Who needs the 9-5 grind and struggling to pay rent in an expensive place like San Francisco or New York when you can easily make money online? Since your office can be wherever you open your laptop, more and more people are quitting their day jobs to do remote work. According to a study by Global Workplace Analytics and Flex Jobs, the remote workforce has grown by 159% since 2005, and remote workers will make up as much as 50% of the entire workforce by 2020, thanks to the ease of making money online. The statistics also show another exciting trend for digital nomads: Remote work gives women, especially female entrepreneurs, an edge and is helping close the wage gap. Do you have a skill that you want to share? International Living suggests setting up an online course with written tutorials, PDF downloads and videos. For instance, Rebecca Groskruetz used her talent for furniture painting to create a site where members can go at their own pace. When she soft-launched the business, she sold 33 programs at $127 each. After doing a bigger launch later the same year, she sold 216 programs at $149 each. Her total sales the first year: $36,375. Some online resources for teaching courses include Take Lessons, Udemy and Skill share. Another way to take advantage of your skills: Become an online tutor. The website Cambly helps you get paid to chat with people from around the world. While you're doing the tutoring, the site automatically tracks the time you spend, paying $10.20 an hour. While that might not sound like a lot, consider the fact that you can set your own hours, work as little or as much as you want—and if you're living abroad, $10.20 an hour can go a long way. Do you love to share advice on travel? Put your expertise to work and become a travel advisor. You can sign up for courses through a place like The Travel Institute. Or you can pay a fee to a company like Cruise Planners, which recruits and trains advisors to work remotely not only in planning cruises but in all kinds of travel—on land and at sea. The company was started in 1994 by a woman named Michelle Fee, who didn’t take a paycheck for the first three years so that she could invest back into the business. Now in its 25th year, Cruise Planners is the nation’s largest home-based travel agent franchise with more than 2,500 franchisees. According to International Living, an even faster and easier way to make money with e-books is to find a book that has already been published in print and license it to publish online. "The person doing the online publishing gets the lion’s share of the money—paying the author the standard 8% to 15% royalties based on net sales," says International Living. You can sometimes do a one-time payment for the rights to publish online, like Vic Johnson. "I once bought the rights to a book for $200, simply because I liked the content," says Johnson. "Over the years, I’ve made over $50,000 selling it as an e-book.” Consider this statistic: There are over 44 million print books on Amazon but only 2.6 million Kindle books—that's a lot of material that could be converted to e-books.
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