Sell Your Knowledge on the Side

from Stepcase Lifehack by Thursday Bram

Having a side line of income can come in handy — but not everyone is in a position to set up a full-fledged business or even take on freelance projects. That doesn't mean that there aren't any opportunities to make some money on the side. If you're knowledgeable about a specific area, you can sell your know-how, rather than selling your time. You'll still need a little time, of course, but there are several ways to come up with ways to make a little money within your time constraints.

1. Write an ebook or white paper

You can turn your knowledge and experiences into a document on your own schedule. While it does take an investment of some serious time to translate an ebook into serious earnings, you can start selling your work through sites likeScribd almost immediately. Your vendor will certainly take a cut, but the publication process is easier and faster than for print. There are also simple ways to up the likelihood of earning some good money: even something as basic as laying your document out in something besides Microsoft Word can give you an immediate boost. As far as topics go, how-to guides tend to do well, as do papers that address current issues in most fields.

2. Offer a seminar or class

While seminars and classes are generally a little more time-sensitive than projects that don't require you to interact with other people, there are a long list of ways to make them a little more flexible. One of the most basic is picking a time and date for the class that works with your schedule and then taking care of planning and other details when ever it's more convenient for you. Another option is offering a class online, even by email if that's what it takes. The biggest difficulty with selling slots in a class is that you have to have a good reason for prospective students to buy from you. If you aren't a well-known expert in your field, you're going to have to do some marketing to make sure that your class is full.

3. Tutor on your topic

If you specialize in a topic that is taught in school — from kindergarten through grad school — tutoring is an option. You don't even need to worry about trying to find local students: you can tutor online. That can make managing time easier, because you can work with students in different time zones so that you can better take advantage of your time. Sites like Tutorz, offer an opportunity to list yourself for a variety of subjects.

4. Write for websites

There are many websites that allow writers to post any number of articles and take a cut of the profits. You're not going to get rich off of such articles, but there's no problem if you need to write on an odd schedule — or even stop writing suddenly. You can write about pretty much any topic, although you'll probably be able to write more often if you focus on a topic you already know well. There are thousands of such sites. HubPages and Triond are just two examples.

5. Provide advice or consulting

You can offer your consulting services on your own online, but if you don't have a lot of time to devote to the project, it may be better to offer your services through a site that connects experts with individuals looking for advice. There are quite a few out there: one example is LivePerson.com. It's a pretty typical site. You post your information and then clients can hire you through the site. You decide on the time and date you'll actually talk to clients.

6. Answer questions

The number of websites offering payment for answers to specialized questions seem to grow every day. SmallBizAdvice, for instance, offers payment for answers to questions about small businesses, for example. There are also plenty of sites with multiple topics, as well as sites specially for students to post questions they have with (or, more often, from) their homework, like Student of Fortune.

Selling your knowledge

It's worth noting that none of these approaches are exactly get rich quick schemes. In some cases, they may not even be get rich quick schemes. You have to have some knowledge worth sharing, although that list can be pretty long — you'd be surprised what some people are willing to pay for video game tips or basic technical support — and you have to be able to share it in a fashion that other people can understand relatively easily. If you can handle those requirements, though, selling your knowledge can be a good way to bring in a little extra money. It doesn't hurt that there are plenty of websites and online services ready to handle much of the marketing and promotion, and let you focus on your own expertise. The pay goes down when you work through these sites, of course, but the amount of time you need to devote to finding clients and related aspects of being in business also goes down. It doesn't hurt that being associated with a larger site also establishes your credentials a lot faster than you can if you aren't already particularly well known.

If you've worked with a website beyond the ones I've mentioned here, please note them in the comments — there really are thousands of websites providing similar options out there, and I only discussed a handful here.

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Thursday Bram blogs about a variety of topics, from personal finance to small business. She is the author of an upcoming book on the tools and tricks you need to build a career you can take with you during long-term travel. More information about Thursday and her book, Working Your Way Around the World, is available on her personal site, ThursdayBram.com.

The New Résumé: Dumb and Dumber

By JANE PORTER for online.wsj.com

Kristin Konopka sent out nearly 100 copies of her résumé in January in search of receptionist work, but got only one callback. That's when Ms. Konopka, a 29-year-old New York actress and yoga teacher, took her master's degree and academic teaching experience off her résumé.

The calls started coming in. The slimmer version of her résumé landed in 30 in-boxes and earned her three callbacks and two interviews. "It definitely picked up the interest," says Ms. Konopka, who realized quickly that people don't "want to hire anyone who is overqualified."

Securing work in a tight economy means more job seekers might find themselves applying for positions below their qualifications. Many unemployed professionals are willing to take paycuts for the promise of a paycheck. But to get a foot in the door, candidates are gearing down their résumés by hiding advanced degrees, changing too-lofty titles, shortening work experience descriptions, and removing awards and accolades.

In the past eight months, Jamaica Eilbes, an information-technology recruiter for Milwaukee employment agency Manpower, has had to weed out more overqualified résumés than usual from the stacks that cross her desk each day. "I'd never feel comfortable putting a really high-level candidate into a lower level position," says Ms. Eilbes, who recruits for Manpower and other clients. "We don't want to take you on if we think you are going to jump ship."

Matt Collins

But in recent months, Ms. Eilbes has seen more master's and doctoral degrees at the bottom of résumés instead of at the top. She's also seen candidates omitting or trimming job descriptions that showed they had substantial years of work experience. Résumés on which job descriptions taper off as they progress down the page raise Ms. Eilbes's suspicions. "How do I know I can trust them later down the road if there's something on their résumé they decided to take off so they could have a better chance at getting that job?" she says.

Still, for some professionals who find themselves constantly rejected despite decades of experience, scaling back the truth -- or at the least, some of their experiences -- can feel like the only chance at an interview.

Lenora Kaplan, 49, has 26 years of marketing experience but doesn't want her résumé to show it. When she lost her job as vice president of public relations at a small Las Vegas marketing firm in January, Ms. Kaplan searched for work with little success. At an interview for a shopping-mall marketing-director position in February, she was told that the hiring budget had only enough for a junior-level employee and that her résumé showed she was overqualified.

Many of the jobs she comes across ask for far fewer years of experience than she has. "There is nothing to apply for" at my level, Ms. Kaplan says. She quickly realized her job experience was pricing her out of too many positions. Her solution: To try not to look as senior level as she really was. So she eliminated certain jobs and removed details about speaking engagements and board positions.

In some cases, job seekers are being told by hiring agencies to tone down their résumés if they want to get hired. When Bridget Lee, 29, moved to New York from Shanghai eight months ago and put her application in at three temporary agencies, she was told to play down her work experience before they would send her résumé to potential clients. The temp-agency version of her résumé changed titles like "manager" and "freelance trend researcher" to "staff" and "office support" and omitted entirely her title as partner of a small marketing agency. "It's been a lesson for how I present myself," Ms. Lee says.

Career counselors advise against making too many drastic changes. But they also say the demand for this kind of restructuring is on the rise. In the past three months, Tammy Kabell, a Kansas City, Mo., job-search coach, says more clients are requesting her help to "dumb down" their résumés, whether by changing job titles, playing down experience, or altogether omitting some impressive achievements. One recent client, a 61-year-old former chief learning officer at a tech company, insisted on omitting her C-level job title from her résumé. She was fearful her application would be weeded out by the Web search-optimization tools companies use to manage résumés.

Some résumé writers advise reworking a résumé into a functional one stressing transferable skills instead of past job titles and accomplishments. "Instead of focusing on the big achievements that might scare an employer away, you can spell out what you can bring to an employer in the next position," Ms. Kabell says.

Of course, reducing your résumé to a skeleton of what it truly should be isn't likely to land you the job you really want. While it took Ms. Lee eight months to get a call back for a job that matched her real experience, this month she landed a position as a temporary account manager -- with potential for permanent work -- at a New York design firm. The interview and job offer weren't earned using her dumbed-down résumé, but rather with the original.

"You have to make those creative edits when it comes to short-term work, but in terms of long-term work, you have to stay true to your experience," says Ms. Lee.

Write to Jane Porter at jane.porter@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page D5

Give Something Back (Online Volunteer)

by Celine Roque

Written by Celine Roque.

Web work doesn't necessarily involve earning an income. Through the Internet, we can give back to the global community and do a different kind of online work — volunteering. Here are some ways to use a little of your time to help others.

Look for organizations that you can work with online. Many non-profit organizations have some volunteers working only through the Internet. The United Nations has a database of online opportunities for which you can apply. NABUURis another online volunteering platform that connects local communities with online volunteers. For both sites, you can choose from a variety of tasks, including research, translation, writing, design and much more.

Just remember that if you're going to work with an organization on a specific project, such as redesigning its web site or setting up an online marketing campaign, treat them as you would your regular clients. Have a contract ready, make a list of deliverables, and define the project scope so that everything is clear to both parties. Also, be aware of the disadvantages that can come with working on projects for free.

Offer your help to non-profit web sites. If you have an erratic schedule and can't make specific time commitments to an organization, you can turn to web sites that are looking for volunteers. If you're a programmer, you can help fix bugs on an open-source application. For book lovers, proofreading for Project Gutenberg and reading for Librivox are good options.

If you prefer to work independently, you can use message boards and social networks to answer tech questions for free, or even upload tutorial videos to share your expertise.

Use social media to promote causes you care about. Most web workers are usually very active on social media sites and have blogs. You can easily use these tools to direct your contacts to the causes and issues you care about. Through this you can help raise awareness, find new donors, or encourage other people to volunteer.

Participate in online movements. There are several cause-oriented online activities that you can participate in, such as Blog Action Day , Stand Up or Train for Humanity.

If you're interested in doing volunteer web work, here are some additional resources that can help:

• Myths About Online Volunteering from Coyote Communications.
• Virtual Volunteering Resources from ServiceLeader.org
• Volunteer Match allows you to search for organizations you can work with.

Cause-oriented web work can be very fulfilling, both emotionally and professionally. Go on, get involved!

Fill Revenue Gaps With Alternative Income Streams

by Dawn Foster

Written by Dawn Foster.

Photo by: borman818

As a freelance online community consultant, I spend a lot of time thinking about ways to stabilize my income to reduce the ups and downs that come with having my own business. The most obvious solution is to manage your pipeline to make sure that you have new projects to replace the ones that are completing, but it's also a good idea to have alternative income streams to complement your main client work and fill in any gaps.

In an ideal world, you finish one project on Friday with your next project ready to start on Monday; however, we don't live in an ideal world, and even our best planning efforts occasionally go awry. While my client base has been fairly steady, I'm always concerned that I might have gaps. I would rather have plans to fill those gaps rather than being caught off guard and unprepared, so recently, I have been experimenting with alternative income streams that will generate regular revenue without relying entirely on client work.

This isn't a new topic on WebWorkerDaily. Georgina recently wrote a great post with some of her recession avoidance techniques: saving more, managing debt and spending, and strategies for finding new work and staying motivated, while Anne Zelenka wrote a great post with 10 new ways to make money online, and Mike and Aliza followed up with 10 more new ways to make money online. However, I wanted to write about my personal experiences with alternative income streams.

Regular blogging and writing gigs in your area of expertise are a good place to start. I started blogging here on WebWorkerDaily last December, and I have really enjoyed the experience. I can do the writing whenever I have some spare time, in between client meetings or in the evening, so it doesn't interfere with my regular client work. In this case, I get to do something that I love and I get paid for it, so the revenue stream from blogging was an easy first step for me.

My second regular income stream comes from a self-published book. Late last year, I decided to take the online community content from my blog and turn it into an e-book: "Companies and Communities: Participating Without Being Sleazy". While I started this project as a PDF e-book, it eventually snowballed into something bigger with Kindle and paperback versions now available. This was a great experience in a couple of ways.  Not only is the revenue from the book useful, but by taking the existing content from my blog, updating it and reorganizing it, I found several gaps in my writing where I had talked about the later steps in the community-building process without first outlining the work that needs to come before. You need to be a little careful with this approach, since you must make sure that you own the rights to the content before republishing it. If you are blogging for a company, you probably don't have the right to republish that content.

I am also experimenting with training classes. I held my first Yahoo Pipes training class last week in Portland, Ore., with about 10 students. As a first class, it went pretty well, but I still need to work on the course content to make a few improvements before I do a second class in late June. I'm hoping to expand my training classes with face-to-face training on other topics, like online community management, and I also hope to reformat the material into an online course, too. Offering it online would allow me to make it available to a wider audience and, hopefully, increase the frequency of the class.

These efforts have come with a whole new set of challenges for me. The biggest challenge has been pricing, which seems to be part art form, part science that I have yet to master. I tend to make the rookie mistake of pricing things too high and then needing to offer discounts or lower prices later. I am starting to get a better feel for pricing these types of products and services, so hopefully this should get easier. My second challenge is marketing. While I do a pretty good job of promoting my work and getting the word out via social media, the people who need more training and my book are not the people who live and breathe social media, so I need to get better at finding traditional marketing channels to augment my marketing strategy.

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Does Your Email Fail to Speak for You?

from WebWorkerDaily by Meryl Evans

Written by Meryl Evans.

Sitting here scanning my email, I shake my head at the worthless information I see in many "From" and "Subject" lines. Not only do the poor choices I see make it harder to figure out what's in the emails without opening them, but also the senders are risking recipients skipping their messages altogether.

The following are examples of what not to do.

Email fail #1: Bad "From" addresses. These come straight from my mailbox:

• Programs
• No-reply
• Customer_service
• Salesusa
• Admin
• Register
• Contact

These "From" addresses give no clue as to where the email has come from or what to do with it.  If these emails had used the company's name or the sender's name, they'd be much more useful.

When the time comes that you need a writer, you might scan your mailbox to jog your memory for a writer you know. So which email will you open? An email from  "Contact", "noname@gmail.com" or "Meryl K. Evans"? You can change what appears in the "From" line for most email clients in settings. In Gmail, for example, you can change your "From"  address under the "Accounts" tab.

Email fail #2: Bad subject lines. Again, these come straight from my inbox:

• Order number 1234
• Your payment has been processed
• [Blank]
• Careers update

Bad subject lines are unspecific (like "Careers update") or worse, totally lacking useful information that could easily be included. The first two examples here would be much more useful if they told me what company and product these emails were pertaining to. A blank subject line is all too common. If you can't be bothered to write a subject line, why should I open your email?

Email fail #3: Lacking signature. Once the reader has opened your email, take it a step further by including contact and other relevant business information in your signature, as not everyone will want to look up your web site.

What to put in your signature depends on your business, but I find it useful to break my signature into two parts: what I do and links to my social network profiles. It's longer than I would like, but grouping the information into two sections makes it less intrusive. Here's my signature:

Meryl K. Evans
Content Maven for Hire
Writing :: Editing :: Research
Web site: http://www.meryl.net/

Connect
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/meryl
Facebook: http://meryl.net/shorty/facebook/
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/merylkevans

Before listing my social network links, I had links to a couple of books I had authored. When the books got "old," the links to my social network profiles replaced them.

Now is a good time to do a review of your email account for the three simple things that can make a great difference in your email effectiveness: "From", "Subject" and a useful signature. With today's overwhelmed inboxes, your emails need to say, "Open me." Give them all the help you can.

Share your email tips in the comments.

Image by stock.xchng user CarrieAlli.

Raveal: The Future of Online Job Hunting?

by Darrell Etherington

Written by Darrell Etherington.

We've all probably used either Monster.com or Workopolis.com at some point. Whether or not we did so successfully or enjoyed the process is another story. Looking for work online can feel clumsy, impersonal and of questionable effectiveness. Even professional networking apps like LinkedIn haven't really made significant advances to the way we go about searching for jobs on the web. A new service, called Raveal, hopes to bring some fresh perspective to the online employment search game.

Raveal is aimed at the job hunter, promising to represent those who list themselves with the service as people, not assets. It's an attractive prospect when you're coming from a situation where you feel significantly less than human in the meat market that is Monster. And it has a distinctly simple, clean Web 2.0 look that at least shows the site's designers take their job seriously.

Once I got into the process of actually creating a profile, though, I began to wonder if the look and feel of the site were the only things that distinguished it from its predecessors. The information asked for when setting up your public profile is suspiciously similar to the information you'd be asked for on Workopolis or any similar site. I suppose the basic search criteria that employers will use doesn't vary that much, so maybe Raveal using it can be excused. Still, for a modern Web 2.0 app, I found the categories provided to be pretty traditional and restrictive.

Raveal's resume creator is a little more free-form. The standard "Objective," "Experience" and "Education" fields are all there (although you can customize even these basic section titles), but you can also add as many additional custom categories as you want. Each section has entries within it, which consist of a title and a description or details. It's a very simple format, but it does allow for considerable customization.

Finally, the "Portfolio" section offers what is perhaps Raveal's most important distinguishing feature. In it, you can write a brief bio for yourself (or, optionally, use your resume objective), and then add "Galleries" to fill it out. For each gallery you can set a title and decide whether or not it is publicly viewable, and you can add as many items as you want, up to your storage limit (100 MB on free accounts, 1 GB for Pro users). File types supported include images, videos, audio, and Flash files, and also entire web sites, so long as there is an index.html file and your internal links are relative. This could be very handy for web designers who have templates or designs not hosted elsewhere.

Raveal's Portfolio feature saves it from becoming yet another Workopolis or Monster. It gives you a visually rich way to present your work to prospective clients, without having to link them off to a bunch of different locations. So far, I don't see any reason to jump to a paid subscription just yet, but this is an early release, so we'll see what Raveal brings to the table in future iterations.