People in my family have some cool jobs you’ve likely never heard of before. All of them are 100% online. So you don’t know if we are working at home or while traveling around the world (which we often are.)
Blog Owner
Let’s start with me. I co-own two membership based blog sites. I actually make money because companies pay a monthly fee to be a member of these sites. My job is to maintain the sites and make sure all the members are raving fans.
Classic Car Broker
Someone else in my family is a classic car broker. He finds old Mercedes in the USA (sometimes literally in people’s barns) and then finds buyers for them in Germany. But aren’t Mercedes made in Germany? Yes, but after WWII the nice ones were shipped to the USA. Now the Germans want them back and are willing to pay more.
Stock Video Seller
My cousin’s husband shoots video clips and sells them online on stock photography sites. He has the process down to an art, no pun intended. He is always trying to think of creative places where it would be hard for people to get video footage. Once I walked into their living room and he had an entire jail cell set up for his next shoot.
Social Media Monitoring
My cousin’s wife is a consultant for a large bank. Her job is to log into a marketing software program that pulls every social media mention of their brand. During her shift, she reads each entry and flags the ones that need attention/response.
Online Marketing
My cousin handles the online marketing needs for about a dozen small companies including Facebook and Twitter posts and website updates.
Proofreader/Copywriting
My mother is no longer a high school English teacher but she still loves to correct people’s grammar and punctuation. She supplements her retirement income by doing proofreading and copywriting for companies.
I also have friends who work online with these jobs.
- Twitter management
- Microsoft Office training (via Skype)
- Language classes (via Skype)
- Violin/Piano lessons (via Skype)
- Answering customer service calls
- Translation services (if you pick up a phone in a hospital and need a translator my friend could get assigned the job by a giant switchboard)
- Jewelry making
- Selling handmade products on Etsy
- Website/graphic design
- SEO services
- Jewelry packaging for TJMaxx (those price tags are added by hand)
We live in an amazing period in time. Who would ever have thought that these things would be considered real jobs.
I absolutely value the freedom my husband and I have to work wherever we are, anywhere in the world.
How about your family, does anyone have any interesting online jobs?
By Anya Ciecierski, Collaboration Works Marketing
Follow me on Twitter: @AnyaCWMktg