[OixKKcj1]

I say go for it. You only live once, right?

:shootmenow:

[pokerbonuscod]

Based on the name of their site I believe your general labor entails having sex with a lot of computers.

[bestcigsnick]

That is way less fun.

[intorkercet]

Do you have a job? If you have a job, are you OK with it? If you answered "Yes" to both, blow this off.

[Enrivaanonock]

"general labor" seems pretty much guaranteed to entail large men doing unspeakable things to my anus. What are your thoughts on the matter?

I think it has probably suffered enough.

Hi Moby

[myspauyijbv]

Sounds legit

[Ephejvll]

TMM, I got this by responding to a Craigslist ad; the "job" in question almost certainly doesn't exist, and all the details are made up simply to entice people to go to their website and do something to help their bottom line for free. Possibly it would involve downloading something nefarious. More likely I would get a little ways into the process before signing up for a credit report as a formality to ensure I was a trustworthy person. Or I would be a "mystery shopper" buying merchandise for reimbursement that never comes (possibly for merchandise that never arrives either). My favorite is the busy jet-setting executive who's traveling around for the next couple of weeks but is willing to "give you a try" by having you run a couple of errands for him before he gets back. Anyway, you can tell there's something fishy by the low skill requirement, the high, specific compensation, the ridiculous YOU MUST CALL NOW notice...

If it were just a lousy sales job and not an outright scam, they would list an utterly outlandish range of compensation like "$100-500K a year!!" with the tacit understanding that it could be achieved by a sufficiently "motivated" seller. There's a pattern to these things.

[iodigmaFemZem]

Not in any paper around here. Not in my experience, anyway. Certainly nobody pays WaPo fees for rubbish like that. That's standard internet scam right there, right down to the you-must-respond-now nonsense. Bad sales jobs follow an entirely different pattern.

[zdlupikkkdi]

Well of course it's not going to be in the WP, how many high school dropouts read the WP?

[Hujkmlopes]

OB, minimum wage is $7.25. Twice that isn't great, but for a general-labor (read: basically unskilled) job that offers paid OTJ training to boot, nuh-uh.

Well of course it's not going to be in the WP, how many high school dropouts read the WP?

You said today's paper, but fine, I don't think they pay to put it in a podunk paper like the Easton Star-Democrat either. My point is, this is plainly a scam, not a hidden sales job. I've responded to (but not actually bitten) plenty of both, and there are distinct differences to their approach. The crap-sales jobs don't make you jump through pointless hurdles like going to a website to fill in information for "security purposes" (which doesn't even make sense). There's no reason for a skeezy sales job to give even the most minuscule fraction of a **** about my resume. They hard-sell you the job the way they want you to sell, by making personal contact and steamrolling you into it: "okay, so you'll be working X selling X to X and here's how you do it..."

[jesyflowers]

I have been drinking generic cola ever since

I was lucky to learn that it was a fake/evil job in time to get a legitimate summer job

[blackjackiisre]

I just got an identical job offer from a different address telling me to click on a different site. I hope sandrab@netboxmail.info enjoys the exciting penis enlargement offers she'll no doubt receive from my posting her address here.

[HQTheodore]

I'm not. Writing doesn't pay bills, so I'm applying for whatever jobs are available to a person of my limited skillset in the present POS economy. The ad mentioned is a scam offer of a type very common on CL, meant to attract people with my limited skills (only dumber). You reply for a job offer that sounds reasonable enough, and they send you a wave of BS offers trying to get you to, say, go through their credit-report service as a "pre-hiring precaution." There are a number of variants, but they all set off red flags from the very first e-mail. I only posted this one because it's a perfect storm of stupid.

[bellson]

Is $14.85/hour all that great?

What has the US become?

The world's leading economy.

[Jadldqys]

Skills take time and money to acquire, and in proportion to their utility. Any abilities I could acquire cheaply and quickly would be of dubious value, especially (as I said) in a bunk economy when there's a flood of experienced talent in most fields. So I'm pretty much skating on a wing and a prayer here.

[HedoShoodovex]

I write for a living and make a nice living at it. Been doing it 7 years.

[Chito]

You could take some jobs at Odesk or something like that to get a feel for the type of writing people are paying for. I started out writing $10 articles for other people to pay the bills until I was able to make enough on my own sites to stop doing so.

If you're writing for yourself, this is where to start:

https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeti...AS#search.none

Look for keywords which have high competition. This is competition from advertisers bidding on those keywords. The more people bidding for ad space, the more likely it's a paying topic. I look for volume in the 1000 to 10000 range using [exact] match type. These are usually obscure enough topics that there aren't a million other people building websites to target them, but still have enough traffic to make them worthwhile.

To find it start with your root keyword. Look for some longer keywords in the returned list. Input those... drill down to more and more specific categories.

As for general topics... never tried religion. Topics where there's clear commercial interest have the best chance of paying off, with a few exceptions. Tech is tough because most of the techies are running ad blockers or are ad blind. Health, insurance, loans, forex/stocks, and making money online are tough because they're very crowded and spammy. I mostly stick to home improvement, gardening, and landscaping topics. They're topics I can write about somewhat intelligently, and doesn't make me want to claw my eyes out. The commercial interest there are tools, plans, contractors, seeds, fertilizers, ect. Things people looking for those topics are going to spend money on, thus things that people advertising are going to be spending money to get traffic for.

Just a quick look at religion as a topic gets me to "electronic bible" as a high advertiser competition keyword with 1600 exact match local (US) per month. People searching for that are likely looking for an electronic bible to buy. "Study bible" and "bibles for sale" also looks like there's potential there. Your site doesn't have to specifically be about those topics, but if you were talking about religion you'd want to make sure you're targeting that traffic by using those high competition keywords in your articles, and have a few articles specifically about those topics. To go back to the home improvement example... I generally don't write reviews about specific cordless drills and don't have a site specifically about cordless drills (though product review sites targeting a product category like that can do very well)... but I do mention cordless drills, their name brands, where to buy them, or what specific model I use when covering broader topics where cordless drills are a useful tool. Then I'd also have articles about what to look for in a cordless drill, how to [do specific thing with a cordless drill], ect.

[texprofi]

Is that how you do it too, -Jrabbit? I have to admit, the process seems pretty intimidating. Guess I'm a wuss.

[oxixernibioge]

Yeah, I've looked at it. I guess it's something I could do--I smoked Basic in high school--but I'm not sure how to learn something useful. I also find it somewhat unpalatable (like trying to supervise an autistic child: you give him orders, watch it go wrong, and try to figure out which order you phrased just a little bit off), but I suppose I could give it a shot and see if it grows on me.

[wmcelesta]

Learn Java, the IDE is free (use Eclipse) and there are plenty of entry-level positions out there. These are the official tutorials, but there are sure to be many others available for free, and you can probably get a Java book from your library. C# is extremely similar, so once you learn Java you can easily transition to C#.