1. Mystery shopping is a fantastic way to earn some extra money. In fact, some people are able to earn more than just a little extra money. Below are the top 10 mystery shopping companies that will pay you to do in-store shops. I have also listed telephone mystery shopping companies below that (those are great because you don’t have to leave.
2. There are two basic ways that you can make money online by building software products The first follows the startup path we outlined above: You have a disruptive idea for an app or piece of software, you validate the idea with real customers, and then raise money to hire developers or a development studio to build, launch, and scale your software.

The prospects for finding reliable ways to make money from home are expanding all the time.

The best way to make real money online is to start a blog and set yourself up for long term success, not quick profits. Instead of getting traffic quickly by paying for ads, develop a long-term SEO and content strategy to get free traffic to your site.

Job seekers who do their research can find legitimate opportunities to work remotely that are neither suspect nor sketchy, and can provide part-time supplemental income or a full-time career.

While there are great flexible jobs across many industries, it may be helpful to home in on specific job sectors if your goal is to work virtually.

Having access to an up-to-date computer and a good Internet connection is essential, virtually without exception, to make money from home. You’ll also need a dedicated workspace and a good degree of discipline to stick to a schedule the works for you.

If you have the skills you need to work from home, scope out the best scam-free resources to help you find jobs that are a good fit. Of course, FlexJobs is the premier source for avoiding job scams in your search for hand-screened, work-from-home jobs that are fully vetted and verified.

The career fields below offer real jobs that can be done from home.

Note:

FlexJobs is a subscription service for job seekers that features flexible and remote jobs. With an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau, the monthly subscription costs allow us to fully vet and verify all of the jobs on our site—ensuring that customers have a safe and positive job searching experience.

15 Real Ways to Make Money from Home

(Click on a title to see open jobs in that category.)

1. Account Management

Account management jobs can be done from home as the main task involves managing client relationships. Account managers may use phone, email, and in-person visits to ensure company clients are happy and to upsell or cross-sell products.

2. Accounting and Finance

Accounting and finance jobs can provide a variety of options to make money from home. Bookkeepers, tax advisors, accountants, finance assistants, and more are some remote job options. These roles most often require experience in finance, and many can be completed 100% from home.

3. Administrative

Many teams and individuals seeking administrative assistance allow for the work to be done from home. Executive assistants, paralegals, administrative specialists, and program coordinators are some common remote job titles. Many of these roles only require a high school diploma.

4. Computer and IT

Computer and IT jobs are a shoo-in for remote work. These jobs can be done entirely remotely with their heavy reliance on computer work. Tech support and even technical writing are two great options to make money at home.

5. Consulting

Consulting provides great flexibility in how much you work and your work schedule. This role allows people to share their experience and knowledge with others to better their lives and business practices. They often utilize tools like job shadowing, surveys, and interpersonal studies to determine issues and suggest solutions and provide training or coaching.

6. Customer Service

To make money from home in customer service, you’ll need a high school degree or the equivalent for many jobs. For some customer service jobs, a post-secondary degree or some college may be required. Customer service jobs from home involve using phone, messaging, email, and social media to answer customer questions and provide information and assistance.

7. Data Entry

Often working as part of a team, data entry professionals may be asked to log into a company’s database system to make entries or access data for other purposes. Depending on the employer and industry, a high school degree and additional certification may be the minimum education requirements.

8. English Teacher or English Tutor

You’ll almost certainly need at least an undergraduate degree to qualify for many online teaching jobs for K-12 online schools, universities, and other virtual education organizations. Remote teaching and tutoring jobs can be great to do part-time or as a side job, as many roles require just a few hours per week.

9. Marketing

The marketing field is ripe with remote jobs and ones that can be done on a project basis or part-time basis, making it an ideal way to make money from home. Marketing professionals promote and educate others on products and services. Working with online content, social media, and print materials are common for marketing jobs.

10. Medical Billing and Medical Coding

In an era of aging baby boomers and changing healthcare laws, medical coding and billing jobs offer relatively stable ways to make money from home. Inputting patient medical data with an extremely high degree of accuracy is the main task of a medical coding job. Medical billing professionals primarily input and submit payment and insurance data relating to medical care and procedures.

11. Project Management

Project managers develop requirements, budgets, and schedules for an organization’s projects. They will make sure projects are completed on time and may work with internal and external clients and vendors. Project managers can work from home full-time or on a project-by-project basis.

12. Sales

Sales professionals can make money from home by working closely with customers to help them identify needs and introduce products or services that will meet those needs. There may be sales quotas to meet as well. Sales rep, sales manager, business development manager, account executive are some common job titles.

13. Transcription

Transcription jobs offer many options to work remotely, as a freelancer, and with flexible hours. This role most commonly converts audio files into text. Certification as a transcriptionist and familiarity with transcription programs like Express Scribe will put you ahead of the competition.

14. Virtual Assistant

Working as a virtual assistant may be a good way to put those skills to use to help you make money from home. You may be asked to use administrative skills to assist an executive or a team with managing schedules, travel, phone calls, email, and record.

15. Writing and Editing

Writing is one of the greatest time-honored home-based jobs, and editing isn’t far behind. Many employers look to hire content writers who are experienced and can provide examples of their published work, online or on other platforms. As for editing positions that let you make money from home, hiring managers frequently look for demonstrated editing skills or an area of specialty.

Finding More Real Ways to Make Money from Home

No matter your schedule or area of expertise, making money from home can be done. Using FlexJobs to find a job keeps you safe from job scams that abound in the work-from-home world. We verify every job and company before posting it on our site, so you can rest assured you’ll only find real, legitimate jobs.

Whether you want to work full-time from home, or just want to find a side job or a part-time remote job, FlexJobs has jobs in over 50 different careers to help you find just what you need.

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When you're just starting out with your blog, it can seem like one of the most arduous and frustrating tasks. With so much information to consume and strategies to digest, how is that any one person can find the time or the wherewithal to not only grasp the art of blogging itself, but also that of driving significant amounts of traffic?

We all know blogging isn't some altruistic pursuit. People want their words to be seen and shared. They want to gain the respect of the masses and boost their authority in their respective industry or niche. However, clearly it isn't quite that simple. Not only is it difficult to drive traffic to a blog, but it's also hard to monetize the traffic that you do receive.

The problem? Most people ignore the fundamentals of online marketing when attempting to earn any semblance of an income from their blogs. When you fail to pay homage to these fundamentals, you'll find it excruciatingly difficult to earn anything. But if you go about it the right way, you'll certainly profit in the long run.

Related: 10 Business Ideas to Make Easy Money and Change the World

Quick Cash Online

5 immutable laws of blogging.

Before I jump into the various ways you can actually monetize a blog, whether you just started that blog or you've had it for some time now, I wanted to cover the five immutable laws of blogging. If you pay attention to these laws, you'll succeed over time. Ignore them, and you'll find it nearly impossible to drive any respectable amount of traffic and ultimately monetize your blog.

1. Focus

Blogs need focus. You need to have a specific industry, niche or topic that you write about repeatedly. Try not to go all over the map. You'll find that veering off on tangents will make you lose your core audience. People want to visit a blog -- and keep revisiting it -- because it fills a need or a void. That happens by staying focused and on-topic.

2. Quality

People think that blogging is about pushing out an enormous amount of content. But it doesn't work if it's thin content. Your content needs to be quality content. It needs to be thorough, well-written and cite its sources. If a study is referenced, it needs to be linked to. Don't skimp on quality if you're serious about monetizing your blog.

3. Value

Your blog needs to deliver value. What can you teach other people about? What are you an expert at? Take the time to deliver value. Create thorough tutorials and informative posts that interweave things like videos and other media to truly help people understand or figure something out. Value is a precursor to income in any industry, but especially in blogging.

4. Engagement

How engaging is your content? Does your blog incite people to spend a lot of time reading articles, watching videos or messaging on a forum, for example? The more people engage with your content, the more likely they'll be to purchase something from you. Without engagement, there's very little chance of monetization.

5. Authority

How much authority do you have? How well-known are you in your field? The more authority you have, the more likely you can monetize your blog quickly. For example, if you have a large social media following and you decide to launch a blog, you can drive traffic quickly. If you're an expert at something else or a best-selling author, for example, you already have authority, all you need to do is leverage it.

Related: Why a Blog Gets You Further than an MBA

Monetizing your blog.

While there are arguably dozens of ways to monetize your blog, there really are eight core methods that will help you earn a healthy income from your efforts.

1. Affiliate marketing

One of the most popular methods for monetizing a blog is to leverage affiliate marketing. This is especially useful when you're just starting out and you don't have your own products or services to sell. All you have to do is develop content that will ultimately be in harmony with whatever affiliate offers you plan to push out.

For example, if you're running a fitness blog, you can easily sell affiliate health, weight loss or body building supplements. Since the content is already attracting people that are interested in fitness, selling these types of products helps you to create a near-automated stream of passive income.

2. Advertisements

While most people might think that adding some pay-per-click (PPC) ads will be a great way to make lots of money with their blogs, unless you have massive amounts of traffic -- as in 10,000+ visitors per day or more -- the income will be marginal at best. The real income here doesn't start until you cross about 100,000 visitors per day.

However, you could easily negotiate terms directly with advertisers by utilizing display ads as opposed to PPC ads. As long as the ads are within your specific niche or industry, you can likely negotiate an amount that would be much more competitive than income from standard PPC ads.

3. Email marketing

One of the most powerful methods for making money from your blog is directly through email marketing. But to be successful, you need to build your list. Whether you promote blog updates or create a lead magnet, utilize one of the more popular email marketing platforms like ConvertKit, Aweber or InfusionSoft to implement the systems necessary to begin marketing via email.

Legit Ways To Make Real Money Online

By building a strong bond and a connection with your readers, you can effectively generate a sizable amount of money through the course of marketing both your own products and services along with affiliate offers directly through email. You can expect to generate approximately $1 per subscriber per month.

4. Sell ebooks

Ebooks offer a relatively quick pathway for making money from your blog. Develop an ebook that's aligned with the content of your blog. Non-fiction ebooks are relatively simple to create, and if you're teaching a skill that many people struggle with, it's likely that the ebook will produce a healthy profit.

You can easily promote your ebook directly through your blog by creating attractive content that will draw people in, then enticing them with your ebook. You could also build a sales funnel, which is an online marketing term for an automated multi-step sales machine, and sell your ebook on autopilot.

5. Sell courses

Selling digital online courses is another way you can profit from blogging. Develop intuitive and helpful courses that add a tremendous amount of value and the rest will be smooth sailing. By putting your heart and your soul into these courses, you can simply allow them to sell on autopilot for you, another great avenue for passive income.

Courses work great when it comes to technical skills like web development, digital marketing, graphic design and so on. But they also work in formats like finances, stocks, currency investing and accounting. Find what you're really great at and do the due diligence before building your course. Thenm make something far better than the other courses out there in the marketplace.

6. Sell digital products

Creating digital products is a great way to profit from your blog. You can effectively sell any type of digital information product on your blog as long as it's in harmony with your content. You can build a webinar to market your product and deliver them through a member's area or through other downloadable means.

Digital products can be a combination of videos, downloadable guides, resources, PDFs, software components, SaaS and others. Do your best to create something that helps fill a need or a void. Don't second guess yourself, as you'd be surprised at just how much money you can make by selling digital products on your blog.

Related: How to Produce Juicy Content That Catches Eyeballs

7. Sell coaching services

While it does seem like coaching services are infiltrating every aspect of the market these days, selling coaching services through your blog can definitely be a lucrative prospect. Whether you set yourself up as a life coach, a career coach or a business development coach, you can earn a significant income through just a handful of clients.

Decide on a number of packages, and do your best to ensure that you address any objections upfront. Customers tend to abandon the purchase process when it's too complicated, they have to leave the site, create an account or a number of other reasons according to one such study by Baymard Institute.

8. Secure sponsorships

Sponsorships are a great way to make money from your blog, but you need the traffic if you're going to sell it for a significant amount of money. You can create sponsored posts as long as you label them as sponsored. The FTC cracks down on marketing products and services, including articles that are sponsored when in fact they're passed off as organic.

You have to be careful with sponsorships. Be sure that you're upfront with your readership. Google also cares acutely about sponsored links and will penalize you if you're selling links along with penalizing the site that you're linking to. Simply put, it's not worth it, so be as transparent as possible.