How about get her blogging (if she has neat viewpoint on something) and some adsense. It would take a while to reach $1K per month though.
Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...
111–120 of 186 posts
Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...
#112Mkelley – Drop shipping has been mentioned a few time, and I wanted to give you my thoughts on the business model. I've had a lot of success with drop shipping eCommerce and have been doing it full-time for more than 4 years. Robryan is right to some extent - it can be harder than it looks - but with some dedication and a good niche, it's a great way to create online income. A few tips from my own experience: - Picki…
Another way to differentiate yourself from the plethora of eCommerce sites around is to have really good customer service and delivery. I once setup a small online shop selling one particular hot form of consumer electronics at the time, and what gave me the edge over drop-shipped competitors was overnight delivery to anywhere in the country. We always had stock on hand. People are willing to pay extra for good service and certainty, especially when they need something quick.
The way the business worked was that I was working full time in an unrelated s/w development job. My wife would pack the orders in the morning and the courier would pick up from our home location every afternoon. I looked after the invoicing etc. at night; but with an automated process it really didn't take up much extra time. I did try drop-shipping as well but it didn't work out as well for us, although of course drop-shipping would probably enable you to have a larger sales capacity.
Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...
#113QA, 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 would also love to get into this. I am teaching myself programming but I'm far off from making a career out of it.
I believe I can usually communicate well with programmers, but is there anything else I can do to make myself qualified for this type of job?
Also, are there any recommended sites or places to look for these types of job postings besides the 99tests one mentioned? Thank you.
Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...
#114A younger, stupider me would have suggested writing for one of the freelancer sites. However, that seems to put her on a collision course with lots of not-so-savvy-but-they-don't-need-to-be folks who would be thrilled to make 1/4 of her reserve price.
Ignoring credentials for a moment, does your wife have any skill which is commercially valuable? Can she develop one? Many knowledge-worker things can get delivered over the Internet at fairly high price points.
For example, does she have a solid grasp of high school mathematics? Does she understand who cares about that and why? If so, that trivially supports $40+ an hour. (Customer: Tiger Mom in a high-achieving suburban school district.)
Does she have native proficiency in a foreign language? (n.b. English is a foreign language to lots of people who have money!) Tutoring goes from free to $10 to $40+ an hour. (Why the range? Customer selection. Think less "high school foreign exchange student" and more "executive recently transferred from Nomura Securities to their NYC office who feels his career growth will be stymied by his poor conversational English skills.")
Does she have a hobby which is common among upper middle class Americans and which carries social esteem? Can she teach it?
For more about this general topic, see Ramit Sethi.
Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...
#115Please forgive the self promotion, but in an effort to teach myself something about code, and to help people I know in a similar situation as you described, I have been building out a Website with resources for making a little bit of extra money that I think you might find helpful.
Personally, I would suggest taking a look at both LeapForce and LionBridge, because they offer 10-20 hours a week working from home at $15/hour evaluating Google's search results and doing other online tasks. They have an application/approval process to go through, but it could be a good fit for what you are looking for.
Side note: I know the site isn't really polished yet, but I'd love some constructive feedback if you have any.
Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...
#116How about get her blogging (if she has neat viewpoint on something) and some adsense. It would take a while to reach $1K per month though.
Agreed - you probably won't reach anywhere near $1K per month unless you are in the 300k hits per day territory, which is pretty much impossible for most bloggers. Just extrapolating my own blog figures from adsense - I've made maybe $50 in adsense so far, from half a million views (over the past several months). While blogging is technically easy to monetize, it is very difficult to make decent money from it.
Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...
#117Buying shit on Cragslist (or Gumtree in the UK) and selling on eBay and vice versa. My better half manages 500-800GBP a month with this quite happily. Persuaded some muppet to sell her a Korg Triton for 80GBP and got 580GBP on ebay for it :) Unfortunately it got converted to clothes and shoes pretty quickly :(
who the fk sold it for that price - beaker? ;-)
Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...
#118QA, 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.
We have actually used this service to test our ecommerce websites.
http://www.usertesting.com/be-a-user-tester
The pitch is "Be a User Tester and Earn $10 per Website".
Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...
#119Mkelley – Drop shipping has been mentioned a few time, and I wanted to give you my thoughts on the business model. I've had a lot of success with drop shipping eCommerce and have been doing it full-time for more than 4 years. Robryan is right to some extent - it can be harder than it looks - but with some dedication and a good niche, it's a great way to create online income. A few tips from my own experience: - Picki…
Another way to differentiate yourself from the plethora of eCommerce sites around is to have really good customer service and delivery. I once setup a small online shop selling one particular hot form of consumer electronics at the time, and what gave me the edge over drop-shipped competitors was overnight delivery to anywhere in the country. We always had stock on hand. People are willing to pay extra for good servi…
You're exactly right - outstanding service is a GREAT way to differentiate yourself. And it's often some of the best marketing you can do, too.
I'm constantly amazed at how many companies will make you send something back to get a refund / replacement, even if it only costs a few bucks.
If our customers receive a defective item that costs less than $20, we simply ship them a new item immediately, without asking them to return the old one. It only costs us a few bucks, saves the customer up to 2 weeks of wait time, save us having to process the return and usually earns us a life-long customer and vocal advocate. It's a no-brainer, and I don't understand why more companies don't do it.
Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...
#120Skype for the sick, create a service that does scheduled calls (ideally video calls) to the elderly and infirm for a fee. I had this idea because my father suffers from Parkinsons disease and gets quite lonely in the house during the day. He lives in Florida and I life in California and I can't call him as much as I would like to given the time difference. I know he gets lonely and would love to just have a conversat…
This is a great idea. Growing population of elderly. This could be a great way for adult children to gain piece of mind that their parents are ok.
iPads make video calls very simple even for people who are not computer savvy. Just configure the software once and it's always ready.