Today we’re going to take a look at 10 different online jobs that you can get, even if you are still a high school or a college student. All of the jobs that mentioned here can realistically pay $15/hr or more depending on how experienced you are with these and your attention to detail.
For most of the jobs we recommend using a platform like Upwork. With Upwork you can look through jobs that people have already posted, who are actively looking for help with their projects.
There are a ton of different platforms out there, but Upwork is the easiest to get started with.
1. Data Entry
We’ll start with the job that requires the lowest skill level, which would be data entry. So with data entry, this can be a variety of different things.
- It could be taking someone’s PDF document and transferring it into Microsoft Word.
- It could be transferring data into an excel spreadsheet.
- It could even be writing product listings, or transferring products from online store to another online store.
Typically with data entry, you don’t need experience with anything, but you will need to have a high attention to detail, especially if you are copying over important financial numbers, or product names. It usually needs to match exactly what the client is giving you, so it’s super important that you are actually able to take data and make sure that it is exactly the same when you are transferring it wherever it needs to go.
So even with data entry jobs, I would try to look on something like Upwork first. There’s also something called Amazon Mechanical Turk, but typically you barely make any money, people who are posting on there don’t really want to pay for quality work, so going with Upwork you are going to be able to get a better rate, and you are going to be able to charge $15 or more. You set your own rate and you charge what you want.
2. Social Media Manager
The next job that would be good for anyone from their early teens to their late 20s would be a social media manager.
Be cautious with this, as there are a lot of courses claiming to teach you how to be a social media manager or marketer for thousands of dollars, but those are definitely not needed.
But you can make money managing social media accounts. Usually, this is going to be for an influencer, someone who’s trying to become an influencer, or some sort of brand or e-commerce store. You could also do this for local businesses like restaurants, dentists, or chiropractors that want to post on social media, but don’t have time to do it themselves.
So what a social media manager does is make the posts, schedule the posts, or if there are multiple people involved, it may be making their schedules for when things need to be posted, and making sure that everyone stays on track so that the schedule is kept.
This could also be deciding which channels their focusing their attention on. For example, do they pull in the most business through facebook or instagram? Or maybe they’re trying out tiktok. You would be the one deciding where they’re posting, what they’re posting, and how often they’re posting.
3. Social Media Marketing
Knowing how to market is a very valuable skill, and it’s something that companies are willing to pay for. So when I’m talking about social media marketing, mostly what I’m talking about is running ads as well as sending email campaigns.
Both are huge revenue sources for companies, so that is what they focus a lot of their time and budget on.
What you would need to learn for this is how to run ads on facebook, instagram, or snapchat. It would also be beneficial to learn how to run email campaigns.
There are free platforms you can do this on, as well as paid platforms. Once you learn one, the rest are similar.
One of the free ones you can start out with is mail chimp. This is an email campaign platform that a lot of companies use at the beginning, and what a lot of small businesses use.
It’s pretty simple, it’s like a drag-and-drop type program. But once you learn how to send effective emails, that is something that people are willing to pay a lot of money for.
4. Freelance Writer
The next job is to be a freelance writer. If you’re halfway decent at writing, you can for sure make more than $15/hr writing. It’s really hard to find a good writer, and if you are a good writer, please share your skills with the rest of us.
This job can be especially good if you have any knowledge in a particular niche. So for example you be a finance writer, you could write about online businesses, or you could write about coaching.
With copywriting jobs, especially with the posts that you see on Upwork, a lot of them are going to be for email campaigns or landing pages. If you’ve ever seen the landing pages for some of those coaching programs or online courses, they hire people to actually write that sales text that is trying to sell you their course or service.
Same thing goes for that, you don’t necessarily have to have a particular niche, but you can do copywriting specifically for emails, landing pages, or articles, or whatever interests you.
5. Virtual Assistant
The next job is a virtual assistant. If you’re not already within the online-job-world you may not have hear of this, but this is basically a general term for someone online that’s helping you do whatever tasks you need.
Virtual assistants can do a wide variety of jobs, but often it will involve some sort of customer service support, it may have to do with some of the other jobs I’ve already mentioned like scheduling social media posts. If it’s for an e-commerce brand, it may be for something like keeping their product and sales pages up to date. It could also be light data entry or anything else they need help with.
For this one, it may be $15/hr, it may be a little bit lower, or it may be a little bit higher. It really just depends on the client and what they need you to do.
6. Video Editor
The next one is a video editor. Even if you don’t have a ton of experience editing videos, if you spend a day or two on YouTube looking up tutorials, you can definitely learn enough to get started.
This is a really good skill to have because so many people are trying to product video content or trying to add that to the content that they already produce, that there are just a ton of people who are looking for video editors.
7. Graphic Designer
The next job is a graphic designer.
Photoshop and Illustrator are pretty much the industry standards for what professional graphic designs use, but there are also free online alternatives like Canva. That lets you make pretty good looking social media graphics, website graphics, and different size banners. And they have templates that you can work off of too.
Using Canva isn’t necessarily ideal, but you can definitely get started with that.
8. Web Developer/Web Designer
The next job requires a bit more time on your part, and that’s a web developer or a web designer. For this you don’t necessarily have to learn really intense coding. If you learn how to use WordPress, Squarespace, or Wix, you can build websites for people and you can make well over $15 doing it.
This is another job where you may not currently know how to build websites. If you spend a week or two just on youtube and googling things, you can definitely start out on one of those basic website builders that’s a drag and drop situation, and you can build pretty decent websites. As you get more familiar with those, you can definitely move into more complicated website builders that people will pay you even more for.
9. Teach English Online
The ninth job is to teach english online. This has been around for a while, but especially now, people are willing to pay a little bit more to get a good online english tutor. One popular program is called VIPKid. What you’re doing through then is tutoring international students.
You will have basic conversations with them in English, and teach them simple words, letters, and phrases. As you move into later levels, you’ll have full conversations with them, practice their sentence structure
That’s something that’s pretty nice to have. Since it is on your schedule, you can open up the time slots that you would be willing to teach at.
If that’s something that you’re interested in, I think there’s a whole English teaching side of youtube where people have a lot of fun making different props, etc.
10. Translation
And the last job is translation, which of course will not apply to everyone. But if you were lucky enough to grow up in a bilingual household, or you were lucky enough to go to a school that actually put time into teach you another language, then that is something that people are actually willing to pay a good amount of money for.
Especially if you’re fluent in two different languages and you’re able to translate things like medical documents or legal documents. It doesn’t necessarily have to be that complex. I know that a lot of people will pay to have their ebooks or courses translated into other languages, so those are options as well.
