Things you can do online to give up the day job
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Actual work
22. Several jobs exist on a pay per hour basis but the better paid ones are
probably contract jobs. Some examples of both: Copywriting; proofreading
of web content/ebooks/newsletters etc. (examples: elance,
guru,
rentacoder, graphicdesign).
23. Email or
phone answering: Be one of the first line support staff
manning a company's phone or email answering service. Filter out the easy
questions by pointing the user to relevant sections of his manual and
escalate those that seem genuine problems. You are saving the company's
engineers' time and providing a valuable service - that they pay for. A
variation of this is chat help where you actually sit at your PC and text
chat to users who've reached a firm's website and clicked the help button.
Sometimes a bit of training is involved.
24. Good at web design, HTML, CSS? Create designs (templates) and
flog them. You can
sell each one multiple times to webmasters who don't have the time or
patience to get familiar with the intricacies and quirks.
25. Monitoring Wikipedia/ forums/ blogs for mentions of a particular name,
brand etc. A recent expose showed that several Wikipedia entries were
being manipulated by a US political party who had several stooges signed
up for just this purpose. Wouldn't their opponents
want to know each time they're manipulating some facts? Find
someone who needs some news "managed" or needs to know when news is being
"managed" and get paid for it. You need to be "proactive" as
these jobs aren't "advertised" but the fact that they aren't advertised
means that others don't know about them, you have an advantage. And
there are opportunities in
almost every
language.
26. Directories: start one. Webmasters pay to be listed in your directory.
The better your directory the more you can demand.
Niche, hand compiled
directories are a million times better than the
SERPs dross and both companies and users know that.
27. Filling in surveys. True, there are a lot of duds around but there
are still some programs that pay you for doing mind-numbingly dull tasks
like filling in surveys. If you aren't fussed about privacy and are
willing to disclose all your personal details (or fictional personal
details) there's usually someone willing to pay you, From
YouGov to
Ciao to owners of properties
on TripAdvisor. This - and some of the
next few - are called IFW or Incentivised Freebie Websites,
more here.
28. Get paid to read email. Why would companies pay for that? Plenty of
reasons, not least that a human eye can spot SPAM that even the best
program doesn't catch. Even the best anti-spam program has some
false
positives and some companies can't afford to have any.
29. Do other filtering. There are people who'll pay money to have you
filter through those millions of ebay listings to find them the specific
objects/ curios/ stock/ book that they really, really need. Another filtering idea: Businessmen looking to buy sites regularly
visit the Site
Buying/Sellin g
forums and trawl through thousands of listings a week. Get talking to one
or two of them, offer to get familiar with what they are looking for and
to do the looking for them.
30. The web has allowed easy access to industrial quantities of
free stuff. For example, in 2007, a major manufacturer of cricket bats had
a problem. Cricket bats can't have knots in them so most of the wood from
the willow tree has to be discarded as scrap. Not a few bin bags full but
70 tons. Per week. Yes, lorry loads per day! Free. They listed it on the
eastex.org.uk site (now defunct) site. Opportunity: Find a company that sells bark mulch
for gardens. Find out how much they are paying to buy wood. Offer them 70
tons of fine willow a week at 50% of their current costs provided they
pick it up themselves. Or contact manufacturers of chipboard/cat
litter/use-your-imagination. OK, eastex may not still have that particular
opportunity... but there are others. And on other sites.
31. CPA = Cost per Action. Apart from filling in surveys
people pay for all
kinds of other things. Like clicking on links (though you may want to
check that you're not participating in click fraud).
32. Posting in Forums: Like hanging out in forums and chatting to other
people? Owners of new forums have a problem. If there aren't a lot of
conversations going then people don't stop to talk. So they get the chat flowing by
paying for posts. So, jump in,
start chatting and get paid.
33. Do something silly. The
milliondollarhomepage guy got famous for
selling worthless pixels on his page. But, because he was in the
news/having his 15 minutes of fame people focused on that and paid money
for what they would normally have realised was fairly worthless links. Yes, people are stupid.
ClickHereYouIdiot. But
some of these "stupid" people are millionaires today.
34. Do something more useful and less silly. Find a need in a niche and
fill it. People complaining in forums about how they can't find replacement
parts for a certain type of car? Find someone who'll make it and be the
broker. People complaining about limitations in a particular niche
software? Find a programmer to design a solution and start selling it.
35. Have expertise in a particular subject? Write regularly on that subject
and give away your knowledge for free. People will bookmark your
blog and
visit regularly. The money is in allowing companies to advertise their
products and services to your very eager audience. There are
third parties
like payperpost, blogvertise, creamaid, Blogitive, reviewme, loudlaunch etc., who handle the
finding of advertisers.
36. Don't have expertise in a particular subject? That doesn't stop
bloggers. Some of them blog on the most mundane things - from what they
had for breakfast to how they spent their day. And still the advertisers
come. So, don't blog to demonstrate your expertise. Blog to demonstrate
your camera obsession and show all the stupid pictures you take
everyday. Or blog about
breastfeeding your kids.
37. Join the social networking bandwagon, build up a lot of
"friends" and advertise the hell out of them. Send them to pages where you promote affiliate
programs and you could walk away with five figures every month. There are
people who make a lot more.
More on how to make money with Facebook.
38. Or use tools like Twitter and Facebook to promote your offline activities - like the
music you create. The
Arctic Monkeys
were record label/ talent scout/ music agent free.
39. Sell trinkets to avid users of social networking sites. They love them. Especially
shiny ones. From Myspace
backgrounds,
to custom LinkedIn profile... also, templates,
animations, scripts, icons and other such "resources" are a multimillion dollar
industry.
40. Writing a newsletter. Building a mailing list is a long term plan and
it pays dividends but don't expect immediate results. If your newsletter
is good and you promote it well you can collect hundreds of thousands of
subscribers (who all get the newsletter for completely free). The more
subscribers you have on your list the more advertisers pay to feature in your
newsletter.
41. Find something that won't sell, let your imagination run wild.
Be willing to think the most outrageous thoughts, the most impossible
items to sell. Who would have guessed there'd be an
active market for urine. Yes, that stuff you flush away. No, I'm not
taking the ... mikey. Start selling your outrageous item and
you may find that a market already exists. For example, you can also sell your
hair,. Yes, there's a huge demand
and criminals are now
raiding hair
salons instead of banks! If the BBC
recognises the
opportunities in hair it must be pucca, right? You can also sell your your eggs and breast
milk... or rent your uterus..
Don't have eggs, breast milk or a uterus? Neither do I, but there are
markets for
blood and assorted body parts
too.
42. Build a community. While some webmasters see lower returns from
forum-type sites it's probably because they're using contextual programs
like Adsense. One of the biggest webmaster communities (forum) is free to
join and free to use though it's very busy, uses massive bandwidth and
costs its owner a bomb. Yet, he makes a very profitable income from
organising conferences/tradeshows. His "community" ensures every one is a
sell-out.
43. Be a link monkey. Webmasters want people to link to them. It makes them
feel loved. And it helps them rank higher with search engines. But they
don't have the time to go begging. You do that for them and get paid per
link. If you're smart you'll find shortcuts and charge people a lot of
money for identifying and approaching possible link "partners".
44. Related to the link idea above - start a directory submission service.
There are
lots of directories around like the
ODP.
Many take free submissions but you have to do these by hand. When you're
familiar with the submission process at a few of the top ones it takes you
a lot less time to make submissions. Webmasters have to register, wait for
a reply, jump through other hoops etc. They'd rather outsource it to
someone who can do it faster and has the time.
45. Another flavour of link-building: Dropping mention of your client's
site in forums, blog comments etc. Yes, clients pay for it. There are
spamming ways of doing it and some more decent ways. If you can make
relevant posts, posts that contribute to the discussion and provide
only those links that are beneficial to that thread, you'll be in high
demand with webmasters looking to spread the word about their good
content. For example, if you genuinely feel that this list of 101 ways
to make money is the dog's testicles - and you participate a lot in
webmaster forums - you're bound to come across threads where dropping a
link would help your forum mates. Some website owners pay for that.
(Update: I've now got
a detailed article on how you can make money from blog commenting.)
46. Press release websites often
need people to screen user submitted releases for profanity etc., before
running the "news". Well known blogs often require the same kind of
vetting service for user submitted comments to blog articles. Niche
directories that take automated submissions need to prevent against SPAM
so could use a human review of each submission. There are numerous such
opportunities. Spamming site owners with offers of your service may not
get you anywhere. The key is to identify a site that looks like it could
use this service and make a personal approach.
47. Write an ebook. It's as easy as falling off a chair. Know something
about something? Whether it's about growing cabbages, writing PERL,
plucking nose hair or being a good cop - if you're a good marketer, or pay
a good marketer, you can probably sell a few thousand copies of your ebook.
People pay online and download it, no publisher, printer, book shop or
other cumbersome details to worry about. In fact, you don't even need to
do the selling. "Affiliates" do it for you (on commission). And, there are
ebooks telling you how you can write and sell ... ebooks! Is writing a
whole book too much effort? You could write articles for the businesses that resell your
material to multiple buyers, it'll help get your name out there.
48. Become an expert in a particular niche, perhaps affiliate
programs for kids' products, or mailing list services ..and charge for
your advice either at online
webinars ... or even
at local business events. The great news is that this is the internet
and becoming an expert in a niche often requires nothing more than
spending lots of time (online) reading and absorbing. No school to
attend, no fees to pay.
49. Data sorting and other mundane jobs usually pay by the hour. This is
the online version of envelope stuffing except that there really are
opportunities to do these jobs online. It's a
matter of looking in the right places and avoiding all those
scammers
looking to part you from your money by asking for upfront fees.
50. Good at graphic design? Design and
offer logos and
icons downloadable for free (and without watermark on payment of a fee). Good icons
sell for several hundred dollars a set. And each set can be sold again and
again.
51. Create an award and some fancy logos to go with it. The more credible
they look the better. Award them to websites you like ... provided they
pay you an "admin" fee every year to continue using the logo. Giving
awards used to be a useful way to get backlinks. But when people's egos
are sufficiently stroked they'll pay to continue boasting about how good
the "rest of the world" thinks they are.
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