How Stay at Home Mums Can Make Money Online
I became a second-time mom recently; my baby is now 5months old. With the baby now a bit grown up, we have now settled into a more relaxed and workable routine and I now find myself less fatigued than I was a couple of weeks ago. I have more time on my hands now and I am ready to plunge into work. Being a stay at home mum is such a huge sacrifice and although it may sound selfish, we mums have got a life to live too. We still want to rock our sexy selves, go for salon visits, hang out with our girls at our favourite eating joints, take vacations, I mean we want to do it all. Question is can we now afford that lifestyle now that we decided to be a stay at home mums? YES, WE CAN, there are a couple of genuine ways that mums can make money while still attending to their little ones. You can join me in doing transcription, a hustle I have been doing for 3 years now.
So what is transcription?
So basically transcription is converting audio to text; listening to an audio and typing out what is being said. The audios could be focused group discussions, interviews, lectures or just about any kind of audio. The clients want their audios transcribed so that they can publish them on their sites, blogs or even for offline publishing. Transcription jobs are pretty easy jobs that mostly anyone can do so long as your grammar is well above average.
What you will need to get started is a good quality set of headphones to listen with, a laptop or a pc, not necessarily with high specs but good enough, and a stable internet connectivity. Once you have all that in place then you can peruse through the internet to gain more knowledge on how to go about it although there are a couple of people who do training either via online or face to face kind of training. I would recommend the latter since you will use less time to learn the ropes plus it’s always safe to have someone holding your hand in this journey. At least until you can stand on your own. The charges go for about Kshs 2000 to 5000 which is an amount you can get back in a week or less.
Transcription does not require any skill set or experience but you must have good listening skills and be able to make out English accents as most of the clients are native English speakers. You will also need to have a good typing speed of at least 40pwm. This ensures that you finish your work on time as well as be able to do more jobs in a short time which means more money. You will also need to be conversant with web search as they will be a bit of research here and there. Just like any other job, online work requires proper time management, discipline, and commitment. It is the only way you will reap big from this hustle. There are people who earn peanuts and there are those who earn six figures from it. You choose when to work and how much to earn.
Getting transcription jobs is not a hustle at all; there are plenty of platforms with jobs. All you need to do is sign up, do a grammar test and a small transcription test and viola! You are in. Of course, you must have passed their test. The sites have their work guidelines which you must go through and master it and apply it to every job. You can sign up for jobs in sites like gotranscript.com, castingwords.com, rev.com, scribie.com, transcribeme.com among others. There are other sites that you will need to bid for jobs such as Upwork.com. To get jobs in this kind of sites you will need to set up an attractive profile, add relevant work portfolio and send proposals that address the clients’ needs. I will talk about this at length another time.
So once you have set up and started working then you will need to get paid. The interesting part, right? Yeah, so most of these sites pay via paypal.com which is an online payment platform accepted worldwide. It’s easy to sign up, just follow the link and follow the steps. Once you have money in your PayPal, you can then withdraw through equity bank but you will need to have linked your PayPal to your equity account. You can contact equity to get more info on how to link the two. You can also withdraw to your Mpesa through various agents who do PayPal to Mpesa services such as the site chura.co.ke . You can shop online using your PayPal account as well as make payments.
You can make a good career as a transcriber working full-time or part-time. I have been working both full-time and part-time and it has been a good source of income for me. I can pay my bills comfortably and keep aside some good amount. Just like any job though you have put in the effort to realize the results.
As we take care of our little ones, let’s also make some dollars to cater for our unending needs. I mean you can take yourself for a vacation without asking your spouse for a dime. Wouldn’t that be so cool? So, let’s meet at the transcription sites as we make them dollars.
Daisy Chepkoech is a Freelance writer, Transcriber and Trainer. She is also the Marketing Director at Dake Business Solutions offering customized water branding solutions. Daisy holds a Bachelors degree in Communication and Media Technology from Maseno University.
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