If the idea of getting paid up to $75,000 a year for basically typing at home sounds preposterous to you, you should know we at Consumer Watchdog were extremely skeptical when we heard about this opportunity.

But evidently, the recession has turned the job market topsy turvy, and as was just reported on Good Morning America, companies would rather pay people to work at home than take on the expense of hiring employees to work in their offices:

The current economic climate has actually increased the demand for certain kinds of at home workers and one of the fasting growing opportunities is for online advertising specialists.

What kinds of companies are hiring online advertising specialists? The list is impressive: American Express, Wal-Mart, Bank Of America, EBay, Amazon, Target and many, many more. These online advertising jobs are not being widely promoted right now, partly because the companies doing the hiring feel it might tarnish their image if the public knew they are hiring just everyday folks to do their promotion work right from home.

Being an online advertising specialist is easy work with excellent pay. All that is involved is assembling short, simple articles and posting them on special websites.

The good news is that anybody with normal intelligence can do this job. The articles themselves are easy to assemble, comprised of material available on the web, and do not require any special writing skills. The problem is, how do you actually learn the specifics of doing the online advertising work, and how do you get hooked up with the companies that are hiring?

As you might expect, a school has seen the opportunity here and is offering a short online course that guides you step by step to becoming a successful online advertising specialist. The school is called SCI (Stratford Career Institute), they have been in business for 13 years, they teach a wide range of online courses and are business bureau members. SCI has ingeniously put all the information anyone needs to learn how to be an online advertising specialist into a few hours of downloadable video.

More important, the course actually guides you through the process of registering to work with a number of Fortune 500 companies, so that by the time you are through with the course, you are not only trained but actually employed!

You have the option of working for as many companies as you like at the same time, which is a great way to maximize your income.

SCI does charge a modest fee for their course (currently $499, but they do offer specials which can reduce the fee to as low as $249). But the most important test of this "work at home" program is can an ordinary person use it to create a nice full or part time income? With so many work at home scams around, we felt obligated to check this program out further.

To put the program to the test, we bought the course for our 22 year old intern Kate (a student) as well as our editor's 78 year old mom Nancy (a senior), since they represent two groups who have the greatest need to make extra income working from home.

Both Kate and Nancy found the course easy to follow, and both completed the training in a few hours over a couple of days. Both began working right away. We were certainly astounded at the results when we took stock of their incomes one month later: Kate, our intern, who invested approximately 26 hours in the program over the course of a month, received checks totaling $5,426. But the real surprise was Nancy, who received checks totaling $7,127 for just 24 hours of work during her first month with the program. Both outcomes were incredibly encouraging, especially when you consider that they had each invested only $249 in the course.

So there you have it. Maybe being an online advertising specialist is kind of a silver lining to this recession. However, with so may people being out of work, we would encourage anyone interested in becoming an online advertising specialist to contact SCI as soon as possible. We suspect that an opportunity as good as this may not stay around very long. You can learn more about becoming an online advertising specialist on the SCI website by clicking here.