Ideas for Making Money Online at Home

Many people are looking for legitimate ideas to earn extra money online from home.  Making money online is versatile, in that a person can work around his/her schedule, and typically put in as much or little time as they desire.  There are a myriad of opportunities out there, many of them scams, so you will need to research carefully.  Much also depends on your skill sets, and how much time you are willing to put into learning new tasks. 

Today, we’ll look at a few categories of different people work from home.  Each one in and of itself, could be researched much further, and should be if that’s an area you may be considering pursuing further.

There are affiliate programs that some have been very successful with. Affiliate programs are basically when a person signs up (at no cost), to sell a company’s products and receive commissions for doing so. A benefit to affiliate plans is once someone buys from the company, you are out of the loop, except getting a check sent to you. No product to carry or ship, returns to deal with or customer complaints. Two very well known affiliate sites are (although there are hundreds out there to choose from):

Clickbank – A huge database of all sorts of information products.

Amazon – If you have a website or blog, it’s very easy to set up an account.

Some people will focus on selling a couple products, or more from these sites and simply focus there, while others will opt for other products or services to sell. Whichever route a person decides to go, there can be a steep learning curve, and getting web traffic to your affiliate links can be a challenge.

Ebay and Etsy currently are the biggest known online auction sites.  There are many people who have been selling on Ebay full time, for many years.  

Some choose to do some form of drop shipping, so they don’t carry or ship physical products, they order from their supplier when someone buys their auction.  Then the supplier ships the product to the customer, and they retain as their profit the difference in the wholesale price and what the customer paid for the product. 

Others find, store and ship the products that they auction on Ebay.  If this is a route of interest to you, I would encourage you to buy some books about it and read up before launching out.  By learning through other’s experiences, can save you a lot of money, time and frustration.  It’s not as easy as it might at first appear.

Odesk is a great resource, both to get freelance online jobs, or to hire work done. A person signs up and bids for jobs. The general categories of work they have available:

Web development

Software development

Writing and translation services

Networking and information systems

Design and multi media

Customer service

Administrative support

Virtual Assistants

Sales and marketing

Another popular way people make extra money is to earn income freelance writing. There are many methods folks may do this. Some choose to start their own blogs, some are paid by writing blog articles for others. Some authors go the more traditional route by writing books and novels. Other people write product reviews, recipes, travel or any of their favorite interests in a wide range of venues, just waiting to be discovered.

Many folks with a passion for photography have found ways to use a camera to make money, both online and offline. Of course, that’s not even counting those with graphic design skills, and desktop publishing talents. There’s a whole realm available in this niche.

Web master skills are also a sought after talent, as well as other computer support services that could be useful to people. With the various remote software applications out there, much can be offered in terms of services such as virus removal, speeding up people’s slow home computers, and troubleshooting problems that average folks can’t.

There’s also medical billing, coding and transcription work that can be done at home, yet usually these will require taking some online courses, or taken at your local college to break into this field. Typically a person would be working for a local medical provider, but the bulk of the work can be done at home, once established.

Keep researching until you find what suits your tastes and is financially viable, there is a huge area of open markets waiting to be found. There are also many other home based businesses to be looked into, that aren't necessarily done online. Who knows, you might be the one to discover a whole new niche.