Work from Home and Make Money Online: Easy Ways to Get Started

Here are six ways that you can make money online (including links to more than 30 companies that are offering work from home opportunities right now).

These opportunities are kind of like the online equivalent of driving for Uber — basic jobs to make money using skills that most people already have. And unlike many of the more advanced ways to make money online, these opportunities do not require you to spend time building a brand or an audience before you can get started.

Content Moderation, Data Validation, and other “microtasks”

The following companies use a virtual army of freelance workers to perform small tasks like moderating content, reviewing and categorizing social media posts, tagging images, and validating sample data on behalf of their clients. Most of the work is “gig” based with no ongoing commitment.

• Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk) is a “crowdsourcing marketplace” for individuals and businesses to outsource tasks (known as “HITs”) like simple data validation and research, survey participation, content moderation, and more. You can sign-up online and get paid to complete HITs.

• Appen provides their clients with “high-quality data for machine learning” and offers a variety of related work opportunities, such as rating, transcription, translation, social media evaluation, and search engine evaluation.
  
  
• Clickworker provides businesses with datasets for machine learning & artificial intelligence (AI) training as well as content creation, categorization and tagging. These services are powered by a global crowd of more than 1.9 million internet users who have enrolled as “Clickworkers”.
  
  You can sign up to become a Clickworker on their website and then work independently on a freelance basis doing things like research, writing product descriptions, categorizing content, editing copy, and filling out surveys.
  
  
• Figure Eight provides “human intelligence” (that’s where you come in) to augment and support their clients’ machine learning projects. The work is “on demand” — once you join the platform, you can select a project from the “task wall” that interests you, read the instructions, and get started. They claim that you can task for as long as you’d like and come back whenever you want, because they have a constant supply of tasks to be done.
  
  
• Lion Bridge SmartCrowd offers online, work from home opportunities all over the world (including Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America). Typical jobs include activities like, “analyzing and providing feedback on text, web pages, images and other types of information for leading search engines, using an online tool.”
  
  
• Remotasks allows you to work from home and make money doing tasks like tagging images transcribing audio, and moderating content. English fluency is the only requirement.
  
  
• Respondent provides opportunities to work from home by to participating in studies to earn money. Here’s an example: “Seeking people that have recently purchased or are considering purchasing auto insurance” (pays $20 for 20 minutes of work).

Customer Service and Virtual Assistance

• 5CA provides support solutions for video games, consumer electronics, and eCommerce. They offer remote customer service jobs providing support via all communications channels, including email, chat, social and phone in multiple languages.
  
  
• Fancy Hands is currently hiring “smart people who want to help build a great company and get paid” to work as remote virtual assistants for their thousands of clients.
  
  
• Time Etc provides busy professionals in over 10,000 companies with virtual assistants based in the United States who take care of their to-do lists. As a virtual assistant, Time Etc offers a guaranteed, fixed, hourly pay rate matched to your skills, with no overseas competition and no bidding to secure jobs.
  
  
• Working Solutions offers remote customer service jobs that you can do from home. Unlike traditional positions, some of these jobs pay by the task or based on the minutes spent on the phone. Their website claims that agents can earn the equivalent of $9 to $30 per hour, depending on the program.

Proofreading and Editing

There are many companies in the business of providing outsourced, professional, proofreading and editing services to businesses, writers, publishers, and students. The companies below rely on a network of freelance editors who work from home to provide their services.

• Cambridge Proofreading delivers high quality, accurate proofreading and quality editing services to their clients. According to their website, they are “always interested in hearing from experienced editors who can help us deliver on this commitment.” Requirements: Must be a native speaker of English, hold at least a bachelor’s degree from a well-respected American, British, or English-speaking university, and be able to commit to at least 10,000 words editing per week.
  
  
• JobsforEditors.com specializes in writing quality papers and editing texts in English for business customers and individual clients from the USA, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, and other countries. They are currently hiring both editors and managing editors.
  
  
• ProofreadingServices.com is an award-winning team of professional editors and proofreaders that has revised documents for 10,000+ clients in 100+ countries. They hire part-time and full-time proofreaders who demonstrate superlative proofreading and editing skills. You are welcome to apply from any country.
  
  
• Scribendi is an internet-based language company founded in 1997 that offers document revision services to clients in business, academia, and publishing. As one of Scribendi’s freelance editors, you have the ability to work from home while choosing the types of assignments that interest you and editing completely on your own schedule.
  
  
• Scribbr has helped thousands of students perfect their theses and earn their degrees. Their team of 500+ academic editors on 6 continents offers services in 10 languages. As a Scribbr editor, you would be part of a select group of editors who use their love of language to help students graduate.

Teaching English Online

One of the most popular ways to make money working from home is by teaching English online. This market has exploded in just the last few years. Most of the companies and the students are based in China, but they hire teachers from all over the world.

The exact requirements vary from one company to another, but you don’t necessarily need previous teaching experience. Most companies require teachers to be native English speakers and to have a college degree. You may also need a teaching certificate (which you can get online).

• DaDa ABC claims to be the leading online English education platform based in China. The company was founded in 2013 and is partnered with Pearson Education, McGraw-Hill Education, Oxford University Press, and National Geographic Learning.
  
  You can work with DaDa from anywhere as long as you have a stable internet connection. To qualify as a teacher, you must have a Bachelor’s degree as well as a teaching certificate (TEFL/TESOL/CELTA, etc).
  
  
• QKids connects 800,000+ Chinese young learners between 4 – 12 years old with you and thousands of other online teachers, tutors, educators, stay at home parents, college students, and all those who have a passion for teaching.
  
  
• VIPKid is one of the most well-known companies in this space with 100,000 teachers and 700,000 students. They allow you to “work when you want, where you want – with no commitment or minimum hours” and earn up to $22 per hour as a teacher. Here’s a “day in the life” blog post of a VIPKid teacher.
  
  
• GoGoKid is similar to the companies above, pairing Chinese students 1-on-1 with native English speaking teachers.
  
  
• italki is a little different than the other companies above, because it allows students in any country to learn any language (not just English) with 1-on-1 instruction from native speakers. As an italki teacher, you can set your own prices and hours.
  
  
• PalFish is an app-based English learning platform. PalFish offers both official courses as well as “Free Talk”, a way for students to practice English with native speakers. Here’s a guide to teaching on PalFish.

Transcription

Transcribing audio and video files into text is another popular way to make money working online. Transcription gigs usually pay per minute of source material that you transcribe, so the amount of money that you can earn per hour or day depends on how fast you work.

Here are a few of the many websites where you can find transcription gigs online:

• Go Transcript
• Rev Transcription
• SpeakWrite
• Transcribe Me

You can read more about the different types of transcription jobs, training, and recommended equipment here.

User Testing

One of the main challenges for those of us who make websites and apps is that there are so many different devices, screen sizes, browsers, and other factors that influence how our work will look, feel, and perform for a given user. That’s why it’s common for website and app developers to have a variety of computers/monitors, laptops, and smart phones at their desks.

Even with all of those devices, and recruiting friends to help, often times there are still more pages, screens, and conditions than we can test. Thankfully there are several companies that offer this kind of testing as a service now. You can sign up with these companies to become a tester yourself:

• TestingTime allows you to create a profile on their website, then if your profile matches one of their projects, they will send you an email invitation to participate in a test. Their website claims that you can earn up to 50 EUR per hour.
  
  
• TryMyUI makes the web easier to use by helping designers and programmers see the problems that people experience while using their sites and apps. As a tester, all you have to do is “be yourself: use the test website exactly as you would in a real-life situation, and voice your thoughts and frustrations out loud so the site developers can understand your experience.” You will be paid $10 for each test (a typical test lasts about 20 minutes).
  
  
• Userfeel testers conduct usability tests on websites by imagining a scenario and perform certain tasks (like finding a product in an online store and going through the checkout process). Each test lasts 10-20 minutes and pays $10.
  
  
• Userlytics offers testing work that consists of providing feedback while completing a series of tasks interacting with web sites or mobile apps (or viewing video commercials). According to their website, the amount you can earn varies by test “$5, $10, $15, even up to $90.”
  
  
• UserTesting pays you to visit websites or apps, complete a set of tasks, and speak your thoughts aloud. Their website says that you will get $10 (via PayPal) for every 20-minute test video you complete.