We are fortunate to live in a digital era where there are a lot of opportunities for stay-at-home moms to earn extra money from the comfort of their own home. Indeed, there are a ton of legitimate ways moms can earn money while their kids are in school, at play days or doing extracurricular activities.
To find a work-at-home job that suits you, check out the following tips and ideas:
1. Turn Your Hobby Into an Income
Turn one of your talents or hobbies into a supplemental income. For example, if you’re routinely asked to bring your camera to parties because you take such amazing photos, consider dabbling in freelance photography. Start small with people you know and build up your portfolio. With some word-of-mouth referrals, you could transform this hobby into a profitable job. Other ideas of hobbies include baking, catering, sewing custom kids outfits, ceramics and jewelry making. Consider opening up an ETSY shop and selling your items there. Listings only cost $.20 and you pay a small percentage of your sales when someone buys.
You can also find people looking to hire someone with your skills for a small project or need they have at PeoplePerHour.
2. Tutor
Although not necessary, a background in education, tutoring, or instruction is desired. Tutors work from home providing virtual tutoring services for a number of different subjects. They also work with people of all ages: children, youth, college students, and/or adults.
To get students, consider doing traditional marketing like putting up index cards with your info and offer up at your local coffee shops. Ask a school if you can advertise in their online or in person bulletin board. Put up notices at your local library. Go to the local college and put up your ads on bulletin boards outside the classes or in the building where classes you’re an expert in are taught. Get a FREE Google Voice phone number so you don’t give strangers access to your personal phone.
3. Look Into Contractual Work
Another great option for work-at-home moms is contractual positions. These combine the security of working for an established company with the freedom to set your own hours and telecommute. To find a position that works for you, think about what you are passionate about and research available opportunities. You can find contract opps at Upwork.com.
4. Deliver Food
You might not want to drive around the city picking up passengers but how about delivering food via Uber’s newest venture, Uber Eats? Take trips for a few hours in the mornings, every night, or just on weekends—it’s up to you. You are your own boss and you can choose when and how much you work. Depending on the rules in your city, you may be able to deliver with your car, bike or scooter. Sign up and start earning extra cash tomorrow!
5. Customer Service Representative
Inbound and outbound calling is typically required for customer service representatives. These flexible jobs provide a range of options, including working from home, flexible schedules, part-time schedules, and seasonal arrangements. If you like talking to people and are decent on the computer, you can get between $8 and $18 per hour for part time and full time work. These jobs are also called Customer Service Associate, Call Center Representative, Call Center Associate, Customer Care Specialist and Customer Support Agent.
If you are the consummate people person, like talking on the phone and are pretty good on the computer, an at-home customer service representative job is a great option.You might be surprised how many major companies hire at-home CSRs. Some of these include major hotel chains like Hilton and Best Western and retail companies like 1-800-FLOWERS and Spiegel. To find these positions, check out companies like Alpine Access and LiveOps to see what they have available.
6. Transcriptionist
Transcriptionist is a great work-at-home option for stay-at-home moms. These workers transcribe audio files for multiple industries, including healthcare, legal, and entertainment. Those with bilingual skills are in high demand. Monster.com has tons of opportunities to check out
7. Be an Ebay or Other Commercial Reseller
Whether you have a bunch of stuff at home or live in a community with a very good quality thrift or second hand store, you can turn those unwanted items into cash. Buy them and then spruce the items up and list them on eBay or Facebook’s new community sales application. There are also a lot of apps that will let you sell your personal unwanted items by simply taking a photo of them and listing them. It couldn’t get any easier. You can find some of those apps here. Be careful about delivering items however. There is risk there in personal reselling, whereas eBay would just require you to ship the items to the customer.
8. Freelance Blogger
Freelance, flexible, and part-time writing positions are great for stay-at-home moms looking to make money on the side. Writers create online content, articles, or blogs for public, private, and nonprofit organizations. Beyond Your Blog has a great listing of publications that pay writers. Job titles for writers are also called Content Specialist, Copywriter, Web Reporter
9. Virtual Assistant
Help overworked entrepreneurs or small companies and startups by working as a virtual assistant. You can find an awesome blog post about this type of work here.
10. Proofreader
If you have editing or proofreading skills or experience, many writers and organizations want your knowledge to provide final touches to their nearly published content, articles, and blogs. Many proofreading jobs offer the ability to work flexibly and from home. You can pick up some quick cash you may need to pay a sitter, for a date night, to go on a weekender by applying for one of the Proofreader jobs in Upwork. They are also called Editor, Copy editor, Content Editor, or Quality Assurance Tester.
11. Be a DropShip Merchant
It’s never been easier to open up an online shop and sell. You don’t even have to house merchandise. The hard work will be figuring out something to sell. Find a passionate market (like horse lovers, Greek Pan-Hellenic organizations, golfers, sneaker heads) and sell items that group would buy in heartbeat without thinking twice. Find reputable and popular simple shops and open up a Shopify account and use one of its templates to create your own shop. Order items from AliExpress or some other overseas wholesaler that will ship directly to your customers after they purchase. There are people making thousands of dollars in sales from items they never see or store.
12. T-Shirt, Mugs of Pillows Merchant
There are a lot of places now that will let you sell customized products to customers on an as needed basis or in small batches. Teespring is among one of the popular ones. Amazon lets you design and sell too from its new service. Cute and quirky sayings demand a premium price in today’s world where people want to be cool and different.
Watch out for Scams
While there are plenty of legitimate and reasonably lucrative ways to make money at home, there are some scammers who are out to take your money. As you look for work, watch for red flags like companies or websites with no contact information. Some other signs of trouble are if a company asks you to pay them a fee to get started or if a position seems too good to be true. Once you find a company that you like, research them to see if anything pops up about scams or bad business practices.