Ways To Work From Home Online

In this post, you will learn how you can turn your experience, skill or even your hobby into a profitable business. The best part, you can do this from the comfort of your own home.

The traditional job market has been suffering for years but the online market is thriving and growing at great speed. You can take advantage of this trend.

This article outlines some of the different ways to work from home online, to earn a little extra cash or a full-time wage.

Let’s get going!

Freelancing

It is possible to make a full-time income as a freelancer. In fact, some freelancers earn very good salaries. However, as with all businesses to be successful, it takes hard work.

If you are looking for more freedom, freelancing can be great. But, having more free time may well mean less money, especially when you’re starting.

What is a Freelancer and Freelancing?

A freelancer is a self-employed person who offers his services to often multiple clients. If you are a freelancer the services that you offer will be the skills you have or things you know how to do. The price you charge will be agreed between you and the client.

What Sort of Work Can You Offer?

Common freelance work includes writing, website design, graphic design, social media management, translation, search engine optimization, illustrations, tutoring, programming and much more.

Basically, if you’ve got a skill that’s in demand, you can start freelancing.

How to Get Started

Before quitting a full-time job to take up freelancing, it’s a good idea to try it part-time. It’s a good way to see if there is a demand for your skills and if you like dealing with clients.

One of the ways to get started that many people are familiar with are the job listings sites like Upwork.com or Freelancer.com.

They have many jobs listed, from something as small as writing a 500-word article to creating a website portal. This can be a good way to start to and obtain experience. Both these sites have some elementary training that will help you set up your profile and start bidding on the jobs available.

One problem with these sites, there is a lot of competition, often from overseas, where people are willing to work for a lot less

If your clients are happy with your work you might get some repeat work and start to build relationships with your clients.

Another alternative is sites like Fiverr or SEO Clerks where you can post your skills and people will pay you to do work.

If you have a portfolio of work, you can create your own website to display your work. This will allow you to:

• show your unique skills
• set you apart from other freelancers
• collect all your work and information in one place
• command a higher price, if you demonstrate the quality of your work
• refer prospective clients to your website. A great portfolio can be decisive in whether you are hired for a job

Who is Freelancing For?

This could be ideal for a job seeker who can’t find a permanent job, retirees, parents who want to spend more time with their families or anyone who wants to work for themselves.

Freelancing may not be right for everyone and it can take a while to get a steady supply of clients. You might consider freelancing as a short term job as you search for a permanent employment. Or you can aim to make it your full-time employment.

Either way, you will be working for yourself and will face the same advantages, problems, and constraints as most other online businesses. Here are a few points to consider:

• You need to be determined and manage your time. You may be working from your own home but don’t make the mistake of thinking you can do what you want all day.
• Running your own business is hard. You must deal with everything. Difficult clients and rejection may get you down but you must be resilient enough to bounce back and keep working.
• You will have some time when you don’t have work, be ready for this
• You will have to set your own rates to ensure you have enough to live on
• Be prepared to market your work or skill

To be successful as a freelancer, as with other self-employed work, you need to have the right work ethic. You must have confidence in your skills and be ready to market these. But with your talent, hard work, and tenacity freelancing can be a rewarding way to make money.

Selling Digital Info Products

Information products are one of the most profitable ways of making money online. With luck, you’ll create an info product put it on your website and sell it over and over again.

What Are Info Products or Digital Information Products?

An info product is usually an instructional e-book, software, a video or audio course. You create a product that can help someone solve a problem or teach them a skill. With the online learning platforms like Udemy, you can also publish courses that teach almost anything.

These products can be stored, delivered and used in electronic format. They are shipped by email and download through the internet.

Why Sell an Infoproduct?

Knowing that you can make money selling others people products as an affiliate, why bother to create your own product?

Well, the main reason is the income you can make on a successful product, this can be substantial. In addition, you have control over the product.

There are probably many people that could learn from your skills and experience and you don’t need to be a real expert in a subject to teach that topic. It helps of course but if you need to fill in a few blanks in your knowledge internet is a great place to research.

How to Start?

You will need a website. If you haven’t got one or don’t know how to set one up, you could try the SiteRubix platform for free.

Obviously, you will need a product to sell. The subject of your course or e-book might depend on your skills and experience but not necessarily. If you already have a website perhaps you are often asked the same questions. You could create a resource that deals with these questions.

If your blog has an audience or you have an email list, you can ask them what type of product would interest them. This way you have the advantage of knowing your audience is interested, before spending the time producing the product.

Once you have produced the info product, you need to choose how to sell your product. Of course, there are the platforms like ClickBank that specialize in selling digital products, however, if you are thinking of selling through your own site there are other alternatives. There are e-commerce platforms that are specialized in helping you sell digital products through your own website. Some of these platforms are SendOwl.com, DPD.com or Gomroad.com amongst others.

These e-commerce platforms deal with your customer’s checkout, integrates the payment gateway of your choice and provides a secure link for the download, so you don’t have to worry about the product delivery.

If you have a WordPress site you might prefer a shopping cart plugin. This is definitely the cheapest solution but requires a little more technical knowledge.

Who is Creating Info Products For?

This is great for people who want to share solutions, tutorials or information on their passions with others and is a good way of building a residual income. You also have the usual advantages of a work from home business, adapting your work hours as you like and working as long as you like.

If your product isn’t a success you will have just wasted some of your time. And even that may not be true because you can always use your product to attract people to your list.

A successful information product can be very lucrative.

Affiliate Marketing

This is my preferred business model. I particularly like affiliate marketing compared to the other 2 businesses because there is no product creation and you don’t have to deal with your clients.

Again to be successful you will have to work hard something that is common with all businesses online or offline.

What is Affiliate marketing?

Put simply affiliate marketing is promoting other people’s products in exchange for a commission when people follow your recommendation and buy the product.

How to Get Started

I always recommend getting some good training when you start affiliate marketing. A good training program will take you through the steps of choosing your niche, building your website, keyword research, writing your unique content and search engine optimization.

A brief explanation of what is involved.

1. Choose your niche. This can be a hobby or passion, something that you will be able to write about for a while. Your niche shouldn’t be too broad but really quite narrow.
   For example, a broad niche could be sports, but this would be extremely difficult to rank for in Google as there is so much competition. So you could narrow it down to table tennis which is still a little broad. Or even further to table tennis bats or table tennis accessories.
   When you pick a narrow niche and create some great content you have a much better chance of ranking well in the search engines.
2. Create your website. These days building a website is very easy and it takes only a few minutes to set up your site. I always recommend using the WordPress platform as it’s quite easy to use and you can add nearly any functionality you need very easily for usually no cost.
3. Keyword research and writing content. Before you start writing an article it’s always best to do your keyword research. You want to find keywords that have traffic but little competition. Once you have your keywords you can write your article.
   Writing for the internet isn’t like writing offline, you need to follow a few different rules. People tend to skim an article before deciding to read it completely, so you need to have short paragraphs and lots of headings.
4. Search Engine Optimization. There are a few different places you need to include your keywords. It’s really not very difficult, this article about on page SEO explains the different steps.

Once you’re used to writing posts or reviews it’s not really that difficult. Yes, it’s a lot of work, but as you should be writing about a topic that interests you, you will probably find it quite enjoyable.

Who is Affiliate Marketing For?

If you are passionate about a subject and are capable of writing about this topic for a while then affiliate marketing could be for you. Being able to analyze statistics can also be useful when you test different promotion techniques. Affiliate marketing is also ideal if you don’t want to deal directly with products or customers.

The most important point is to be able to write articles and reviews, although there are other forms of media you can use such as video and audio. You should also be aware that this is hard work and you won’t make money overnight.

Local Marketing

People are often happy to shop locally, to support the local community and have a better after sales service. But they must be able to find the businesses they’re searching for.

There is a high demand for local marketing services because people no longer use the yellow pages to find a business, they use the internet. Most small businesses don’t know how to create an online presence. If you have the necessary skills you can propose your services to businesses in your area to make sure they are visible online.

What is Local Marketing?

Many small business owners may have neglected the internet as a possible marketplace or they may have a website that doesn’t get any traffic. You will be working with them to obtain more sales from the internet. Put very simply you will be helping an offline business with their online marketing.

Most small business owners don’t have the time to look at how the internet could find them extra clients. They probably don’t know anything about setting up a website, SEO, social media or creating ads online. This is where you can step in to help.

How to Get Started

When you are starting you will probably accept any business owner in your area, later when you are established you might be a little more choosey.

To find businesses that need your services:

• You can network with people you know, friends family, businesses you use
• Check the yellow pages
• Internet. Do a search in your area for different types of business and any business that is not on the first page is a potential client. These businesses are probably the best to aim for. They know that an online presence is important, but probably don’t know how to achieve a good ranking. They may even have paid a lot of money for their website but they aren’t getting any traffic.
• Check local papers for ads
• Email campaigns

What Services Can You Offer?

This will obviously depend on your skills but here’s a list of some of the services that you could offer:

• Building websites
• Search engine optimization
• Setting up and maintaining social media accounts
• Creating and ranking YouTube videos
• Pay Per Click advertising campaigns
• List building and email marketing
• Setting up Google business pages

It’s good to start with something you know really well and are confident in doing a good job. Once you have done your work and have a happy client you can propose a bigger project and show how it will help them.

Who is Local Marketing For?

With this business, you will have to deal directly with your clients. Most small business owners will probably want to meet someone they are hiring to improve their business face to face. They will probably contact you by telephone for frequent updates, which is normal if they are paying a good fee.

You will possibly have clients telling you what to do, with some clients this will be similar to a boss relationship.

So, having some good people skills will be advantageous, both in acquiring the client and also in keeping them happy when you’re carrying out the work.

Of course, you will have to be proficient in internet marketing and be able to propose solutions to help your client’s business.

Conclusion

For many people work means getting out of the house, some people may actually need a different environment for work. While for others the home is the desired workplace.

If you’re someone who dreams of working from home, here you have 4 excellent ways to make money online. These are all businesses you can start from your own home. We are all different so we will all have our own favorite.

Personally, I don’t want the hassle of dealing with clients myself so that would eliminate freelancing and local marketing from my list. My preference is for affiliate marketing but each of these businesses has its pros and cons.

Whatever your choice it’s a good idea to get some internet marketing training. This will teach you how to:

• Set up a website
• Carry out keyword research
• Write articles for the internet
• Perform search engine optimization
• Create social media profiles
• Set up Pay Per Clic campaigns
• And more

All these business models would benefit from at least some of these subjects. If you choose a platform like my #1 recommendation, you will also have the chance to ask a community of internet marketers a question if you have any problems. This alone could make it worthwhile joining!

I hope my post has given you some ideas of ways you could work from home online, there are of course others but perhaps 1 of these 4 could be for you. If you have any comments, questions or have any other good ideas of ways to work from home please leave them below.

Thanks,
Peter