Foreign residents making the choice to work in Spain frequently buy into hotels and bars, or become English teachers or telemarketing sales representatives. Jobs in the current climate are hard to find, worse still, most private sector jobs seem to be given to friends of the employer before they are opened to the general public.

With this in mind, foreign residents really need to understand, we often find working for ourselves to be the best option. The downside is that being autonomo (self-employed) isn't easy, there is a lot of red tape, and anyway how do you identify a market for your expertise if most of your network are Spanish?

So heartbreaking is the problem that many British expats end up leaving at great financial loss and going home where the benefit of a familiar language and culture mean it is easier to get work. It doesn't need to be this way though, success can be achieved in Spain, and building a small home-based business that earns an income for you and your family. Working in Spain doesn't need to be difficult.

Knowing about the working situation in Spain is key to being successful. Sorry for stating the obvious, but you need to know what is possible, you need to know your skills, and if necessary, you need to improve your skills. We all have expertise in our native language, and there will always be students wanting to learn or practice another language, however in larger coastal towns you may be competing for a small market.

Why not try other ideas, you can continue to do business with people from your own country via the Internet. Thousands of foreign residents in Spain contract with companies in their home country, and many hundreds more are discovering how easy it is to create information websites, or sell goods and services online, and this growth industry is proving a life-saver to many foreign residents in Spain.

Being an Internet Marketer isn't much different from other jobs, it only requires learning new techniques for promoting your business, such as using Facebook, Twitter, Ecademy, LinkdIn etc, and investigate your keywords so that your website ranks well in search engines. After that, you can almost run your business on autopilot.