More Ideas on how to make money with your computer

How do I make money online? Find out with even more ideas on how you can use your home PC to make extra cash in your spare time.

Translations

If you're fluent in languages other than English, there are opportunities to work on translation for businesses and government departments. You can either work solo or for one of the major translation companies.

Opportunities for translation work from home are: translation of text for printed and web-based media and translation of speech over the phone. If you have in-depth knowledge of specialist areas such as the law, medicine or computing, the opportunities and rewards can be very good.

Virtual Assistant and Telephone Answering

This is another occupation that didn't exist as such before the web appeared - arranging quotes and dealing with customers had to be done on the premises. With the advent of easy and fast online communication, many small businesses have found it cheaper to outsource many of their administration and secretarial roles.

If you have data entry and spreadsheet skills and a good telephone manner you could provide a useful service by fielding calls and doing the paperwork for small firms and tradesmen etc. Minimum requirements are a phone, PC with broadband, printer etc. Acting as a virtual assistant also sits well with book-keeping as another service you can offer.

See also Homeshoring

If you have knowledge or past work experience in a particular field, try to specialise.

Writing - Books, Short Stories and Articles

Demand for the written word is huge and growing all the time. Just walk into your local newsagent and take a look at the bewildering range of magazines on display. Add the many more thousands of magazines, periodicals and journals that aren't on display and the free sheets, house magazines, newspapers, books and you can see that the potential demand for well-written material is massive. Then add the web - millions of sites which need well written content and you can double your market.

How do you make money online from writing?

The big advantage of the web is that anyone can publish anything. You don't need anything beyond basic computer skills and the ability to type to put your thoughts into cyberspace for the world to read. If the stuff that you write is interesting enough, the world will beat a path to your (virtual) door and you can start to generate income from placing adverts on your blog.

Get started by opening an account with one of the online blog hosts and take it from there. If you start to generate vistors in quantity, set up a hosting account with an ISP and put ads on your blog. Then watch the money roll in!...it might be just 50p a day to start with but you'll find that as long as you keep generating quality content, your income will increase. Just look at Perez Hilton...

It's the same story if you want to make money from a website. If you can write interesting content, you can make a useful income from running a website.

Start by looking at your hobbies and interests - is there some aspect of your hobby that isn't already covered by a website? could you do it better? Or look at it from a purely commercial basis - can you write a site that informs and entertains on whatever subject will earn you the most from advertising?

Offline, you can make money by selling articles to magazines. If you're starting out , the writer's and artist's yearbook is a great guide to who buys what and how much they pay for it. The top names rarely accept unsolicited articles from new writers but there are a whole host of local and special interest mags that depend on freelancers to fill their pages. The money you make might not be great but it will provide a useful second income if you work at it.

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