBay and Amazon have affiliate programs you can sign up with in a matter of minutes.
When looking at work at home jobs, make sure you choose a reputable program that will actually pay out once you've done the hard work.