Make Money From Home or While Traveling

Tired of your day job? Who isn’t. There are several ways to make money from home. I am in no way suggesting you up and quit your job. There are several factors to consider before taking that step, which is actually more like a leap from a cliff. I know because I did it, and I’m still questioning my sanity. It has been a rocky road, but here are some ideas that have worked for me.
Mystery Shopping

Mystery shopping is a lot of fun. I know you may be thinking that mystery shopping isn’t legit, but it is. A few companies I have tried are BestMark, Sinclair Customer Metrics and Confero Inc. They offer mystery shops at car dealerships, grocery stores, fast food restaurants and other stores. Mystery shopping is great for working at home or for traveling. If you live in a rural area, there may not be many shops open to you, but traveling opens up a multitude of options.

There are even mystery shops available inside of airports. You will have better luck making more money if you live in a city. Getting paid depends on the company. Some of them will do direct deposit to a bank account or Paypal, others will send you a physical check. As always be wary when looking for mystery shopping companies. Any company that makes you pay to become a worker is most likely a scam.
Amazon Mechanical Turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a good site for making extra money, but not so much a full time income. Mturk is a crowdsourcing site powered by Amazon. Requesters will post several different types of tasks. The tasks could be something as simple as flagging adult images or academic surveys. There are more in depth tasks such as transcription, writing and editing as well. In order to make decent pay, you have to be pretty established on the site since some requesters won’t accept workers who do not have a certain number of tasks under their belt. Persistence does pay off, though, and the work isn’t hard.

Some great sites to find good paying tasks or Human Intelligence Tasks (HITS) are the Mturk forum and the Hits Worth Turking for Subreddit. The hardest part about Mturk is deciding what is worth your time and what isn’t. Some requesters will post things that pay abysmally for the time it takes to do the tasks. Of course this type of work can be done anywhere you have an internet connection. Even while awaiting your next flight in an airport terminal. Pay is through Amazon Payments.

Some other ways I have learned to make money from home are survey sites and freelance writing sites. It has taken some sort of combination of all of these to make enough to get by, but it’s been worth it to me. The freedom I gained from leaving a brick and mortar job has been phenomenal.