27 Work at Home Opportunities

Everyone wants to do it, but is it just a pipe dream that only a lucky few insta-famous mommy bloggers and tech nerds can actually attain?

Not at all! It’s 2017, and jobs are going virtual at 4G LTE speeds.

You don’t have to spend hours filling out surveys for a quarter, and you don’t have to harass all your friends on Facebook by pushing diet pills or marketing makeup to make money from home anymore. Here are 27 legitimate (and fun!) work at home opportunities.

• Be someone’s Virtual Assistant

Behind every great internet entrepreneur, there’s an effective Virtual Assistant plugging away at home in their pajamas. According to leading freelance job board Upwork, Virtual Assistants are one of the fastest growing positions when it comes to online and freelance work.

Virtual Assistants can be tasked with just about anything, and the range of specialties they can develop is endless.

According to Melissa Smith, founder of The PVA, a virtual staffing agency that matches clients with the right Virtual Assistant, “Jobs and opportunities to work from home are everywhere. First, you must determine what you would do all day long even if you weren’t getting paid. Then determine who your ideal clients are and what they will gladly pay you for. The best jobs are the ones you create for yourself. If you are someone who excels in graphics, that’s a business. If you can create excellent Pinterest points and gain followers, that’s a business. If you can create meal plans, budgets, crafts, do it yourself videos, those are all businesses. Don’t worry that other people already have a similar business. Figure out what makes yours unique. In a world where there’s a Starbucks on every corner, you still have your favorite.”

• Get paid to tweet and Instagram

According to Hootsuite, social media advertising budgets have doubled worldwide since 2014, and they’re expected to grow another 26.3% in 2017.

Companies like Emphatic and Writer Access hire Social Media Specialists and Social Media Managers to tweet and write Facebook and LinkedIn statuses for small businesses and major companies all over the world. Once you’ve got that down, you can start developing more lucrative skills like managing Instagram giveaways, running successful ad campaigns on Facebook, and using social media analytics.

• Help students with their homework

If you have a background in education, are a university student, or you’re just a trivia geek who knows a lot, you might be able to make money by helping students with their homework online.

Websites like Tutors.com and WyzAnt hire people who can pass online subject tests to offer tutoring services to members in those subjects.

At eNotes.com, you can apply to become an “Educator”, and they will pay you to upload study guides and answer questions from students in their “Homework Help” section. The better your answer, the more you make, but all answers must be researched and well-written.

• Find side hustles on Reddit

Believe it or not, the popular forum website Reddit actually has entire sections or “subreddits” dedicated to job postings for remote work and side gigs. Some of the best places to browse for opportunities to make extra money online are ForHire, SlaveLabour, WorkOnline, and BeerMoney. You can also advertise your services on these forums.

• Be a virtual Customer Service Rep

While sitting in a call center surrounded by 100 other people answering phones doesn’t sound ideal, getting paid to sit on your couch in your underwear and answer the phone sounds pretty nice. More and more companies turning their customer service jobs into remote positions, including Amazon, Hilton Hotels, and even Neiman Marcus.

Search any job board for “Virtual Customer Service Representative”, and start practicing your “Hello, how can I help you?” voice.

• Teach English as a Second Language online

There are a wealth of websites that pay ESL tutors to help English language learners online, including Berlitz, LearnLight, iTalki, Language Development System, and English Hunt.

• Fluent in a foreign language? Get paid to use it

Lots of companies and individuals look online to hire translators, so if you’re fluent in a second language, you could easily use that skill to make money from home. After passing a proficiency exam, you can start getting paid to translate from websites like Gengo, OneHourTranslation, and Unbabel.

You can also teach a foreign language on websites like VerbalPlanet and Verbling.

• Put your spare bedroom on Airbnb

If you have a spare room or even a spare apartment, you can make a good second income by renting it out on Airbnb, especially if you live in a popular area. Some entrepreneurs have gone so far as to create “Airbnb Empires” that have allowed them to completely quit their day jobs.

• Start a pet sitting and dog walking business

Getting paid to host furry friends in your home sounds like an animal lover’s dream, but it can easily be a reality. Websites like Rover.com allow you to set up a profile as a pet sitter and dog walker in your area. Once you start getting gigs, reviews and word-of-mouth could help you build a doggy daycare kingdom that can replace a full-time job.

• Become a full-time freelancer

Offering freelancing services is a great way to make some side money online, and if you really know how to hustle, you can build your client-base into a full-time career. Websites like PeoplePerHour, Freelancer, Fiverr, and Upwork have freelance job boards and allow you to post and sell your services to potential clients.

The list of services a freelancer can offer is endless, from graphic design, programming, writing, and editing services to acting, marketing, creating travel itineraries, virtual yoga classes, and even relationship advice. Find out how to turn something you enjoy into a service, and offer it up on one of these websites. If you do well, soon enough, the clients will start to come to you.

• Teach your skills online

If you have a talent or skill, from drawing to an instrument to general life skills, you can make money giving lessons online. Skillshare and udemy are popular websites that pay people with unique skills to create and teach online classes.

• Make money doing transcription

Transcribing audio to text is something that you can get paid to do online through companies like Transcribe Anywhere, Rev, TranscribeMe, and QuickTate.

• Start a voice acting career

You don’t need to be a superstar with Pixar and Disney on your credit reel to start doing voiceover work. Lots of companies, big and small, use voice overs for everything from commercials, advertisements, and promotional materials to training resources and explainer videos. If you’re just getting started, you can make a profile on websites like VoiceBunny.com, Voice123.com, and Voices.com. In the last 12 months, the average job on Voices.com paid $277.32 and was completed within 14-48 hours.

If you’re really serious about making a career out of voice acting, you’ll have to put down some cash for things like professional recording equipment, demos, and acting classes, but it could be a worthwhile investment if you’ve got talent.

• Check out job boards for remote work

There are tons of job boards out there targeting work-from-home positions, although they aren’t all 100% legitimate. A few trustworthy remote job boards include FlexJobs, Remote.Co, We Work Remotely, and Remotive.

Another great tactic when searching for remote positions is to target start-ups, as they tend to be more open to hiring remote employees. AngelList is a great place to get started. Finally, you can search general job boards for remote and freelance postings.

• Rent your designer clothes

If your favorite spot in the house is your giant walk-in closet, stuffed to the brim with designer dresses and 5-inch heels, you may be able to make some decent cash renting out your clothes online at sites like Style Lend, Date My Wardrobe, and RentNotBuy let you rent out your clothes to other fashion-forward individuals, while Loanables.com gives you a platform to rent out just about anything.

• Rent your car out

Uber and Lyft are good side gigs if you want to drive people around, and delivering for companies like Postmates and Amazon are an option if you want to drive food and goods around.

But now you can make money off your car without even leaving your home. New peer-to-peer car-sharing websites like Turo let you rent out your car to visitors for extra cash. Think of it as Airbnb for your automobile.

• Become a nanny or open up a daycare

If you like children and have some experience working with them, becoming a nanny can be a great work from home opportunity. Eventually, you could even work toward starting up your own in-home daycare business.

Websites like SitterCity.com and Care.com are the best places to get started. Both include other opportunities as well, such as tutoring, housecleaning, pet sitting, and caring for the elderly.

• Create your own job based on your current work experience

Successful entrepreneurs don’t wait to find their dream job – they create it. One of the best ways to start working from home is to think about how you can take your current career and transform it into a remote business.

That’s exactly what Carrie Madormo, registered nurse and founder of The Healthy Work at Home Mom, did. She was working as a full-time nurse when her daughter was born, and she decided to find a way to work from home and spend more time with the family. Carrie started her online career as a freelancer, writing continuing education courses for other nurses. Eventually, she started up her own blog, sharing her knowledge on health and working from home with other moms. She now works 10-20 hours per week from home with her children and makes more than she did as a full-time nurse.

• Be someone’s virtual bookkeeper

Noticing a trend here? A lot of traditional career paths are going virtual, including bookkeeping and accounting. If you’re good with numbers, you might want to consider becoming a virtual bookkeeper. There are even training programs out there to get you started, such as the Bookkeeper Business Academy.

• Teach online as a certified teacher

While anyone can apply to teach a language, skill, or tutor online, there are also opportunities for certified school teachers and university professors to find full-time remote jobs in their field.

If you teach K-12, try looking for a job homeschooled kids or other remote coursework on TeachAway. If you’re a university professor, look into opportunities to teach online courses at your university or a local community college.

• Consider a career in telehealth

Healthcare professionals now have unprecedented opportunities to work from home, thanks to the rise in telehealth. Remote jobs in things like diagnosis and health monitoring are now available in all sorts of fields, including dentistry, nursing, counseling, physical therapy, chronic disease management, and even medical writing, medical coding, and health education. Websites like CareAnywhere and the American Telemedicine Association are a great place to search for these positions.

• Self-publish a book

Thanks to the internet, you don’t have to get scouted by a major publishing house or get an expensive agent in order to publish a book. In fact, anyone who wants to nowadays can self-publish their own books through Kindle Direct, Amazon’s self-publishing platform, Apple iBooks, and Kobo eBooks. Of course, self-publishing means you have to do all the marketing and promotion yourself. But if your book is a hit, you also get to keep most of the profits.

• Start a virtual personal training business

Are you a gym rat who loves to help others eat healthy and get fit? While starting a traditional personal training business gives you the flexibility of self-employment, you can even become a virtual personal trainer nowadays and offer online fitness courses. According to Training Journal, virtual coaching might be the future for the fitness industry.

• Get paid to run a Meetup group

If you have a hobby, passion, or area of expertise, start a group that meets up regularly and holds events around that hobby and charge a membership fee or event fee. You’ll have to make it popular enough for people to want to pay a fee, but what’s better than getting paid for your hobbies?

Branch Whitney, an avid hiker and author of the book Hiking Las Vegas, started an elite hiking club and hiking Meetup group for people in the Las Vegas area with over 2,200 members. She monetized her hobby group by charging a fee for the initial fitness survey, a membership fee, and a small fee for attending the hikes.

• Start a website

Starting a successful website is not for the faint of heart, but if you’ve got some design, programming, and internet marketing skills, or the money to outsource them, it’s one of the best ways to make passive income. There are infinite ways to monetize your own website once you’ve got some decent traffic, but some of the most popular methods include selling ad space, affiliate marketing, selling products or services, and sponsorship.

• Complete tasks on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

Mechanical Turk is Amazon’s online marketplace for work, where you can complete all kinds of small tasks such as transcription, categorizing products, and captioning images. Tasks can take 5 minutes or an hour. Pay is literally nickels and dimes, but the tasks are designed to be things you can do while doing other tasks such as studying, working an office job, or watching your kids.

• Convince your boss to let you go remote!

According to the latest data from a Gallup poll, the most engaged and satisfied workers are the ones who spend the majority of their work week (60-80%) working from home. Study after study is showing that allowing employees to work from home costs less and makes both the employee and the boss’s jobs easier and more enjoyable.

So, if you’re happy with your current job but would like to spend more time at home, take these surveys to your boss and see if you can’t strike a deal.