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Top Work at Home Jobs
It’s a new year full of new opportunities for anyone willing to get out of their comfort zone and begin a work from home career. With each year that passes the internet becomes a bigger part of our lives and that creates an increase in online jobs you can do from home. The world is changing and will continue to do so. This is your chance to get ahead of the game and take advantage of what’s available to you in this new digital world.
Of course, there are many options available, and the "best” one is impossible to say because everybody has different preferences and needs. However, I have discussed 5 of the top work at home jobs for 2011 below to hopefully help you make an informed decision. They aren’t listed in any particular order.
1) SEO Consultant – With the growth of the internet and everyone coming online for business and personal reasons, it is more important than ever to be able to get websites ranked highly in search engines. Most people don’t have a clue how to do search engine optimization (SEO) properly nor do they have the desire or time to learn. They need the services of an SEO specialist to help them out and are willing to pay good money for it. If you have the knowledge and skills to get high rankings on the major search engines (mainly Google) then you can work from home as a search engine optimization consultant and earn great money.
2) Web Designer – As with above, the increase of people and businesses coming online makes the services of a web designer more in demand than ever before. Most people and companies don’t know how to create a website or have the time to learn. They would rather pay someone to do it for them and do it right the first time. If you can design and build web sites you can make a very good living from home in 2011 and beyond. This is certainly one of the best work at home jobs right now.
3) Blogger – There are actually a couple ways you can make money blogging. One is to start your own blog(s) in a profitable niche then work towards building up the traffic, readers, and rankings until you can monetize it. However, that is not really so much a "work from home job” as it is your own online business as a professional blogger.
The other way is to actually hire yourself out as a blogger. With so many blogs online now there are countless opportunities for someone willing to be a blogger-for-hire. A lot of people don’t have the time, energy, or ability to keep their blogs updated consistently so they will pay someone to help them out with the writing duties. This can be a great way to earn money online without having to build up your own blog.
4) Freelance Writer – These days just about everyone needs articles, blog posts, website content, information products, sales letters, press releases, and many other things written. But not everyone is a good writer or has time to do all the writing themselves, or maybe they just don’t want to do it. If you were to work at home as a freelance writer, you would have more jobs than you could handle as long as you were good at it. This is another one that will continue to grow in 2011 and years after.
5) Social Media Marketing Coach – This is the newest, the least known about, and probably the least saturated of the five work at home jobs on this list. Social media is all the rage right now but relatively few people know how to truly use it properly and effectively for business marketing. So there is huge potential for those who do. One of the hottest ways to make money online in 2011 is being a social media marketing coach for internet marketers, small business owners, and even large companies. If you got the skills they can definitely pay the bills.
So, there you have it, the top 5 work at home jobs for 2011 and each of them could also be turned into your own online business. As I said, it’s impossible to say what the absolute top five are because everyone has their own needs and preferences. However, these are certainly among the best of the best. Hopefully one of them fits within your expertise. If not, then get started learning the one that interests you most and you will be working from home as your own boss before you know it!
6)Answers On Demand
On-demand services connect people with an immediate need for information with experts who can supply that information. It's a one-on-one service, conducted over chat or via email for a fee.
LivePerson.com boasts 30,000 experts who are "ready to chat" on subjects from personal growth to small business solutions.
Some experts are lurking online, ready to jump in to answer your question, and others can be scheduled ahead for a one-on-one. The fee is set by the expert, anywhere from 50 cents to $5 per minute, about 45 percent of which goes to LivePerson.
Advice about "personal relationships" is clearly a money-maker here, although you can find a Web designer, a homework coach or a cosmetologist when you want one.
The vetting process includes licenses for professions that require them, like doctors and lawyers. All experts' resumes are available to prospective clients.
But once online, the experts live or die by client ratings which are, in the great tradition of the Internet, brutally honest. And in this world of pay-per-minute, the reviews cover typing speed as well as communication skills.
JustAnswer.com has an even simpler system. Got a problem? Just describe it, and indicate how much you're willing to pay for an answer. One of the experts will get back to you fast.
Experts run the gamut from veterinarians and attorneys to mechanics and computer repair people.
A quick glance through current questions reveals that many people are baffled by their electronic equipment, their cars and their puppies. Also, many students want somebody to write their term papers for them.
A new site out of Nashville, called Moontoast, wants to carry the concept to the next step and arrange actual face-to-face video and audio confrontations between expert and client. (Scary!)
Expected to launch soon, the site is bankrolled by country music stars and inspired by a musician's need to hear information, not just read it.
7) Website Tester - Many companies pay online testers to make sure websites are intuitive and easy to navigate. It usually only takes about 15 minutes per test. There are people who make $100 to $200 a month by staying on top of those tests
7) Crowd-Sourcing
This is the ultimate piece-work for the digital age.
"Crowd-sourcing" takes a big, ugly, often repetitive task and hacks it into small bits to be assigned to many people.
Say you are publishing a restaurant reservation directory, and every phone number has to be checked. How do you get it done? Try "crowd-sourcing" it.
MechanicalTurk.com, owned by Amazon, currently has almost 700 projects up for grabs, each divided into hundreds or thousands of "human intelligence tasks." Each task pays literally pennies -- from 1 cent to maybe 20 cents.
A lab needs information on 98 Web sites, for 10 cents a pop. Somebody is collecting data on 50 baseball players, for 9 cents each. Zappos wants people to edit product reviews for a nickel each. You might even see positions for big-time names like Google or Yahoo.
You grab a task, complete it and submit it for approval. As soon as it's approved, your payment gets transferred from the requester's Amazon Payments account to yours.
If you can stand it, you could sit at your computer all day banging these things out.
An experienced professional could get very bitter writing abstracts of technology news for a nickel each. But an under-employed college grad might greatly prefer it to flipping burgers, and it looks better on a resume.
More rarefied versions of crowd-sourcing are available at specialized freelance sites. DesignBay.com offers designers the chance to submit their work in online "contests" for posted projects. The odd jobs, most paying a couple of hundred dollars, come in from around the world, from small businesses and individuals who need logos or fliers, banner ads and posters.
Crowd-sourcing hits its low point in sites that pay people to "play around on the Internet." Put bluntly, they're falsifying usage data by goosing the number of unique hits on Web sites or banner ads.
See also:
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- Website Tester
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