Would You Like to Make Some Extra Money in the Comfort of Your Home?
Many of us would like to make some extra cash and most people often consider getting a second job to earn a few bucks on the side. Week-end bar-tending often comes to mind, grocery bagging, dog walking, baby sitting and some other odd jobs are the most popular choice, however “work-at-home jobs” are getting very popular and some folks even manage turning their part-time extra income into a full-time business.
If you are looking for a few ideas on how to make extra money from home – this article is for you.
1. Rent out a room.
If you have an extra bedroom in your house you can always rent it out for a day or a week. Many travelers and professionals always look for cheaper accommodations and would be more than happy to pay $200 to live in your extra room for a week than pay $700+ for a hotel room, especially if you would offer free breakfast. This is also a great way to make new friends. Remember, the shorter the stay – the more expensive it is.
You can post a free “For Rent” ad on your local websites like Craigslist, Kijiji, etc. You can also look up local newspapers, they will often let you post an ad for a very low cost.
I have never tried this method to make extra money but some of my friends have been doing it for years and they seem to like this easy side-line.
Resources:
2. Freelancing.
Freelancing has been around for a long time and it’s only getting more popular. You can offer your writing skills, proofreading skills, web design skills, language translation and much more on freelancing websites. Companies prefer to outsource a certain task from time to time instead of hiring a full time employee to do the required work. As I mentioned in another article, I have already paid $200 for someone to write a press release for me. 1000-some words for $200 – not a bad payout.
I have tried freelancing a few times but haven’t turned into a full time gig because I was looking to own and run a business; freelancing gigs are just like a normal job (although from the comfort of your home) – you trade your time for money, you are usually paid for a contract or a job, once the job is done you have to find another one.
You can also agree to do some jobs for local companies and actually outsource these tasks to someone who charges less than what you’re paid. I wrote more about it in my post How To Make Money Outsourcing.
Here are the most popular and most trusted Freelancing/outsourcing websites:
3. Selling your old junk.
Stop being a hoarder. You probably have loads of items around your house that are simply collecting dust. You can try to sell these items for extra cash on Kijiji, Craigslist or eBay. Someone once gave me a bunch of vinyl records (because I actually listen to those) and the records came in an old wooden beer crates. I sorted through the vinyls and only found a few artists that interested me so I decided to sell the rest for $1 each – a few days later someone came to pick up the 50 records for 40$. However, I listed the old beer crate on eBay because I thought it looked cool – it actually sold for about $100! The crate was useless to me but very valuable to someone else – get rid of your old junk.
3 (b). Flip Items for Profit
Thrift shops often carry small treasures that could be flipped a.k.a. sold for profit.
You can buy books at those stores at $0.5-$1 and re-sell them on Amazon for $10+. How do you know if the book will sell? Simply get an ISBN scanner app for your smart phone and scan those books! The app will take you to the amazon page where you will see how popular the book is, how many times it has been sold and what is the average price for it.
If you have some knowledge about fashion and design – it could help a lot. Sometimes you would find clothing or accessories at thrift shops that are worth several hundreds of dollars, even used. Keep your eyes open for valuable items.
4. Sell Your Crafts.
This is an awesome method to make some extra income from home for those who like making custom pillows, figurines, collages and other crafts. Did you know there are websites that specialize on selling Your home made crafts? Etsy.com is probably the most popular when it comes to selling and buying handmade crafts.
I would suggest you to do a little research before putting all your effort into creating an item for sale. Research ETSY for a few days to understand what kind of items are the most popular and sell for the most money – ideally you would try to sell similar items. Make sure your item has something unique about and is better than all the other items out there – this will help you sell.
Although ETSY.com is the most popular site for such items, you can also list them on eBay.
5. Sell Your Photos.
There is more and more demand for photography and graphics. Internet is a great tool to find an image for your website however most images and photos hold some kind of copyrights. I know some folks who run their own websites and these folks were sued for $800-$10,000 because they used images they found on Google.
If you need to use an image for your website, your print material (flyer, magazine, etc) you should either make your own photos/images or buy them from a reputable reseller.
On the other hand – someone needs to sell these images, why not you? Grab your camera and go take some photos outside (or inside). iStockPhoto will let you sell your photography on their website. This is a great method to make some extra cash, however if you take this hobby seriously and constantly deliver great quality images – you can actually make a full-time income from it.
There are 2 main ways of selling photography; the rights to your photo could be sold for a lower price hundreds of times, to hundreds of people and you will be getting a payment from one photo for years to come. Alternatively your photo could be sold exclusively to one person (or company) at a much higher price but it will be sold only once.
Just like I wrote about selling crafts, it is a good idea to research the site beforehand and see which images are the most popular and the most sold, then try to offer the images in the same category.
Resources:
6. Sell Your Talent on Fiverr.
Fiverr is the best thing that ever happened to online money making. I do not sell anything on Fiverr (although I did previously) however I constantly buy stuff on that website, along with thousands of other buyers.
The concept is pretty simple: everything on that site costs $5 (hence the name; FIVErr). As a seller you actually earn $4 when you sell something and Fiverr takes the 5th dollar as their service fee. So what can you sell on fiverr?
You can create videos for people, reviewing their product, wishing them a happy birthday, etc. You can write music for people, make short videos, photoshop their images, transcribe short recordings, and write short poems. There are thousands of things you could offer just make sure whatever you are selling doesn’t take much of your time, you are making only $4 per sale after all.
Once again, it would be wise to look at the most popular and/or most sold gigs and try to offer similar services products.
I have also used Fiverr for outsourcing. A client of mine needed a 30 second promotional video for his business and he was quoted $200+ locally. I told him I can do that video for $100 and the client agreed. Yes, you guessed it; I had someone on Fiverr do the video for me for $5. Buy for $5, sell for $100 – it’s a win-win-win situation because at the end of the day everyone was happy.
Resource: Fiverr.com
7. Virtual Assistant Jobs.
This is somewhat similar to freelancing yet it’s completely different. Unlike freelancing where you are paid per project or per task, many virtual assistants often get a full time job. Being a virtual assistant is the same as having a regular job however you do it in the comfort of your own home.
A lot of these jobs require you to speak on the phone; take appointments and do customer support. Many others will be repetitive computer jobs; data entry, some sort of website testing and so on. Many of these jobs will pay about $10 an hour – which isn’t a lot but still more than the minimum wage in the USA. Many of these jobs are temporary and will last anywhere from a week to a few months. There are also many part-time VA jobs which could be perfect for someone who can only spare 5-10 hours a week.
Don’t worry about your “competitors” offering these services for $3 an hour; these folks are usually based in India or other countries with much lower salaries. When you are located in the USA or Canada – companies will be willing to pay you more. Some companies will prefer to pay more simply because they want to support local economy and would rather hire someone local but more expensive rather than pay less and hire someone from another country.
8. Affiliate Marketing.
Well, I’ve decided to keep the best for last. I have started learning about affiliate marketing 6 years ago (in late 2007) and I have become an expert in that field. First of all, what is affiliate marketing?
“Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.”
This is a definition of Affiliate Marketing on Wikipedia.
I love affiliate marketing because it can offer huge earnings but requires a lot less work than being a merchant. An affiliate marketer promotes services and products (acts as a middle man or a salesman) but it’s the company that actually takes care of the payments, fulfillment, customer service, etc. They also have to pay for a warehouse and stock the products, they have to manage the inventory and deal with failed payments; an affiliate has to promote the product and pick up the commissions from every sale.
Where can you sign up for an affiliate program?
In our time and age most companies (especially in the US) offer affiliate programs. Walmart, Target, Amazon, eBay – they all have affiliate programs (sometimes also called Partner Programs). You can promote dog food, airplane tickets, hotel reservations, laptops, scanner, shredders, books, toys, watches, web hosting packages, flowers and flowers delivery services – if it can be bought than it probably has an affiliate program for it. Simply Google: “company name affiliate” or “product affiliate” and you will find thousands of affiliate programs.
Commission Junction and ShareaSale are very popular affiliate networks and they often manage affiliate programs for companies, most companies will tell you to sign-up to their affiliate program through CJ or SaS.
At this point all you need to do is create a website where you’ll offer these products/services and you will need to come up with a marketing plan for that website so people actually come to your site and buy through you. This isn’t as simple as I make it sound, however you can learn all of the required skills rather quickly. Personally I learned every single thing at Wealthy Affiliate (check it out, it’s free). I am still a member there and I still learn something new every single day.
At this moment I am working on a free course to teach you the ropes of affiliate marketing. You can sign-up to blog updates (top right corner of this page) and I’ll send new posts to your inbox, this way you will be able to get my free course as soon as it comes out!
There are thousands of ways to make extra money from home and I have just described some of the most popular ones. Are you making some extra cash from home (either online or offline)? Would you like to know more details about these strategies? Don’t hesitate to ask questions and leave comments right below this post!
– Alex
Very informative blog post. Most people don’t know where to start when it comes to working from home. Organizing oneself can be a major problem when it comes to several streams of income, but it looks like you have mastered this one.
Nice. I think that should help some people. Please check the link again though – there’s some extra characters.
Thanks, Jay. I have no clue where that came from. I saw the characters on the post but didn’t see any in the back-end. All fixed now 😉
Cool post, Alex. Under “Rent out a room” I would like to add AirBnb.com It’s a popular site people now use for listing their rooms for rent. I have a friend from Jamaica who made a few thousand this year using AirBnb.
Thanks, Jay! I have added the Airbnb to the list of resources 🙂
– Alex