Another Option for Extra Income
Wouldn’t that be the dream to work from home all the time? Unfortunately not all job opportunities that you come across want you working at home. Working from home is a bit of a “gray area,” for most people and doesn’t seem like a viable option. There are jobs that do require always telecommuting, but these jobs don’t always pay as well as jobs that you have to be in-person for. This is a great route to go if you are just looking to expand your options for earning more income, but not replacing your primary source of income. As you look for these extra jobs, you’ll more than likely come across many sites that either promise “I MADE $8,000 LAST MONTH ALONE!,” and I’ll tell you right away that this is surely a scam. Things that look too good to be true, generally turn out as just that. I’ll go over actual ways of earning money and not just give you a list like “Top 10 work-from-home jobs” or “Top 10 ways to make money from home.”
Affiliate Programs
Affiliate programs are excellent ways to generate more income for yourself. There are dozens of tutorials online about how to use widely popular programs such as Amazon Associates, which is absolutely free to join. The way that Amazon Associates works is that you place an ad on your website that links back to Amazon’s site and when someone buys that product or anything else on Amazon, you get a certain percentage of the sale. It’s almost like being a commission-based sales person. However, it isn’t easy as it seems; to have a shot at joining in on the affiliate-giant, you have to have a website with very well-written and original content and also having a niche market. For instance, if I was searching for “Portable Generators,” and your website was only about “Portable Generators” and had a ton of information on them, you could have advertisements from Amazon on your website that would link to “Portable Generators.” Having reviews of products that you’ve tried on your site is an excellent way to start earning more, as people will trust your insight on the product that you’ve tested. Commission-based sales opportunities are one excellent way to start earning money. Do a simple search for what other affiliate-based opportunities there are on the web and you’ll be surprised. At all costs, AVOID sites or companies that require you to pay into them to get started, these are generally scams.
To get a jumpstart on how you can really get-into these affiliate programs, I recommend checking out Affiliate Marketing for Beginners – A No-Nonsense Guide on How to Make Money Online
Sell Products From Home
Believe it or not, the basis of entrepreneurship is still the best way to start earning money from home. Buying products at a low cost and reselling them to earn at least twice as much or more than what you paid for them is a great way to go. There are plenty of businesses that will sell you products for you to sell. One of the leading items that is turning out to be promising are golf clubs from Japan. There are tons of success stories all over the web about how people have made a small business and extra income from buying low-cost golf clubs from Japan and reselling them in the United States. However, this is an extremely competitive market, so success may take a while to achieve here. Don’t forget you can even go simpler. Find things on websites like Craigslist that are absolutely free that seem interesting and sell them at a garage sale. Now this requires a bit of work with going out to people’s homes and picking up their unwanted items. It’s more than likely not going to make you a millionaire, but who couldn’t use a few extra bucks here and there? There are also other opportunities to sell items from home that you want, such as starting a business in something that you can make. If you are great with wood-working or metal-working or any type of crafting, you can always make and sell your crafts online. Setting up a website to sell things on is extremely easy now. There are tons of free tools that will help you start up. Check out hosting services such as Hostgator, which I use for all of my sites, due to their easiness, great customer support and the endless free-offers that help you build a website, such as this.
Find Extra Work
There are multiple places that require work that can’t be automated easily by computers. One source of this would be Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program. The way that program works is that, there are tons of little jobs on there that people need help with such as, transcribing audio, writing articles for websites, writing articles for papers, converting video, etc… Each one of these little jobs can pay you to do the work. Again, this won’t replace your main job as the work on there usually pays out between a few cents to sometimes up to $100. This is a great way to constructively spend time that you would have otherwise wasted by figuring out how to make a few more bucks a day. Another great thing to do is look on Craigslist under the “Odd Job” section. People are willing to pay you to do some things that they need help with. Sometimes you can help people around their house with small tasks, help them write a paper, help them with their car, or just anything that they may need help with and they’ll pay you to do something. I’ve tried doing so on some weekends where I didn’t have anything else planned. I was able to make some money and I do enjoy helping people out (that’s why I created this free website).
Start a Website
As you’d expect, people can make a living or some extra money from home if they own a successful website. Websites are extremely easy to make now-a-days with programs such as “WordPress,” which I’m using now to create this website and many others that I have in the past such as one of my most popular sites that you’ll enjoy a laugh at, Haterworld, home to some of the funniest pictures you’ll ever see. The way that people make money from websites is that they can sell products, become an affiliate (as I’ve mentioned above), or sell advertising space to individual companies or through programs such as Google Adsense, which is the most popular choice by far. When people visit your website or click on an advertisement, you can get a certain percentage of money. Websites are great potential income earners, but they come at a price. Just like anything else, they take A LOT of work to become successful. There are so many things that contribute to a website’s success. SEO, search engine optimization, is the key to having a great audience and lots of traffic. When you create a website, you want people to find it. SEO has so many components to it, such as Backlinks (links found on other people’s websites recommending their site), Keywords (words that people search for in a search engine), Page Rank (Google’s system of ranking websites, based on traffic, keywords, backlinks etc…) and various other components that contribute to increasing your traffic. We’ll get more into website success, later on, on this website.
Other Options
Now, there are a variety of other options that I didn’t cover (because there’s just so many and I have just so much time, as do you). One option that really requires skill to become successful is day-trading. Day traders are people who work almost solely from home. Day trading is something that I tried with success, but nothing to make me quit my current job. Buying and selling stocks can be risky for many reasons as company’s shares rise and fall due to way too many factors for me to explain (there are sites that are just all about that). If it is done right and you are skilled in it, it’s a great way to make a living or extra income from your current job. Maybe I’ll go into it further and my personal success stories if this page gets enough questions or comments. There are a multitude of other options out there, but I just wanted to let you know of the ones that have stood the test of time and actually work, instead of giving a boring list of things that sound promising, but just aren’t worth the effort *cough* online surveys *cough…
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/59937401@N07/
