Available Jobs in SL

If you run around in 2nd life and help new residents, you quickly realize, that the search for jobs is quite an issue for most newbies. And yes of course, there are ways to make money in Second Life. But those differ quite much.

First of all there are the simple jobs like cleaning windows or the street, playing slot machines, posing as a display dummy, sitting in chairs (camping), dancing on poles or even visiting stores.

All of those activities in the right place are payed in SL. A small amount of money is given more or less for presence. The land owner increases traffic (visitors) and can therefore better sell his services to investors (advertisers). You usually get 5-20L$/10-30min/1-10 cycles (cycles mean you get only payed a certain number of times before you have switch to a new spot). Sometimes those jobs check if you are away or require some regular interaction (There is an "ORB of Anti-Idle" if you have problems with that).

Those places are best found by asking others or looking in the search (camping, chairs, lottery, make money). You can do that, if you want to sit around for some chat (with the IM system). But generally the time wasted (to keep up to date) and the amount earned is in no relation. Isn't your online time worth more fun?

Not sure if there are websites or SL places where you can get current lists of camping sites (beside the search), if yes - post a comment.

The quickest way to make Lindens - and the one Linden Lab prefers for sure - is to actually exchange USD against lindens. Personally I recommend that to newbies: you need some money to design a character (and find a job) and the game is much more fun if you can go explore and shop instead of camping.

After all Lindens are cheap, 1000L$ are about 4USD. Start with 20 USD, this is still less than you would spent for other Online Games or a night in your favorite RL club. And it is just fun. If you have troubles getting your payment methods accepted by LL, you may buy Lindens also on EBay, however the exchange rate is a bit worse.

There are some jobs, which are payed better than those camping chairs. This includes DJ, Stripper, Escort, Poker Dealer, Event Organizer, Model or Sales Agent. All of them require some special knowledge, experience and appearance, just like you would expect from your other life. For most of those Jobs you will have to invest (see for example what a Stripper needs to do in a later post). You need to be communicative, be able to interact with people - entertain them.

And finally, SL lives from the ability of generating user content. Clothes, Things, Buildings, Animals even creatures - all that can be build, designed and scripted. Everybody can be a Designer, Builder or Scripter. It requires however deeper understanding of things like Photoshop (for Textures used in Design), Scripting (Linden Scripting Language), Building (Combining 3d Primitives) , Sound Mixing or Animation (with Poser or other Animator Tools). This is a lot of fun, and not neccesaryly something only for computer geeks. If you are interested in that, there is exactly one place to start with: Natalia's SL Blog and of course the SL Wiki and Developer Resources.

Big Big Money can be made by Auctioning for Land, being a Landlord or offering Facilities like Malls or running networks for merchandising and Events. However this entrepreneurship requires a lot of time, skill and especially risk aware investments (we speak about hundreds of USD per week and thousands per auction).

If I find tips for making money, will post them in my Blog, look for the label money.