I’m excited to share with you 6 Work from Home Job that requires no money to start!
These online based working from home jobs that are perfect for 2020 onwards, and where money might be tight is no excuse to hold you back from creating a business you control where really the level of income is completely with your expectations and limits.
All of the jobs are very much in demand due to the high rise of internet based small businesses in the UK and globally, and this post will give you a great place to start feeling inspired how to create a job outside of your normal day job.
In addition, the jobs mentioned offer flexibility over the hours you set, location not necessary a factor that would restrict your choice of starting a new work from home job, and hopefully this is the start of a home based career that could dramatically increase your time scales to achieve financial freedom from your main career or offer more cash to save and spend as you wish.
In a recent study by Monster, it was reported that most workers would be willing to take between a 5-10% pay cut in their normal day job IF it meant they could work from home consistently during their week.
The work from home structure is definitely becoming more and more commonplace, which is fantastic for employee well-being and productivity but could you even take this one step further and create a career completely from scratch that could even replace your day job eventually?
How to make money working from home
The secret to starting any new career path is really to start small with investing your time and money and then allow it to continue to grow as your skill set and passion grows with it.
Often at starting a new career, particularly outside of a day job, you can feel pressured to go “all in” from the word go and invest huge amounts of money believing you need the “right kit” and “most expensive options” to get the job done.
As we know, building a customer base who love what you do when you do it well is key, and therefore all the jobs mentioned below allow you to work and grow your skills without the financial commitment that is normal for starting a business.
6 Work from Home Jobs that require NO MONEY to start!
- Become a Virtual Assistant
This role is becoming more and more popular recently and in high demand due to the risk of UK and Globally based Entrepreneurs and Small companies in recent years.
Essentially as a VA (Virtual Assistant) you will be that “extra pair of hands” to your clients and could be asked to perform any range of admin level tasks that help their business grow or maintain their high standards.
For example, you could be asked to complete tasks such as email replies or invoice creation, right down to specialising in Pinterest scheduling or Social Media content creation.
This particular role does not require any set skills to start, however as you can imagine if you are able to provide a very specialised niche offering to your clients then they will be willing to pay more for your time.
Generally you would bill your clients per hour of work completed, and could expect between £10-50 per hour based on the skill set and detail of tasks you complete for them.
The great opportunity within this business idea is really once you are able to decide the services you will offer, and start to look for potential clients that would be willing to hire you, generally once clients are happy with your services they will not look to go elsewhere as they trust your skills and role within their companies performance.
- Offer a Service based Business
In a similar way to offer services as a VA that we mentioned above, the opportunity to offer similar but more niche high end Services to individuals and companies alike is a great opportunity.
Again, you would have full flexibility over your location and hours worked and unlike a VA where you are paid per hour, with this business idea you would be paid per product completed successfully.
The idea essentially is that many companies and individuals are looking for high end digital products or services to allow them to finish products themselves and would like the “creative” parts outsourced and willing to pay for that service.
Anything again where there is a level of admin outside of the normal business working required, this is the opportunity.
For example, if you were an author writing a book but in order to sell your E-book on Amazon Kindle or such online store you would need a creative E-book designed cover so that you can attract readers and make sales.
That creative work is not easily created or understood by the person themselves, and often people would want to outsource that to someone with more expertise.
This is the service you could then offer to them for a premium without having to actually create the item yourself either, via using outsourcing tools such as Fiverr.com
Summary of the process:
- You would create a website offering a Service for an end customer – a one off service where as soon as payment and the goods are received the relationship contract ends
- You source the service for a price on an outsourcing website
- Manage the relationship between your end customer and the selected outsourcer until customer is happy
- Charge your customer more than the outsourcing cost price, therefore make the profit on the difference
- Continue the process over and over
You can see a screen share of this process in my video here:
- Dropshipping your own designed items
Another product based business that I have personally offered in the past has been exclusive designs printed on Tshirts and Jumpers, and the way we do this is via a Drop Shipping company.
For this business, we remove ourselves completely from the physical creating and shipping to the end customer and our only management for the business is creating the designs/items we wish online and then managing the customer relationship until they are happy with their items purchased.
To do this we would create a website (ideally using Shopify or WooCommerce) where you can display your items at your price to the customer including shipment.
Using your website, your customer would purchase your items and then in the background the drop shipping company would electronically receive the order, create the product and ship it to them for a lower price than the customer was charged.
You would then be in profit from the difference you charged the customer for the item compared to cost to buy and ship from the drop shipping company.
The ideal aspect of a drop shipping company is that at no point in the process do you, as the business owner, hold any stock or have to create the physical items.
You simply ensure the online presence is maintained and the customer is happy through the process of waiting on their product to arrive.
You can create an online store such as this using the Drop Shipping company Inkthreadable in the UK, and also Amazon FBA.
Potential earnings from this type of business are endless, as the customer can access your website to buy products at any time of day and without your interaction.
On average ensuring you are making a minimum of 15-40% profits on top of the cost of goods would allow this business to make a considerable income for you if you were able to drive traffic to your website and products over time.
- Social Media Manager
With the rise of single person home based businesses in recent years, the need for specialists to help in areas such as customer acquisition and retention is key and that is where you could offer your help as a Social Media Manager.
The range of tasks here very much again depend on the client’s needs and asks but likely to be traditionally setting up a schedule for social media posts within Facebook, Instagram and Twitter by hand or perhaps even managing a customer’s Pinterest account using a scheduler such as Tailwind.
For scheduling Social media posts, some great and easy tools to use would be GRUM and Later for Instagram, and then SocialBee for Facebook and Twitter.
You could also be asked to create content for them based on their branding and image.
A great tool to create content based on your skills would be using free online Graphic websites such as Canva.
With this particular role you are likely to be charging based on content created (for example a bundle of 30-50 images for a specific social media platform for £X) or for your time per hour (usually between £10-40 based on tasks and expertise level.
- Content Repurposing
All of these business ideas you will see touch upon the fact that the rise of Entrepreneur based businesses, particularly single person companies, require additional hands ah-hoc or on a regular basis to help them grow and develop their businesses further.
On such area of expertise required is being able to outsource someone who would be capable of taking whatever content they have created for say social media or online video platforms, such as Youtube, and make shorter pieces of content that could be used on various social platforms as well without having to recreate the content again.
For example, if I was to create a Youtube video of 10 mins in length but someone could take that video and create many shorter snippet videos to be used on Facebook or Instagram, that would be a service where value could be given to me for my business.
To offer this serve, you would very much have to be a creative type of person but really would only require editing software and a few hours regularly to assist your customers.
This work would be charged either in packages for output such as a set fee for a certain number of content items created, or you can choose to charge your clients per hour if it is larger projects.
Suggestions for this type of work could further be taking a Youtube video and editing the audio for a podcast for example, allowing the audio to be stripped from the video completely or making the smaller bullet point segments for social media usage.
- Transcriber
A transcriber is someone who writes down what someone else is saying, and with the rise of video content and creation for social media and general brand building, having a business where you would offer this service of taking video or audio files and creating a written exact copy could be a fantastic choice of working at home business.
Particularly with the need to be inclusive for all types of customers, the need for captions on videos used on Youtube, Facebook and Instagram allows for even the hard of hearing to enjoy these types of media to learn and follow their favourite businesses.
To do this role, you would need a good ear for detail and patience to take the spoken word and format it exactly into what was said.
Equipment wise you would need a text creation tool that can use the file for captions such as Express Scribe which is available free currently.
Typically as a Transcriber you would expect to be paid between £0.50-£1 per minute you transcribe, and on average for a 15 minute video to be transcribed it will take approximately one hour.
That means between £30-60 per hour could be expected.
Really to take the plunge and actually begin your new business idea?
I think you will really enjoy these posts especially if you are thinking of starting a business from home soon:
7 Steps from Idea to Business in 1 Night
Passive Income Ideas that anyone can try!
You might also love this video I created about the process of taking an idea to a business format in one night:
Do any of these jobs sound perfect for you and excite you to give them a go?
Leave me a comment below to share your thoughts on this post, and if you have recently decided to start a work from home job that you are passionate about outside of your day job?