If you want to live comfortably today, you need to have multiple sources of income. Even if you have a well-paying job, there is no guarantee that you will still have it in a week or in a month, so having a Plan B is simply just the smart way to live your life. In the pursuit of alternative sources of income, people have come up with increasingly creative ways of making some extra cash. The truth is, we are living in wonderful times. Advances in technology have brought with them a new world of opportunity, meaning if you only think a little outside the box and do some research you will realize that there are hundreds of ways to make money without working a regular 9 to 5 job.
To make your work even easier, I went out and did the research for you. I found several methods you can take advantage of to start making money without working a real job. I compiled all the ones that have the highest chance of success into this list. Here is my ultimate list of how to make money without working a real job.
1. SIGN UP FOR A FOCUS GROUP
The concept of a focus group is simple: you get to talk about things you do on a daily basis, stuff you like and don’t like, products you use, and other things like that while in a room with a group of people, or over the phone in your home. Some focus groups can also be conducted through Skype or a similar video call service.
To get started with focus groups, all you have to do is sign up with a marketing company that organizes focus groups. You will outline your areas of interest, and they will contact you when a focus group within your interests comes up.
Sometimes, you may be asked to test out a product before giving your opinions on it. In such cases, the marketing company will send out free product samples to you for you to try out for a specific period of time, say a week or so before you have to come in and give your opinion or your experience using the product.
Most focus groups will pay you immediately after the session is done. Some of them also pay in cash.
Where to start: Focusgroup.com, 2020panel.com, Fieldwork.com, Intelli-shop.com, Conferoinc.com
2. TAKE ONLINE SURVEYS
Surveys are another great way of making a little extra cash on the side. Although it is quite difficult to make a livable income from survey sites, the money you can get from answering survey questions and watching videos can make life a little easier.
Survey sites pay you to give your opinions, watch promotional videos or perform other simple tasks such as playing online games. Once you complete a task, your account is credited with a certain number of points. When you accumulate enough of these points, you can redeem them for cash or gift cards after a specified period of time. These online surveys and tasks are usually simple enough to be performed by anyone.
Check out my post on Legitimate Surveys that Pay Cash!
3. SELL STUFF
Do you have clothes that you are absolutely positive you are never going to wear again? Did you know that you can sell them and make some easy cash off them? If there is a consignment store in your area, you can take your clothes there and get paid a percentage of the sales they make from your items.
There are also several websites that do exactly the same thing. You get to sell your clothes through them and they take a small percentage of the listed price. Some of the best ones include theRealReal.com, ThredUp.com, LikeTwice.com, and of course, eBay.
Apart from clothes, you can also sell other stuff online. Although eBay is a great platform for this, there are other sites that you can use to get rid of your other stuff that you are not using. Craigslist and Gazelle.com come to mind. Keep in mind that while you can list practically anything on some sites like Craigslist and eBay, many of these sites usually specialize in a single niche. For example, you can only sell books on Bookscouter.com.
Where to start: eBay, Craigslist, theRealReal.com, ThredUp.com, LikeTwice.com, Gazelle.com, LetGo.com, Swap.com, Offerupnow.com, Cash4Books.net, Bookscouter.com, and Decluttr.com
Check out my BuyBackWorld Review
4. EARN MONEY DRIVING
This is another great way of making money without a real job. It is a really quick way of making some extra money, too. There are several ways through which you can start getting paid to drive. One of the most popular is driving people around. To do this, you simply have to sign up for a service like Uber or Lyft, and you can start making money by picking up and dropping people off around your city or town.
If you do not like strangers in your car all day, you can opt to deliver food to people in your town. You can sign up to sites like Instacart and you will be delivering food orders and buying and delivering groceries for people, or sign up for Amazon Flex and start delivering packages to people’s houses.
Where to start: Instacart, Amazon Flex, Uber, Lyft
5. RENT OUT A ROOM IN YOUR HOUSE
If you have some extra space in your home, you can monetize it by renting it out. Airbnb is great for this. All you have to do is list your property and location on the site, and when someone is in the area and needs a place to stay, they can simply look you up and come stay at your place. The best part is that you get to set your own prices and the company acts as a mediator between you and your clients so you will always get paid.
Where to start: Airbnb, VRBO
6. START A BLOG
Blogging is a massively popular venture for making an extra income online. If you have a subject that you are passionate about, you can start a blog and talk about it for as long as you want, amassing a growing audience in the process.
ACCESS MY TOP RECOMMENDED MAKE MONEY ONLINE SYSTEM FOR FREE HERE!
Blogs should be fun and they should express your personality. They are absolutely easy to start, but the only downside to them is that they take time to grow and to build a good enough reputation that can start generating you a regular income. If you are looking for a quick fix, try other things on this list because this is not it.
Where to start: WordPress.com, Blogger.com, Tumblr.com, Wix.com, Medium.com, Weebly.com
7. SELL YOUR PICTURES
If you love photography, this is the perfect method for you. Photography can be a creative hobby that earns you a regular source of income. One of the best avenues for this is getting paid to be a stock photographer.
Everyone uses stock photos. From websites to business ads, it is estimated that the stock photography industry will hit the $4 billion mark by 2020. And you can get a piece of this pie.
The way it works is simple. You take a photo then upload it to a stock photo site. When someone buys the photo, you get paid a percentage of the sales price. If you upload about 500 good photos, you could end up making about 100 sales a day. The best part is that these are recurring sales, so the same photo can be sold multiple times. Selling one picture at just $1 means that you will be making at least $3000 a month.
Selling stock photography is great because it is so simple to pull off. However, most people do not realize that it takes quite a bit of work earlier on to get the ball rolling. The pictures that sell well are usually professional level photos, so you need a good camera before you can start. Also, taking 500 high-quality pictures is not easy.
On the bright side, if you do this right, you will have a great source of passive income, with money rolling in month after month.
Where to start: Shutterstock.com, iStockphoto.com, Alamy.com, 123RF, Getty Images
8. TEST WEBSITES
This is another easy way of making some extra cash. The way it works is simple: there are companies that need to know people’s experiences using their websites. So they pay you to test them out for them and tell them what you think about these sites. Usually, these testing tasks take around 20 minutes to complete, and you can earn up to $10 per task.
Where to start: Usertesting.com, Enrollapp.com, Youeye.com, Whatusersdo.com
9. PET SITTING
Pet Sitting is another great way to make money without a real job. If you love animals, this method is perfect for you. All you have to do is register with a company like Rover to let people know that you are offering pet sitting services. You will then become a dog walker or a pet sitter, and people near you will start contacting you when they need your services.
Where to start: Rover, Tailster, Care Pet Care
10. RENT OUT YOUR BABY STUFF
If you have growing children, you probably realize by now that they outgrow their baby stuff pretty fast. On the other hand, if you are a new parent, you are probably wondering why that stroller costs so much when they won’t even need it anymore in only a few months. This is why some services have come up that allow you to rent out your strollers, car seats, among other baby stuff and make some money off them.
Where to start: GoBaby
11. TAKE PICTURES OF YOUR RECEIPTS
It works exactly as it sounds. When you go out grocery shopping, simply scan the receipts and get paid for it. One of the best apps for this is Ibotta. It literally pays you to do your groceries. So the next time you go grocery shopping, instead of throwing away your receipts, you can make some money off them by simply taking a picture and uploading it to the app. Target and Walmart (price match) have similar services through their Apps.
Where to start: Ibotta, Target, Walmart
12. BECOME A RENT A FRIEND
With this method, you will be signing up to be someone’s friend for a specific period of time. Most services, for example, RentAFriend.com, pay hourly.
To become a Rent-A-Friend, simply sign up on the website and wait for someone needing your services. Whenever people are in or around your town and they need a friend, they will reach out to you to hang out. You get paid more if you are accompanying them to social events. You can also choose to be a tour guide for people who are new to your town. This is a bit of a strange one but it is actually a thing!
Where to start: RentAFriend.com
13. DROP SHIPPING
Drop shipping is a great way of making money without a real job. This is because it has a nearly uncapped earning potential, meaning the more sales you make, the more money you earn.
Here is how it works: With drop shipping, you do not have any inventory of your own nor do you ship any actual products to your customers. All you do is find a product source, which is usually a company. You will then list your product on a site like Shopify. When someone buys it, they pay you the cash. Now keep in mind that the listing price on your shop is the actual price of the product plus your commission. So when you get paid, you simply take your cash and purchase the product on behalf of your customer directly from the company that makes the product. You then tell the company where to ship the product and voila! A transaction is complete. You get paid, the company makes a sale, and the client gets the product they want. Everyone is happy.
Where to start: Shopify, Amazon, AliExpress
14. ONLINE MARKET TRADING
Investing in the stock market sounds scary, especially if you are a complete beginner. However, as I mentioned earlier, we live in wonderful times. Today, it is possible to reduce your risk by joining online market trading platforms that do everything for you.
Some of the best ones are Plus500 and eToro. They are the two biggest online market trading platforms, and they are completely free to join. They also have really cheap options because everything is spread out among millions of users. If you are not too sure of yourself, you can use their free practice accounts to see how well you would hypothetically perform, or in the case of eToro, you can choose to use the copy trader feature which shows you what top performing traders are doing and lets you copy all their investment decisions.
However, you should know that stock trading involves a significant amount of risk. Only invest money you can afford to lose.
Where to start: Plus500.com, eToro.com
15. CONTENT CREATION
Quality content is one of the bestselling products on the internet today. Everyone needs high-quality content. Businesses of all types need a consistent supply of articles, blog posts, social media posts, among other types of content. And they are willing to pay you good money for it. This means that if you are a good writer, or even just a fairly decent one, you stand to make a killing creating content for people.
The best part about freelance content creation is the fact that you can write about anything you are interested in. There are thousands of niches to choose from and plenty of opportunities available. If you like learning new things, there are also research intensive articles that will get you taking a deep dive into the topic.
Where to start: UpWork, Freelancer, iWriter, Textbroker
16. WRITE AND PUBLISH A KINDLE EBOOK
This is another wonderful money-making opportunity. Writing an eBook and publishing it on Kindle is so easy that absolutely anyone can do it. And the best part is that once your eBook goes live, it will earn you a passive income for as long as it stays up.
Here are a few tips that have gone a long way in making eBooks do really well on Kindle:
– Create value for your readers. Put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself if you would be willing to spend good money on what you have just written.
– When it comes to pricing your book, list it at $1.99 to $6.99. This way, you earn 70% commission from every sale.
– Write non-fiction. Fiction books are a dominated market, and unless you are an amazing author, you will likely not find much success in it. Nonfiction is much easier for complete beginners. All you have to do is conduct your research and present it in a fun-to-read, digestible format.
– Get your cover professionally designed if you can. The cover is what will attract readers to make a purchase, so it needs to look great if you want it to stand out.
– Encourage your readers to leave an honest review at the end of your book.
I love eBooks because all you have to do is invest your time doing a great job in the initial phase, and then your efforts will keep earning you money for years. For this reason, it is one of the best sources of passive income.
17. SELL YOUR ART
If you are an artist, you can make quite a bit of money selling your original art online. This applies to visual artists, sculptors, people who create accessories, and even people who customize clothes. If you put yourself out there, and if your work is good, people will buy it.
There are many ways to get your name out there. Use your friends and family by making stuff for them and asking them to tell the people in their circles about you. Take advantage of social media and platforms like Pinterest and Instagram to get the word out even more.
You should also consider creating a platform where your fans can reach you and interact with you and your work. One of the best and easiest to use sites for this is Tumblr. Just publish your work on there and wait for feedback.
Where to start: Tumblr, Deviantart, ArtFire.com, MadeItMyself.com, Etsy.com, Bonanza.com, ShopHandmade.com
18. GET PAID TO LOSE WEIGHT
Did you know this was an actual thing? There are sites out there that will pay you good money to lose weight. And the concept behind it is simple: if you have some sort of incentive, you are more likely to work harder to achieve your goals.
Here is how it works: For a site like HealthyWage, you place a bet on your weight loss. For example, you can bet $50 that you will lose 50 pounds in, say, 4 months. You get paid when you reach your goal, and you get a huge bonus when you exceed that goal. It’s that simple!
check out my Achievement Health App Review
19. RUN A VIRTUAL STOREFRONT
This one touches a little bit on the selling your art point we made a little bit earlier. However, it does not only apply to art. With a virtual storefront, you can sell absolutely anything you want.
What a virtual storefront does is give you a platform to run your business without having to set up a website. One of the most popular such sites is Etsy. On Etsy, all you have to do is list your product, upload a few pictures, then work on driving traffic to your storefront. After that, your only job will be fulfilling orders and making sure that your customers are happy with their overall experience every time they buy from you.
Where to start: Etsy, CafePress.com, Zazzle, ArtFire
20. ENTER CONTESTS
Contests are another interesting way to make money without a real job. However, although most of them have amazing rewards for winning, the chances of winning are often really low because you will often be competing with people who are just as good as you or even better. But life is about taking chances so it doesn’t hurt to try.
Most people never win any contests throughout their lifetime for one simple reason: they enter very few contests or none at all. If you want to make money off contests, you need to enter every contest you can find, as long as they are within your areas of interest. This way, you increase your chances of winning by a huge margin. Even if you do not win, you will end up having tones of fun.
Where to start: Contestgirl.com, Contests.about.com
21. ENTER COMPETITIONS
Similar to contests, competitions are also a great way to earn some money while having a good time doing it. And every time you participate in a competition, even if you do not win, you get the confidence to participate in even more competitions. The best part is that you get increasingly better at them, so by the time you would have participated in your fifth competition, chances are you would have become one of the crowd favorites.
Where to start: There are several competitions out there on every niche. Just find something you are good at and search the web for related competitions.
22. GET ON A GAMESHOW
Speaking of contests and competitions, this is another interesting option you can try out. This option only applies to a very specific type of person. You need to be comfortable with being on camera for extended periods of time, and you need to be ready to get to a studio extremely early and stake it out because participants are often determined on a first come first served basis.
Sometimes, you also need a very particular set of skills to be considered. You need to be really smart to get on a show like Jeopardy, or really good at guessing to get on the Price is Right. It also depends on where filming is taking place, but if money is not an issue, you can always catch a plane to get there.
Where to start: Jeopardy.com, Wheel of Fortune, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, The Price is Right, Wipeout
23. SHARE FILES
There is a whole market out there for people who share files by uploading them to file-sharing services and getting paid per upload or per download. Although it pays a minimal amount per instance, this amount can add up, and it is always nice to get a few hundred dollars in your account when you didn’t expect it.
Most sites pay $1 per download or upload, and they pay out when you hit a $100 minimum. You should know, however, that a lot of times, the uploaded files usually breach some sort of copyright laws, for example, when you upload a cracked version of software.
If you are willing to look into it, there are plenty of resources on how to go about it and do it the right way online.
Where to start: DepositFiles, ShareCash
24. TRANSLATION SERVICES
If you are bilingual or multilingual, there is an entire industry built around the skills you already have. Since the world is becoming a smaller and smaller place every day, there is an urgent need for people from different parts of the world to understand each other.
Businesses and individuals have documents, audio files and video files that need to be translated. This means that if you can speak more than one language, there is a ton of work for you to do online.
Where to start: Freelancer, UpWork, Gengo, Proz
25. PAID FORUM POSTING
When someone starts a new forum online, they need it to be visible and to demonstrate that it is attracting a lot of attention online. They need to build this notoriety to attract traffic to themselves. One way of doing this is to pay people to post on these forums, drawing attention to them.
If you want to be paid to post on forums, you should know that the pay is not that great. You would be lucky to hit the $100 mark every month as a beginner. However, if you combine it with other methods on this list, it all adds up.
Where to start: PaidForumPosting.com
26. BECOME A CLICKWORKER
This business model is based on crowdsourcing. This is where a business advertises a specific task that is scalable and needs to be completed quickly. Hundreds of internet users then jump on it and complete a task that would have otherwise taken months in just a few hours.
These tasks usually involve data entry, form filling and basic web research. You get paid via PayPal upon completion of the work. The best part is that you determine how much work you want and when you want to work.
Where to start: Clickworker.com, Mturk.com (for US users only)
27. GET PAID TO INSTALL SOFTWARE
If you want to get paid to install software, you can do it in two ways. First, you can do it through affiliate marketing, where you get people to download the software using your affiliate link, and when they install it, you get paid. Secondly, you can offer a service where you help non-computer savvy people to install software.
Where to start: Clickbank, PerInstallCash
28. SELL VIRTUAL PROPERTY
This is perfect for you if you are a gamer. People have made fortunes selling virtual properties on Multiplayer games. For example, Ansche Chung, a Second Life player, became famous for making millions by simply selling land and houses on Second Life. There are also people who make a few hundred thousand dollars every year by creating, levelling up and selling characters on games like World of Warcraft.
Where to start: Second Life, World of Warcraft, Planet Calypso, Entropia Universe
29. FREELANCING
Over the past few years, freelancing has become an extremely popular way of making money online. Which is why a platform like Fiverr is now the world’s leading marketplace for people selling small services, which are called ‘gigs’ on the platform.
The best part about it is that you can monetize practically any skill you have, no matter how bizarre it is. The fact is, if you are good at something, someone somewhere will be happy to pay you good money for it. For example, how good is your Australian accent? Offer to say something in it for 5 dollars on Fiverr. Do you have a Spiderman or Scream mask that is sitting somewhere in your room from last Halloween? Put it on and promote someone’s product wearing it. Can you draw really good stick figures doing various things? Monetize this skill!
You can also offer more professional skills like writing, tutoring, creating music, accounting and even architecture. As long as it can be done remotely, you can freelance in it.
ACCESS MY TOP RECOMMENDED MAKE MONEY ONLINE SYSTEM FOR FREE HERE!
When Fiverr started, you used to get paid a $5 flat rate fee for anything you do. Today, you can pick any amount you want, as long as it is $5 and up.
Freelancing is a great option for you especially if you have a skill that you can do in mass. The money you get from each gig often adds up pretty fast into something significant, especially if you have a popular skill.
Here is a pro tip for you: what can you do if you have zero skills? Well, you can become a reseller! All you have to do is find a Fiverr freelancer who does decent work for cheap, and there are many of those. Next, you will need to source jobs from other freelancing platforms like UpWork and Freelancer. Once you get a job, you contract your freelancer to do it for you for $5, and you submit it to your client for a markup!
Where to start: Fiverr, Fourerr, SEOClerks, GigBucks, Upwork, Freelancer
30. BECOME A MUSIC REVIEWER
Did you know you can start reviewing unsigned bands and artists online and get paid for it? It really is as simple as it sounds. To get started, all you have to do is sign up on a platform like SliceThePie, then sample a few albums and write reviews about them.
It does take some time to build a respectable reputation in your niche though, so you should take that into account. Anyone can sign up and review the songs, and you all get paid in $US via PayPal. In a few weeks, you could be making an average of $40 a month for your reviews.
Where to start: Slicethepie.com
31. BUY & SELL DOMAIN NAMES
A domain name is a website address. Usually, they come with a variety of extensions, such as .com, .org, .net, .co.uk, among others. They are very cheap to register, often going for as little as $0.99 on GoDaddy.
Premium domain names often garner thousands of dollars in resell value. Case in point is VacationRentals.com, which was sold for $35 million in 2007.
The trick is to find a domain name that is available and has some commercial value. You will then have to buy it and list it on a site like Sedo.com, where people who are looking for domain names can buy it.
Where to start: GoDaddy.com, Hostgator.com, Sedo.com
32. TELECOMMUTE
This basically means doing jobs that would normally be done in an office, only this time you are doing them from home. There are lots of jobs in a wide range of industries. Most of them, however, usually center around advertising, administration and data entry. You can also get coding jobs and copy editing tasks.
If you want to get started with telecommuting, all you have to do is carry out a little bit of research on the area you are interested in and dive right into the tasks by signing up with one of the many service providers.
Where to start: FlexJobs, VirtualVocations
33. DESIGN AND SELL T-SHIRTS
This method is another easy way to make money without working a real job. There are so many websites out there that can help you get started on this, and you only need to have fairly decent artistic skills.
How does it work? Well, you first have to sign up to one of the sites for free. Next, you will need to use their design interface to create your T-shirt. You will have to select the color and cut of the T-shirt, then design a front and back for it.
The next part is where you set the price and sales goals for your T-shirt. This is what determines how much you get paid. Your t-shirt then goes live, and you get paid for every sale you make. If you want to maximize your profits, all you need to do is advertise it and try to get as many people to buy it.
It costs you nothing at all to design the t-shirts. The printing and distribution are also taken care of by the company. All you have to do is sit back and watch the money roll in.
I should point out that the T-shirt business is not as easy as most people make it sound. The market is heavily flooded, and you need to come up with very unique designs to get noticed. Also, if you do not invest in advertising, no one will know your great t-shirts exist, and you will not make any money off them.
Where to start: Threadless, DesignByHumans, TeeFury, TeeSpring
34. TUTORING
Today, it is easier than ever to tutor anyone from anywhere in the world on subjects that you have a good understanding of.
One of the best places to do this is on Udemy. With Udemy, you can create an online course, and as long as students take it up, you keep getting paid. You can earn from your course for as long as you want.
There are also platforms that allow you to give one on one tutoring sessions. These include places like MyTutor and SuperProf. The pay is also pretty good: you can make about $10 an hour as a beginner, and $50+ an hour as you rise up the ranks.
Where to start: Udemy, SuperProf, MyTutor, UKTutors
35. RENT OUT YOUR PARKING SPACE
If you have more parking space than you need, and if you live in a busy part of your town, you might be able to monetize that space by renting it out. Lots of people hate paying expensive daily parking fees and they will happily pay you a smaller amount to park in your space.
Where to start: Gumtree, Parklet, JustPark, YourParkingSpace.co.uk
36. BECOME A BANK
If you have some money to spare, you can make it work for you by investing it in a peer to peer lending platform. These platforms cut out the middleman by paying you higher interest on your savings and offering cheaper loans to borrowers. And the best part is that you can manage it all at the comfort of your home. The interest that you earn depends on the amount of risk associated with each loan. The riskier the deal, the higher interest you will earn. This is another case where you should not invest in if you ca’t afford to lose the money.
Where to start: RateSetter
37. SELL YOUR BODY (Not how you are thinking!)
And I do not mean in the “oldest profession” sort of way. If you are comfortable taking off your clothes, consider being a life model. Your work will mainly be to sit there and look pretty or handsome for artists and photographers. If this sounds like your thing, check out ModelReg.co.uk.
If you are not into getting naked for a crowd of strangers, try applying for clinical drug trials. These often pay really well, and the pay varies from company to company. You will be essentially signing up to be a human guinea pig, so you better read the fine print and have a good understanding of any potential risks and side effects involved.
Alternatively, you can make some money donating blood plasma. This is perfect for you if you are not afraid of needles. Donating plasma can net you about $50 per session.
Where to start: ModelReg.co.uk, Biolife
38. DONATE EGGS OR SPERM
Although donating sperm for men sounds like the best job in the world, you should know that it has a very stringent selection process, and very few applicants become successful. Only about 7% of applicants get selected to make a donation.
To be selected, your family’s medical history needs to be almost perfect, and your own medical records and lifestyle will also be evaluated. Everything that affects sperm quality will be scrutinized. Also, everything is on their terms, so qualifying today is no guarantee that you will automatically qualify next week.
Men make around $40 per sperm donation.
Women, on the other hand, have a much easier time qualifying to donate their eggs. Although the process is not as pleasant as it is for men, donating your eggs is extremely lucrative. The donation process starts with a strict drug and diet regimen and consistent testing for about 3 to 5 weeks. This means that if you are going to do this, you need to be all in.
However, you can make about $3000 per donation.
Sometimes, prospective parents look for the “perfect” donor. In such cases, they might specify your race and nationality, your age and weight, among other stringent demands, for example having to have gone to a specific university or having made valedictorian. If you meet these requirements, you can make anything from $50,000 to $200,000 as an egg donor.
Where to start: SpermBankDirectory.com, TheWorldEggBank.com
39. MAKE VIDEOS
Everyone uses YouTube every day. In fact, it is the second most popular search engine after Google. With the recent introduction of the YouTube Partner Program, being a Youtuber has become an actual profession, and you can make a livable income from making and uploading videos on YouTube.
Revenue on YouTube is mostly from advertisements. You get paid for every 1000 views. You can also make money by posting affiliate links below your videos, and when someone makes a purchase using your link, you get paid a commission.
With the rise in popularity of Let’s Play videos, other platforms like YouTube have also come up. TwitchTV is hands down the biggest of these. The concept of Let’s Play videos is simple: you play a video game as you talk, and people watch you and donate money to you if they like you or your gameplay. It’s a lot like watching a regular sports game on TV.
These platforms have proven that as long as you are doing something interesting, people will want to watch you do it. However, becoming a successful YouTuber of making it big as a Twitch streamer takes a lot of hard work, time investment and to some extent, a degree of luck. However, if money is not your priority, you can make a good secondary income as you amass your audience and slowly rise into the big leagues.
Where to start: YouTube, TwitchTV, Break.com
40. AFFILIATE MARKETING
If you are looking to make money without a real job, affiliate marketing is hands down one of the best ways to do it. It is a business model that allows you to promote other people’s products and earn a commission from every sale made from your leads. It is such a simple and straightforward way of making money that anyone can use it to make as much money as they want.
The beauty of affiliate marketing lies in the fact that it allows you to be your own boss, and it also has a very low barrier to entry. Anyone can do it, no matter their background and previous experience. It also gives you an unmatched level of freedom, so you can choose to work whenever you want, wherever you want, promoting only the products you want.
It is absolutely easy to get started with affiliate marketing. The first thing you need to do is identify a niche you can promote. This niche needs to be something you are passionate about and something you have a background in. Next, you need to identify the actual product you want to promote to your niche. Virtually every product on the web has an affiliate program. So just Google product name + affiliate and select the best choice from the results.
Finally, you need to start a website and start creating content promoting your products. Just remember that your content needs to offer value to your readers. They need to keep coming back, so you just can’t keep constantly selling products to them. You need to help them solve their problems, which will make you an authority in the niche.
The most important thing in affiliate marketing is traffic. And the best kind of traffic is organic traffic. Getting organic traffic is simple. All you need to do is consistently create high-quality content and do your SEO, and search engines will reward you for it. When you rank well in search engine result pages, more people can find you, and you will get more high-quality traffic to your website. And more traffic means more sales.
Where to start: ACCESS MY TOP RECOMMENDED AFFILIATE MARKETING TRAINING COMMUNITY – IT’ S FREE!
BONUS WAYS OF MAKING MONEY
1. House Sitting
House sitting is another great way to make money without working a real job. It is as straightforward as it sounds: when a friend or someone in your family is going to be out of town for a while and they do not want to leave their home unattended for one reason or another, you can offer your house sitting service to them, or they reach out to you and ask you to watch their house while they are away. So you head on over there and watch Netflix all day as you eat their food, and when they get back you get paid for it.
2. Proofreading
If you enjoy reading, this is the job for you. As a proofreader, your job is to go through what other people have written checking for typos, grammar errors and punctuation mistakes. The more detail oriented you are, the better. The best part is that proofreading needs no certification, and you get to pick your clients and the number of hours you would like to work each day.
3. Social Media Marketing and Management
If you love social media, you will enjoy doing this. Many businesses now understand the immense power of social media, and they are actively seeking to be part of it. However, particularly for small local businesses, the entire process of setting things up and posting consistently without any results can be frustrating.
The setup process is usually the hardest part of this job. It can take anything from a few days to weeks to set up a client’s social media pages and to start promoting them. Once the hard part is done, you stand to make a consistent income every month working just a few hours each day managing your client’s accounts.
4. The Disney Vault
Disney restricts the supply of its home release classics to make sure they remain in high demand across several generations. So every 8 to 10 years, they release these titles for a short time. You can buy them during this window for a normal retail price and wait for them to go off sale again. This way, you can turn a huge profit. For example, Beauty and the Beast on Blu-ray 3D went on sale in 2011 for $24.99. Two years later, it was being sold on Amazon for $74.99.
5. Be an Extra in A Movie or TV Show
If you are a budding actor, or you simply just want to be in a zombie crowd scene in The Walking Dead, you can apply to be an extra. The pay is also pretty good. Extras get paid $60 to $100 a day on average, and all they have to do is walk by in the background or lay down dead after an explosion scene. Several casting agencies regularly place extras, and all you have to do is apply. You should know, however, that casting agencies make their money by taking a cut from your earnings, so make sure you know what the percentages are before signing off.
6. Hold A Garage Sale
Garage sales are the same as selling your stuff online. However, they have much lower price points. The idea behind a garage sale is that you need as many items to be sold as possible, so it is better to sell things cheaply than not to sell at all. To start selling, all you have to do is set your stuff up on your yard or some other similar space, put up one or two signs, and wait for people to show up. You can also advertise it in your general area if you want to have a higher chance of success.
7. Give Massages
This is another great way to make a little extra cash on the side. However, you need to be completely sure of what you are doing, so it might be a good idea to take a few classes before getting started. Or at least read up on it and watch a few videos online.
Massages are pretty intimate. You need to make sure your client is as comfortable as possible, and you need to respond to things that they like. If someone prefers more firm action, do that. But don’t go hard on someone who was expecting a simple, mild, gentle massage.
It is a good idea to first practice on family and friends before going commercial. Give a few free massages, get their feedback, then improve on your massage skills based on that feedback.
It is important to note that in some states, you need to have a license before you can operate such a business. Do your research and make sure everything is according to regulations to avoid getting into trouble with the law.
8. Clean Houses
Offering maid services is another great way to make a little extra cash. Almost anyone can do it, and if you are good at it, you are looking at a lot of repeat clients and referrals.
Since there are many existing companies that offer house cleaning services, consider undercutting them in price when you set up your own service. You should also consider throwing in an extra service in there for cheap, for example, you can also offer to organize the spaces you clean.
If you establish yourself well in this niche, you can easily scale your business up and even employ people somewhere down the road, turning it into your main source of income.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Our society today has pushed us into a lateral way of thinking: go to school, get an education, graduate, get a job, make money. However, the reality is rather different from that, and if you are not well prepared for it, it can come as a rude shock that jobs are not always guaranteed for people who have a good education. Things do not always fall perfectly into place, and that is part of life. You might not be lucky enough to get a “real job”, or the job you get may not pay well enough to sustain the kind of lifestyle you want. So what do you do when this happens?
Well, there is some good news. Many people are waking up to the fact that they do not have to follow the formula prescribed to them by society. You do not need to go to college to make a living. Technology and the improved communication and connections between people today have made it extremely easy to make money. It is possible today to get paid to do almost anything you can imagine.
This gives you the freedom to pursue things that you are actually passionate about. You can go out, live your life and be happy doing what you love, without feeling trapped in a job you hate earning just enough to survive month to month.
There are so many people making a living today without a regular 9 to 5 job. Most of these people take advantage of methods that wouldn’t even exist without the Internet. Sometimes, the money they make may only be enough to treat them to a nice dinner. Other times, it is enough to completely replace their regular income and set them free, giving them the ability to do anything they want whenever they want.
For many people, though, the goal is to simply make a little extra cash. Income-replacing success often only comes after several months or even years. The good news is that no matter which group you belong to, there are many opportunities for you to try. I hope this list gives you a great starting point on your journey towards making money without working a real job.
While I have tried many of the methods outlined above, I can honestly say that I find Affiliate marketing to be the most appealing and effective. No boss, no inventory, no paperwork and no customer service hassles. Add to that the fact that I interact with people on subjects that I love.
ACCESS MY TOP RECOMMENDED AFFILIATE MARKETING TRAINING COMMUNITY – IT’ S FREE!
I hope you found the content of this super long post helpful. I am sure that at least one or two of these methods will appeal to you. Let me know if you have any questions or any comments.
To your success,
Mike A