In collaboration with some friends and financed by a successful expat in Michigan, last year I started an outsourcing company in Ibaan, a small and relatively poor town in Batangas. I called it Remote Reliance.

However, we were not able to get it off the ground. Maybe we started with a wrong premise. We thought, or so I thought, that Ibaan had the skills, and all it lacked were opportunities to utilize them.

Remote Reliance was supposed to provide the opportunities. So we opened our doors to train people. A bunch of young people came in, hoping to find a job. But it wasn’t a job we’re offering yet. We were still discovering what they could do, or if they were fit for this.

We didn’t really have the time to know if they were the kind of people we envisioned, who could work independently from home, given their natural intelligence and education. Because soon enough, these young people were gone, before they could even learn what it took to become an outsourcing professional.

It would have been more interesting to them if we had jobs available, and they could get them after the training. But no, we didn’t have jobs yet. We were just introducing them to something new.

From the encounter, one sure thing I noticed was that they lacked the ability to communicate effectively. Indeed, most online jobs just take you to a website to fill in the blanks. But to keep your client, you must know how to express yourself. To get more high-paying jobs, you must keep learning new things aside from data entry stuff.

Days went on and we learned that the skills available in Ibaan right here right now were so limited and unripe for remote work. There were still a lot of things to do to prepare the population for global outsourcing.

Maybe we could start with easier tasks, like data entry stuff. Basically, they must know how to follow instructions, how to type fast and take care of smaller details.

Moreover, they should be trained on efficiency and commitment–commitment to work and learning, essential stuffs that would make you stay long in the business of outsourcing.

Soon we will reopen in the new office at the so-called Ibaan Innovation Center (an offshoot of Remote Reliance idea). We will sit again to discuss the future of Remote Reliance and we should know better as to where and how to start, and to keep this thing going to benefit certain people with the right skills in Ibaan.

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I was in First Asia Institute of Technology and Humanities (FAITH) in Tanauan, Batangas yesterday afternoon for a short talk in poetry. In front of me was a good listening audience of around 70 college students under Carlo Peña, a good friend and former student of mine.

The event was brief I had to make sure they got something really straightforward from our encounter. Surely, poetry isn’t news writing, but for the beginner’s sake, I listed down 5 steps on how to write a poem:

1. Establish a dominant theme.
2. Build your primary image or images.
3. Build your poem’s environment using secondary images.
4. Complete your poem by projecting it outwardly.
5. Leave the rest to the reader.

You may want to post a reply below if you want me to explain each step. What I am about to discuss is not poetry. I want us to talk about something that really matters to everyone: getting what you want.

I told Carlo to really think about what he wanted in life. Like me, he was not raised to become a teacher. He was a communication major and aside from what he does for a living, dabbles in poetry and film making. Creatives such as writers, artists and filmmakers often thought that the academe was the best place to be, until they found out that it was simply a comfort place, a hideaway, or something else aside from what they actually dreamed of for themselves.

Two years ago, when I decided to leave the life of a commuter to become a telecommuter (as we used to call online workers), I thought I needed something to prop me up and help me manage my time and get more things done. You really need to achieve self-discipline when you work from home. Becoming your own boss also means you must be strict with yourself, most especially with your time. I stumbled upon what at first seemed a funny term, “simpleology,” coined and developed by Mark Joyner, a leading authority on Internet Marketing.

Joyner defined Simpleology as “the simple science of getting what you want.” The book description says: “Success is simple, and scientifically reproducible, if you know the 5 Laws… Simpleology proves that success and happiness are easier to achieve than most people think they are. In fact, people can almost guarantee their own success simply by following a few simple rules… Throughout history, these 5 laws have helped the world’s greatest minds amass fortunes and forge new paths… Applicable to any challenge or goal and irrefutably commonsense, these 5 laws form the basis for almost any successful person or endeavor.”

The 5 Laws of Simpleology are:

1. The Law of Straight Lines
2. The Law of Clear Vision
3. The Law of Focused Attention
4. The Law of Focused Energy
5. The Inescapability of Action/Reaction

If you want to understand these laws in depth, I highly recommend reading Simpleology: The Simple Science of Getting What You Want. You may also want to sign up free for Simpleology 101 and get access to a wealth of materials, including the Simpleology Software to keep up with your short, medium and long-term goals and finally achieve your “Ultimate Life.”

I love task management programs and keep trying each one that I can find on the web, but it is always Simpleology that I turn back to whenever I want to bring sanity to my day. For only 5-15 minutes of doing your “daily target praxis,” you will get more things done and you will be amazed to realize that the way to get what you want is really that simple.

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As I write this, I’m thinking if I should accept an interview invitation from a Dubai-based buyer on oDesk. It requires a full 40 hours of work per week at $10 an hour. The unique offer comes with a fixed $40 just to take the required tests within two days upon acceptance. That’s how serious and big the company is. So what do you think?

I can only say that I am an avid fan of oDesk if I am able to compare it with other freelancing sites. So for the sake of conversation and probably, greener pastures, I have recently joined a couple of other online job sites. I will write a review as I make progress in each one.

Meanwhile, if you are really serious about making a living from the Internet, you cannot pass up each opportunity to make money online. You’ll dig through scam dirt, but this is also how you may discover gold.

Definitely, what I will be talking about is not scam. If you know ClixSense, this is a sister site — GeoString. You’ll get paid $10 instantly just for joining. At first, I could not believe this. I stumbled upon a survey site in the past that gave out $10 for each of seven test surveys before signing up, until I found out it’s a scam. It quickly relieved my doubt once I learned that GeoString.com is connected to ClixSense.

ClixSense.com, Inc. is the number one paid-to-click site. It has quite a few clicks for free members, but it gets better when you’ve upgraded to premium. Even the referral rate increases. For those who have yet to try PTC because they think it’s a shallow thing to do and simply a job for street smarts, well, the street smarts are already way ahead of us, earning residual income even as they sleep.

So what this GeoString does is pay you for becoming an opt in member of its email marketing program. The advertising revenues from the sponsors make it possible to pay the members for doing nothing more than creating a free account, referring others, and opening the once weekly email from the company.

Why do such sponsors pay to show you their products? Well, that’s business. If you want to sell something, you must spend for promotion and buy your customers into it. Many online marketing companies keep devising new and unimaginable ways to promote products and services through the Internet.

GeoString.com is a new program vouched by ClixSense’s good reputation, and even if there’s a chance for a program to fail, you certainly have nothing to lose cause you get it free, and only for allowing the company to send you a sponsored email once a week, which you already normally do spam or no spam.

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Web development and web programming skills remain to be the most demanded. So I will be virtually “schooling” again starting June (following the academic school year) to address my weaknesses on certain web-related skills. I want to make sure that I will have the expertise to be able to compete with other providers worldwide in these high-paying online jobs.

If you are particularly interested in languages, demand for translation is on the rise. Localization is increasingly becoming a trend, so you may want to find out which language you can take focus on. Find out the trend and learn the language that you think will be in high demand in the next few years.

As evidenced by many job posts recently, US buyers favor homeshoring or hiring providers in the same time zone. Online work is seen as a means to curb unemployment, as more and more Americans are into it and competing with providers from countries they formerly outsourced to, like India, Philippines and Ukraine.

Contrary to what others may have thought, online work is not as easy as it sounds. There is a lot of preparation involved to be competent and to become an expert in your chosen field. You compete for the right price and skill with other providers worldwide and ought to deliver what the buyer hired you for.

To view complete statistics pertaining to online jobs trend, download the Online Jobs Report courtesy of oDesk.

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In a previous post, I left you with some readings on the top reasons why people work from home. I believe they represent the views of freelancers across America, but what about us here?

With the failure of the NBN-ZTE deal, and the anomalies surrounding it, we also realized that we are not yet a 100% wired or wi-fi country. The truth is, despite our good numbers on the major social networking sites, majority of the population are still in the backwaters regarding the Internet technology. Businesses are mostly brick and mortar and not too many companies utilize virtual solutions.

Local outsourcing (in plain words, allowing a remote staff do the work for you) is a strange thing to speak of. More importantly, becoming self-employed like the freelancer is considered akin to being unemployed. You will have a hard time convincing your family that you do have work, except of course, when the money is in. The banks will have a hard time establishing your sources of income and you may not be approved for a payday loan.

There are certain advantages, of course. While the cost of daily commute, food and bed space eat much of the regular wage earner’s meager salary, those who work from home naturally don’t have to deal with such realities.

In this country, only a few professions are guaranteed to build wealth, employed or self-employed, like doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers and accountants. We may also include those who work in livestock and farming, given that they are already big players, like those wealthy and powerful families in my hometown.

The question, instead of why, is “who can really work from home?” Basically, these are people with computing skills, a computer set, and a reliable Internet connection. I believe we have more female than male freelancers, and most of them are outside the normally employable age limit of 25. I also suppose they are underemployed.

The Internet is a fertile ground for those who want to put to good use their special talents and interests, which they seldom have a chance to do when working in a company. One thing is true about work from home jobs–you can only work them out if you are a good fit.

When you are underpaid, underemployed or both, naturally, you are not satisfied with yourself and what you’re getting. The freelancer is born in you when you take risks and overcome the scariest part of being self employed.

Whatever your reason for becoming self-employed, as a work from home professional or online business owner, you have to find satisfaction from what you’re doing. It is what really counts anywhere in the world.

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