A side income feels like being rich if you already have a day job that covers the bills.
March 1, 2019 11 min read
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Making some extra side hustle cash doesn’t actually have to be that complicated. As someone who’s been immersed in the field of online income generation for nearly two decades now, I can tell you that it takes some work. However, there are several clear paths forward. At the end of the day, it all boils down to what your goals are and just how much you’re looking to automate your income.
Could you make an extra $200 per month? Sure. How about an extra $1000 per month? How would that change your life? To most, it would make a monumental difference. But what if we were talking thousands more per month or even tens of thousands more? How would that alter the trajectory of your life? Clearly, you can make money on the internet. You just have to decide how much of your time it’s worth.
While we all have some extra time, it often doesn’t feel like it. But it also doesn’t take too much effort to make some extra dough on the side. We’re not talking about millions upon millions here — we’re mostly talking about doing small, bite-sized projects to generate some fast cash. And depending on your skill set, you could easily make a few hundred dollars or even a few extra thousand per month.
Related: 4 Side Gigs You Can Start Today
1. Become a virtual assistant.
One simple way to make money from home is to help others complete tasks as a virtual assistant. If you’re highly organized and can properly manage your time, then becoming a virtual assistant presents a low-friction entry point into the digital services industry. You can easily perform these functions as a remote worker no matter where you live.
Finding work as a virtual assistant can be easily done through sites like Upwork, Indeed.com and Remote.co. Search the existing posted jobs and create bids. You’ll need effective communication skills and fluency in English and popular web and business software applications.
Related: Learn the 4 Principles That Helped This Virtual Company Become One of the Best Cultures in America
2. Sell stuff on eBay or Craigslist.
A large subset of our society is earning a full-time income by selling items on Craigslist and eBay. You can do this by selling your own items, or you can help sell items for other people and take a small commission. Selling on eBay offers more friction than Craigslist and you’ll need to establish solid reviews before you can begin to move high-ticket items.
However, eBay does provide resources for sellers to help you get acclimated to selling on the platform. Take the time to do your due diligence and research the platform. If you have some solid online marketing skills, you’ll find this much easier than if you’re a complete newbie to the world of digital marketing.
Related: 8 Places to Sell Stuff Fast When You Really Need the Money
3. Trade cryptocurrency.
As the digital world evolves, so does our currency. What seemed like a novelty yesterday will ultimately become the preferred medium for money. A Gallop poll found that 10 percent of people claimed to use cash as their preferred payment method in 2016 (down from 19 percent in 2011).
While cryptocurrency is still relatively new, it will ultimately become the standard. Bitcoin and Etherium might be the primary cryptocurrency platforms today, but the US Dollar will eventually become the Digital Dollar by leveraging the blockchain. You can take advantage of the current boom in cryptocurrency by trading it through platforms like eToro and Kraken, amongst many others.
Related: Bitcoin Is Now Classified as a Commodity in the U.S.
4. Online tutoring
Websites like Skooli, Tutor Me and Tutor.com provide resources for entering into the online tutoring space. While you don’t need to use a platform like these, they provide a lower friction entry point into the market. You could also search for online tutoring gigs on a variety of other sites like Upwork, Freelancer and many more.
What types of things can you tutor online? You could easily tutor a subject like math or science, while also teaching a language if you’re bilingual. You could also tutor musical instruments like the guitar or piano, along with a slew of other subject matters.
Related: To Rapidly Enhance Your Business, Stop Selling and Start Teaching
5. Sell services on Fiverr
Fiverr has grown significantly since its inception. Today, it’s a vast marketplace where you can sell just about any service under the sun. This is great if you’re looking to make money online as a digital nomad or even while sitting at home on your laptop while in your pajamas.
What, specifically, can you sell on Fiverr? Anything from graphics and design services, to digital marketing, writing and translation services, video and animation services, music and audio, programming and application development, business services and lifestyle services that includes anything from celebrity impressions to gaming.
Related: How to Use Fiverr and Skyrocket Your Startup’s Growth
6. Build sales funnels.
Every successful business has an automated sales funnel. Yet, so many businesses are completely unaware of the power of an effective funnel. Sales funnels provide automation in the sales process. They help you build a relationship with your audience and develop a bond with the consumer. There are plenty of tools you can use to build a sales funnel, but the world’s most successful businesses often create custom-coded funnels.
Expert sales funnels often start with a free offer, also called the lead magnet. By delivering value in the lead magnet, you’re creating trust with the consumer. In the next step, you’d usually find what’s called a self-liquidating offer or a trip wire. These are deals that are hard to pass up, often for $7 to $47. The front-end offer is usually found beyond that along with one-time offers to help boost the lifetime value of the customer and the average cart value.
While there are considerable technique details when it comes to sales funnels, understanding them today, right now, could set you up for a higher degree of online marketing prowess. It’ll also help you scale your business by optimizing a conversion rate, then simply expanding your ad spend.
Related: What Is a Sales Funnel? The Guide to Building an Automated Selling Machine
7. Rent out your home.
Another way you can make money at home is to actually rent out your home. AirBnB has carved a sizable industry out of vacation rentals. While the market did exist prior to AirBnB’s arrival, it’s certainly grown by leaps and bounds since its arrival on the scene.
In 2017, AirBnB purchased luxury vacation rental provider, Luxury Retreats, and other consolidations in the marketplace have happened with leading sites like InvitedHome’s acquisition of PPG rentals and Seasoned Dreams’ platforms, and Expedia’s $3.9 billion acquisition of another vacation rental giant, HomeAway. The market is booming and the time is ripe for entry, no matter how big or small your home or condo might be.
Related: 11 Weird and Wonderful Airbnb Listings, Including a New York Taxi and an Igloo
8. Launch an ecommerce site.
Ecommerce is booming. While Amazon takes the lion’s share, consumers are buying by the droves when they can scoop up great offers. In fact, some of the leading online marketers like Neil Patel, Frank Kern, Dean Graziosi, David Sharpe, John Reese and many others, are using free-plus-shipping ecommerce and book funnels to make small fortunes. This comes back to the implementation of sales funnels within an ecommerce environment. In fact, much of what people think about traditional ecommerce stores taking months or even years to build and costing a small fortune simply isn’t true.
Related: How Can Ecommerce Owners Use the Latest Trends to Their Benefit? 5 Entrepreneurs Advise.
9. Start a blog.
Blogs are quite possibly one of the best ways to earn a passive income, even while traveling the world. While starting a blog might be simple you will need to put in the work and the effort in order to reap the benefits. Plant the seeds now to enjoy the harvest later.
However, once that blog gets going, generating an income and scaling out your business is straightforward. Simply produce more content and line up more offers. As your blog grows in popularity, you’ll also be able to attract top talent willing to write for you simply in exchange for one very powerful link back to their own websites.
Related: How to Start a Blog and Make Money Online
10. Build a side hustle business.
There are plenty of ideas for lucrative side hustle businesses that you could easily start from the comfort of your own home. While starting them is easy, actually putting in the work to market and grow those businesses is a bit more challenging. The hard part is seeing them through.
While you could launch a regular business selling someone else’s products, you could also invent your own product. While businesses based on inventions might seem more complex to create, they do present attractive investment opportunities as depicted on popular shows like Shark Tank.
Related: What Type of Side Hustle Should You Try? (Infographic)
11. Create webinars
I’ve become obsessed with the webinar medium for selling. Building out automated webinars is one of the most useful skills you could possibly have, like entrepreneur Jason Fladlien, who’s done of $100 million in sales through webinars by only selling other people’s products and not his own.
Webinars follow a specific template and format. They’re formulaic. If you can master that formula, you can quite literally dominate in this space. Find a great business idea or opportunity that you can sell that delivers massive amounts of value.
Related: 12 Steps for Creating the Perfect Webinar
12. Social media management.
Social media management is a great way to generate an income from home. Considering the expansion of social media, businesses are clamoring to find their way in front of prospects. However, most businesses haven’t got a clue about how they can increase their exposure. That’s where you come in.
Building a social media management business might take some effort and time, but it’s well worth it. You could charge a sizable monthly fee for each business to help manage their social media, allowing you to earn a full-time income doing this gig.
Liz Benny, the founder of Jinga Social, not only built one of the largest and most well-known social media management businesses out there, but also created multiple seven-figure webinars teaching people, you guessed it, how to launch your own social media management company.
Related: Top 10 Social Media Management Tools You Should Try Now
13. Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing presents a very low friction entry into selling products online. While you do need some type of audience to sell these products or services to, you could make a significant amount of money from home while doing it. Some products or services have very high earnings per click. That means, if you play your cards right, you could easily make a large profit on conversions by driving traffic to specific offers as long as you target the right interests.
You can find affiliate marketing offers on sites like ClickBank, CJ.com and Rakuten LinkShare, amongst many others. Search for the right offer and ensure that you present it to the right audience and don’t spam people about it. Do your marketing ethically.
Related: Top 10 Affiliate Marketing Tracking Software Platforms
14. Create online courses.
One of my absolute favorite ways to make extra money from home is to create online courses. Now, this does take an upfront investment of time. But, as any other passive income generating activity, you do the work once and get paid repeatedly for it.
Take whatever skill you have and find a way to build a course around it. Use sites like Udemy, Ankur Nagpal’s, Teachable or Jonathan Cronstedt’s Kajabi to build those courses then begin marketing.
