Almost anyone can use typing side hustles to make money at home. The internet offers many different possible jobs that pay for writing or a variety of typing. These gigs are often really easy to land, and many of them can pay you cash the same day you work.
Fast and easy are the key words for side hustles that involve typing. Most of this type of work won’t pay a ton of money, but you can start earning rather quickly immediately after you start looking for projects to complete. I got started running online businesses doing typing side hustles, so I have a lot of advice and personal recommendations to share with you in this post.
Typing Side Hustles
Before I start talking about specific typing side hustles you can try, I have some general information to share first. Overall, typing jobs don’t pay a lot, but there are some exceptions. Many of the gigs you can land are basically entry level positions looking for cheap keyboard labor. If your skills improve, you may be able to get higher paying work in the future, especially for content writing.
Typing side hustles can be a lot of work. They can involve long hours writing or doing data entry, but they will not typically pay a ton of money. This can seem like a big negative. However, there are some ways around this issue as you gain more experience.
Speed is money with typing jobs. The faster you can type, the more money you can potentially earn. A lot of work is paid by the project and not by the hour, so you can simply finish work and get paid more by working faster.
Freelance Writing
There is always a demand for article writers online. Most of this work is offered and found through freelance websites, such as UpWork. Freelance sites offer not only article writing gigs but also a variety of other kinds of typing work too.
You may notice that the vast majority of writing work gets bid at insanely low prices, especially if you live in the USA. There are a lot of foreign writers that do this type of work for lower wages than most Americans can afford to live on. However, most of those other writers do not speak English as their first language and will often provide very low quality work for those low wages.
If you live in the USA and speak / write English as your primary language, you have an advantage. You can potentially produce much higher quality content than other writers. If you can harness this skill, you can find some business willing to pay much more for quality writers.
Freelance websites depend on reviews so potential employers can see how you’ve been rated in the past. When you’re brand new on one of these sites, it can sometimes be difficult to land your first few jobs without any reviews on your account. For this reason, it can sometimes be a good idea to bid $0 on a few projects to write a single article when you’re first getting started. Make it clear that you’re bidding to do the work for free to build a few reviews. After you have those reviews, you have go after better work that will actually get you paid.
Data Entry
You may also find data entry jobs on freelance websites. This kind of work will be similar to writing jobs in regard to pay. You won’t make a lot of money doing data entry, but pretty much anyone can do it without any kind of special skills. For people that hate writing but can type fast, this can be a potential alternative.
Amazon Mechanical Turk is a site where you can very easily find data entry work. Pay is incredibly low, but you don’t have to bid on jobs like freelance sites either. For this reason, MTurk can be used to make a bit of spare cash when you have free time or in between freelance jobs.
Data entry can be grueling work with long hours and low pay. However, the faster you can type, the more potential there is to earn better money. Just like writing side hustles, the amount you earn per hour from data entry jobs is heavily dependent upon how faster you can type.
Transcribing
Audio transcription is another typing side hustle. It’s similar to writing in many ways, but you don’t have to be creative at all. You simply listen to an audio recording or a video and type the words that you hear.
A lot of transcribing work will also offer low pay, but there are some businesses that need quality work done and are willing to pay extra to get it. Like writing, there is also an issue with low quality work from non-English speaking writers in this industry.
Some businesses don’t really care about the exact quality of a transcription, while others want a perfect job done. If you can do high quality work, you simply need to seek out the right people that are willing to pay more for good work.
Customer Support
In my opinion, one of the better paying typing side hustles is to work customer support for an online business. Larger businesses will employ people to work from home and answer emails and/or support tickets for their company.
Social media is another possibility with this kind of typing job. Businesses that desire an online social presence will need to hire people to talk on social media daily.
Since these side hustles are more like real jobs, even though they’re online, you will typically get paid an hourly wage. This results in much better income than most other typing work. Writing high quality articles can potentially deliver more money per hour, but it also requires a lot of skill and experience to get paid those higher article rates too.
More Typing Gigs
The four typing side hustles I’ve talked about in this post aren’t the only possibilities. If you browse online job postings and freelance websites, you’ll notice that there are even more kinds of typing or writing work that you can do from home. When your typing skills include website programming knowledge, you can make even more than you would writing articles.
You can even run your own side hustle blog where you write content for your own website. If you do not need the immediate money that freelance work can offer, I’d highly recommend working for yourself instead. By building your own blog and writing articles there, you can earn much more in the long run. However, it can often take a year or two to start making decent money from a blog.
I am personally extremely thankful that typing side hustles exist online. In my early years of working at home and being broke from a low paying job, I paid for an entire Christmas for my family by doing freelance article writing. It didn’t pay enough to ever make me rich, but the ability to earn extra cash on demand at home in my spare time was a lifesaver.