One of the biggest questions on everyone’s minds these days is how to make money on the internet. Everyone has their own hobbies, and talents, and some of them can be turned into a source of income on the internet if you know how to do it. Depending on what your hobby of choice is, you might be able to make a fair amount of money on it online.

Photography

If you’re a photographer, you can bring in a good bit of money on the internet. There are two main ways to go about making money from your photography. You can sell stock photos, and prints. There are a few different ways to sell each on the internet, and picking the right ones for you is really going to depend on the type of work you do, and the audience is’t most likely to appeal to. For stock photos, two of the biggest sites you can sell your work on are iStockPhoto, and Getty Images. Getty Images is mainly used by journalists looking to get stock photos for articles, so if you have a lot of work covering people and places, you’ll do well there. If your work is diverse, iStockPhoto may be a better place to sell your stock photos. Their customers are looking for a wide variety of things. As for prints, your best bet is to set up an Etsy store. Etsy has a great community of both sellers, and customers. It’s easy to set up an Etsy store, and have it become profitable.

Writing

If you can write, you can bring in some money on the internet. A lot of different websites are looking for writers, and if you can’t find a site that’s hiring, you can always list your services on a site like oDesk, or Elance. Fiverr can also be a great place to find clients – just offer up one article for $5, and see if anyone takes you up on it. Once you get a client on Fiverr, there’s a good chance that they’ll keep coming to you for work over time.

Other talents can be turned into profits on the internet. Take the time to do some research about your hobby, and see if there’s any way you can do it professionally. If there’s a market for it, you can make money on the internet with your hobby.

Hiring outsourcers can either be an awesome experience or a complete nightmare, sadly I have been on both ends of the spectrum. Good contractors are hard to come by, but if you look in the right places you are going to have a much better chance of finding someone within budget and that is capable of doing the work to your satisfaction.

Today we are going to focus on outsourcing websites such as oDesk, Elance, and Guru.

Putting Out Jobs Requests

The first step of finding someone to do work for you is your job request. This is the most essential part and the area where you will make or break your chance at getting a good contractor.

Make sure you are extremely specific. If you want a native English speaker, make that a requirement. If you want someone for less than $5 per hour, make that a requirement. Make sure the task you are requesting to be completed is extremely detailed so that potential contractors can assess whether or not is worth their time and if so, what their price to complete the task is.

Choosing a Contractor

If you are looking for a long term contractor this is the time to really focus in on what you want and make sure the person is qualified to do what you are asking them to do. One great way to make sure you have the right person is to put 4-5 of your best candidates on a trial basis. What you do is simply ask them to do a task (for a reduced amount, say 50% of their asking price) and do part of the task like that. If they get hired you will hire them for their asking wage, if not you pay them for the work they did. This helps the hirer make sure they have the right person, and as a contractor makes them work harder to try and get the long term work.

Clear Tasks

Make sure you are very clear with the tasks you give to your contractors. From the start you need to give very clear and concise directions to your contractor. Ask them to explain back to you what you are requesting, so you can make sure they understand the task (especially if it is a long term task). Don’t be afraid to ask for changes or to send videos showing them how you want something done.

Once you have a good contractor, hang on to them and make sure they are happy. Keep the work coming for them and you will have a great working relationship.

If you’ve ever thought about starting a new website, chances are you have looked into hiring a professional designer. A lot of design firms charge extremely high rates for simple websites, and in many cases there are additional costs for different types of functionality. With design firms charging such high rates, it’s hard to imagine getting a website off the ground on a budget, but it can definitely be done.

Setting up a site using WordPress is actually fairly simple. If you’re comfortable with some light HTML, chances are you could do it yourself, as long as you’re not looking for anything too complicated. Most hosting providers offer an automatic install of WordPress, and once it’s installed, all you really need to do is make a few simple tweaks to the theme to get it looking the way you want it to. If you’d like to add a little bit of additional functionality to your site, there are many plugins and widgets available for WordPress that allow you to do a wide variety of things. There are some plugins to help with SEO optimization, some to add things like polls to your site, and some to allow you to embed a podcast right into a post. Some of them require a little more effort to set up than others, but if you’re on a tight budget it might be worth the time.

If design firm prices don’t fit in your budget, and you don’t feel like you could learn to set up a site on your own, there’s a third option. Sites like elance.com let you connect with many freelance designers. Freelancers can often product the same quality work that a large firm would deliver, but given that their operating cost is significantly lower, you’ll get a much better price out of them. It’s important to go through a site like elance rather than just searching Craigslist for a freelancer. Elance, and other sites like it let you see a designer’s profile, along with reviews of their work. That way, you can be sure you’re getting a designer that can handle your site, and won’t leave you high and dry if there’s a problem.

Don’t be discouraged by the prices big design firms offer. If you take the time to do a little work with your site yourself, or if you can find a freelancer that suits your budget, your site can become a reality, even if your budget is tight.