After so much planning, you are finally living off your 401(k) and are looking for another string to your bow in terms of income. However, since you’ve reached a certain age, you’re looking for a gig that will keep you busy, entertained and will help you make some extra cash while enjoying freedom.
In this case, home businesses allow you to do just that and generate significant additional income to improve or support your personal finances during retirement.
Without a doubt, online businesses represent a great alternative to catch up on your bills and monthly payments, and the best part is that you do not have to leave your home. In essence, you have the freedom to monetize a hobby and decide how much time you can invest in your new venture.
Let’s have a look at some of the best businesses from home, some of them including online ideas that will keep you busy, do something of value and, of course, make some extra money.
1. Generate online content
Digital marketing is growing, and people are becoming more interested in creating content to monetize it. Certainly, this is one of the most profitable home businesses you can start, one that will keep you busy and engaged —with enough passion could yield the expected results.
There are several retirement-related blogs whose authors became successful by writing about their own experiences, such as Sightings Over Sixty and Baby Boomer Retirement. You can find inspiration therein and start your own blogging project!
How to make money with a blog
To get started, the first thing you need is a hosting service to host your website. For this, you can use platforms like Hostinger, through which you can acquire a web domain for the purchase of a hosting plan.
Once you have created your blog, you can start generating content according to your audience, and with time, you will gain authority and relevance. This implies you’ll start to rank higher on search engines, which will help you create a digital community and draw income.
You should think about monetizing your blog from the beginning. From day one, you must be clear about how to do it and what strategies you will use to achieve it.
For the moment we will tell you about some ways you have to start generating income with your digital publication.
To monetize your blog, you must create affiliate links and use them on your posts to promote products from other merchants, companies or brands. To do this, you must join the affiliate marketing programs of large global companies such as eBay, Amazon Affiliates, Click Bank, AliExpress or iTunes.
As soon as you sign up with them and get your links, you can start earning commissions for each sale. The good news is that these range from 40% to 75% in some cases, so you could make up to six figures a year if you set your mind to doing a great job as an affiliate.
Google AdSense advertising is another solid alternative. It is part of the Google advertising network and allows you to insert graphics, text or interactive ads on your blog to obtain profitable income.
It’s been a very good option among online businesses for a couple of years, and it is one of the most attractive home businesses for those who have pages or blogs. All you have to do is select the type of ad you want to show, choose its location and publish it.
2. Freelance photographer
Besides being a nice retirement hobby — for example, it will give you the chance to travel and engage with people— photography is a good source of monthly income. If you already have a camera, dust it off or just use your smartphone.
Becoming a freelance photographer will open up new experiences, and it is one of the most common retirement activities, and monetizing your work is a clear possibility.
Basically, you need to visit pages dedicated to uploading photos and selling photos, such as Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, Fotolia and Dreamstime.
Most of them require you to follow a standard procedure:
- Visit the web page that you like the most to upload your photographs.
- Register and access your members’ area after making the payment.
- Take a look at the available proposals —these can include taking pictures of nature, cars, parks and much more.
- Take your photos and upload them.
- Receive your payment when someone buys one.
3. Create an online store
Online stores have become one of the most sought-after home businesses at the moment due to the pandemic. It is an initiative that will demand dedication and commitment at first, but it will quickly generate good income.
To start, you can use tools like Shopify, which is one of the leading companies to create online stores and does not require you to have programming design experience.
The investment is also pretty low as, for only $29, you can create your store and start selling products. Additionally, you can enjoy a 14-day trial, where you can review how it works, validate your business model and see how your audience responds to your products and services.
Several website design companies like Wix have added e-commerce functionalities and services that allow people to create an online sales platform.
Whatever type of products you decide to sell online, you must make a good selection of suppliers, including quality brands with a good price and warranties.
Hiring a designer or agency to take care of your site and train you to update the catalog, is a great idea. Also, you will have to allocate an amount for marketing and advertising strategies, so your business will be positioned among potential customers.
4. Create online courses
If you have academic knowledge, or better yet, some professional expertise, you can learn how to generate solid income through this type of business from home.
The investment is not very high because, most likely, you already have the necessary equipment to get down to work, such as a video camera, a computer or even a smartphone.
Now, if your courses are met with acceptance and in the largest virtual learning platforms on the market, you could make thousands of dollars per month. Currently, Udemy is one of the most famous, and it allows you to become an instructor and start this type of business from home just by following a routine procedure.
How to make money doing courses
This is a quick, step-by-step guide to start earning money from home with this business:
1. Do market research and define the learning areas most in demand by students
In general, digital marketing, programming and web development courses are the most requested, so you cannot ignore them.
2. Define the work methodology
This involves determining how many classes the course will have, whether it will have resources available for download, what the quality of the videos will be, how long they will last, etc.
3. Dedicate yourself to recording the lessons and editing them -in case you have scheduled it
For this, you can rely on the features offered by certain web-based learning management systems, such as Chamilo or ATutor.
4. Upload your courses and start building your online community
Besides offering an engaging product, online marketing is essential at this stage so you can position your courses within your target audiences.
If this is sounding attractive to you, you’ll start wondering at this point how much money you could earn with online courses.
Let’s say you create a course on digital entrepreneurship that costs $11.99, and after a great deal of promotion and dissemination, you manage to recruit about 100 students in just 30 days. The remuneration will be more than $1,000, which is a satisfactory sum, considering that you are running a business from home.
Additionally, you will have the freedom to continue attracting interested parties, and you can even create more courses on other topics that you master to significantly increase your earnings.
Within your business model, you must take into account that platforms like Udemy and others charge a fee for each course sale you make.
5. Content writing
If you have writing skills, or even if your university career was journalism or you have taken courses to become a writer, you will likely get an incredible benefit from this type of online business besides blogging. In fact, content writing has gained impressive ground in recent years because it allows you to work on your own schedule and from your smartphone, computer or tablet.
Some attribute the sustained growth of online writing jobs to the constant need for companies or entrepreneurs to keep updated content on their blogs or pages.
So, if you think about it a bit, this proposal makes a lot of sense, especially since thousands of websites are created worldwide every day, and therefore, their creators need a large text bank to start.
How to make money writing
If you are determined to get fully involved in these online businesses, you should join one of these platforms available in the market and create an account to offer your writing or editing services to third parties:
- Publisuites
- We Are Content
- Influenet
- Fiverr
- Freelancer.com
- UpWork
- Textbroker
Earning money writing articles or stories has a lot of advantages as the promise of creativity and personal freedom attracts so many people.
Besides writing novels or other literary genres, there are many business-related writing tasks and projects that are highly in demand and make it possible to earn money writing during retirement.
This article was produced and syndicated by MediaFeed.org.