Well, you can create your own job, if you like. It’s not for everyone, but it is flexible – there’s no employer looking to squeeze every ounce of productivity out of your hours. I can describe a little bit what that would look like in case it’s helpful.
I think most businesses at their core have one of a limited set of problems. For the people I encounter, it’s either content, marketing, sales, or customer service. Even though I operate a tech company, the problem is almost never technology (probably there’s a lesson somewhere in that). Sales and customer service often don’t leave you much downtime if it’s a busy company, so let’s ignore them.
Marketing: A lot of businesses just need someone reliable to set up Google Adwords and stuff. You won’t make a fortune, but it’s easy to learn how to do, and once it’s set up there is very little maintenance. We’re not talking Coca Cola here – small businesses that need some help getting local search traffic by paying for search ads. One of my clients just hired someone to do exactly that, who walked into their business and just outright suggested it – although they’ve been pretty awful at it to be honest. Anyway, the bar is pretty low and Google wants you to do this so there’s tons of learning material out there.
You can identify customers by walking down the street and searching for every small business, and seeing which ones are hard to find.
Content: Businesses that sell online often need a bunch of product photography and website updates that they don’t have time to do. Often this is non-technical work – there’s a UI you add the photo and description to, then press ‘update’. Often their business profile isn’t set up right on google maps and stuff and they need help fixing it.
Content can also be copy writing, video reviews, social content… but honestly I find all of these harder sells than just “your website is out of date, want to pay me a small fee to fix it, then keep it current?”.
Put together a list of services and print it out so you look organized. Don’t worry about looking like a fool – it’s OK to look like a fool sometimes, as long as you also sometimes succeed.
Try to avoid charging minimum wage. Start with a more moderate cost and work downward if you need to. The customers that pay the least, typically demand the most. I’d structure it as a setup fee and then a fixed amount per month, paid quarterly in advance, for maintenance. Send them a report of what you did every month (google adwords makes this easy).
I’ve got a couple of people I do this for and I bill 250$ a month, paid quarterly in advance, for 10 hours a month. You might earn less than this at the start and that’s OK – I’m just volunteering a data point. It’s not rocket surgery, it’s boring stuff, but it keeps my bills paid while I harass bigger clients to pay theirs.
Yeah, I hate that. Forcing me to input special characters makes my password slightly less secure. Of course I’ll include them by default, but now an attacker can eliminate all passwords without special characters. Most people just put the number 1 or a period at the end of their existing, frequently re-used password anyway. Or capitalize the first or last letter. So it doesn’t make it really harder to crack dumb passwords.
It’s like we’ve optimized passwords to be hard for humans to remember, but easy for humans to guess!