Learn How to make money From Internet and Get Rich or atleast Get Paid

The days of stuffing envelopes or selling seeds by mail and then waiting six to eight weeks for your check are gone.

A new search startup has an idea that it hopes will attract the new breed of stay-at-home freelancer -- one who makes a living doing the web's odd jobs.

ChaCha Search, a site offering human-assisted guided search, is introducing an instant-payment system that would offer its contracted guides the option of being compensated for their time immediately through debit cards.

Workers at ChaCha are experts in specific topics, and they help users of the search tool find information that, presumably, only somebody in the know would be able to uncover. The ChaCha guides earn between $5 and $10 an hour as a starting wage, and any money they earn can be dumped instantly onto a debit card and spent right away. The guides keep track of their earnings on the ChaCha site and can get their earnings by clicking a "Pay Me Now" button on their personalized page.

"I liken this to the way a day laborer gets paid," said ChaCha chairman and CEO Scott A. Jones. "They hop on the truck, do their work for the day, then they get paid in cash when they're done. We let people work as long as they want, whether it's five minutes or five hours, then instantly transfer the money they earn to their debit card."

The debit cards are issued by First Internet Bank of Indiana, where Jones was a founding board member, and they can be used anywhere that traditional credit cards are accepted. As previously reported on the Monkey Bites blog, the debit card program is currently in the final stages of development. ChaCha will begin offering instant payments to all of its guides Oct. 2, according to the company. There are 2,000 guides working for ChaCha right now, and another 5,000 are in training.

ChaCha's model affords a flexibility that Jones says appeals to college students and busy multitaskers like work-at-home moms. "You can go online for five minutes or work for 16 hours straight if you want," Jones said. "If you're in college and you have finals, you can take the week off."

"A lot of my friends who are ChaCha guides have specifically labeled this as their beer money job," said Tim Myers, a college student at the University of Texas at Dallas and a ChaCha guide.

The flexible hours are the main reason the casual working class first turned to the web to make a living. Some have even found an employment niche in Captcha solving. As reported on tech news site Slashdot, freelance workers can earn a meager wage of 60 cents per hour by passing alphanumeric codes to human-verification systems at websites.

But it's the opportunity to get paid instantly that's the real draw for ChaCha's guides.

"Say I need to send my daughter to the store to buy $10 worth of groceries, but I have no cash," said Melissa Sewell, a telecommuter who works customer service and data entry jobs from her home near Houston. "I sit down and work on ChaCha for a little while, watch the money add up and click 'Pay Me Now.' I give her the debit card and a grocery list. Brilliant."

Myers, who has dabbled with a number of web technologies in his 10 years as a freelance web designer and student, sees ChaCha's model as unique. "It kind of goes beyond the typical web work you run into," he said. "If this works out, I think you are really going to see a revolution in how people are paid. Why not allow the McDonald's employee to spend their day's wages after work?"

Social-networking sites like Netscape.com and the Yahoo Current Network have recently started paying freelancers within their communities for content contributions. Netscape.com, a news site, pays its top contributors up to $1,000 per month for sending in links to news items, and the Yahoo Current Network writes a $100 check to video artists if their work is featured on the site. The main competitors of these two sites, social news destination digg and video site YouTube, don't pay their contributors anything for the same types of submissions.