As a Grandmother with lots of toddler grandchildren, if one catches something now he or she gets treated as a pariah cause God forbid any child catch a cold. They get banned from school, banned from extended family visits, doomed to isolation. For frigging colds, and then the drama about “you exposed my precious child to illness” from the parents. WTF happened to normal childhood colds and flu….
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Sounds interesting; care to share more about your job? I’m looking to start something similar
I mostly do genealogy work. I started working on my own genealogy over 50 years ago and started writing soon afterwards. Word has gotten around that I know what I'm doing. I have written a number of books and am working on a new one.
I'm currently working for one client who doesn't know much, but has plenty of money. So I negotiated a pretty good hourly rate. I do a little genealogy research each week, send him a report and a bill, and he sends me a nice check. I have worked with this one client off and on for around 10 years. Also, in relation to this client, I wrote a small history book for his hometown a few years ago. I'm a minor celebrity there now.
I also do smaller jobs for local people, but I charge them a lot less. Because they are local, I have a lot of their ancestry already on my computer. Old families living in one area for hundreds of years causes most long-time residents to be relatives.
One tiny side hustle is ordering things online for older people who don't have computers or who don't want to bother with it. They tell me what they want, I look it up and tell them how much it is, they approve it, and I order it. When it arrives, I call them, and they come to pick it up. I only ask for reimbursement, but they always give me extra. It's not a lot of total money, but it's a great return on the time I spent. The number one item right now is cell phone batteries. The stores are telling these people that they can't replace the batteries and have to get new phones. They've heard from others that I can get them the batteries anyway, saving them hundreds.
There are other things I do that bring in a bit of money here and there. I have printed photo books, created a cookbook, printed notepaper, created wedding invitations, and more. If it can be created and printed, I can usually do it. I'm also good at doing any kind of research and organizing information.
Wow! Sounds like you have a lot of great stuff going on. I started doing some genealogy in my family tree a couple years back, and quickly realized how research intensive it is. Glad to see you’ve built a successful business on it. I went through a web design bootcamp a couple years ago and have been thinking of getting into freelancing, although i would need to find a way to find clients. The internet has opened up a lot of opportunities if you’re willing to learn and even specialize in a niche market.
One thing I've done for a few people is to set up Wordpress sites for them. I help them buy a domain, download the latest version of Wordpress, and then upload the files to their new domain. I then show them the ropes and let them take off with their internet-conquering dreams.
Wordpress is easy to learn, and setting up everything goes pretty quickly. It all impresses people.
I've created a YouTube channel, but I haven't done videos yet. I don't have the presence or the equipment to talk on there, but I might present some information along with music clips or video clips. It's not hard to set up, and you don't really have to worry about YouTube's stupid monetization rules, if you just give links in the comments to sell your own merchandise (t-shirts, etc.). Spring.com allows you to design all kinds of stuff, and then they produce it on demand, ship it, and send you the profits. You can use them to make money from YouTube or from your own website. You can also set this up for other people.
Word of mouth actually works pretty well to start off with. Then there are press releases to local papers and FB self-promotion.