How to Earn a Side Income as a College Student

As a college student you have the awesome opportunity to make a part-time income doing something beyond the usual fare of retail, fast food or hard labor.  Instead you can earn an income via a whole new paradigm of jobs that the information economy has created.

You’ve heard of the information economy, right?  This entails the web.  You know that place you already spend an ungodly amount of time on.  Why not make it worth your while and score some coin while you’re at it.  The thing is that some of these jobs can be done without a lot of experience but some skill is required as is experience.

For example on the social media job front, you obviously need to know how to access, navigate and manage accounts.  This isn’t something you can learn in one day, so experience is definitely required and requested.  Let’s look at a few options below on ways a college student can earn a side income.

One of the rare non-Apple laptops seen in an otherwise cool park full of cool people by Ed Yourdon, on Flickr.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Social Media Management

This involves as the name suggests mastery of the various social media networks including the four most popular – Facebook, Twitter, Google + and Pinterest.  If you happen to know Facebook inside out and how to get “likes” on a page, then your skills are in demand by small business owners.  These small business individuals will gladly pay you an hourly or flat rate to get their business Facebook pages popular.  Or they might simply need management of said pages, as their schedules are full and do not have the time to do social media.  You can update their page, respond to comments and generally manage the page.

Blog Design Skills

Did you know there are millions and millions of blogs on the web?  Many of these blogs require several things; design, content, promotion and management.  If you happen to be a design student, then why not niche yourself and design for blog owners.  You might be pleasantly surprised at the demand and the income to be had, if you hit the right note.  You can charge a flat rate of $200 per custom design or less for just a simple revamp and so on.  Find your niche and go make some money.

Website Promotion

As I mentioned above, blogs and websites all need promotion.  Anyone can build a blog, but it’s another story to make it successful and popular.  If you happen to have a blog and have experience with making them popular, put a “for hire” shout out as soon as possible and charge a few bucks to help others who need it.  This could entail whatever form of blog promotion you’re skilled at; SEO, PPC, social media, email marketing, etc and then charge accordingly.

As you can see the web is indeed your friend and could also potentially be an income earner for you.  Get creative, think about your current skills and experience – then get to marketing your own business to others.  Good luck.

Missy Diaz writes for the education market and is creative in coming up with varied topics of interest to all students from the post-secondary college crowd to the MBA movers and shakers.  She also writes about the recent MBA Rankings 2013 among other topics.

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