Wednesday 30 March 2016

53 Work At Home Online Opportunities...And other Fiverr Gigs

I'll get to the 53 Work At Home Online Opportunities element in a second.

But the thing about 'living' online is that there is so much out there that you didn't realize existed (or even realized that you ever needed!). That in itself is a charm and a curse. Is it useful? Is it relevant? Am I killing brain cells and time or am I genuinely adding value to myself?

That's the world I'm still learning to navigate as I look at earning more online income. There are a lot of good strategies out there which may have value for me in the future; there are plenty that make absolutely no sense to me at all. In the meantime, I'm having fun learning and falling at every turn.

And in my endeavors to build more in the way of income streams online, I've spent quite a bit of time on Fiverr, pitching my wares there and learning how other people are making money there. There are people pitching all kinds of services there. You need a logo? It's yours for $5 (well, $5 plus a bit of Fiverr commission). You need an article written for you? This is the place to go for the cheap and cheerful.
Make money online by being smart

The problem with the approach in many cases, though, is the extent to which you are trading time for money. If it's a gig that takes five minutes to create, then brilliant -- you've earned your $5 (minus commissions) in five minutes flat. But if you've got a gig that doesn't allow you to upsell any other service, and it's not taking just a few minutes to do, then you could be working an hour or two for $5. And that doesn't work out well in my head -- I realized that after a bit of trial and error.

It's true that different parts of the world have different costs of living and some people are actually able to make a decent living by being ultra efficient. But for someone like me with a lower work ethic than a lot of people I've got to work out whether I'm really making the most of my time online.

And then there are gigs like this 53 Work At Home Online one that fits perfectly into the model. It's created once and can be sold multiple times. You are, in reality treating Fiverr as your retail outlet. Your Amazon, if you will. Ok, you don't get the traffic in the same way, and you will have to promote and manually send out your work by yourself, but it's a great way of using the Fiverr system without spending hours upon hours in creating a service. It's an approach that I'm adopting.

At the end of the day, making money online is very much about having the right systems in place that will allow you to leverage other people's time, money, energy and platforms. It's about working smarter as well as harder. Time for me to practice what I preach.


Tuesday 8 March 2016

Building Online Income Momentum

Making money online is actually quite easy....if you have something to offer. And package it in the right way.

That's my current interpretation anyway. Over the last month I've been focusing exactly on that - having something to offer and making it looking appealing enough for someone to be willing enough to pay for it. Well, I've spent a lot time fine-tuning my profiles on PeoplePerHour and Upwork, in addition to looking at the skills I've got to offer and tried to improve them. And it's started to pay off.

I've managed to snag myself a regular resume / CV writing gig with a company out of London, while another company contacted me to help re-write the content of their website. I've also had requests for two one-off projects. So there's clearly been some traction.

Yes, it is still trading time for money. The slower I do a task, the less of a return I'm getting on a per hourly basis. It's not perfect and it doesn't represent my long-term focus of building passive income streams.

But for now, at least, it's a regular income stream that can build into something bigger if I play my cards right. It also helps me to improve my career capital.

So I will still default to Prolific Academic and Postloop for easy and consistent earnings opportunities. They do that very well. But for building my long-term opportunities I will continue to look to build the future.