Kumiko's Cash Quest

“Why do work?” - In your quest to make money online, it’s probably a question that you’ve asked yourself many times. Making money online hardly seems like work sometimes and when you can outsource a lot of your tasks to India for $4 per hour, it can be hard to find an answer to the question!

Despite its relative ease, making money online can be incredibly difficult in the initial stages when you’re searching for opportunities and trying to sift through the scam and hype of internet marketers. What the internet really needs is a 100% professional career site that works to hook you up with legitimate “work-at-home” and “home business” opportunities.

WhyDoWork was founded way back in 2004 and aims to help you obtain legitimate home based employment while becoming “the Internets largest and most trusted telecommuting and work at home website”.

Let’s take a look at whether they can help you find your dream online job!

Work is for suckers

Started by a group of partners with entrepreneurial and start-up experience, WhyDoWork hails from Canada (why are so many Canadians making money online?) and has been around long enough to get featured in quite a number of big name sites and magazines.

They started the site with the belief that the spread of the internet enables anybody to earn a comfortable living from their home – and if they believed that back in 2004, they must really believe it these days!

When you hit the home page, you’ll immediately get a real sense of “community” from the site. With excerpts from their active forum and highlights from the multiple blogs that the site maintains, you immediately know that the site is active and not some new start-up. They’ve even got a huge banner inviting you to join their forum where they claim over 20,000 telecommuting jobs are posted every day!

It’s a nice first impression and the fact that it’s free to join them will definitely keep you intrigued.

Let’s get a job

As a CashQuests reader, you’re probably looking to earn an online income, so let’s jump straight into their ‘Work At Home’ section and see what’s on offer.

In their ‘Telecommuting Job Search Engine’ you’ll find over 31,000 work-from-home jobs on offer! Seems pretty awesome, right? Well, only 8 were listed in the past week and all of the jobs from the past month pointed to jobs already listed on Craigslist.com so I have to assume that those 31,000 jobs consist of every job they’ve ever listed over the past 3 years. That makes me think that not all are still available and it gave me the feeling that I should really check out Craigslist.com for jobs!

Some of the jobs listed on WhyDoWork included jobs for magazine writers, travel agents and marketing specialists – but I really wish I could have found more information about what the jobs actually involve.

Perhaps somewhat more useful, is the WhyDoWork list of “legitimate” online employers who they claim have been researched and are known to hire home based employees on a regular basis. Unfortunately, they don’t go into details as to how they were “researched” and with a few hundred companies listed, I’d really like to know how well they were checked out.

However, I did discover how I can become an online juror! That sounds pretty cool!

What I really like in their job section was how upfront and honest the WhyDoWork team are. They explicitly tell you to be cautious and to be wary of scams. Furthermore, they advise you to be especially cautious of any employer who charges you a fee for the placement. That’s smart online advice that everyone should adhere to!

Their job section also contains a “Paid Survey Jobs” area where you can supposedly earn your online fortune filling out surveys. If anyone has ever made decent money from filling out surveys, let me know, but I doubt that you’ll really make the $100p/hour like many of the programs claim. The fact that WhyDoWork directs you to the programs through affiliate IDs makes me think that they’re the only ones making money in that area.

Hey! It’s an active forum!

Perhaps the star of the WhyDoWork site is its incredibly large and active forum. After 3 years online, you’d definitely expect it to have built a large member base and topic list and it has done just that.

The forums generally discuss the various “get paid to” programs on offer online and there are some interesting posts to read as members discuss their previous experiences with the programs and whether it actually made them any money. It would be a good idea to check out these forums before you waste your time with any online offer that you come across.

As well as discussing the programs that make you money, the forum has an equally active section that discusses all the scams that its members have come across and their experiences with them.There a large number of topics on offer and it is a lot more focused on the “make money online” niche than many other large forums.

Selling to those who want money

WhyDoWork is definitely aiming to make money and there is quite a bit of monetization throughout the site. While they’re fortunately not too pushy on any affiliate programs, they do have an “Ebook Center” that tries to sell you a few internet marketing e-books.

I’m not a big fan of the e-book game but fortunately most are priced around the $10 region so you probably won’t feel too ripped off if you decide to buy one. And they all come with resale rights and a 100% money back guarantee so it would be hard to feel like you were scammed if it didn’t live up to your expectations.

The entire site of WhyDoWork is also heavily monetized with Google Adsense. While they have to make their money somehow, this really takes away any professionalism on the site and makes me feel like they’re just in it for the money.

Furthermore, most of the Adsense ads try to sell me work-from-home opportunities on different sites which made me question whether I was on the best site to find a job. Dropping the Adsense would dramatically increase the professional feel of the site and help give the impression that it’s the internet’s number one destination for work-at-home opportunities.

Expect to see more

Why Do Work has already been reviewed by John Chow dot com and will soon be reviewed by Yaro Starak, CarloCab and the world’s best blog designer, Nate Whitehill. Hence, you can expect to hear a bit more about them! They’ll also be following the ROI for each review on their blog which will be interesting to read.

Overall, they’re a pretty comprehensive destination to check out if you’re looking for work-at-home opportunities and a site where you’ll definitely learn a thing or two about making money online.