Online Jobs For College Students
Getting a college education is not cheap – we are all aware of that, which is why there are more students who are working to offset college expenses, and at the same time, make their way through college graduation. There’s one common problem though: there are just too many people looking for a job, and while we have class schedules to take into consideration, looking for a regular job offers schedule flexibility is almost next to impossible. That’s before we discover these online jobs for college students.
Why Consider Working Online Instead Of Doing Regular Jobs?
There are a lot of reasons why and one of the most common is that this is the most convenient type of job that any working student can have. Aside from the daily hassles and commute going to a regular job, online work gets rid of all those types of inconvenient situations. As long as you have a laptop, an internet connection, and a headset, you can go snag a job or two to help you pay for your college.
Schedule flexibility is another reason why online jobs rock! While some work requires you to be online on a certain period of time, some clients are flexible with your work schedule. As long as you deliver, most of them don’t mind! This is one of the best things about working online! You’ll have to practice a bit of time management first, but, once you get the hang of it, it’s all worth it.
How about the pay? You’ll be surprised that the majority of these online jobs pay generously. Depending on what type of work you agree on getting, expect that you’ll get compensated for $15 per hour, or even more. To help you get an idea on which online jobs for college students are worth your time, here’s a list of possible job descriptions and where to possibly find an employer:
Social Media Manager
This is by far, the most in-demand work as of this writing. Small and large-scale companies make use of social media to increase their online presence. This is where most people spend their time online, and these businesses would want to take advantage of these leads and hopefully turn online users into one of their customers.
What does a social media manager do? In a nutshell, one of your tasks is to manage one (or more) of their social media accounts. As a social media manager, you are the voice of the company and it is your job to keep the company’s fanbase engaged. This means that you have to post deals, regular content, and ensure that you are connecting with the company’s followers either by responding to messages and/or post comments. This is a fun way for college students to support college fees, not to mention that social media isn’t that hard to study.
To get started, you must have at least an understanding of how social media management works. There are free courses you can find online, especially in YouTube and you can start watching those first. Once you get to know the ins and outs of this job, you can offer your services directly to clients.
How? Choose the platform that you are most comfortable with. Whether it be Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Pinterest – start with that platform. Create a proposal and reach out to those companies directly and offer your services.
Alternatively, you can check different group boards such as UpWork or Freelancer.com and look for companies who are looking to hire social media managers. Prepare your CV and cover letter because you’ll be sending (a lot) of these when looking for a social media manager job. Social media managers usually get paid $15 – $40 / hour depending on experience. Start from the bottom and improve your skills to boost your pay.
Writer
If you have a knack for words, you can work as a ghost/content writer. Again, you can start offering your services to clients by directly sourcing small companies. You can look for them on Facebook, Instagram, or even Twitter. Directly pitch your services and see if they are in need of writers. If you have an existing portfolio, keep them ready just in case a potential client would want to see your work.
Writing is great for college students as they are usually paid per output. This means that you don’t have to worry about reporting to work – as long as you can provide the article(s) within the deadline.
Alternatively, there are other writing platforms where you can snag a writing gig or two. iWriter is one – you usually start with the lowest rank which pays you about $3 – 5 per article. As you increase your rating and get more clients, you are given access to more “expensive” articles, up to $80 per 500 words! Some experienced writers claim to be able to write one article in an hour or two. Just do the math! If you can write a $15 500 word article in 1 hour, work for 4 hours per day, you can earn up to $60 a day! Of course, you can do more or do less – depending on your schedule.
Online Tutor
If teaching is your forte, working as an online tutor is one of the most popular online jobs for college students. This is because you get to pick your schedule, and you don’t even have to work 8 full hours per day. You can choose the days and the time that you are available to work, and that’s it! You can get paid $12 – $20 per hour depending on the subject that you are teaching.
You can start your own business and offer these services to non-English speaking countries, or even help your fellow college students with their subjects. You can charge your own rate and accept as little or as many students that your schedule can handle. It’s all up to you!
You don’t have to stick with academic subjects. If you’re great at playing the guitar, you can also offer music lessons to kids, high school students or even college students. Are you great with arts? Offer a short painting course online! Tutor.com is one place where you can market and offer your tutoring services. For courses, you may offer your courses through Udemy or Skillshare. These platforms make it easier for you to create courses and offer them to students at your defined pricepoint.
Data Entry Specialist
To be honest, data entry jobs aren’t the best paying, or it isn’t the most exciting work, to begin with. Most data entry tasks are daunting, but these are good starting points if you don’t have experience working online. If you type really fast, most likely you’ll be able to find a couple of jobs that require data entry specialists.
The pay is usually $5 – $19 per hour, depending on experience. Again, you can find data entry jobs through different online job boards such as UpWork and Freelancer.com. Sometimes, when you go to the jobs section of Craigslist, you can even snag a couple of online listings that might interest you.
Resume Writer
You’d be surprised that there are a lot of people who are willing to pay to have their resume fixed/written. Do you know someone who’s about to graduate and would be looking for a job? Your university is the best place to look for customers right now! You can offer your resume writing services and charge $15 – $25 per resume. You may go lower or higher, but usually, it falls within that range.
If offering your resume writing services to your college’s graduating students seem difficult, or if you have too much competition at school, you can also offer your services to ResumeEdge or other similar websites.
Niche Writer / Blogger
This is a bit different than the typical freelancing jobs that you may find online, but many people are doing it, which means that they’re a lucrative way of making money online. With this, you can start working on your own blog and monetize your blog in different ways. You can sign up as a Google AdSense publisher and get paid every 1000 page views or every time someone clicks on your ad. You can check Google AdSense’s publisher guidelines to learn more about what your website should be, and to understand what isn’t allowed.
Focus on a niche that you’re passionately in love with. For example, you’re passionate about ATV bikes and own a couple of ones yourself. You can start blogging about it, focusing on topics that many people would want to know about your ATV bikes. You may write reviews and other informative articles, and start bringing traffic to your website through social media platforms. Pinterest is an awesome way to generate traffic to your website – many people have had huge success with it!
Why does traffic matter? When you have people visiting your site, if you’re a publisher, your earnings continue to rise along with the number of site visitors. If you have signed up for affiliate products, Amazon, for instance, you’ll get commissions every time someone purchases from your website.
Take note though that this is a long process and may not yield instant results. It may take about a month before you start seeing results, considering that you have to write original content and build up traffic to your social media channels. However, it’s your own website and you’re working for yourself.
If you’re not into content writing, you may also try vlogging for a change! If you’re artistic, not afraid of the camera and can share interesting portions of your life, or can do video reviews on whatever niche you’ve chosen, by all means, do it! YouTube vloggers are everywhere – and why do you think they’re doing it? Yes – because it’s a lucrative way to generate income online!
Micro-Freelancer
There’s this popular site called Fiverr – this is where people turn to and offer whatever service for as low as $5. With the new platform, you can now offer more upgrades and offer services more than $5. For example – are you great in writing? If you don’t want to take the typical route of looking for clients online, you can offer your writing services here in Fiverr. For example, offer a 100-word article for $5, and increase in increments of $5 or $10 for more words. It’s up to you. Add $25 for a rush job – or more! It’s your gig – you can price it however you want!
You should take into consideration though that you may want to check how much your competitors charge in Fiverr. You don’t want to charge more than the typical rate unless you are really offering something more outstanding than other Fiverr sellers. To check your competition, just look for the keywords/services you are about to offer and see how much top sellers charge.
Other services you may offer in Fiverr may include but are not limited to: logo design, website design, and development, stock photos, calligraphy, resume writing/editing, proofreading,
Graphics Designer
This may take a bit of experience, but if you’re in college and studying graphics design, you may have an edge in this field. Again, you can offer these services in Fiverr, you may post your resume online or even look for companies looking for graphic designers. There are tons of job vacancies in this field. Compensation is usually $20 – $50 per hour depending on experience.
Web Developer
Do you know programming languages, or at least master one of the most commonly used languages such as PHP and CSS? You may be one of those skilled people who gets paid a hefty amount per project. Usually, web developing jobs are paid per project, but some people charge by the hour. It’s up to you. Web developers usually get paid $20 – $100 per hour
How to find clients? Again, job boards – there are numerous clients looking for talented web developers. You may need to have basic experience in Wordpress or other e-commerce sites as these are the ones clients are usually looking for. If you’re not familiar with these platforms but have experience coding, you may want to brush up your skills by checking YouTube tutorials or by checking out Udemy or Coursera courses. They’re worth it – I promise!
General Virtual Assistant
This position is equivalent to secretarial positions in the corporate world. Small and large companies are looking for online workers that will help them with their day to day tasks and activities. Your task may vary depending on the client but usually involves taking calls, managing client schedules, preparing content calendars, arranging phone calls and meetings, and so on. Some clients may need help with their data entry tasks, while some others may require assistance in their social media tasks.
People Per Hour, Zirtual, VA Networking, and UpWork are some places you can turn to for General VA jobs. The pay varies and ranges from $7 – $20 per hour.
General Transcriptionist / Captioner
Among all the other online jobs for college students, this position is one of those that require little to no experience at all. However, you need to be able to type faster than others as your work requires typing – a lot of it!
The great thing about transcription jobs is that you can snag a few projects only when your schedule permits you. You are not tied down to certain work schedules – and you don’t even have to work the week if you can’t! We get it. Sometimes, college life is hard and working at certain weeks is impossible, which is why working as a transcriptionist is perfect for students!
Rev, Transcribe Me and TigerFish are some websites where you can apply and work for as a transcriptionist. This work requires a good headset too since you’ll be listening to audio and transcribe everything in words. As mentioned earlier, once you’re in the dashboard (considering you’re accepted on these websites), you would have the option to grab a project and work on it and submit within the deadline. If you can’t, you’re not required to snag a project. Perfect for weekends, or during those school days which aren’t tough as other days.
Sometimes, the text is already provided, and you just need to sync those texts in the videos – thus, here’s what captioners do. Do you see those Facebook videos that have captions so you can watch them even with your sounds turned off? That’s what your role is going to be!
Get paid $15 – $30 per hour – sometimes even more! The faster you work, the more you earn.
Proofreader
Proofreading jobs pay from $10 – $45 hourly. If you’re not ready to accept writing projects but is great spotting grammatical errors, run-on sentences or other mistakes within a written piece, then you’ll do well as a proofreader. There’s no shortage in proofreading. Publishing companies, small and large companies may need a proofreader’s help every once in a while. You can check online job boards for job listings.
Movie Reviewer
Did you know that Netflix hires people on a regular basis to help them with their movies and to categorize them accordingly? How cool is that? Netflix pays you to watch movies! It’s like a dream job, right? Among all the other work from home jobs, this isn’t as stable as the ones that we’ve discussed earlier, but it sure pays really well. Earn $10 – $25 per movie you’ve watched. There will be days (or weeks) where no job is available, but there will be those weeks where you’ll be swamped with work! So only consider this job if you’re looking for a bit of extra college money, and not as your main source of income.
Netflix hires people to watch movies and series to make sure that they are placed within the right category. This way, it’ll be easier for Netflix’s customers to browse through the list of shows that they have on the platform.
You may check Netflix for job opportunities.
Book Reviewer
Attention bookworms and lovers! There are a lot of publishing companies who are willing to pay people to review their books before it goes out for publishing. If you like reading books and can compose a well-written, constructive review ranging from 200 – 500 words, then this is for you! Any Subject Books, Online Book Club, and Kirkus Media are a few of those many companies who are willing to pay book reviewers.
This can be a good way to spend your extra time, and literally, a great way to get paid while doing the things that you love. The only thing though is that book genres may be diverse. But if this isn’t a problem for you, then go ahead and check out available jobs on these websites. There’s also a lot of these similar websites and you can easily spot them by doing a simple online search.
Stock Photographer / Videographer
Stock photography and videography is gaining popularity these days. If you have your own way around the camera, then did you know that you can easily make money by taking amazing photos and get paid for royalties? For instance, if you’ve captured an amazing time-lapse video of the sunset with the Hollywood sign in it, you can upload it to Shutterstock and other stock websites and set your own price for it. This is a great and passive way of generating income with your hobby. Businesses are now into visual content – and if you have an amazing talent taking videos and pictures, then it’s worth giving it a shot.
Some people have even reported that they even get paid for photos and videos that they have uploaded 3 years ago! You just have to find the perfect niche (and shots!) that will appeal to your audience. The great thing about this is that you can even upload these digital media to more than one stock site – which means, more chances for you to earn passive income!
Alternatively, you may also offer customized packages in Fiverr. You’ll be surprised by how much people are willing to pay for a perfectly captured photo!
Working your way through college doesn’t have to be hard. Hopefully, with the suggestions we’ve mentioned above, you’ll be able to find a job or two that meets your schedule, and jobs that will help you make your college more financially stable. Good luck job hunting!