A variety of new jobs

Looking for work? SideHusl’s editors found a variety of new jobs for writers, reviewers, college students and teenagers this week.

However, the new jobs aren’t all great. Some expect a lot of work for very little pay. On the bright side, each of the bad jobs have competitors that offer roughly the same work with better terms.

Variety of new jobs

Here are a half-dozen newly-reviewed job platforms. We’ve sorted them into categories to allow you to skip ahead to the job or jobs that suit you.

Teens

Very few online job platforms appeal to young teens. Indeed, most prohibit anyone under the age of 18 from using their sites. Kumbaya is an exception.

Kumbaya is specifically aimed at industrious youths between the ages of 13 and 18. And it has some unique features that make it attractive to both teens and their parents.

Specifically, if you want to find work with this app, you’ve got to ask Mom or Dad. One of your parents has to sign up first. The parent then sends a link to the teen. At that point, the teen and parent collaborate to create a profile. The profile explains what the teen can do and how much he or she charges per hour. Some job options: tutor, walk dogs, babysit, mow lawns, provide tech support.

Parents retain access to all the messages sent to and from their own child. And, they’re encouraged to share their teen’s profile with friends. This helps the teen find work with someone he or she knows and trusts.

Other online platforms that also help teens find work are Bambino (babysitting), Fiverr (which offers a variety of jobs), and Etsy (arts & crafts).

College students

College students have lots of ways to make money working on and off campus. But few jobs are as attractive as simply selling their class notes. After all, you’re already taking the class. If you want a decent grade, you’ve got to take lecture notes and, probably, create study guides from the important information in your book or class materials. Taking better notes is likely to get you better grades. If you can earn a few bucks in the process, it’s hard to find an argument for why you wouldn’t.

Stuvia is one of several websites that make the process of selling your notes to other students easier by providing marketing help and payment processing. Where most other note-selling platforms pay a set price for each set of notes that you upload or sell, Stuvia allows you to decide how much to charge. The site takes a 30% cut of the sale price before remitting the balance to you, however.

Another nice feature: The site does not require exclusivity, so you can sell the same notes elsewhere, if you want to. The only bit of weirdness that we found with this site’s terms is that Stuvia demands all rights to any flashcards you might make and sell on their platform. Our advice: Forget the flashcards. If you want to make flashcards for sale, sell them offline or elsewhere.

Other good sites to sell your class notes include Study Soup and Nexus Notes.

Reviewers

There are a number of companies that will pay you to provide reviews of products that you use daily or of websites and smart phone applications. Of the variety of new jobs we discovered this week, three are for reviewers.

The least attractive of these three is Voxpopme. Voxpopme is a consumer research company that pays people to tell them what they think of a wide array of consumer products. You do your review via a short video. Voxpopme pays $1 for each video. Even if you’re fast, this isn’t going to come close to paying minimum wage.

Fortunately, competitor Product Tube pays at least five times as much — between $5 and $35 per video. If you want to do video consumer product reviews, Product Tube is the better bet.

Technology reviewers

Meanwhile, if you’re willing to review technology, from websites to smart phone apps, both UserTesting and Appen are worth a look.

UserTesting primarily hires freelancers to review websites, paying $10 per 20-minute review. These reviews are done by using UserTesting’s software, which records your interaction with the site — both video and voice. You are asked to talk out loud, so the site’s owners can understand what you found pleasant about the site and what you thought was tough to navigate.

While $10 per 20-minutes works out to a pretty good hourly rate, you’re unlikely to get three reviews per hour. You may not even get three reviews per week. So, don’t look at this as more than lunch money.

Appen pays by the hour at rates ranging from $10 to $15. And it appears to offer more regular work. You could evaluate websites, smart phone applications or other products. However, all jobs at this site are about helping companies improve their artificial intelligence offerings.

For instance, websites often have “chat bots” that are supposed to bring up relevant information when a consumer asks a question on the site. However, for the bots to be effective, they need lots of information about the many words consumers might use to describe the same things. Appen testers help the websites “teach” those chatbots how real people talk and what answers they’re seeking.

Writers

A site called Verblio maintains it is the “simplest, most flexible” way to grow your writing career. In reality, writers on this platform are incredibly poorly paid.

The site sells content to websites for a relative pittance and then passes on a small portion of that payment to the writer who actually did the work. Worse, you have no real assurance that anything you write for this site will ever be purchased.

All stories are done on spec and posted in the writer’s portfolio. When one of Verblio’s corporate clients needs something on a topic you’ve written about, they’ll review your story, as well as a number of others on the same topic. If they choose you, you get paid. If they don’t, your work goes uncompensated.

When you do get paid, the site’s rates work out to between 3 cents and 6 cents per word. In other words, about $10 for a 300-word article.

Better platforms for writers include Contently, Skyword and Cracked (if you’re funny). Reedsy is also a good choice for writers who are willing to ghostwrite or want to edit and proofread other writers work.