Working from home is one of the greatest things that can happen to a person’s life. It reduces the stress that comes with working in a corporate environment, plus it also removes the hassles of commuting, preparing for work, buying new clothes, and so, much more.
But where should you even start?
The first thing you need to ask yourself is what skills you possess. Surely, you will find work online, and earn close to if not as much as your salary from your office work. It all depends on what you can offer, but you need to know that 1.8 million Americans left their jobs between 2005 and 2017 to work from home.
What this tells us is that it works, and that you can earn a living from home. And you can do it, too. Today, you will learn the top 21 best work from home jobs for 2020.
1. Virtual Assistant
A virtual assistant or VA is not a secretary as many others think. Your job as an assistant is to help the entrepreneur do the things that he or she could not do anymore. Most of these things are paperwork and office work, which are important but not as important as what the business owners do.
What do VAs do?
Here are some of the things that VAs do for their employers or clients:
- Setting up meetings
- Preparing paperwork
- Documentation
- Business management like order fulfillment
- Responding to emails and customer inquiries
- Transcription of conference calls
- Bookkeeping
- Scheduling activities
Others may involve running a business like simple social media marketing, uploading products, researching new products, product documentation, and a lot more.
How much money can you make?
Depending on the complexity of the task, you can charge anywhere between $5 and $35 per hour. If you can find a client who can pay you $10 per hour, you are earning more than what a fastfood restaurant employee earns. At $10 per hour, your monthly salary is roughly $1,760 per month.
2. Freelance Writing
Freelance writing does not mean you have to write novels. There is a ton of writing materials out there that the world needs, and you can write for one or several types.
As a writer, you can charge by the hour or by word count. Just remember that as a freelance writer, you are classified most of the time as a ghostwriter and that you do not retain copyright to the materials you produce.
What do freelance writers do?
Here are the different types of materials that you can write to earn:
- Copywriting
- Fiction eBooks
- Non-Fiction eBooks
- Blogs
- Academic papers
- White papers
- Product descriptions
- Tutorials and how-to articles
- Wiki-type articles
- Book, movie, and game reviews
To become a freelance writer, you can start your career in three ways:
- Offer your services in online marketplaces
- Put up a website and advertise your services
- Apply to writing jobs in job forums, job boards, and sites like LinkedIn.
How much money can you make?
For those who are starting out, the most common rate is between $0.01 and $0.03 per word. If you can write 5,000 words per day at $0.03, you can earn as much as $3,300 per month. Professional writers earn more than this as they charge at least $100 for each article.
3. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a process where you promote a company’s products. The products can be physical or digital. If you made a sale, you will receive a commission.
To get started, you have to register in a company’s affiliate program. Once your registration is approved, you will receive a link. This is the link to the product that you will promote. If a person clicks this link and buys, you will receive a commission.
What do affiliate marketers do?
The only thing that affiliate marketers do is to promote the product of their partners. This, however, can be done in many ways.
- Create videos and post them on YouTube; these videos can be product reviews or tutorials that will showcase the items you are promoting
- Write product reviews or tutorials and publish them in your blog
- Go to forums and answer questions; help people solve their problems and offer the product you are promoting as a solution
- Advertise in several channels; create advertisements and squeeze pages that will take the lead to the company’s purchase page
How much money can you make?
There is no direct answer here. Commissions can be as low as 4% and as much as 50%. Some commissions are one-time only, and some can be recurring. There are affiliate marketers who are earning $5,000 per month.
4. Voiceover Artist
Whether it is a movie, radio, or TV commercial, the voice you hear are from voiceover artists. These people read a script, and their recording is what is used in these commercials.
If you have the talent to read a script and give life to it with your voice, then you can be a voiceover artist. All you need is a microphone, a quiet space, a recording device, plus an audio editing tool.
What do voiceover artists do?
Voiceover artists do only one thing: read a script. However, it is important that we share with you what kinds of scripts these are and what they are used for.
These are:
- Advertisements that online entrepreneurs would use for their businesses
- Short tutorials that provide step by step instructions
- Reading stories for books that will be converted into audio books
- Learning materials for kids, like reciting or reading words with the right pronunciation
- Different sounds that will be used for shows like animal sounds, car sounds, etc.
How much money can you make?
Voiceover artists charge at least $10 per 100 words. Once the recording is over, you have to give your client the audio file, either in WAV or MP3 format. There are voiceover artists in online market places who have hundreds of clients per month.
5. Online Tutor / Coach
As an online tutor, your duty is to teach students become better at subjects they are struggling with. However, most tutorial jobs offered today are for kids from non-English countries. These are children of rich people, and their parents want them to learn the language.
There are also adults who need tutoring, or college students who have the budget and the desire to excel in their classes. Whatever it is, you can only teach subjects that you are good at. You can also be a self-improvement coach or a business coach.
What do tutors/coaches do?
Here are the things that tutors do to ensure that their students or clients achieve success:
- Create lesson plans
- Conduct the tutorial—around one hour per session
- Create quizzes and exams to assess what the student has learned
- Provide consulting services
- Do analysis if the student is a business person
- Provide recommendations to fix problems
How much money can you make?
As a tutor, you can charge at least $25 per hour. Experts can even charge $50 to $100 per hour. It all depends on the subject you are teaching and your kind of clientele.
6. Graphic Arts
As a graphic artist, you will be responsible for creating infographics, posters, and also hero banners for websites. You can also offer photo editing services.
Your target clients are those who are doing business online like influencers and bloggers. Another group you can target are corporate clients that need a steady stream of graphic art for each blog that they post.
What do graphic artists do?
There is a ton of work for graphic artists. Pretty much, every image, cartoon, drawing, and edited photo you see on the internet is made by a graphic artist.
To give you a perspective, here are some examples of art work you can offer:
- Design business cards
- Posters, infographic, posters, banners, menus, flyers
- Cartoons and caricature
- 3D drawings
- Artwork for advertising materials
- T-shirt design
- Comic book drawings
- Photo editing
- Turning photos into cartoon portraits
How much money can you make?
This really varies because the price of art is difficult to pin down. The price you charge is going to depend on the kind of artwork you produce. Some charge at least $40 for a single art work, while some charge hundreds of dollars.
What’s important is that you know how long it will take you to finish a job. If you do, you have to convert the hours of work into money that you are comfortable charging. If you are okay with $20 per hour, and the artwork will take you five hours, then charge $100 for that project.
7. Video Editing
Video editing is not the same with animation services. With video editing, the video does not come from you. The video clips come from the client, and your job is to cut it, or add elements to the video including sounds.
Video editing requires hard work and sophisticated tools. As a video editor, you have to invest in a powerful computer and video editing software. Overall, you may need to spend about $500 for both these tools.
What do video editors do?
Edited videos are used in movies, ads, tutorials, and others.
Here are some examples of what you are expected to do:
- Cut the video parts that the client does not like
- Make sure the that audio is syncing with the lips of the person talking
- Add music to the video
- Add overlays such as titles, call outs, and call to action statements in the video
How much money can you make?
Like the graphic artist, you have to charge by the hour or by project. The amount of money you charge depends on the complexity of the video editing job. You can charge at least $30 for simple video editing tasks, and at least $100 if you are asked to add a lot of effects.
8. Video Animator
As a video animator, your job is not just to edit the video but to create the entirety of it. You will create the video from start to finish. Most of these are used for commercials, and they come in different lengths.
What do video animators do?
Here are some examples of the services you can offer as a video animator:
- Cartoon shows
- Whiteboard videos
- Explainer videos
- Commercials that really involve people
- 3D effects for intro and outro
- Stickman animation
- Logo animation
How much money can you make?
You can charge $10 for a very basic animation that you can do with templates and software. For videos that are longer and more complicated, like 3D videos or stories, you can charge up to $400 per project.
9. Web Design
Web design includes building the website yourself. As a designer, it is like being an architect and a builder at the same time. You will be in charge of the color, the function, the backend coding and the programming of the website.
What do web designers do?
As a web designer, here are your duties or services:
- Create landing pages
- Create a UX or UI plan
- Create web banners
- Create templates that can be used in web-building platforms
How much money can you make?
Web designers can earn anywhere from $10 and $1,000 per project. If you are going to design a simple one-page website, do not expect to get paid a lot of money. If you want to earn a lot, you have to create a stunning and fully-functional website that is unique.
10. Build Online Stores
You can do this in two ways. The first one is to build an online store for you and sell goods online. The second one is to build online stores for clients.
We will focus on the latter. As a web builder, your target market is comprised of people who want to build an online business but do not know how to build a store.
What do online store builders do?
If you build an online store, it has to be a fully functional web store before you turn it over to your clients.
Here are the things expected from you:
- Build a store on the preferred platform of your client
- Add apps and plug-ins for functions that your client needs
- Upload products to the store
- Set-up the payment gateway for the store
- Add the domain name and make it work
- Make sure the site is secure
How much money can you make?
If you use platforms like Shopify or WooCommerce, you can charge as little as $49 for the build. This price, however, does not require a lot of work. For a fully unique and huge store, you can charge upwards of $500 per project.
11. Proofreading
This is a task that is related to writing. While writing deals with the creative aspect of it, editing and proofreading are both leaning on the technical side. As a proofreader, your job is to ensure that the written material meets the standards of print.
What do online proofreaders do?
- Here are your duties as a proofreader:
- Check and correct grammar and syntax errors
- Re-write sentences or correct the voice as you see fit
- Make sure the style follows standards like APA or Chicago style of writing
- Ensure that the material is not copied of lifted from other source
- Make sure that references are properly cited
How much money can you make?
The amount of money you charge depends on the length of words. The kind of work you do also dictates how much you can charge.
Proofreading gigs where you only check grammar and spelling cost lesser than a complete suite of editing service. As a proofreader, you can charge anywhere between $10 and $500 per project.
12. Marketing Manager
As a marketing manager, do not make the mistake of believing that your task is just to create and post promotional items. Your duty is just one thing: make money for your clients. Since digital marketing has a big scope, you have to choose a specialization.
This can be SEO, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, ads, Pinterest, and a whole lot more. Basically, the promise you offer to your clients is that you will help them make more sales. Of course, you cannot guarantee this, but you need to deliver results.
What do marketing managers do?
Here are the duties of marketing managers:
- Think of ad creatives
- Work with animators and graphic artists to bring the ad concept to life
- Plan the ad release, the target market, and release the ads
- Measure the effectiveness of the campaign
- Make revisions if the campaign is not yielding positive results
- Measure sales and conversion rate
How much money can you make?
Internet marketers charge by the hour. Depending on your level of expertise and the kind of service you are offering, you can charge at least $25 per hour. It is likely also that your client will only hire you on a project basis. In this case, you can charge $1,000 or more per project.
13. Dropshipping
Dropshipping is a business model where you sell someone else’s products. In here, you have to build your own store, and then do the marketing yourself.
What do dropshippers do?
As a dropshipper, you are an entrepreneur. However, the products you are selling are not your own. It is what we call an arbitrage. You only buy the products from the supplier once a customer orders from your website.
Here are your activities as a dropshipper:
- Find suppliers
- Build a store
- List your products online
- Market your products
- Fulfil the orders
- Answer customer inquiries
- Issue refunds
How much money can you make?
Dropshippers make anywhere upwards of $1,000 per month. Some successful dropshippers made it possible to earn $300,000 in less than three months. The money you earn here depends on how hard you work.
14. Miscellaneous Offers
A miscellaneous offer is something that we cannot classify under most online work from home gigs. Examples of these are taking photos of yourself, being a model, and a lot more.
What services can you offer?
Here are some ideas of miscellaneous offers that you can offer:
- Sing a happy birthday song that is personalized
- Hold a banner of a client and take a photo of yourself
- Be model of a shirt or anything
- Offer astrology or spiritual healing
- Impersonate a person
How much money can you make?
Gigs like this do not cost a lot, but if you have a lot of customers, you can earn a ton. Personalized messages are a thing right now, and you can charge at least $10 for each gig.
15. Virtual Contact Center
A virtual contact center means you will take phone calls to answer customer inquiries. Some clients have a small operation and it is not financially sensible to build a facility. As such, they would rather hire work at home employees to do the job.
What do customer service representatives do?
There are a lot of jobs that customer service representatives do. Some do not even have to talk to customers. Instead, they do back office work.
Here are some tasks expected of you if you are a customer service rep:
- Answer customer inquiries
- Process refunds
- Provide technical solution to problems
- Update customer profiles in database
- Make outbound calls to make sales
How much money can you make?
Call center or contact center specialists earn by the hour. If you work from home as a fully employed individual, you may earn as much as $20 per hour.
16. Transcription
Transcription means you will write something from an audio file. Most of the people who need this service are lawyers and doctors. They have recordings that they need you to turn into text.
As a transcriptionist, you may also receive projects for writing the audio from a video, or to create subtitles of films. Some clients may also ask you for translation services.
What do transcriptionists do?
The basic job of a transcriptionist is to convert sound into written words. As such, you need a powerful headphone and a word processing system.
Here are some of the tasks expected of you:
- Convert audio into text
- Listen to podcast or interviews and convert it to text
- Create subtitles for movies or short clips
- Translate an audio into English
- Transcribe medical and legal audio files
How much money can you make?
Transcription services are paid depending on the length of the audio. The most common rate is $10 for every 10 minutes of audio. If the transcription requires translation, you can double your price. You can also ask for more money if there are more than two speakers on the audio or video file.
17. Data Entry
Data entry job is leaning towards gathering data. Most of the time, the clients you would get are those who are planning to do mass marketing. Some of the clients already have the data in PDF format, and they need you to transfer the info into a spreadsheet.
The output of your work is a spreadsheet with different columns. Some clients, however, have CRM tools. They will give you access to these tools so you can input data in there.
What do you do as a data entry specialist?
Your main duty is to type information that is accurate. In some cases, you have to do the research yourself.
- Here are the things expected of you as a data entry specialist:
- Type names, addresses, phone numbers, and other customer details
- Research for data about a specific group of people; for example, dentists in Chicago
- Transfer data from PDF or MS Word to a spreadsheet or a client tool
How much money can you make?
A data entry job is what we can call a commodity job. It means that it is so easy that a lot of people can do it. You can charge $5 per hour for this line of work. This is a job best done by those who do not need a full time job but rather a side gig only.
18. Dropserving
Dropserving is like dropshipping. The main difference is that instead of selling a merchant’s products, you are selling services.
All the things you are doing in dropshipping are the same with dropserving. The only difference is that you are offering a service. In here, you build a website where you offer different type of services. Once you receive an order, you order that service from a freelance service provider.
What do you do in dropserving?
You can offer all types of services that you like since it is not you who will do it. Basically, what you need to do is to find clients.
Here are some examples of services you can offer:
- SEO
- Writing
- Book Covers
- Graphic arts
- Voiceover
Pretty much, you can offer almost everything that we have on our list. Dropserving can give you an endless list of services. For as long as you can find a freelancer, you pass on the work to that freelancer. Your profit is the money you charge on top of what you pay the freelancer.
How much money can you make?
The sky is the limit here since you are putting a premium on top of the freelancer’s price. If a writer charges $10, you can sell that service for $20 or $30.
19. Air BnB Rental
If you have a spare room, you can rent it out through AirBnB. It is like converting your house into a mini-hotel.
To do this, you have to register for an account at AirBnB. Once your account is up, you have to upload photos of the room you are renting out, the amenities, the price, and your house rules like no pets allowed).
What do you do in AirBnB?
After listing your room, the next step is to market it. You can post it on social media, or you can just wait until for tourists to see it.
Here are some things you can do:
- Market in social media
- Be aggressive in advertising if there is an event in your area
How much money can you make?
This really depends. The price of your room is up to you. AirBnB charges at least 3% for every booking. If you plan to list the room for a long time and if the cost of your room is high, you can get a plan where you will pay $349 annually so you can save on fees.
20. Social Media Manager
As a social media manager, your focus is to put content on your client’s social media channels and respond to followers. Your job is to grow the follower count, which the client can market to later on.
What do social media managers do?
Some social media managers do ads, but the most common things that you will do are:
- Upload content
- Respond to comments
- Address customer issues
- Post motivating content
- Follow people
- Moderate groups and forums
How much money can you make?
As a full time social media manager, you can charge anywhere between $5 per hour up to $30 per hour. The rate you charge would depend on the kind of work you will do. If you can prove to your client that your management skills will bring amazing results, then you can charge more.
21. Sell Online
In here, you do not have to build a website. Instead, you will use platforms like eBay, Amazon, or Etsy. This being said, your products will be your own, unlike in dropshipping where the supplier manufactures the products you sell.
What do you do as an online seller?
Here are your task if you will work from home with this model:
- Create or buy your own products; keep them as inventory
- Upload them to your preferred platform
- Market the products aggressively
- Take orders and fulfil them
- Print shipping labels and ship the items
- Handle refunds and customer complaints
How much money can you make?
Many people who do this have become millionaires. Your earnings depend on your sales. You have to be good at marketing and you should sell products that have a demand. The other approach is to create a unique and personalized product, and sell it to a target niche.
Summary
There is a ton of work from home jobs out there. You can offer your services in online marketplaces, or apply to job boards. Whatever your approach is, make sure that you have a portfolio to offer. Without a portfolio, your clients will not have a “proof of concept”.
If there is something that you want to do but you are not sure how to start, take online courses so you can get proper guidance. Follow the steps laid out in the course, put in the hard work, and you will succeed and earn a decent salary.