The job landscape is changing very fast. It is now a feasible and achievable to work from home in South Africa. People are making money in ways they weren’t before. A lot of the world is changing to a digital space, with even work at regular offline day jobs taking place mostly on computers, and people having the option to work from home. A step further than that, is people working completely from home, with no need to every go to work. It is the dream, doing your work from coffee shop or at a cafe near the beach.
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Benefits when you Work From Home In South Africa
Flexibility Of Hours
– When you work from home, you work based on the work done and not by counting down the clock. You also don’t have to deal with that nightmare that is your alarm clock.
Location Independent
– You can work from anywhere with internet reception. You also don’t have to follow a specific dress code. If you want to work in your gown and slippers, that an option you have.
Freedom of Movement
– Because you are not confined to an office or a site, you can move around as you please. If you have another business, you will be able attend to it when required. You can take a break from your work to do something else or run other errands and then get back to your work.
How I Make R25,000 Per Month Working From Home
How Much Can You Make Working From home?
You probably want to know how much you can realistically make if you work from home in South Africa. Realistically, if you approach working online as a genuine venture and not as a way to get rich quick, you can reasonably expect to earn R5000 or per month if you have no qualification and are doing the basic jobs. With more skill, you can easily earn much more than that.
I was earning between R15,000 and R25,000 a month in my first year, from a combination of online work that required me to work at least four hours a day. The job that requires no formal qualifications and consisted of basic research and simple online tasks, but it also involved a bit of luck because in getting work that paid more than the average rates of pay.
Different Grades
There are different grades that you can begin working at home with. This depends on how much skill you bring to the table. If you are starting from scratch it takes some effort to get to the point where you can get paid enough rival full time offline jobs. They key with online work is to get started and learn your way around. No matter what your skill or qualification, you can make a path for yourself online and reach what ever goal you set out.
There are various levels of online work that are online equivalents of “flipping burgers” all the way to begin an entrepreneur and having your own online business that is paying you hundreds of thousands. As with in the offline world, the level of input required to reach each higher level increases and the only limits you have, are those that you place on yourself by how much you are prepared to put in.
The key message here is that anybody can get into the work from home space. Whether retired or disabled, or lacking in qualifications, you can get in the game and build in what is usually a quicker time than the conventional way if you put the effort in.
Surveys and GPT Sites
The entry level of online work is survey work and GPT websites. Survey work is simply answering questions and getting a reward for it. GPT means Get Paid To. A lot of websites that host surveys tend to have additional ways to make money through things like micro-tasks and offers.
Micro-tasks are simple tasks like cut-and-paste or classifying products into groups such as cleaning products that are scented or not. GPT work can be done by anybody who knows how to use a computer or a smart device. The only limitation I have found is age, where the lowest age allowed by the most lenient survey site is for a user to be at least 13 years old.
GPT sites don’t pay very much but are good for people who have a lot of the time on their hands and want to use it in a constructive way. Students, retirees and unemployed people benefit a lot from these jobs as they have no formal requirements and can help them make some money.
Check out our list of best Survey and GPT Sites
Transcription
Transcription is a popular option for many people who are new to online work because it pays decent money that you can pay bills with. If you have the skill then transcription is definitely worth a try. I started my journey online with transcription and made around R8000 a month from it which was enough to pay for my car and some spending money afterwards.
For transcription, you need to be fairly good in English with both spelling and grammar. There is no formal education required. The transcription platforms always have a transcription test which tests the level of your English and if you can pass the test, you are enabled for the platform and can start working immediately.
Work From Home Africa has conducted in-depth reviews of some of the popular transcription reviews. You can find the reviews of the different online transcription platforms here.
Academic Writing
There are platforms on the internet that pay people with tertiary education for doing assignments that are submitted by clients. This is great for recent graduates and a great starting point if you want to work from home in South Africa Essentially, you get paid for doing someone’s homework. The ethics of the matter can be considered questionable but there is a market out there and it provides opportunities for students or even unemployed people with degrees and diplomas to make some money.
The money for academic writing is comparable to what you will earn for transcription. Considering that this is work that requires serious thinking, while transcription is simply listening and typing, the compensation might be too low for some tastes. But it is an option for those who are potentially interested.
Crowdsourcing Jobs
Crowdsourcing is where things start to get good in terms of online work. Or at least that’s how it was for me. Crowd-sourcing is the first type of online job that started to pay me what can be viewed as a full-time salary. Depending on how much I worked, I could make between R12000 and R25000 a week, which is the same as I would earn in a real-world job with a degree.
These jobs pay per hour or per task and the rate comes to about R120 an hour for the work that I was doing. Crowdsourcing jobs, although they do not have education requirements, are hotly contested. Because of how well they pay, many people apply and they take the best of the applicants. So although they are not a requirement, having higher qualifications can be advantageous.
English Tutoring
English Tutoring online is another good option for making money online. It is quite an easy job. For the most part, all you have to do is make conversation with students who want to practice their English conversation. These jobs pay from around R120 an hour.
For English tutoring you need to have an outgoing personality and be able to communicate well as the whole job is based on communicating with your students and if students like how you tutor, they add you to their favourites and you get more tutoring hours. There are various online English tutoring platforms that hire from all over the world.
Freelancing
Freelancing is where many start the self-employed trek online. If you have a skill that you want to sell, you can freelance for money on websites like Upwork and Fiverr. These websites are marketplaces that bring clients together with skilled people. There is a whole variety of work you can do there, from transcription, to ghost-writing, to graphic design or even SEO consulting.
If you are highly skilled at something, you can build a decent client base on these freelancing marketplaces. The only challenge is that it might take a while to build a good reputation there and there are often bidding wars for jobs where people undercut each other and you might have to work for less than standard rates.
Internet Influencer
It is a brave new world we live in and people get paid from simply having a following. Many local influencers are proof that you can work from home in South Africa just by doing things you like. To be internet influencer, can be through luck by some people or knowledge to others. Influencers make money mainly through partnerships with advertisers. It is also not impossible to be an influencer. To be an influencer, all you have to do is have people’s attention or their trust. One misconception is that you have to have 10s of thousands of followers to be an influencer.
For example, If you are a mountain bike enthusiast and create content that is followed by 500 people, you are an influencer in that space. There are different types of influencers and different companies have different expectations. All you need to do is provide content that people engage with and you can get paid for that. You can be an influencer in any field and on any platform like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or YouTube.
Create a business.
The ultimate in working from home is running your own business. In terms of running a business from home, there are too many ways to list so we will have to focus on running a business online. The quintessential method is to create an online business website.
If starting from scratch and building an authoritative website, you can make anywhere between R20,000 and R50,000 a month, or even more if you are very knowledgeable about how to make money with websites. As you can see on one of the popular website market places on the internet like Empire Flippers, some websites that are 2-3 years old make upwards of R300,000 a month.
Website vs Blogging
People often use this concept interchangeably with the term blogging, but there are some key differences. In short blogging is more of a discussion or a diary, while with a website you can expand beyond how you present your information. All blogs are websites but not all websites are blogs.
Blogs (websites dedicated solely to blogging), usually make most of their money from advertising. In order to make decent profits you have to have a substantial amount of traffic. Check out our article on how online advertising works to understand the different ways that bloggers can make money with advertising.
Monetization
One of the most popular ways to make money with websites these days is affiliate marketing. This is largely due to the fact that outside of directing traffic to products, the business model is hands off. You send buyers to a seller, and you get a commission on whatever they buy. No risks and no need to worry about post-purchase support. All you have to do is get a buyer to click a link on something they already wanted to buy and the rest takes care of itself.
My #1 Recommended Affiliate Marketing Platform
With dropshipping, you create an online store and your customers buy products that are then delivered to them by your dropshipping supplier. You can start an online shop with an eCommerce platform like Shopify, and then market products that dropshipping suppliers sell on your website and through your online shop. In South Africa, dropshipping has some sever limitations that make it nigh impossible to scale efficiently but there are still some people making it work to an extent.
To learn how to create a free website for business, try the free website builder at SiteRubix. Their free training will teach you all the basics that you need to know and you will have your first website up with in a few minutes.
Conclusion
There are various ways to work from home in South Africa and to make good money doing so. A lot of the limitations from earlier years, like formal qualifications and work experience are steadily begin eliminated. You can even work without ever having to meet anybody that you work with these days. Which work from home solution is the one that you think will work for you best?