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So here I am, looking again at listings for part-time work-from-home to bring in a little extra money. The past six years or so have convinced me that I'm unemployable full-time for anything I'm physically capable of doing at this point¹ (I could probably get hired to work retail at, say, Home Depot, but my knees and left foot would never stand it). And it seems there's basically three types of jobs listed if you're looking to work from home:
Telemarketing. 'Nuff said.
(I'd almost sooner mug old ladies.)
Unspecified get-rich-quick promises using all the pyramid-scam buzzwords.
(Sub-category: Unspecified get-rich-quick promises using all the pyramid-scam buzzwords plus a liberal showering of "Christian" and "Mentor" and the like, to take advantage of the pious who think that if it's Christian it must be honest, because surely no fellow Christian would ever try to cheat them... right?)
And "Get paid to take surveys on your computer." I have a hard time believing there's significant money in that. The sites I've looked at so far, it seems that to sign up, you have to agree to be spammed, opt in to a bunch of marketing crap, and sometimes even sign up for online college courses. Can you say "just another scam"? Sure you can.
Once again, I find myself wondering about a home-based PC repair business. "The PC Doctor makes house calls!" With places like Best Buy charging $70-$80 just to examine and diagnose a problem, there almost has to be a way to undercut them on repairs, and there may be money in support too. (With the number of cheap-crap white-box PCs on the market stuffed full of lowest-bidder parts, there's probably little chance of making money building machines; anyone who knows enough to understand why it's worth using better-quality components probably knows enough to build their own.)
But how does one get started...?
[1] Well, unless I were willing to uproot everyone again and move back to California. Which I'm not. It'd be chancing everything on a roll of the dice, and we'd be back into apartment-rental hell for the foreseeable future.
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If you can't get a job with someone else doing it, then you could always set up a "real" blog and get Google Ads on it.
Among other things, there are a lot of free or nearly free options for various applications on the internet. There's a demand among people running searches for articles comparing them.
There's a whole lot of applications that offer evaluation versions. There's a searching market for articles comparing products.
Do good work and you might be able to get enough traffic and click through to make a bit of cash.
The other side of that is a good site with a lot of traffic is an advertisement for your ability to do technical writing. Product reviews and technical writing aren't all that dissimilar.
You don't necessarily need to be employed by someone else to do technical writing---could run it as your own business and target smaller mom and pop shops who can't afford to take someone on full time.
I don't know what standard rates are for tech writing, but for short stories and such, typical (unless you're a pro) is about two or three cents a word, so you'd probably want a minimum, or a base charge to look at it and then by the word. Dunno. You'd have to investigate average pricing.
Tech writing doesn't really take much talent--just a good grasp of the English language and the ability to explain things clearly.
If you do the pc repair business, you might want to try the tech writing/product reviewing thing as a sideline.
The advantage of product reviews is you can work them in as money work, however limited, when you're low on other work. They also serve as an advertisement for your PC repair business, by demonstrating you know what the f*** you're talking about. :-)
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And yeah, ouch is why I don't do it.
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I didn't consider the angle of doing product comparisons though. That's not a bad idea. Neither is leveraging it into technical writing.
I'm going to have to give that some thought. Thanks for the suggestion :)