Hi, I live in a city with few available jobs because it's a college city. Most positions are already taken. I work on ChaCha.com answering text message questions online, but recently, it's been too slow to make an income. I'm a college student who is very intelligent and I'm wondering what I can do to make an online income/living to pay my expenses. I have many creative interests, such as writing and art. (non-digital art.) I'm basically asking, where are some good places to research, to start a job, and something that will get me on the road to making a steady income, something plausible. I'd be more than grateful if anyone would help. After all, right now, I'm having a hard time making enough money to even feed myself, and sadly as a college student, rent comes first. What a world. Eventually I hope to market my art, but that'll come later. Thanks sincerely, Ryan
Hi Ryan, Welcome to the forum. It's a bit tough to get a steady income online in the beginning, like what you would get from an offline job. It's usually a case of a lot of work upfront before your income begins to build. It's certainly worth it, but I'm not sure if you are in a position to do that since you seem to need money asap to keep food in your belly. Since you enjoy writing, and seem to be well-spoken, you may be able to pick up some steady freelance writing from places like elance.com or getafreelancer.com. Also, Amazon's Mechanical Turk is really simple to use and you don't have to go through the bidding process. You just complete the tasks (HIT's) that are listed and get paid the set amount offered. It's still not much, but if you're fairly quick and efficient you could write a few articles an hour for $3-$5 each which isn't too bad. Long term, the best course, and the most profitable, would be to build your own website business (instead of writing articles for other people's business). You can take one of your creative interests and build a site around that subject. As your site grows and builds and you start getting more and more visitors, you can make money in a variety of ways. The beauty of this is that as time progresses, the income generated grows, while the amount of work needed to maintain it lessens. Perhaps you can do a bit of the freelance stuff to get your daily crust and use the rest of your spare time building your own little mini empire for the long term. There are free ebooks and resources that explain the process in simple terms and make it easy to understand how you can accomplish it - even without prior experience. I hope this gets those creative juices flowing for you. Blessings, Angie
What other skills do you have? There are many forums that you can visit to see what they have available. I also suggest looking carefully at craigslist.org listings. If you have design skills, you can also try http://www.liveperson.com and sign up as an expert in the category of your choice. http://www.workplacelikehome.com http://www.wahm.com http://www.webcosmo.com http://www.webcosmoforums.com http://textilicious.com/textopia/ These are all good boards to take a look at ! Best of Luck!
Valhalla, I agree with the above posts - if you need money soon, free lancing is the way to go. They've given you some solid tips and leads. As HappyWife pointed out, the other online income methods, such as building your own site and monetizing on it, take quite a bit more time to produce income. Good luck, ~Newbie Shield~
well there are a lot of oppertunities out there...just keep your eyes open and research a bit. i'm sure you will find what you are looking for. I love the work at home jobs. they are great...
I agree with happywife's suggestion to try building websites for people. There are a number of programs out there that will construct complete websites for you with WYSIWYG interfaces so you don't need to know HTML. You can Google to find any number of cheap packages (well under $100).
