Top 5 Online Jobs That You Can Make a Career From

Adaptation may be your best asset against the ever-changing tide of the economy and speaking of which, it may not be beneficial for you to only have a single source of income and instead a second career. Like attempting to balance 2 clay jars on a stick, finding an alternate source of income requires careful planning and hard decision-making. So the first thing to do is to answer these necessary questions:

• Do you have spare time to manage a second career or a business?
• Are you physically fit to handle a second job?
• Will the time reserved for your family bonding be compromised if you take a job besides the one you already have right now?
• Is the additional income really worth it?

Having answered these questions positively let us proceed on how to get you from your current lifestyle to the one that you want. Remember also that you can do all of these jobs from the comfort of your own home. So here are some online jobs and businesses that you can plan for and decide on later:

1. Blogging – online blog & article writing pays between $5 - $10 per hour and sometimes they pay for $16 per page (usually 500 words) of academic writing. If you’ve got good writing skills you can use it to earn online and make it a good second career.
2. Web Design & Programming – I personally know a very good web designer who makes $75 an hour on creating professional websites! His projects usually last about 2 weeks, but sometimes it can go on for much longer periods of time and he could easily make thousands of dollars a month with his skills. Web programming is also another lucrative business that you can venture into.
3. SEO & Social Media Marketing – search engine optimization or SEO is what’s trending for online start-up businesses these days and an SEO specialist can charge as much as $400 - $3,000 a week in exchange for their services. Besides SEO you can also make money from social media marketing.
4. Graphic & Logo Designing – if you have excellent Adobe software skills or Autodesk and other computer animation software skills, then you can market them online and make big bucks from it. Websites like Hatchwise and Crowdspring pay as much as $1,000 per project! So just imagine how many projects you could accomplish each week, you can earn as much as $5,000 USD a week by simply designing logos and animated presentations!
5. Networking & Affiliate Marketing – the biggest winners are those who are in affiliate marketing and that’s because they earn exponentially through the contacts in their network. Unlike with other online jobs or businesses they don’t earn per hour or per project basis, but for each sale they make, which can vary from a few hundred to several thousand dollars – some can make dozens of sales in less than an hour! A good example of this is the “buy& sell” business of web domains where site owners want to migrate their website to a new domain, while their old domain is still getting a lot of traffic from previous marketing efforts done on it. An affiliate marketer can sell a dozen of these kinds of sites and earn a certain percentage from the full amount. New comers always prefer high PR (page rank) domain names than to buy a new one that still needs a lot of work to get ranked in search engines.

You can earn between $200 - $1,000 a week or higher if you’re into any of the job/business mentioned above; as they are the most profitable online second career for anyone who has the right kind of skills. Some people have become fulltime freelancers working on the internet and makes a huge sum of money day-in and day-out. While others have successfully created a business enterprise and are currently making a hefty profit from it each fiscal year and they are not showing any signs of slowing down.

There are also other advantages of working from home or creating a home-based business. Among these include saving expenditures in going to and from work, additional meal expenses, wearing of business casual and other professional clothing for work, work on your own pace, no bosses or superiors; you can appraise your work at a competitive value than what is generally offered on the market based on your experience and more opportunities for growth. It's no wonder why third party sites such as oDesk and People Per Hour (among other sites) are on their highest growth rate ever recorded. More and more people are going online and finding a second career.

Despite all this attractive information about online jobs and home businesses it is not without a weakness and the first weakness of it is the consistency of the projects that you can get. Sometimes there are no projects available so you'll have to make sure that you regularly seek out projects to maintain your flow of income, but simultaneously you have to minimize your expenditures during these times or until you can land a new contract. The second weakness of being a freelancer online is that you will not have medical and other benefits that under normal circumstances are being offered in a company and so you may have to pay for the insurance premiums yourself.

The third weakness is unreliable network connection. Apparently your internet connection is solely dependent upon your internet service provider (ISP) and if their system is down, then you really can't do anything about it also. You can subscribe to a second or third ISP in order to mitigate this problem but we can't rule out the possibility that they might have a system downtime simultaneously. But the overall assessment of making a second career online is highly acceptable and, in fact, a lot of experts recommend it especially for mothers who desperately need to stay at home to look after their kids. So if you think online work is for you, then start now and be successful in as little as 5 years time.