There’s a saying, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”. Finance professionals advise people to diversify their investments but you should also diversify your income and have multiple income streams.
Job security is a thing of the past. Industry changes over time and an economic downturn can happen at any moment. At most companies, people are the biggest expense and are the first the go when budgets have to be trimmed. You should always think about ways to supplement your income and reduce your financial risk if you were to lose your job. Plus, it doesn’t hurt to make some extra cash.
How to make money online at home? The following is a list of side hustles or passive income where you can make money online:
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is when online retailers pay you for traffic and sales generated from referrals. There’s tons of YouTube videos on how to get started.
Essentially, there’s two main ways:
1) Generate content that reaches your target audience
2) Promote affiliate products in your content
Affiliate marketing requires lots of upfront work but once you build the foundation and get traffic, you can literally make money while you sleep.
Drop Shipping
If you’re not familiar with drop shipping, it refers to a sales order fulfillment method where a company doesn’t maintain an inventory of product. Instead, when a customer makes a purchase, the store purchases the item directly from a supplier and has it shipped to the customer. The store never handles the product directly.
Drop shipping requires low overhead and is relatively easy to get started but it does require some research into what products would sell.
Drop shipping tends to be a low margin business but once set up, you can start receiving passive income. Becoming a drop shipping store isn’t without its headaches: You can face inventory issues, errors, and quality problems with your suppliers. Also, shipping from other countries could require long delivery times which in the day of Amazon Prime 2-day shipping, customers generally don’t like.
Create a YouTube Channel
Create a YouTube channel that educates and/or entertains. Over 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every single day. 30 million visitors visit YouTube every day. 3.25 billion hours of video are watched on YouTube every month. That’s a lot of eyeballs but also a lot of potential.
To be successful, you need to be somewhat unique and find a niche in order to grow an audience. Creating a channel takes time and effort but it is low overhead and minimal expense.
Think of a subject that interests you and create content that would engage your audience.
Become an influencer or micro-influencer
Influencers are social media personalities who have engaged followers. Sometimes noted as experts and influential in their niche area, influencers promote products or services and followers listen to their recommendations. Brands are happy to sponsor posts and pay influencers to act as brand ambassadors.
This is a crowded space where lots of people are competing to become popular. Although it may not seem like it but this requires lots of planning and hard work. As a potential influencer, choose your platform, build your brand, grow your audience, and then get paid by companies.
Develop an Online Course
If you are a subject matter expert in any topic, you can put together a course and teach others. This requires you to be thoughtful about outlining your content, course objectives, and materials in a format that others can follow. This requires an upfront investment of time and energy but depending on what platform you use, you can get paid royalties and commissions for people who sign up for your course.
Udemy is a great website to get started.
Similar to some of the other side hustle suggestions, you need to find your niche. Think about the best materials and format for teaching such as video, slides, webinars, and even podcasts. Market your content and adjust based on customer feedback.
Publish an e-book
Subject matter experts can capture their knowledge in a book. These days you don’t need to find a publisher since Amazon allows you to self-publish with Kindle Direct Publishing.
Writing can take time and requires lots of editing. This is a large upfront effort. By publishing an e-book, you can write once, and then sit back and collect royalties and commissions if your book sells.
Start a blog and monetize it
There’s a million tutorials on the internet on how to set up a blog using WordPress. Again, find your niche and research key words to see if people are actually searching for your topic. You need to establish and grow your audience and then monetize your blog using Google AdSense and affiliate links.
Similar to writing a book, creating a blog that engages audiences takes time and determination. It can be months before you start seeing traffic and even longer before you start seeing any money from your efforts.
Become a freelance writer
A good writer can thrive in the gig economy. Look on job boards and ask around to get started. Try to develop your portfolio with a range of topics and be ready to provide potential clients with writing samples.
There’s a high demand for writers and you can use this skillset to write content for blogs. Many blogs pay people to guest post. Some writers are paid to ghostwrite books. Do you think the Housewives of New York really know how to write? I kid but not really. You’d be surprised how many writers write the content for books where famous celebrities just slap their name on the cover.
Sell items on eBay or Amazon
One person’s junk is another person’s treasury. This side gig can help you declutter and make cash. Before you throw out anything, look up the item on eBay and see if it recently sold and for what price.
During COVID lockdowns, I cleaned up my family’s basement and sold over 100 items and made thousands of dollars.
Simply go to eBay and make an account. Take photos, describe your item, and then list your item as an auction or as a fixed fee buy-it-now listing. If you plan to do more than a handful of transactions, I recommend getting a scale so that you can accurately weigh packages and use eBay’s reduced price shipping labels instead of paying retail at the post office. It’s also wise to invest in a pair of scissors, and masking tape and possibly boxes (or just reuse Amazon boxes).
If you have clothing, check out PoshMark, a popular site to resell clothing. A friend of mine makes a side hustle of buying designer brands on sale at Marshalls and TJ Maxx, models the clothing, and sells for sometimes insane profits.
Invest
You can earn passive income by investing. There are many investments including dividend paying stocks, high dividend exchange traded funds (ETFs), and real estate that pay much more than your savings account. You’ll receive your dividend payment on a schedule and you can reinvest the dividend to get more shares or take the distribution as cash. If you invest money, the dividend payout could grow over time.
If you can do this for many years and your investment account grows large enough, you can make a significant amount of money just off the dividend distributions alone.
Make creative handcrafted items and sell on Etsy
If you are a creative type, you can earn some extra money by selling on Etsy, a marketplace for handcrafted items. People are constantly looking for new ideas and unique pieces, especially for weddings, birthdays, and other important events, as well as home and office. People are willing to pay for something “different”.
Sell Stock images
If you have a good eye and a camera; you can sell your photos and earn a commission. You can sign up for istockphotos, shutterstock and getty images and upload your content. When someone buys your photo, you’ll earn a commission.
Online Surveys
Your opinion matters! Companies are very interested in what you have to say and there’s tons of nationwide studies where you can earn some cash for your opinion.
During COVID, many survey and research companies switched to online and Zoom focus groups and made it really easy to sign up and participate. If you are fortunate enough to work from home, this is an awesome way to make extra cash.
Look on Facebook and google survey focus groups near you and get on an email list. I recommend using a secondary email account since you might get spammed. Fill out pre-screeners and see if you qualify for a study.
Just a few recommendations include:
With online surveys, I’ve tried products, talked about finances, tv shows, and a range of topics and received hundreds of dollars in gift cards and cash.
Your turn
Do you do any profitable side gigs where you make some extra passive income? Share your ideas in the comments how to Make Money Online At Home.