Money Making Ideas

Freelance Jobs On Top 10 Websites

July 13, 2016 By Twila VanLeer

Freelance jobs on the top 10 websites online — Freelance jobs posted online are becoming easier to find.

Freelance jobs can solve income problems for many people who work at home. In 2015, some 15.5 million Americans were self-employed, according to Bureau of Labor statistics. By 2020, the number is expected to rise to about 60 million – more than 40 percent of the total workforce.

Freelance Jobs Online

Freelancers are doing their work at home, in coffee shops and co-working spaces everywhere. Many or the best and brightest are leaving traditional jobs to take advantage of the flexibility and autonomy in jobs of their own creation. Whether the objective is just making a side job of a hobby or making freelance the way to a living, there are resources that can be helpful.

Toptal

Toptal is a freelance network of elite software engineers and digital designers from more than a hundred countries around the world. It has a screening process that weeds out everyone except the top 3 percent of talent in a number of categories. If you are selected, you know you are in company with the elite. You are allowed to decide if you want full or part-time work, how many hours and set your own rates. Toptal works with such companies as AirBnB, IDEO and JP Morgan and has a consistent lineup of interesting clients and projects.

Upwork

Upwork, a union of the two leading freelance networks, Elance and lDesk, is now the largest website to find freelancers. It has more than 10 million registered users, four million clients and listings for three million jobs every year. It is a source for writers, architects, legal aides, photographers and others. Users can enroll for short-term or long-term projects, work by the hour or by the project. A chat feature, time-tracker and payment protection are part of the program.

99 Designs

99 Designs has its own twist. The platform is for designers and every job comes in the form of a contest. Instead of browsing through a catalog of portfolios and resumes, clients are asked to crowd source projects, set a budget and give instructions and then let designers submit work based on the project brief. At the end of a week, the client chooses the best design and pays its originator. This is a good site for designers who want to test their talents and shake up their workflow.

PeoplePerHour

PeoplePerHour offers a source for all skills related to web projects, including software engineers, digital designers, SEO specialists and marketers. A tool called WorkStream simplifies the business side of the work by organizing payment, communications and management all in one place. You can browse jobs, be notified of new openings via your inbox and send up to 15 proposals without charge before you sign up for the premium plan.

LinkedIn Profinder

This freelance source has more than 420 million members in more than 200 countries and is a leading place for learning about job-related information. It recently launched LinkedIn Profinder as a means to help freelance professionals to find jobs. Based on its enormous amount of user data, it is able to connect freelancers with strong leads based on keyword searches and companies followed.

SimplyHired

SimplyHired has the largest variety of freelance jobs of any on this list, with information on jobs ranging from construction to concierge work. It offers help for those seeking extra work and has information on jobs in more than 24 countries, offering opportunities in 12 languages.

Freelance Writing Gigs

Freelance Writing Gigs is a job board that is updated daily with freelance writing and blogging jobs. Topics vary from technical writing to writing about such things as recipes, photography and healthcare. There are great opportunities whether you are looking to supplement your income or make freelancing you full-time work.

If you are among the millions of freelancers looking for new opportunities, check into these sites to see what’s in them for you.

Is There A Future For The Check Printing Business?

April 19, 2010 By Sherry Tingley

The check printing business has gone through hundreds of years of refining. In the 1600’s, England began using checks as a way to eliminate the problem of carrying sacks of money. Checks did not become a popular way of conducting money transactions until the early 1900’s. By 1913, checks were widely used in the United States and by 1915, W.R. Hotchkiss had created Deluxe Check Printers, a leader in the check printing business now called Deluxe Corporation.

As personal checks became more and more popular, an overwhelming problem developed. The process by which the checks were sorted to the correct account number was painstakingly slow and expensive.

By 1952, there were approximately 8 billion checks a year that needed to be processed. On one day alone, there could be 69 million checks requiring sorting.

Dr. Kenneth R. Eldredge of the Stanford Research Institute to the American Banking Association, came up with a solution to the problem. His solution is well known today as MICR technology, which he patented in 1961. The patent number 3,000,000 was given to him. The patent office held this number for someone who would create a significant invention and they felt that this invention was significant.

MICR stands for magnetic ink character recognition. Dr. Eldredge used a special type of ink toner that had iron oxide in it. When the check was passed through a magnetic machine, the iron oxide particles became magnetized. These created patterns which were then recognizable by the magnetic reader. This allowed for matching checks to checking account numbers.

A special font was selected to use with this technology. That font can be seen in the bottom left hand corner of any bank check. The first font was called “E-13B.” The font has ten numbers and four symbols. This has been revised five times so the letter E was used to represent that. The 13 was used to represent .013-inch which was the design of the font. The B represents the second revision to the system.

By 1963, a standard had been set by the banking industry. The American National Standard Institute (ANSI) recognized the MICR technology and the chosen font as the one to be used on all printed checks.

Many revisions have been made over the years, but this original technology paved the way for the check business.

In the 1980’s the check business was predicted to be on the decline because of the use of electronic fund transfers. Thirty years later, the check business is still hanging in there.

puppy-checks — Hundreds of Dog and Puppy Checks

Deluxe Corporation, recently acquired Custom Direct checks for $98 million. Deluxe reported sales of $1.34 billion dollars in the past 12 months. They are anticipating the new purchase of Custom Direct will increase their revenues by $60 million. They have successfully positioned their company as a leader in checks sold directly to consumers and not through financial institutions.

Although technology makes electronic funds cheaper than processing printed checks, the check printing business is still thriving in 2010. With fierce competition between VistaPrint, Walmart, Checks In The Mail, Carousel Checks and Harland Clark, it seems that Deluxe Corporation is currently the leader in this industry.

Basic Affiliate Marketing Tips

March 22, 2010 By Sherry Tingley

Affiliate marketing? People look at you quizzically when you tell them that is what you do to make money. Most people have no idea of what affiliate marketing is. They just can’t wrap their minds around the idea even when you explain it to them.

clickbank — Clickbank has paid affiliates over $1,503,759,460!

Most will ask how they would start affiliate marketing and how they would choose a product to promote? This is a common question that has an easy answer. Research your desired niche products and see what kind of demand is there. Use the Google keyword tool to choose a niche that has a lot of monthly searches – over 40,000 searches a month is good enough to get started. Make sure you have enough interest in providing your customers with as much helpful information as you can. If you have no interest, you can still promote the products, it just won’t be as fun.

Next, you will need to apply to become an affiliate through an affiliate marketing company. There are several major affiliate companies that are very highly recommended. One is Clickbank, which offers thousands of information products that people can download after purchase. Some of these products are software products that have a recurring charge and hence brings you a monthly payment without getting a new customer. Other products are solutions to various health problems. Some will teach you to learn a new skill. Some will actually tell you what the best selling products are.

A second company to check out is Google Affiliate Network. Google has combined their affiliate network payment schedule with their Adsense payments. So if you are already getting money from Adsense this is a good fit for you.

Google has thousands of merchants. When you log in to their site, they’ll give you statistics that are important to understand. There is a figure called EPC – and this means earnings per click. There is a 3 month EPC and a 7 day EPC. You’ll see that the higher the numbers, the better chances you have of selling their products. They list these statistics for each merchant. They also show you the merchant’s payout rank. So you’ll be able to see which merchants are paying the most to affiliates. Choose your merchants wisely with help from these statistics.

A third company to check out is
Sshareasale.com. They have hundreds of merchants with thousands of products. They will deposit your earnings directly to your checking account on the same day every month. Shareasale is run by Brian Littleton, who is experienced in every aspect of ecommerce. Shareasale has many merchants to choose from and they provide easy ways to make an web page that will display products on your site. They also have some video selling options available.

Affiliate marketing is challenging, but worth all the effort you put into it. You can be your own boss and set your own working hours. Be warned though, you’ll probably work twice as hard as you ever have worked. That’s what happens when you get to follow your passions. It hardly seems like work.

Launching a new website – Days 21-30

September 29, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

checksmall-web-traffic Launching a new website is not as easy as some would have you think. This is the last article in a series of articles that covered the promotional strategies of the first 30 days in the launching of a new website. Time will help any new website get more traffic and this site is so new that it will have to go through some growing pains for the next four months. Patience is needed to develop and get these new sites to a profitable stage.

The last week of the month showed some solid traffic increases. The total visitors for the month was 1018. As a whole, that wasn’t too bad. Next year at this time, it will be interesting to compare the differences.

Using SEO elite, I checked for the number of backlinks and there were 22 backlinks. These backlinks were acquired by writing articles and making comments on other people’s websites.

I checked the main search engines to see how many pages were indexed with each engine. Google has indexed 104 pages. Yahoo has 38 pages. MSN has only one page indexed and I’m not sure how to get more pages indexed by them. I just found a link to submit sites to MSN: http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx so now I’ve submitted to that website. Alta Vista reported indexing 38 pages and All The Web has indexed 38 pages.

One strategy that I have added to this site is to add a blog. I think that WordPress blogs are very search engine friendly and I believe that adding content to it on a regular basis will be helpful.

I was able to get some help in making my website comply with the W3C, the web standards organization for all web pages. I have tried in the past to get compliant with that website, but my web skills were not good enough to understand how to change things to get into compliance. A friend of mine from the Philippines told me about a fellow named Taylor S. Ripley. He runs a web development and hosting site at http://www.turkreno.com/. I gave him a call and he was nice enough to walk me through correcting all the mistakes that were on my front page. He also helped me create a more useful sitemap and I have submitted that to the search engines. He was so knowledgeable and helpful. I highly recommend him as a person to help you with your SEO efforts. It was so nice to meet someone that was so helpful.

So to wrap things up for this 30 Day Plan, I’d like to review the most valuable lessons that I learned during this time period.

1. When developing a new site, submit a basic sitemap for at least part of your site to Google webmaster tools so you can start getting some traffic.

2. When your site is completed, submit another sitemap to Google so that they will index all of your pages.

3. Submit your new site to Yahoo, MSN, All The Web and Alta Vista.

4. Begin the process of creating a sense of community by visiting other sites that relate to your topic and participate in their conversations on their blogs.

5. Write articles that relate to your product or website and make sure that they get distributed to a large number of directories.

6. Make sure your site is W3 Compliant.

7. Be patient and keep contributing to your site by making it better and offering people more resources and help.

8. Start trying something, anything. Some of what you do will work, and some things won’t. Doing something is better than just dreaming about it.

9. Realize that it takes time for your new project to become profitable and know that it is possible to get your sites profitable enough to support yourself.

10. Network with other people through http://www.meetup.com to find others in your community that are pursuing the same types of business.

I hope that part of this experience has helped you learn what you can do to get your sites started an on to profitability. Good luck with your projects!

Ebay’s Largest Store Owner

September 27, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

Have you ever wondered who owns the biggest ebay store? The powerseller, Buy, has 867,112 successful transactions and is listed on eBay as the largest store there. Upon further research through the help of Google Maps, you can see that the address listed for this seller is in California and is located in the buy.com building.
buy-dot-com-building

The powerseller, Buy, is actually a leading e-commerce company that has been in business over 10 years and has over 11 million customers.

They carry millions of products in categories ranging from sporting goods, computer hardware and software, cellular, electronics, movies, music, books and more.

At their website, they even list their most searched for items: 16GB Flash Drive, 1tB external hard drive, 32gb flash drive, Cordless phone, Ipod touch, Micro SD Card, USB flash drive, cordless phones, external hard drive, iphone, iphone 3g,iphone 3gs, ipod classic, ipod nano, micro sd, microsd, netbook, netbooks, nintendo ds, ps3 refurbished, sansa sd card, sdhc, slingbox, webcam, wii, wireless router,zune, zune hd.

The www.buy.com website is ranked by Alexa.com, a web monitoring site, as number 238 in the United States. The lowest numbers indicate the most popular sites. There are some bad reviews about this site on Alexa, but eBay seems to have nothing but positive feedback for them. Apparently their customer service is outsourced to India which causes problems for United States customers.

Buy.com has been listed by Internet Retailer as one of the top 100 retailers on the internet. Apparently the top 100 retailers are responsible for 55.3% of retail web sales.

Amazon.com is the leading retailer on the net with $19.2 billion dollars in sales. Internet retail selling is here to stay. People are becoming more and more comfortable ordering online. How comfortable are you with online ordering?

View Buy’s Ebay Listings