If you are fortunate enough to be in an industry that allows for it, there are many opportunities to be found online to work from home. Most of the sites built for freelancing have a strong focus on IT related work, but several of them cover many other soft-touch areas such as writing, marketing, sales, telemarketing, virtual assistance, graphic design, etc… I’ve tried several of them and have had success with some:

Being self employed, ODesk has always been my favorite freelancer type site. I have worked with them as both a service buyer and provider. They have a great system for keeping track of time spent on various projects, an awesome user profile and review system, a very large community of users. Their policies are straightforward and common sense. Their fees are also reasonable. They have a great timekeeper application that eliminates the need to manage time spent on tasks, or you can enter your time manually. They also support fixed price projects. As an employer, Odesk is super easy and straight forward. Employers pay nothing to use Odesk or post a job.

Elance is now merging with ODesk, which I think is great for both communities. I’ve always considered them to be pretty expensive if you really want to make best use of them, but they have recently made some significant changes to their fee structure, opting for a flat 8.75% model similar to Odesk.

Another contender in the freelancing space, these guys have a really vibrant community of freelancers and employers. Their fees average between 7% and 12% depending on several factors.

Everyone loves to trash Craigslist, but I have actually had some success finding freelance gigs there. Use street-smart common sense, and you will too. When in the jobs category, do a search for ‘telecommute’ and / or ‘contract’. Also don’t be afraid to contact job posters and ask them directly if they are open to telecommute. You may be surprised!

Probably one of my least favorite freelancer type sites. Freelancer.com users are extremely competitive, and as a domestic software developer I have had very little luck with getting jobs there. Estimated budgets are frequently set way below where they should be, and buyers will infrequently give complete information for a bid requiring estimates. The fees they charge are also high in my opinion, on a sliding scale based on the membership that you choose, anywhere between 3% and 10% of the job. They also charge employers another 3%. As an employer, they have fees out the wazoo, pretty much following the Ebay model. Their website has also been very buggy lately, and doesn’t even really work well at all in Chrome. They do have escrow built in though, which is nice.

How do you find freelance / work from home jobs? Let me know in comments!