Many of us are out of work or underemployed. In 2011, in a workforce of approximately 139 million people,13.75 million of us were out of work. That’s a lot of idle hands. The nice part of this statistic is that 125.25 million of us are still working and earning an income. This doesn’t help those that are out of work but it does provide an opportunity for people that would like to earn a supplemental income from home.

If you are out of work and are finding it difficult to become re-employed it may be time to look at the alternatives. Take an inventory of your skills. What have you done, what is it that you know and how might you be able to offer value to others. Everyone has life skills that can be used to provide an income of some kind. Are you an artsy person? Is there a creative craft that you could do to create an item some people would like? The site Etsy will provide a venue for you to offer your creation to interested people.

One way that people are finding work is to capitalize on their current skills and offer their services on a contract basis. Fill the need that employers have and often this will lead to a permanent position. If there is a good match, many times a job will materialize out of a contract position. Usually, these positions are not advertised. You need to work on making a good network of contacts. These can be isolated using Linked-In or through networking in your local job bank or even the library. Once you have identified the service that you can perform brainstorm to identify employers that may find this service useful. Identify who in these companies would be most receptive to your pitch and contact them using a professional network.

If you are unable or need additional credentials to do contract work. There are online avenues for you to explore. Perhaps you have a hobby or a passion that you would like to explore. If you have this interest, there are hundreds of others that share your passion. It is an amazing thing that technology has been developed that will let you connect on a personal level with many of these people. Blog about your passion and people will come. Well, the internet used to be like that. Now, with the sheer numbers of people and sites, you will need to do some self promotion as well.

Promoting your website is not a difficult undertaking. You do need to have a good keyword and a feel for the audience that you are speaking to. Keywords can be as short as one word or long-tailed keywords which are a phrase up to 5 words long. Put this term into a good keyword tool (Jaaxy comes to mind) and look at the results. Keywords with high search volumes and relatively small competition are easy to rank quickly and will generate additional terms that people are searching. You can then expand your content to include these additional terms.

There are many places where you can learn to promote your website. But perhaps you need to step back a level and learn how to make a site before you can start giving people a reason to visit with you. The technology today makes this easy but you still need someone willing to help. Well this too is available in plenty. Many sites will tell you that you can make instant cash online. If you see this leave immediately. Scams abound. It takes time to build a following, but you can make a good supplemental income online. If you are curious about this, if you would like to see what is available, just look around on Google, the good sites will have glowing comments, others will be exposed as shams or frauds.