Broke? Don’t Get Part-Time Job. Start A Part-Time Small Business
November 10, 2007 By
If you’re an adult and not a stay at home mom, chances are you have a full-time job which keeps you from being at home from eight in the morning to five at night. Unfortunately the eight-to-five gig doesn’t always pay all of our expenses, and we have to find a secondary source of income. Some people turn to overtime and part-time jobs, but these are often very inflexible because you have to work when they want you to, not when it works for you. If you start your own home business, you can make additional income on your schedule, and not theirs. This will make it a lot easier to handle the additional workload if you can do it at your convenience. Here are some ideas to get you started on creating your own sources of additional revenue.
Flipping Houses - If you’ve ever seen some of those TLC and Discovery shows, flipping houses can be very profitable if you do it properly. Often times flippers make mistakes and try to do too much, but if you can do it right you can easily make tens of thousands of dollars for a couple month’s work of part-time repairs. You’ll want to know a lot about construction before considering this move.
Freelance Writing - Some people have a knack for writing, others do not. If you’re one who does, there are several companies online which will pay around $5-$15 for freelance written news articles, if you can get enough work this can be a very profitable part-time job.
Freelance Tech Work - If you went to college for a degree with the word computer in it, you’re in luck. There’s all sorts of freelance work to be had in programming, web design, database work and the like. If you’ve got the skills, you are worth a decent amount of money for your time.
eBay - EBay is a great way for you to get rid of a lot of the old junk sitting around your home that you want gone. It’s probably not a fantastic way to make extra income considering that they keep raising fees, but it’s a good way to get rid of stuff you no longer want.
Flipping Cars - If you’re a gear head, consider purchasing cars that need repair, and fixing them up and reselling them. You can also buy old cars and restore them for additional income.
Online Surveys - There’s a lot of junk that goes around with online surveys, but if you find a high quality online survey company, you can easily make $25 for an hours worth of work. You won’t get rich doing this, but you’ll get some nice extra income for fun!
Blogging - Increasingly people are monetizing their weblogs. You can use promotion techniques and advertising to turn your blog into a source of income.
Transcription - If you know how to type, chances are you can get some data entry or transcription work that you can do on the side whenever you want.
Babysitting - Who could forget this? We all did it when we were younger, so why not now? Get a few of the neighbor’s kids over on a Friday night and make some extra money!
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November 10th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
do you have links to any of the freelance writing sites? all the ones I find are scams or spam
November 10th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
About Freelance Writing - New sites like StoryMash.com/thisby.us/triond.com are great places to make easy money, just by writing, even if you are not a good writer. There are many free writing contests as well.
November 10th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
I had two ideas:
* You can make LED candles rather easily with some small parts from Radio Shack (or a cheaper place online) and a bunch of melted wax. Sell them online for the holidays or any time of the year.
* You can go to radexinc.com and pick up a box of see-through picture viewers, then borrow some time at Kinko’s with a color laserjet and thin weight white paper, and make pictures for people. Your website could be like keychainpictures.com and you could have already-made pictures in a variety of categories, or sell custom ones for people who upload images. For just a little bit of cash, you could turn these out by the thousands.
The only reason I haven’t done them is because my wife would rather I focus on finishing my web software that I’m planning to sell.
November 10th, 2007 at 6:42 pm
You could start a phone answering service for little to nothing, then expand it later on with a cheap PBX you make yourself using parts from Digium and a free software package like Asterisk.
November 10th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
I’ve always thought that jewelry websites are the best thing if I can ever get off my duff to do it. They have huge markup, get a lot of web hits, and you don’t even really need to have the actual product in your inventory. I mean, you can resell other people’s stuff through reseller agreements and your own small markup. If you’re site is attractive enough, zippy fast enough, and you hop on live and communicate with your customers through live chat, Internet phone, quarterly newsletters, or whatever, you might actually gain quite a following, even repeat customers, and never have a scrap of inventory. Of course, that’s not sustainable for too long, so you’ll have to eventually start to collect inventory and perhaps hire some helpers, but by then you’ll be rolling in cash.
November 10th, 2007 at 6:59 pm
Jewelry? Have you looked at camera security systems? These sound difficult, but they really are pathetically easy to show customers how to set them up by themselves (saving loads of cash). It’s almost like setting up a DVD and a web cam. Some cameras even don’t require an electrician and can send power over a combination power and MPEG cable, and collect the power from a power strip at the base unit. Some can run wirelessly. Many companies in any USA town will charge $18,000 to setup 4 cameras and a monitoring station, but they can purchase the equipment online for a mere $3,000-$5,000. With the recent emphasis in the USA on homeland security, or perhaps the thefts by all the new gang activity you hear, you have an easy marketing strategy with many businesses. What I like about this versus jewelry is that you can sell far less, have an even greater markup, and make far more money much faster.
November 10th, 2007 at 8:20 pm
I started working in a mailroom at this USA tax business. I didn’t really know what they did exactly but now I think I do. Seems like an easy business to start. Evidently there’s these 8850 WOTC and WTW tax credits you can do for businesses, and some FHA Enterprise Zone tax credits, and also some state tax credit programs for businesses. Many mid-sized businesses don’t even know they can make a few changes and start to qualify for them. Your business can handle that paperwork for the businesses, maximizing the most credit possible. The tax business I work for starting doing this as a very tiny startup, but now they’re a massive nationwide business with Fortune 100 customers. The big fish seem all wrapped up in my employer, but there’s plenty of mid-sized and small fish to go around.
And I imagine in many countries of the world they have something similar that almost anyone could get started with.
November 10th, 2007 at 8:24 pm
How about joining a lending site like prosper.com and lend money to people, earning interest and part of the finance charges?
November 10th, 2007 at 8:31 pm
You know how you hear all these companies doing stupid stuff, putting it on the web, and walking away with several hundred thousand or perhaps a million or more dollars? There have been some crazy stories, such as the high school kid who sold advertising space to the tune of a million dollars on this great big bitmap that displays on his website. The website does nothing else but this and now he’s a millionaire. Another guy had a site where he made several million simply by selling dressed-up antenna balls that people put on their antennas when they go to football, baseball, or NASCAR events.
So I had an even better idea — yaba.com. You know how all these blogger sites seem to have a tinge of reality to them, but a tinge of falsehoods and mis-notions? You know how blogger sites run the gamut of useful information or are a terrible waste of time in the other extreme? Many sites have verbose guys who rarely get to the point, even though they may have some valid points.
Well, I had the idea of yaba.com. At yaba.com, it would have me seeming to say something fairly important, but would use hillarious nonsense phrases like “Yaba aba dot aba laba. HOw CABA WABA DOTH YABA? Obiosobla, this *CANNABA* lob trobba.”, speaking an absolute ridiculous, made up language, but trying desperately to try and get my message across along with completely ridiculous photos, bullet points, numbered lists, break out sections, interviews, quotes from SMEs, and a comment area where all the comments are fake but have people responding to me in this same language. Even the advertising on the site would be made up of an animated GIF with this craziness. When you visit the site, you would randomly get, about every 2 days, one of 10 versions, giving the impression that the site is updated frequently.
And, in a ribbon on an angle in the upper lefthand corner, would be a link that said, “Donataba” with a dollar bill icon on it. If you click it, it’s a PayPal link where the person could donate to my “cause”, whatever they think that cause may be.
Another link would say, “Advertiba”. When you click it it asks if you want to pay to advertise on my site with your product using the yaba translator for the text animated across two of your product images and your legitimate website name. This would then get rolled up into an animated GIF and be put into rotation among the other ads there. Besides the initial fee of $20, they would pay me in purchase clicks at least $2, whatever those purchase clicks they feel to be. (I would not enforce it that much, however.) (BTW, I would use a sneaky trick where if the advertiser comes to my site with even a remotely similar IP address (the first 2 octets), the odds get higher that they’ll see their own advertisement.)
Last, I would have a link called “Pressaba”, where the press could click this and get the real scoop on why this site is the crazy way it is, and “Contactaba,” where you could respond to my website.
Anyway, sure, it’s a little zany, but it might get donations, and if people can have “Help A Brotha Out” sites like these…
http://www.dmoz.org/Society/People/Requesting_Help/Make_Me_Rich/
…surely they would like to donate to something just as funny.
November 10th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
I’ve thought about getting a couple weight loss and great abs books, changing them up a little so that people can do them with the least amount of equipment, getting a muscle-bound guy in town willing to do the exercises and be filmed, make a “muscle man workout” kind of DVD, take snapshots of it to market on YouTube and on the website, and try to sell these online. Since studies show that women are the major online purchasers around the holidays, and especially around eBay, I could try to cater this sort of thing as a gift they could give their boyfriends or husbands, and sell it any way I can, even on eBay.
November 11th, 2007 at 10:24 am
Very good ideas people, thank you!
November 15th, 2007 at 12:00 am
Find 500 well-known charities. Put up 500 websites with RSS news feeds and your own blog with topics for these charities, and put donate buttons all over the site. Create funding drives for these charities. Clearly mark that you are not affiliated with the charity but help sponsor funding drives. With the money you get for charity, you donate 100% to charity. Create another donate button to donate to you to help keep up the cost of the site. Post a public disclosure statement that clearly shows where the donation money is going and even turn that over to the IRS (or your own required tax agency for your country).
Now, add in Google AdSense and collect 100% of the ad revenue from this. Do not broadcast this small fact and avoid comment of it.
November 15th, 2007 at 12:11 am
I’ve also heard that some people can make money with freelance photos, posting them to pay-for-your-photos type of sites. You can take even ones slightly out of focus if they have an artistic bent or fit a great theme. In fact, there’s a special Russian camera called a lomo and the photos are called lomography. It’s an art form that virtually anyone can do and which you often see in more modern magazines like Wired.
http://www.aisling.net/darkroom/whatsalomo.htm
November 15th, 2007 at 12:17 am
Many people still don’t know how cheap or easy it is to build a website and will still be willing to pay you at least $500-$600 a year for a site. And if you update it every month for them, they might pay you at least $50 a month. I’ve landed a few deals with local politicians to host their sites. I know a firm in town, though, which made a canned system that they can customize rather easily and which offers an online calendar of events, an online magazine of sorts, a monthly newsletter with subscriptions, interactive surveys, and so on. This firm is actually paid $200 per month for these content sites for businesses and churches and it blows me away that they are landing these sales. I haven’t been that lucky yet.
Plus, you can build some static catalog pages for people, linking it with Paypal and Google Checkout (good to offer both), in a matter of minutes, creating rapid eCommerce solutions.
November 15th, 2007 at 12:33 am
I have a hunch that making a few hundred blog + forum sites on (a) video game stuff, and (b) celebrity news and gossip would definitely get you some decent AdSense revenue. You could even probably find willing people online to moderate sites for free just to pass the time and help you out. You could even share a small portion of your AdSense revenue with them twice a year as a kind of bonus.
November 15th, 2007 at 12:39 am
After reading some of these posts here, it gave me an idea. Have you ever stopped over at ThinkGeek.com? I mean, they collected a set of cool gadgets together. It’s a great shopping place around various holidays. It didn’t appear to be that hard to build a site like this with very little money, and, like Jane Hansen said — you might not have to initially keep the inventory on hand. Instead, when starting out, just do reseller agreements with your own profit margin. Then, as you grow, it’s obvious you’ll need to increase your revenue. Grow the business only as much as you can handle. Then, cash out and sell the business to someone else to take it to even higher levels, or remain on as a minor stock holder in its private stock while it continues to grow under some larger firm’s steady hand.
November 16th, 2007 at 5:38 am
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