Edit College Papers For Profit
Are you a college student looking for a job you can do from your dorm room? Why not build a business around the huge population of foreign students in the American educational system? Start an editing service for college term papers.
While there is competition in this niche, there is also huge demand. Plus there are a variety of strategic ways to differentiate your business.
Here are some tips:
1. Start the business on your own campus. Volunteer or apply at the ESL writing center, which most campuses provide. Meet and befriend potential clients. Worried that this service is already being provided? Don’t worry. Most campuses don’t have enough staff to meet demand. If your calendar gets booked, look for the first time a student comes to you desperation because her paper is due the next day. Tell her that you can help, but that you charge an hourly rate of $50/hour. You’ll get the business.
2. Differentiate your service by offering professional level editing and building a reputation for quality. The fact is that most of the online editing for student papers is done for low rates either by people for whom English isn’t even their primary language or by people who rush through the work because they aren’t being paid enough. Set yourself apart and charge a premium. Trust me: there are people out there who are seeking out the higher priced products because they aren’t satisfied with the low priced ones. So save yourself the headache of having to edit 10 papers just to make a $100. Competition always occurs at the low-end. Because offering low-end prices justifies a low end product. Offer a better editing product, and you minimize competition while maximizing profit.
3. Contract out the work. Find students in the English department or any other writing intensive major and offer them $25/hour to edit papers. You’ll find that a lot of students will bite at the opportunity to make 2.5x more than they are through work study. Plus, you’re getting good writers. A win-win situation.
4. Consider offering translation services. A lot of editing companies just do basic editing. Expand your offerings by providing translation services. Take a real world example: a friend of mine from India was writing a paper, but he couldn’t express an idea in English, so he wrote it in his native language. Only about two paragraphs out of a 15 page paper. Nonetheless, he wanted to express this idea. Once he had written it in his native language, he paid an online translator to transalte the two paragraphs into English for $35. As a college student, you are in a unique position to recruit translators (advanced foreign language majors, students who are fluent in multiple languages, etc.). Take advantage of this to differentiate your editing business.
So why not give it a try? Get paid to edit papers. It’s a great way to get started with a college startup business that has one foot in the real world and one foot online.
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Related Ads:
I used to own a service called noteplates.com that allows for students to “sell” their papers to other students. It also allows them to sell notes and research material. At one point, students were making some cash from it; some of you students may find it useful.