I’ve recently became unemployed from a long time job and I am trying to decide what career path to follow. I’m disabled with heart disease and diabetes so am limited to sitting and not much driving. This is a problem because I live in a rural area and most jobs that fit my limitations would require driving about 45 miles a day. So I’m thinking of telework or starting a home business.
Before I was lain-off from my job I was working on creating a newsletter for the library. No one else on the staff wanted to be bothered with it so I volunteered. It was fun and I was enjoying it, drawing the plans, writing the stories and finding fillers. I’ve been told by other’s that it’s a job that a lot employers usually have to force on an employee as no one seems to want to do it.
So do you think that a business writing newsletters would be a good idea? It could be done at home over the computer, would allow me to set my own work hours and be doing something I enjoy. Honest opinion is this a stupid idea, or could it work?
I think it could work. My company has toyed with doing an agent newsletter for years, but the question of who would provide content always derails the plan. We buy a newsletter from a person in CA who writes on malpractice cases. It’s very popular with the policyholders because it’s well-written, interesting, and topical.
Your biggest challenge will probably be marketing yourself. But it sounds like a good way to go in your situation.
Good luck!
I think you should go for it as well.
It sounds like a good idea and if you have some time to experiment with it, it may work out beyond your expectations.
I’m sure there will be people more experienced than myself to chime in about jobs appropriate to your situation, but accounting or product support sound like reasonable telecommute options as well.
cheers & luck.
it could definitely work, and not just newsletters, but flyers, pamphlets, etc. You can e-mail the product directly to the copy shop and then they could send/deliver to the client. I know our library would appreciate such a thing but wouldn’t be able to pay what you deserved. But for paying clients (even non-profits that have a publicity budget), it should be a great idea.
It sounds very much like the way David set out his business.
Childhood friend of mine, best friend’s little bro. When he finished college with a degree in Journalism, nobody wanted to give him a real job, it was all temp contracts, fillers, “we call you for 6 hours and pay 2…”
He found a print shop that could do newspaper-type print. I think he knew the owner’s son or something like that. He started a newspaper specializing in a local sport (jai-alai), at the start just 4 pages but now it’s 32; he made sure that it looked fully professional from Issue 1; later he started others, including newsletters for local organizations, town councils, several local-level governments… Some are internal newsletters, some are those free newspapers where income is exclusively from advertising.
This was a while back, when this was almost a world-wide novelty.
I think it’s a good idea; you will run into potential customers who need to meet physically but there will be others who are perfectly happy to move to a “telerelation” after a couple of initial meetings.
Maybe you could insert an ad in the library’s newsletter 
I think it’s worth a shot. However, I’m not sure you’d be bringing in much money at first, so another home gig would help you supplement income until that really takes off. Maybe an ebay gig?
Could work, though writing is a spotty business, financially. On the other hand, if you got a really large client it could be quite a gig!
There’s a website called Absolute Write; one of the better writing sites I know of and really comprehensive. There’s tons of forums there too and I’ve seen newsletter writing discussed. You might want to check there for ideas.
Thanks for all the encouragement, it’s appreciated. I will probably be able to get a job telecommunicating for a company that handles support for a satellite TV service. However it’s certainly not something I want to spend the next 20 years doing.
I’ve been thinking about selling on Ebay just to clear out a lot of stuff from my too small house, and I’ll check into to that web site bonobo_jones it sounds interesting.
I would like to start my newsletter business on the side and see if I can make it pay enough to quit the other job. Kind of like the idea of creating something on my own. The fisrst place I’m going to approach is the trucking company my hubby works for as I know they’ve been thinking about a newsletter. My husband said go for it, but my mother and sister both thought it was an incredibly stupid idea. They want me to get a Real job.
Companies that I have worked for farmed out that type of work to people like yourself so it definitely can happen. I don’t know how much they make though.
I did this for awhile, and it brought in some money but not a lot. I charged by the page so if I got hung up in my software my hourly rate went down, down, down–but when things were working well it worked out to around $20/hour. If I’d had about six more newsletters per month it would have been a full-time job (except they would probably all have had their deadlines the same day–there is something to look out for).
Web design is pretty good, too, if you know what you’re doing, because a lot of people want web pages and do NOT know what they’re doing.
After 25 years I was only making $10.20/hour on my last job as cataloger, reference librarian and internet mentor. The telcommuting job would only pay $8/hour so even if writing newletters only payed around $10/hour I’d be thrilled.