Do you love your job, but you’re sick and tired of having to be there in person every single day? Would you like to keep on developing professionally – but you’d also love to work from home, or from any other exotic place you’ve so often seen on Instagram? Don’t you think you could ever work online? Then this post is for you!

There are some types of businesses which are naturally born to go digital – think writers, translators, photographers, social media managers… They have it easy, right? They just need a PC and an Internet connection to get new customers, receive an offer, send a project quote and, finally, send the completed project! They can work whenever and wherever they want – literally!

However, other professions may have some issues when taking their business online – either because they’ve traditionally been brick-and-mortar businesses, because they need an in-person relationship with the customers, or because they’re creative tasks which don’t find much resonance online.

How to Work Online When You Need a Place to Attend Customers

So, what happens to those who usually need a physical place to offer their services or products? How can a teacher meet her students? How can someone give cooking classes? And wine tasting? How can a bakery work online? It doesn’t sound easy, right? Well, with a little bit of creativity and fantasy, it doesn’t have to be that hard!

Let’s see some ideas for you to digitalize your work, even if meeting customers is required for you to keep the business going:

• Make online consultations with free tools such as Skype or Zoom (my favorite).
• Schedule your online meetings with Calendly. You’ll save so much time! You just have to set up your availability preferences, and your customer picks the date and time. It even updates your calendar automatically! So you don’t have to keep up with back-and-forth emails, and can also forget about checking whether someone has booked a call with you. Isn’t it cool??
• If you really, really, really have to meet your customers in person, ROPO is your way to go! ROPO stands for Research Online – Purchase Offline. So, even if you have to be physically there for your patients, for instance, you can let them do the whole research online. This means that you’ll only have to be there for the actual meeting. Every other transaction – customer communication, appointment booking and payment – can be done from the comfort of your home.
• Once you earn enough, let others do the “physical work” – and you can focus on the online/offline logistics, for instance.

How to Work Online As A Creative

As a creative, you need your time and space to design and build your artwork – but you need to make money, too, right? So here you are a couple of ideas for you to work online with your creations:

• Start an online shop to sell your products. There are easy-to-set-up e-commerce platforms, like Shopify, which will let you have a pro shop for everyone to find your creations!
• Sell your products on other platforms – not your own -, like Etsy or Artpal, for instance.
• Teach others to do what you do! It’s much easier than you think, and once you have your online course up and running, you can dedicate more time to your creative passion again! The online tools I’ve used for online courses are Thinkific, Kajabi, and Teachable. Check out Reinvent Yourself as a Freelance Online Teacher – It may awaken the teacher in you!
• Start a membership site, where you upload 1 weekly or monthly video teaching new techniques – and get a recurring monthly payment for getting access to your video library!

How to Work Online When You Don’t Like Your Job Anymore

If you don’t want to use your work experience because you hate your current job, why don’t you try and benefit from your hobbies to make a living? You could consider:

• Creating an online course (see above) and teach others about your hobbies, whether it’s languages, cooking, or yoga classes!
• Starting a blog as a platform to get an audience – and make a business out of it. You don’t even have to pay to start blogging right away.

If you need a little extra help to figure out how you can benefit from your experience and skills to start working online, download this free worksheet I crafted for you!

Are you still thinking that working online isn’t something you can do? I bet you’re wrong! Tell me why you don’t think your job can be taken to the Internet – write your comment down below!