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. (elance, guru, rentacoder, graphicdesign, more).
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. 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/Selling 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. 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 myspace bandwagon, build up a lot of "friends" and bulletin
advertise (what?!) 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.
38. Or use tools like myspace 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 myspace users. They love them. Especially shiny ones.
Myspace backgrounds, templates, animations, scripts, icons and other "myspace
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. You can also sell your hair, your
blood, your eggs, breast milk and body parts... and rent your uterus.
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.
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!
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
Things you can do online to give up the day job
