There are many reasons senior citizens are actively trying to return to the workforce in today’s world. For many, it’s a matter of simply not being able to make ends meet. Inflation has destroyed their savings or made it impossible for them to live on their limited income.
For others, retirement hasn’t suited them very well, and they are eager to have something useful to do during the day. Many of them were forced into retirement by companies that were trying to recruit a more youthful team.
If you are looking to increase your earnings and find a fulfilling career in the process, you want to consider taking a new route where you don’t have to apply for a job and work under the thumb of a boss or corporation, but instead get to spread your wings and do what you love using the Internet as your avenue to earnings.
Below, you are going to find eight of the easiest business models seniors can pursue in order to start bringing in more money to their household. These are no to low cost options that allow you to hit the ground running and start the process without a big learning curve.
We’ll talk about each of the business models, what it takes to run one, tools that can help you succeed, and tips that will enable you to bypass any of the frustration or confusion you may have felt if you didn’t have any guidance when starting out.
Offer to Help Others for Quick Cash as a Freelance Service Provider
When money is tight, or if you simply want to earn without having to start your own full-fledged business, you can become an online service provider instead. This is a quicker way to earn money because clients will be putting a down payment on or paying in full for your services that you will be delivering.
Some clients will pay up front, and others will pay half, but you want to make sure that you have some sort of guarantee that the client will be paying so that you don’t do the work and discovered that they have walked away without you being paid.
In order to prevent this type of theft, you can sign up for a platform like UpWork or Fiverr, where you can get help with having the funds put in escrow so that you get paid once the project is complete.
The people who will be hiring you are a variety of individuals from offline to online businesses and entrepreneurs. The kind of work they’ll be hiring you to do maybe things like writing articles or eBooks for them, creating logos or other graphic designs for them, recording video or audio for them, etc.
You can go online to see what people are hiring others for in terms of freelance service projects. You’ll also be able to see the price range you can charge for those services. For example, as a ghostwriter, you might charge approximately $20 per 400 words.
So if you can write 5 pages an hour, you could earn $100 an hour for those five articles. Certain sites like Fiverr will allow you to have upsell offers in your listing so that people can pay more if they want things done faster or if they want a larger amount of content.
Another freelance service provider position you can pursue for quicker earnings is to become a virtual assistant. There are many of people who need help with smaller tasks, such as uploading their content to their blog, replying to emails from customers, sharing content to their social media profiles, etc.
Networking online on platforms like Facebook or in forums for marketers is another good way to get clients for your freelance service provider business. You don’t necessarily need a website, but it can help if you have one to showcase your skills and contact information.
Make Recommendations for Products You Love as an Affiliate Marketer
Another business model you may want to consider is affiliate marketing. This is a very popular business model for newcomers. It’s a very low to no cost endeavor, because you have the option of starting it on social media sites or simply paying $12 a year for your domain and under $4 per month for hosting if you want to start your own WordPress blog.
As an affiliate marketer, you will first be selecting a niche that you want to promote products in. It’s best if you can choose something that you already have a passion or interest in, and this can be anything from gardening to cooking, pets or skin care.
Anything that people are spending money on, whether it’s golf clubs or organization for their home is a topic that you can become an Internet-based affiliate marketer for. Once you have a niche, go online and start looking to see what kinds of products that you can promote and earn money from.
Usually, at the bottom of a website, you will see a link that says Affiliates. When you click on that, it will tell you where you can sign up to promote their products. Each company and platform has a different program for their affiliates.
For example, some companies will only pay you 10% of every sale, while others will pay you 50% of every sale. Some companies also will pay you a flat rate for every customer you send their way, so you want to make sure you read through the specifics and find out how much you can earn.
Be sure to look for both digital and tangible products that you can promote. For example, you can look on the ClickBank marketplace to find a lot of digital products, but you can also find them on places like Warrior Plus and JVZoo, too.
You can also find tangible products that are sold through platforms like Amazon, Commission Junction, and Share-a-Sale. And you can also go to Google and simply type in the name of your niche and the words affiliate program.
Once you are signed up to promote products that you believe in, you can write your reviews and also record them in video format if you want to leverage YouTube. Whenever someone find your review and trusts your recommendation enough to click your link and buy the product, you will earn your commissions that will be paid to you at a later date.
Some companies pay quicker than others. You may have to only wait one week, or you may have to wait up to 60 days, such as with Amazon. This is to ensure that there is no fraudulent activity involved in people trying to get paid for their promotions.
Whip Up Niche eBooks and Sell Them as an Info Product Creator
Another business model you may want to consider is writing digital info products. There are many people who don’t want to go to a bookstore and purchase a print book. Instead, they prefer to instantly access a downloadable book that they can read on a topic they need more information about.
There are eBooks sold for many different niche topics. For example, you can write something about how to grow a vegetable garden, how to cook healthy meals, how to train a puppy, how to improve your relationships, and more.
The great thing about selling your own info products is that you’re going to earn money directly from all of the traffic that comes to your website. But, you can also have affiliates sign up to promote your product for you.
The more commissions you pay them, the more likely you are to have top affiliates signed up to promote your offer, so you want to offer at least 50%. When you have dozens of affiliates sending traffic to you, and purchasing your product, you can put their customers on a list of your own.
Using tools like Aweber or GetResponse, where you can sign up for a free trial that you don’t have to pay for until you reach a certain number of subscribers, you’ll be able to capture the names and email addresses of your customers so that you can promote things to them later.
Launching an info product is not a difficult thing to do. First and foremost, you want to get to know who your target audience is and what their pain points or goals are. Next, you want to outline a book that will answer their questions and guide them to success.
Once you write the eBook, you can design a cover for it using free tools online or by hiring someone at an inexpensive rate from sites like Fiverr. If you want to do it yourself, you can use a free stock photo site and a tool like Canva, which has a free level of use as well.
Next, you’ll need to list your the product for sale on a platform like one of the ones listed above where you can find digital products. In order to list it, you have to have a sales page or people can find your buy button.
You can use an inexpensive domain and hosting account to sell from, and there are many easy drag and drop or template page builders that are already set up for you where you only have to fill in the text for your sales letter and publish it.
Tap Into Your Creativity and Earn Money as a Kindle Self-Published Fiction Author
Many people who achieve senior citizen age have always had a dream of putting together some sort of book that tells a story they’ve been thinking about for years. There are more self published fiction authors online than ever before, and many of these are achieving the goal of being selected as a New York Times bestseller.
You won’t have to pay anything up front in order to self publish your fiction story or novel on Amazon. Instead, they will simply take a portion of each sale. While it’s always best to hire a professional graphic designer to create your covers, there are many people who take the do-it-yourself route and use free online tools to create their cover instead.
Go to Amazon and look at the best seller list for the genre that you feel like you can write for. Study the covers, the titles, and the storylines to see what the market is looking for and responding best to you at that time.
Then, follow Amazon’s formatting guidelines whenever you are writing your manuscript. When you are done, you can run it through a free editor online such as Grammarly. After it is polished up, you can list it for sale on Amazon and other online platforms if you wish to earn from many of them.
You can publish under a pen name, so that no one will even know you are an author unless you want them to. In fact, if you have more than one genre that you want to write for, you can have more than one pen name.
There are many husband and wife teams who self publish together on Amazon and other sites. So if you have a spouse who is helpful in creating the content for your books, you may want to enlist their help.
Take Your Ability to Engage with People and Become a Social Media Influencer
A social media influencer is someone who publishes content on social media platforms and accumulates a following of loyal fans. There are major influencers who have millions of followers, and micro influencers who may only have a few hundred to a few thousand followers, but they are dedicated to the influencer and appreciate their content.
There are influencers in every niche. Whether you are teaching survival prepping or cooking, there is an audience that will latch on to what you have to say and eagerly wait for the next installment of your content.
Social media influencers earn money in a variety of ways. First and foremost, they can get paid for the content that they publish. Whenever it gets a lot of views and engagement, the platforms will pay them for entertaining their audience.
Secondly, you have followers who will send gifts through the platform. These are usually things like emojis and animated content that the platform allows them to purchase that you can then turn into cash that will be deposited into your bank account.
Another way you can get paid as an influencer is to come up with your own merchandise. You can have print on demand items such as coffee cups, T-shirts, and other things that you simply upload a design for and the company ships them directly to your customers.
Social media influencers also get approached with brand deals by companies and other entrepreneurs who want you to mention their product in exchange for payment on your account.
You always want to have a special note at the bottom that it is a sponsored post so that people know you have been paid for it. And you can integrate affiliate marketing into your social media influencer position, recommending products that you link to from your profile.
Depending on the platform, you might also be able to sign up for advertising income. Once you achieve a certain level, they will pay you to allow them to advertise to your followers.
If you want to become a social media influencer, look at the niche topics that you are interested in and go online to various social media platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and more and see who else has a large following and what kind of content they’re publishing and what kind of engagement they are enjoying.
Then, create a plan for registering an account and creating content that you know that audience will appreciate. The most successful social media influencers are those that have a personality that is likable and that share their own experiences and insight with their audience.
Part of being a social media influencer is knowing how to get your audience to engage with you. You can invite them to comment on or share your content. When they do comment, make sure you pop it into the comments section and respond to as many as you can.
Use Your Eye for Design and Planning Sell Printables Online
Many consumers are shopping for things for their home and for their life on sites like Etsy and Shopify. They no longer go to the bookstore and look for a journal or planner, or even order wall decor for their home online.
Instead, they go to these sites where they can find printable versions that they can download to their computer and print off whenever they need them, even editing some of them in some instances.
When you create a store on a site like Etsy, people will be able to shop from your entire store or simply use the search option to find a specific type of product that you offer. Currently, people are buying a wide variety of Etsy printables that range from coloring pages to wall art, planner pages to calendars and more.
Homeschool parents and those whose children are struggling with subjects in school turn to sites like this to print out educational material like math sheets or vocabulary sheets to help their child succeed.
You can use a variety of tools to help you create your Etsy designs. Many people use PowerPoint, while others use Photoshop. You can get a professional version of Canva to create some designs as well.
Go on Etsy and other sites to see what types of things people are buying, and then put your own spin on the marketplace by looking at their needs and coming up with content they can print out and use whenever they want to.
Become a PLR Content Creator Who Sells Articles and eBooks to Others
PLR, also known as private label rights, is content that you create once and sell to a variety of customers so that they can put their name on it, edit it as they like, and use it in their online business.
It’s similar to ghostwriting, but instead of having one client that pays you one time, you can sell your PLR for many years to come. It’s not only a text based business, either. If there are some PLR sellers who also include video content, audio files, and graphics that people purchase to use in their business.
The reason it’s so popular is because private label rights are priced very inexpensively so that everyone can afford it. The seller earns a lot of money because they are selling to many people, so they often earn more than they would if they were ghostwriting.
You will need some way to create listings. If you are going to launch individual products, you have to have a sales page for each bundle of content. Or, you can create a PLR store where people can go to your website and put many different packs of content into their cart and check out.
Some PLR providers specialize in one niche topic. For example, you might only want to write content about self help topics or fitness and health topics. Or, you may want to be a PLR seller who writes about a variety of niche topics.
The key to success with private label rights sales is to create unique content from scratch and know how to craft it in a way that will work best for marketers who need to use it in their business.
For example, if they need blog content, you will be writing packs of articles that are optimized for search engines by using topics that appeal to consumers and keyword phrases that will attract traffic on Google and elsewhere.
Or, if you are writing a short report, you need to know what kind of topics would be good to entice people to sign up to their list so that they can use the content as a lead magnet.
With private label rights sales, it’s similar to info product sales in terms of being able to get affiliates on board to promote your products for you. This works best when you create a launch of a product that has a front end item that is priced attractively, with upsell bundles of content that rise in price with each level.
So for instance, you could have a front end bundle of 30 one-page articles for $15, a first upsell of 50 articles for $27, and a third upsell of 20 videos or slides that you created out of the text content for $37.
If you even only sold 100 copies of the front end, 50 copies of the first upsell, and 25 copies of the second upsell, you’d earn $3,775 – or $47 per page for the content. But that doesn’t factor in what affiliates will send you, or the fact that many PLR launches have thousands of sales, not just 100.
Use Zoom and Other Tools to Start a Coaching Business with Clients
You don’t have to have a degree to start a coaching business online. All you need is a computer and internet access and you can use tools like Zoom to connect with your clients and help them achieve their goals.
Coaching is a high end career path online. People are usually willing to pay much more for one-on-one coaching than they would for an info product, for example. You can even do group coaching if you want to offer package deals for more than one person.
What you coach people in will depend on what kind of expertise you have period there are coaches who help people figure out their career path, life coaches that listen to their struggles and help them overcome certain obstacles, Wellness coaches that help people achieve better fitness, relationship coaches who assist people with their love life, and more.
If you want to be a coach, go out and look to see what the competition is doing in your niche topic. Look at what their coaching includes. For example, does it include worksheets that are sent to the client, are the coaching sessions 30 minutes or an hour, and what is the price point?
After you determine what you will be offering, you’ll need to set up a website or use social media so that you can attract clients and get them signed up and placed in your schedule for regular meetings.
Make a Plan to Start and Grow Your Business Once You Make a Decision
There are so many different options available to seniors online, and you’re not restricted to just one period it’s best to get started with one business model, but you can grow from there.
Diversifying your income as an online entrepreneur is easy. For example, if you start out selling info products and build a list, you can also promote products as an affiliate to those subscribers, and even offer coaching to them.
What’s important is that you learn how to search for information online that will teach you what you need to know without making you pay a lot for courses and tools. There’s a lot of free information on YouTube and elsewhere.
Understand that this is not an overnight solution to a financial struggle. Building a business can take a little bit of time and has a learning curve, but many seniors are doing this, and they have no special certification or technical knowledge other than a desire to help others and have fun in their niche.
To help you get started with your new online business, there is a truly earn while you learn training that has been very helpful to lots of seniors. Click the link below and see how easy it can be to create extra income online and from home or where ever you are.
You could be on vacation, visiting the grand kids, or traveling the world. This training works where ever you have a laptop and can connect to the internet.
This could be the start of something that you can do for many years to come.
Click the link below to see what sending a simple email everyday can do for your income.
Learn How To Email Someone Every Day