averysmartbowlofoatmeal asked: So as of last week I'm off work because of my health (I now can't stand for long periods of time without passing out) do you know of any ways I can be making a little income to pay some bills while I'm getting treated?

How To Make Money From Home (For Beginners)

I went over this a little in this post, but I can make a list of recommendations since I do a fair amount of work from home. Keep in mind that I found a few things that worked well for me off the bat and had a full-time job on top of them, so I cannot personally attest to the success of all of these. But I’m going to list to a bunch of resources to help you figure out what works for you rather than specific jobs.

What Kind of Jobs Are There?

In terms of working from home or earning passive income, I would recommend:

  • phone, email, chat, or social media support
  • data entry
  • search engine and website evaluation
  • transcription
  • freelance writing, design, photography, etc.
  • virtual assistant
  • eBay/etsy seller
  • surveys
  • mystery shopping
  • blogging
  • social media management
  • writing ebooks
  • mechanical turk

Bolded items are the jobs I’ve personally had. 

I really like Fiverr for design work and writing Kindle ebooks (I’m hoping that’ll be my primary income by the end of the summer). And even though it’s tedious work, I think transcription is very reliable once you make good connections. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and similar services like odesk are also good for tedious unskilled work that can only be done by human beings, like transcription, social media management, or proofreading.

Blogs and Resources

The links I included in my previous post provide a few employers or job posting aggregators for each of these jobs. This one in particular has picked out some of the most reliable work, and this post from the same blog has a good rundown of flexible schedule WFH employers/contractors.

I mentioned in that post about online work that if you’re in college, it would be wise to keep an eye on stay-at-home mom blogs. As a student, you’re working with roughly the same amount of work experience, education, and available time as a mommy blogger. 

I’ll probably talk about mommy bloggers a lot, but that’s because they know their shit when it comes to making passive income online. The blog I linked to above also has a post about how teens can make money online, which would definitely be a great post to check out if you don’t really have a lot of experience or employable skills.

I have quite a few masterlists on my Work At Home Jobs Pinterest board, but here are some blogs and resources for getting started working from home:

Reddit

I know that Reddit is a cesspool of awful, but I use it a lot for getting useful information about some of my freelance work. In particular, these subs may be useful to check regularly:

These subs have a lot of great information about getting started working from home or being a telecommuting entrepreneur. 

If you’re just looking for easy passive income to get a couple hundred a month, this post on /r/beermoney is a good rundown of the most popular online gift card and minimal income providers. Each of the subs has some kind of FAQ/Getting Started post pinned so definitely start there to see what your options are.

Writing Smut

If you’re looking to get into writing erotica for Kindle, your first stop should be /r/eroticauthors/ as I noted in my blog post about getting started in the genre. (Tumblr-rebloggable post here.) 

Do you read/write fanfic? This is a pretty good route to take. It takes a little SEO knowledge and market research, but once you hit the right market you can make five figures a month. I’m serious.

I hope this was a good starting point! cc: averysmartbowlofoatmeal

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