Being A ChaCha Guide: A Scam or Not A Scam

Being A ChaCha Guide: A Scam or Not A Scam

Being a ChaCha Guide has been described by some as a scam. I find that interpretation to be a little amusing. The only way you could come away thinking that it is a scam is expecting to make a full living out of being a Guide for ChaCha. That is highly impractical. It pays just enough to give you incentive to supplement your income. But still a lot of people were under the impression that it'd be the big work at home pay day of their dreams.

I've been a ChaCha Guide since 2008 (off and on due to not having a steady computer and Internet connection) now and I have found it enjoyable. I learn things all the time that are just nuggets of useless trivia knowledge. I also get to ponder on the mysteriousness that is human nature. So its not an activity that is ever boring. You always are doing something different even if some questions are the same. I'm constantly amazed about the content of a majority of the questions.

I googled ChaCha and was surprised to see several articles bashing ChaCha. Now that I think about it I shouldn't have been surprised at all. When you first hear about ChaCha your mind wanders to "work at home" scams that often con you into buying into a program with many promises that never seem to pan out. When you read about being a ChaCha Guide on ChaCha's official website it sounds too good to be true. In 2006 I believe (but am not for certain--could have been a year earlier or later) I saw ChaCha being profiled on Good Morning America. Immediately after seeing it I tried to become a Guide. I received no response to my first applications. I was under the impression from the Good Morning America story that this was a definitely legit way to make money working at home from your own PC. So I chased being a Guide when the thought hit me till I finally got accepted in 2008. This was right after ChaCha had morphed into a Text Answering service which is why I suppose they were looking for more Guides.

I was very excited to start doing ChaCha. For a lot of us homemakers, working from home is a kind of Holy Grail. ChaCha was the only way I'd found you could work at home and set your own hours that wasn't a scam or a total waste of time. But I still had a lot to reconcile with. I still had the impression that the Good Morning America show left on me with regard to ChaCha. It could have been my own skewed perception or it could have actually just happened the way I thought. I willing to believe either is possible. I had still had it in my head that doing ChaCha was going to be like having another income in our house. It was naive to the extreme and I do think ChaCha did nothing to stop this impression then.

I went and completed the lessons at ChaCha's "Search University". I practiced a lot before I took the final test--and then I was finally a ChaCha Guide. After a few days of being a Guide I became initially very disenchanted. I had expected to make a little bit of money. Okay, I expected to make a little itty bit more than "a little bit" of money if I'm going to be honest. At the time I lacked 24/7 computer access to really put in the time that was required to make that little bit of extra income I was hoping for. It was disappointing to me. Eventually I only did ChaCha occasionally. I walked away feeling that I was slightly misled about the money to be made being a Guide. But I've since realized that though ChaCha may have slightly encouraged this impression, I developed it all by myself with my desire to be able to add money to income every month. So I became inactive as a Guide for a long time because I didn't have regular access to a computer to put in the time necessary to make being a Guide worth it in the long run for me.

Last month we got a new to us Laptop. I thought of doing ChaCha again but was afraid of getting my hopes up for something that doesn't exist. That is when I searched Google for recent posts on the Internet about ChaCha and ultimately decided to become an active Guide once more.

As I said at the beginning of this blog I was surprised to find people calling ChaCha a scam. ChaCha is definitely NOT a scam. The only scaming that could be done is to yourself. ChaCha has even come out and posted that ChaCha Guiding isn't meant to replace a normal full time income of any job. ChaCha Guiding is meant to be a supplemental income. I think if it would have been described more in those terms to me I'd not built up delusions of grandeur around being a ChaCha guide.

When you are a ChaCha Guide you don't have to pay ChaCha.com anything for your training or for software. Most work at home scams always require you to buy really expensive "requirements" of a wide variety so you can "buy in" and "own" your new "business". With ChaCha they provide you all the tools you need to do your job free of charge.

Another facet to the work at home scams is getting you to suck other people into also buying into the scam. It is a classic pyramid scheme tactics. You end up spending so much money yourself and find that your business hinges on your ability to suck in your own friends and strangers a like. ChaCha doesn't require you to sell anything. All you are required to do is log in and do your job which can be searching for answers and typing them up, expediting questions, and transcribing questions. And then ChaCha pays you for it.

Some have complained I saw that ChaCha doesn't pay a fair amount. Well, when you think about what it is you're being paid to do--you should feel lucky to be getting paid at all. Yahoo has a question service. So Does Ask.com. But they don't give you instant results and they also don't pay the people who answer the questions to answer them. So I'd love to point out to some complainers that it merely depends on the way you look at it.

Now that I'm able to Guide again and on a more a regular basis I find myself very pleased with ChaCha. The system has its grumbling points but in the end you're not standing to lose anything. So if you've got the time to devote to being a Guide then you should give it shot because other than time--you've got nothing else to lose!