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Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

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Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

#71
post #57
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, this kind of thing still works though. Google updates are slowly trending towards hitting low quality stuff like spun articles though.

Sadly yes some of this does work, but you have to buy the tools and resources promoted by these sorts of sites, most of which would only seem to have experience using them to market SEO tools to other wannabee web marketers. The search engines are getting smarter though as you say, and depending on these sorts of techniques is asking for trouble.

Same with buying links from private blog networks and similar, Google is cracking down on this but people are still using links from vast blog networks and ranking well today.

Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

#72
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contract programming? Try advertising on Kijiji/Craigstlist. There's always people out there who will pay you to make a website. Takes away the risk of not making anything from the site.

I don't happen to be a programmer. I have skills at doing things the world says cannot be done. There appears to be no money in either doing the impossible nor in trying to share information on how to do so. But thanks anyway.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

#73
post #21

My girlfriend was doing medical transcription for a while before going back to school. It's boring, but it's a somewhat skilled position and thus the pay is decent (my girlfriend topped out around 2k per month). Your wife will have to get a medical transcription certification first, though. Here's the company she worked for: http://www.nuance-nts.com/ - they're the same people that do Dragon Naturally Speaking and Si…

Hey. Glad I ran into this post. My girlfriend likes paperwork, has been working as a nurse for four years, and is looking for a change for at least a bit. Can you tell me where your girlfriend got her transcription certification and how long it took?

Most community colleges with any sort of health programs (which are most) offer medical transcription programs. They're usually only a semester or two long and typically are very affordable. That said you may be able to find faster private/for profit certification programs.

Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

#74
My wife was in the same position. She found some work pretty quickly networking at startup meetups. She ended overseeing a technical project, and doing some lite database work. She had a few opportunities; but picked the one that had the fewest hours.

If she has some skills, or can even pretend to have them, there are people that are desperate to give work to other people they meet at meetups.

Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

#76
post #49

QA, testing web sites in late development and logging bugs. Most developers hate doing this, & PM's are not good at anything. I usually pay $40/hr for this, however it only takes a few hours, and that rate means the bug report is reported in a way that it's easy to read and recreate without having to have a conversation about it.

I'd love to get into doing this on the side, but 99% of QA jobs I've seen require solid knowledge of programming. Is this not the case?

Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

#77
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey. Glad I ran into this post. My girlfriend likes paperwork, has been working as a nurse for four years, and is looking for a change for at least a bit. Can you tell me where your girlfriend got her transcription certification and how long it took?

Most community colleges with any sort of health programs (which are most) offer medical transcription programs. They're usually only a semester or two long and typically are very affordable. That said you may be able to find faster private/for profit certification programs.

Thanks very much. I will look into it.

Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

#78
post #35
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This site promotes horrible spammy paractices such as "article spinning" (automated word substitution) and cross-posting the same (spun) article to numerous sites to with links to the niche site to enhance google-rank. Every link here is an affiliate link for another marketing site in the dense web of self-referential marketing guru sites. Not HN-ey is one way to put it!

So are there better resources you would recommend? Thanks.

Check out http://www.seobook.com/ and http://www.seo-theory.com/

Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

#79
post #27

just a wild, very wild and untested, idea. a mini-niche "mechanical turk" iphone(andorid) app. i.e.: if your wife is called "gloria" the app is called "Ask Gloria" * user types in an question/request. * gloria (the real gloria) response. the app is free(? or 0.99) with a 1 question package. an additional question pack (of 5 questions) costs 10(?)$ the selling point is that not an anonymous person or siri-AI answers y…

Vodafone in Australia (not sure about everywhere else) once had a similar service which they pitched as being able to find the answer to anything. I only used it once or twice, often while trying to prove something in a bar.

Pretty handy service however I think you'd want to be able to call in your question as there might be a bit of forwards and backs in trying to work out exactly what you're trying to get the answer to.

Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

#80
Thanks for all the replies, I actually wasn't expecting so much of a response - maybe there are a lot more people out there in a similar situation. I like the medical transcriptionist suggestion, as well as the ebay & craigslist buy & resell though I'm not sure she or I know the best type of items to focus on. As for a niche site selling x-type of items... that sounds alright and one I've thought of - but what's a good niche market where the google ad words prices aren't astronomical? Anyone?
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