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Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

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Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#91

Post by MattGaiser »

truckerbill wrote: post #73
MattGaiser wrote: post #38

1. Teach English by video to children overseas. 2. Get a remote call centre job. 3. The DoorDashes and Uber Eats of the world are doing tremendous business right now, as is Amazon (and they have the Flex delivery service). Instacart was also hiring some 300,000 people. 4. If your friend is the creative or innovative type, there are a ton of competitions being hosted by various companies. You enter enough and the inco…

What kind of competitions?

Ideation, graphic design with innovation, and engineering are the ones I do.

Check out Mindsumo.com, Eyeka.com and herox.com

Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#92

Post by ge96 »

fred_is_fred wrote: post #79
goatherders wrote: post #77

There are some truly awful suggestions here. The question isnt about changing his life by learning to code or setting up a plastics machine (which is pretty cool but takes investment) or starting an affiliate site and then generating traffic, it's about generating income during a global pandemic. 1. Fiverr 2. Mechanical Turk 3. Craigslist Gigs 4. UpWork Can generate $50 by dinner time if you're willing to focus and p…

I think it's disingenuous to suggest that you can setup an account on these sites and have $50 by the end of the day "if you are willing to focus". With the exception of Mechanical Turk, which pays pennies, the others require you have a skill that people are willing to pay for.

I think the competition is nuts too, when I've been on the other side(hiring) it's overwhelming how many people you get to respond/hard to tell if the person is competent/trustworthy(with regard to allowing access to your tech to work on it). Starting from 0 is really hard(people with former work look more trustworthy).

Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#93

Post by cpach »

snazz wrote: post #71
xoxoy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s in all seriousness is a day trading market right now

It might be a good time for day trading, but it's probably not the kind of stable, safe income that an unemployed person needs.

I agree. A person in a dire economic situation should only day trade as much as they can afford to lose. Which might be $0.

Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#94

Post by ge96 »

thrower123 wrote: post #23

It seems that a lot of people are starting OnlyFans accounts...

that's interesting right, so much free stuff what compels you to pay, idk. there's that psychology too of being "closer" knowing someone eg. watching twitch or whatever... oh well glad I did not get sucked into that, though I'm not a social success myself

Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#95

Post by jefftk »

LanceH wrote: post #42
jefftk wrote: post #26

With daycares closed, there are a lot of people working from home and trying to watch their kids at the same time. You'd need to sort out with them (and any housemates) about what level of contact to have outside your (now expanded) bubble, but people need childcare badly.

Daycare may require state certification (just beware). With so many kids homeschooled, tutoring the last couple of months was probably a gold mine. Many parents run into a hard wall with respect to math and science and can no longer help their kids.

Watching the kids of a single family is being a nanny, not a daycare, and at least in the US doesn't require a license or certification.

Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#97

Post by jsamuel »

If you have even a little experience with Linux or are looking to learn, we've built https://hostlaunch.io/ to make it very easy to start a managed cloud hosting company.

Just drop in your DigitalOcean, ServerPilot, SendGrid, and Stripe API keys, set your prices, and you've got a hosting company.

Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#100

Post by tstegart »

ilSignorCarlo wrote: post #75
tstegart wrote: post #53

I run an affiliate blog, and they're definitely easy to get up and running. However, they're not "only 1 or two hours a day" type things as they are often claimed. But they can be fun and rewarding. I usually make around $200 a month with about 500 page views a day.

would you mind expanding a bit on what you do and how did you start?

Sure, I run https://basicbands.com/. It's a website about watch strap fashion. Most of my income comes from Amazon. I don't make money off the sale of watchbands very much, they're very cheap, so I write posts about watches. This is an example of a money post: https://basicbands.com/the-complete-guide-to-the-seiko-presa...

I either write the content myself, or ask watch strap companies to send me pictures. I then link back to their website and mention what watch is featured and use an affiliate link. Most companies are happy to send me pictures. I also interview custom leather watch strap makers. Most sell on Etsy and they're happy to be featured. I send them a form to fill out and they provide the content and pictures. This is an example: https://basicbands.com/small-brand-spotlight-choice-cuts-ind...

I make almost zero money off featuring the watch strap makers, but they fill out the blog with interesting and fun content that bring it a step above the usual affiliate blog (I hope). Its also the most fun part and it keeps me going, because the artists are fun to talk with. Otherwise I think I would have stopped by now from boredom. Most of my traffic is search engine, Pinterest & Reddit.

I got my start by reading the case studies on this subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/ They're getting less useful now, but the early ones were a big help. Basically, just start something and see how it does.

Affiliate marketing gets a bad rap, which I totally understand, but its also very easy to get into, basically a WordPress theme and some cheap hosting, so its very accessible for people at home.

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