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A lot of people dream of working from home, but the question often asked is, “What can I do to make money from home?”
There are a lot of things that you can do to earn money from home – it all depends on your motivation, interests, time and resources. You can make money by offering the skills you use for your day job for other clients (as long as there’s no conflict of interest or anything that could jeopardize your day job). You can also make money from your passions and interests, or from untapped opportunities that you have seen in the market.
We’ve selected three work from home ideas that you could get started on right now. Use them as a starting point and think around them to come up with your own ideas. For example, think if there is something similar that you could do or something you could add to an existing idea then go for it. Brainstorm by writing down every home business idea that you think of even if it sounds stupid or weird. Sooner or later the perfect way to make money will come to you!
1. Freelance Work
Why this is a good work from home opportunity:
If you have specialized and in-demand skills such as coding and programming, web design, writing, translations, editing, transcription, marketing, finance, or just about anything else, you can work from home offering freelance services for other people. There are many individuals and businesses around the world who are looking for talented and qualified freelancers to do jobs for them.
Things to watch out for:
However, to succeed as a freelancer – and earn sufficiently from it – you need a combination of strong demonstrable skills and excellent marketing. Better yet, you need to be an expert in your field. It will be very tough to get clients if you have marginal skills or you are just learning the skills; unless you price your services so low that potential clients are willing to overlook your lack of skills. Remember, in freelance marketplaces, you will be competing with hundreds, if not thousands, of other freelancers from all over the globe and many of them are talented and highly skilled.
How you create your profile and present yourself will be extremely important as potential customers make decisions based on the information you present in your profile. While not required, it is a good idea to showcase your expertise if you have a website that customers can check out to learn more about you, see samples of your work, and even read testimonials from past clients.
How to earn money:
To start doing freelance work, create accounts in freelance marketplaces. Here are the top freelance marketplaces that you can check out:
- Freelancer.com (formerly getafreelancer.com)
- Upwork.com (formerly Elance and odesk.com)
- Project4Hire.com
- GetaCoder.com
- Guru.com
- iFreelance.com
- PeoplePerHour.com
In addition to freelance marketplaces, there are job sites that are excellent sources of potential jobs for freelancers. Some of them include:
- ProBlogger Job Board (jobs.problogger.net)
- Smashing Magazine (jobs.smashingmagazine.com/freelance)
- SimplyHired.com
- 99designs.com (for graphic designers)
- Behance.com (for creative-type jobs)
- CrowdSpring.com (for logos, graphic design and naming)
Additional Information
Read the following articles to help you learn how to make money from freelancing:
- How to Succeed on Elance
- How to Start Freelancing and Succeed as a Freelancer
- How to be a Successful Freelancer
- Common Mistakes to Avoid When Freelancing
2. Blogging
Why this is a good work from home opportunity:
Blogs have grown into a huge medium online in recent years. In Tumblr alone, there is an estimated 227 million blog accounts. While some are just mindless rumblings of someone with too much time on their hands, there have been a wide range of successful blogs from politics to travels to macroeconomics to travails of work-at-home moms.
Given that blogs are fairly easy and cheap (even free!) to build, blogs have grown to become an important source of income for those who want to work from home.
Things to watch out for:
While blogs have huge potential to earn money, they are not a quick way to riches. In fact, it can be a long process before your blog earns anything significant. Creating your blog is easy; but getting audiences and making money from it are less so. You need to be prepared to write consistently and market the blog incessantly.
The most difficult part is choosing the niche. If your goal is to earn money, you can’t simply choose a topic that you love as it could be a topic that nobody cares about, whether in terms of potential traffic or advertisers. The choice of your niche will depend on a number of factors, such as:
- Your knowledge and interest = you’ll be able to write better content and create a better blog around things you know about
- Level of interest of advertisers = you can check the keywords advertisers are paying for in online ad marketplaces such as Adwords. The more expensive the keyword in terms of pay per click, the greater the advertising income potential for your blog
- Number and quality of competition – check search engines for number of pages on specific phrases or do keyword research first
Choose niches with good profit potentials. Remember though that topics with high income potential will also be very competitive, and many areas already so saturates with blogs and websites. It will not be easy to get your blog noticed in that mix, unless you know you bring a unique perspective that can give your blog significant headway.
An alternative is to choose smaller niches where there may be fewer competitors. For example, instead of a general blog on law, you can focus on a specialized legal topic. Lower competition topics may generate lower commission payouts or lower cost per click keywords, but these topics are easier to get traffic for.
Better yet, if you will create a network of blogs, experiment with combining high-competition topics with low-competition, high-volume topics. Having more than one blog on diversified set of topics can provide you with a sound infrastructure upon which to build your business.
How to earn money:
There are a number of ways you can earn money from blogging:
- Advertising Networks = you can use networks such as Google Adsense or Chitika to earn money. Choose the type of ads you want on your blog, while making sure that the ads do not overwhelm the blog content.
- Sponsorship ads, including solo advertisements in newsletter
- Affiliate programs = you can sell products or services from other businesses and earn commission from the sale. Check out Amazon Associates program or affiliate program marketplaces such as Commission Junction.
- Package content and sell them as books and ebooks
- Paid membership where some sections of your content are for your paying members
- Speaking fees
3. Sell Content
Why this is a good work from home opportunity:
Content is an integral part of any online business. All websites need content to engage the visitors and provide them with information that will help in their buying process of any product or service. It is the essential tool needed to compel visitors to patronize the website and turn them into regular buyers and customers.
Content on the Web comes in many forms, and you can choose to specialize in creating content in one or more forms:
- Infographics
- Videos
- Ebooks
- Articles and blog posts
- Guides
- Book reviews
- Product reviews
- Research and original data
- Podcasts
Take for example infographics, which presents distilled information or data visually. It is a type of content that many marketers and website owners love as infographics tend to be shared more and viewed more. Whether as a stand-alone or as a complement to an existing article or white paper, the visual format of infographics helps communicate data, studies, research or even lists. The viral potential of infographics is huge; and as such, many top websites are using infographics to deliver information and their messages.
How to earn money:
If you are a graphics designer and has the ability to present information visually, you can make a living by creating compelling infographics. Most infographics creators charge anywhere from $1,000-$2,500 per infographic, depending on the amount of research that needs to be done and level of visual details incorporated in the infographics.
You can also create information products for niche markets like DVD’s and CD’s. Think of a topic that will generate the kind of income that you need. With today’s technologies and internet based services the mechanics of this are easier that you would think.
Videos are another type of content that have the potential to bring in significant income. You can create videos for your own Youtube channel and earn advertising money, or create videos for other website owners.
Additional Information:
Check out these other articles:
- 8 Ways to Earn Money from Online Videos
- 12 Ways to Make Money with Photoshop
- How to Earn Money from Writing
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