4-Sell Your Services to Your Neighborhood: Babysitting, Pet-Sitting, Yard Work, or Dog Walking

Cut down on competition and offer your services to people in your neighborhood—people you actually know and can interact with in person. Most people still want someone trustworthy to watch their kids while they slip away for dinner and a movie, or someone to feed their cats when they're on a business trip, or walk their dog while they're at work during the day. If you work from home, this can be even easier: It's not much to get up once or twice a day, visit a few friends in the neighborhood, check on their pets, then go back home and go back to work. Offer to rake leaves, cut grass, or shovel snow for your neighbors. You'll have to clean up your own yard, why not get a few bucks for doing your neighbor's too? Handy with computers? Offer to fix your neighbor's PC—for a fee, of course. It's an especially good option if you live in a neighborhood with busy professionals, elderly neighbors, or anyone else without the desire or means to do the job themselves. Even if you donate your services a few times, it won't take long before they offer to pay you for the work, and you'll foster a friendship with your neighbors at the same time. Significant Effort, Skill-Based, Scheduled Activities Now we're getting into activities you need to set aside time for and require specific skills. By contrast, that also means they're worth more money, and you can either set your own prices or charge more because there's less competition for your services. Here are a few you can start with: Tutor Students or Teach a Class Everyone has something they can teach to someone else, and tutoring students or teaching your own class is a good way to make some extra money teaching someone something you love. Tutoring is especially great if you have a few hours a week to dedicate to a student and you're familiar with a subject area enough to help them with their curriculum. Take on multiple students and you have a pretty steady revenue stream. You can offer your services on community message boards or through Craigslist, or you can sign up and get certified on sites like Tutor.com, InstaEDU, or TutorVista to open yourself up to online students. If you'd rather create the curriculum than help someone stumble through it, consider teaching a class at your local community center or community college. If you're certified or have a degree in a topic, you may already be eligible, and in some cases all you have to do is submit your course idea (along with your expertise in the area) to the school to get it approved. As an example, I once applied for a technology job at a community college where I used to live, and the school looked at my resume and instead asked if I wanted to teach some of their continuing education classes in science and computer technology instead. One of my friends' mother taught a great night class in "organizational skills and time management," for which she was paid well to help people get organized and be productive. Odds are you have a skill you know well enough to teach someone else, too.