Those with the right marketable skills can immediately start earning money online by offering their services as an independent contractor through one of the well know online contract work brokers, including oDesk, eLance, vWorker (formerly RentACoder) oDesk provides online skill tests a worker can take to boost their online resume, for the employers peace of mind oDesk requires workers to install monitoring software that allows the employer to view a screen snapshot of the workers computer at any time as a means to verify they are actually working on the assigned project. While these freelancer sites are focused on programming and design, they also handle writers of skill levels ranging from specialized technical writers to simple web site article writers. Those with no special skill, other than solid English grammar can earn anywhere from $2 to $10 for a 450 word articles. Webmasters are hungry for a stead stream of original content, necessary to maintain a good ranking in search engine search results. Another non-technical task requested on these freelance sites is the virtual assistant, who may be called on to perform secratarial skills including making phone calls, screening emails and writing. One can also find job offers for low level SEO activities including link building and competitive research that require minimal internet skills, some employers sill provide instructions virtually anyone can follow.
A new unique niche outlet for independent workers is Fiverr.com, a site offering various services all costing exactly $5, you will find weirdly creative services being offered, like prank calling your boss,sending you a photo of a message of your choice written in the sand in Miami Beach, drawing your face on a superhero body, on can also rent a hot girlfriend for their facebook page. Third world programmers and graphic designers can offer a meaningful amount of labor for $5. Some inventive folks have come up with no labor or high profit offers, like selling plr ebook collections with republishing right that cost only a few dollars, offering to setup a web site as long as they run it on a specified hosting service that can earn the Fiverr worker more than $50 hosting affiliate commission.
Short term micro tasks are performed by people working through sites including Amazon’s mTurk.com (Mechanical Turk) and ShortTask.com. Amazon came up with mechanical turk when they determined they had a need for automation with human intelligence, orders are placed for simple human intelligence tasks (HITs) like looking up business addresses, comparing photographs, testing web links, better paying tasks like transcribing an audio recording to text might pay $1 while more basic tasks pay only pennies, many of the mTurk workers reside in the 3rd world, where pennies still count. Some Americans take on mTurk tasks as a hobby, in place of of working on crossword puzzles.
Those with longer range plans might start an online business, most commonly online businesses are online retail stores or affiliate marketing sites, see more in the Creating n Online Business article..