How to Work From Home
Work from home is the dream job of many Americans. The freedom of working in your own space, the time money saved on transit, and the flexible hours make for an appealing proposition to most. However, it’s important to watch out, because scammers know that working from home sounds amazing to most people, and it often is too good to be true. Read on for some real ways to earn money from your own home, and some nasty scams to watch out for as well.
Amazon Mechanical Turk
Mechanical Turk, or Mturk, is one of the real ways to work from home, and is something that I have personal experience with. This can be a great place to start if you need to make some extra cash in your spare time, and if you get lucky, you can even find ways to make a full career out of it. Here’s how it works.
Mturk functions by allowing workers to perform HITs, which stands for Human Intelligence Tasks. The idea behind Mturk is that it behaves like a computer program that performs tasks that computers can’t do well, like language parsing or image recognition, or sometimes even writing and editing.
Many HITs are very low pay; maybe you’ll earn 2 or 3 cents for looking at an image and typing in what that image displays, or a few dollars for transcribing a voice recording. However, there are some tasks that pay much more. Most of these HITs will be restricted to only workers who are rated highly by others, or workers who have passed certain qualification tests. If you get into one of these competitive fields, Amazon Mechanical Turk can become a real job, earning $15, $20, or even higher per hour of work. The best part is that you set your own hours; you will never be penalized for working too much or too little, and you are your own boss as long as the work gets done well.
Youtube Content Creator
Another much more glamorous, though also much more luck based, way to work from home is to make and monetize videos on Youtube. There are all kinds of things you can do, just as long as you can get people interested in it. When you first start out, you won’t get many views, but if you make good, entertaining, or informative content, you stand a chance of gaining a following of tens, hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people! Here are some ways people have found success and are able to work from home on Youtube.
Vlogging, or video blogging, is an increasingly popular style of video, though it is also very competitive. For this, all you need to do is set up a webcam and talk about subjects that are interesting to you. Remember that you have an audience, so if you can think of topics that are informative or funny, or worthwhile to watch in some way, you’ll have a big advantage. It also helps to have a good personality, but that comes with practice.
Teaching videos can be very popular. If you know a lot about an academic subject, then making a video series teaching it in a way that’s brief, entertaining, and educational can be a great way to get a following. There are very popular channels that focus on history, math, science, literature, and more. You can focus on teaching adults who love learning, or children still in school who need help passing a test!
Let’s Play videos are content about video games! A let’s player will record themselves playing a video game while providing entertaining commentary or teaching about how to play the game well. You may laugh at the idea of playing video games for a job, but the number one most watched channel on Youtube is actually a let’s player, so don’t rule it out! This is obviously a very competitive field, but if you’re good at video games and funny to listen to, you stand a chance of landing the dream job of playing games for money!
Now that we’ve discussed a couple of ways to work from home on the internet, let’s talk about some less possible job opportunities that you may see floating around.
Pyramid Schemes
Also called MLM, standing for Multi Level Marketing, pyramid schemes work like this. A company will create a product that nobody actually wants, but the product isn’t the point of the business. The real way the pyramid scheme makes money is by calling every salesperson a recruiter who makes a percentage of the sales of every recruit under them. Rather than selling the product, these recruiters make money by convincing other people to buy the product with the intention to sell it, thus sending money all the way up the pyramid.
The problem with pyramid schemes is that the recruits three, four, five levels from the top will quickly find that all the people willing to be recruited are already in the system, and they have no one to sell their expensive “starter kits” to. Essentially, a pyramid scheme takes money from these low level recruits, and gives it to the people at the top who started the scam.
Pyramid schemes are often labelled as ways for motivated self starters to work from home, set their own hours, and be their own boss. Don’t get fooled by a pyramid scheme; look into any sales opportunity carefully and make sure you’re selling something that people might actually want to buy. If you’re responsible for recruiting other salespeople, that’s a big red flag.
The ability to work from home can be a dream come true, but it’s not easy to find! Everyone wants to work from home, so there’s a lot of competition. Hopefully this article has given you some opportunities to think about, as well as some nasty pitfalls to avoid! Look around for ways that you can make your living off of work from home, but watch out for pyramid schemes.