There are many ways to make money, today, and whilst once upon a time we were dependent on a standard job, working 9-5, thanks to the internet and modern technology in addition to a shift in the way we perceive work, more and more people are working remotely and/or on a freelance basis with a preference toward side hustles, entrepreneurship and passive income over the daily grind of working a standard 9-5 job.
The remote working lifestyle has many advantages, yet one of the challenges can be coming up with ways to make money in the first place.
Here are six ways to make money without having a conventional job.
1. SET UP A BLOG
The great thing with starting a blog is that it costs very little money to get into, and in terms of the technology powering the blog most things today are as simple as “drag and drop”. That said, just because you have a blog doesn’t mean you are going to make money – it’s all about how you leverage the blog as a platform to generate cash.
Think about it this way, the thing that makes a blog an asset are not the words written on the page or the fancy memes – it’s the visitor engagement – and this is essentially what you are selling when it comes to making money from your blog. For instance, advertisers are not paying you because you have a blog, they are paying to be seen by your blog’s visitors.
One of the best ways to make money from a blog is to engage in something known as affiliate marketing, this is where you essentially recommend a product to your readers and in return, the person or company that gets a sale as a result of your recommendation compensates you with a referral commission.
Sometimes this can be for less than $1 if the item you are recommending is of reasonably low value, such as a book on Amazon, whereas if you were promoting a luxury holiday or expensive event, then the commission you receive can be for several hundred dollars. The best thing about this, is you’re not actively using up your time in order to make this money, it’s not like you are having to go out and trying to sell people on something – you’re simply making a recommendation, providing a link, and if a person clicks that link and goes on to buy the product, then you make a referral commission.
The other thing you can do, to make more money, is to create an online course that you can sell on your blog – this way, once the course is created (which might take several days or weeks) you have an asset you can leverage multiple times. Let’s say you sell your course for $100, and each week, you sell 5 courses, minus the payment provider fee of 5% you are making 95% profit on this, which would be $475 a week – in passive income.
2. PROPERTY INVESTING
If you’re interested in retiring early, then property investing is one of the most viable ways to achieve this goal. Whether you buy a new property in some faraway land or a do-upper just down the street, there’s vast potential to make money by investing in property; particularly if you rent it out, meaning you get rental income in the short term and capital appreciation in the long term.
The challenge, however, with property investing is that unlike setting up a blog that requires very little in the way of capital investment, properties are expensive and you kind of need money to make money – so whilst this is perhaps one of the most lucrative and stable opportunities that does lead to financial freedom for many people, it’s not necessarily accessible for everyone.
3. WORK AS A VIRTUAL ASSISTANT
This is similar to having a job, yet it is a lot more flexible and autonomous as you get to set your own hours and choose who you work with. The majority of VA’s can be found in countries such as India and the Philippines, meaning you will be competing with people that are able to charge a lot less than you may be accustomed to, as the cost of living in the local area is much less.
That said, the benefit of being local in the sense of natively speaking the language of an employer and understanding cultural references and expectations holds a lot of value, and therefore you might be able to charge a premium for your service.
This is particularly pertinent in consideration of the fact most people looking for a VA reside in the UK, US or Australia.
4. SELL T-SHIRTS
This is a growing trend within e-commerce, and can be an incredibly easy way to make a decent income… but most important the income is generated passively as you can set up automated systems to process everything – meaning it can run on autopilot rather than requiring you to put loads of time into it each day.
How it works is that that sign up to a site such as TeeSpring which is free, then you use their simple design interface to create the design of a t-shirt, then you set a sales goal and a sales price which will determine how much the company pays you per shirt.
From here, you go out and advertise (e.g. Facebook Ads) in order to get people to buy the shirt, and presuming you reach your sales goal, the shirt will be printed and distributed by the company – who will then pay you a handsome reward as the creator.
5. GET PAID FOR YOUR EXPERTISE
If you have a high level of knowledge about a specific topic then you can charge for this expertise in the form of consultancy. The tricky bit, of course, is finding people to pay for your knowledge and expertise – which is where platforms such as JustAnswer come in to play.
The general format for these websites is that a question will be posed to an expert, and you provide the answer. If the person asking the question approves the answer, then the website will pay you for the answer (having taken out a cut for their fees). In financial terms, you could be making $10 – $20 per accepted answer, which can definitely mount up, particularly if you’re expertise is in a popular subject area.
6. BE PAID TO WRITE
There are a huge number of opportunities for people that can write today, due to the explosion of content marketing and blogs many people are making a decent living working as a freelance writer. Now, there’s a large difference between a writer in the context of an author that writes books, and the type of writing we’re talking about here, as the writing that pays tends to be purpose-driven in the sense that it could be ad copy for example, though the majority of writing gigs tend to pertain to blog articles.
The trick, if you’re looking to make a decent income from writing is to arrange a plethora of opportunities rather than rely solely on one particular revenue stream – and perhaps to mix things up a little, as writing can get a bit mundane, particularly if you’re tasked with the same genre of projects each day, therefore you could work within different niches so there’s a topical difference or perhaps do some blog writing in addition to advertising copy, just to keep things interesting.