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Most jobs are in-person — they may require a lengthy commute, working in loud areas, and dealing with the general public. But if you’re an introvert, or if the idea of spending tons of cash on gas money doesn’t appeal to you, you might be interested in ways you can work from home and still make bank.
Good news — there are ways to make money from home, provided you have the right skills, drive, and creativity. This article will break down 20 wise work-from-home jobs to make some extra cash, many of which can serve as secondary or primary careers.
Related: 4 Side Gigs You Can Start Today
1. Become a virtual assistant.
One easy way to earn money from home is to help others complete tasks as a part-time 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 with remote work no matter where you live.
Finding a remote job as a virtual assistant can yield some extra cash and can be easily done through sites like Upwork, Indeed.com and Remote.co . Search the existing job postings 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 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 currency. What seemed like a novelty yesterday will ultimately become the preferred medium for good 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 Ethereum 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 in an online course? You could easily tutor a subject like math or science, while also teaching a language like an english online course 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 for freelance work 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 and similar apps? Anything from graphics and design services, to digital marketing, freelance 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 small 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 as freelance writer. While starting a blog might be simple you will need to put in the work and the effort in order to reap the benefits of your blog posts. Plant the seeds now to enjoy the harvest later.
However, once that blog gets going, generating an income and scaling out your product as a business owner 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 good 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.
15. Make crafts or digital designs on Etsy
Etsy is one of the most popular online store platforms for good reason; it allows you to make a unique digital storefront with a minimum of effort from several pre-existing templates. Not only does this remove some of the initial costs of starting an e-commerce enterprise, but it also lets you take full advantage of its built-in user base.
Simply put, when you start a store on Etsy, you’ll reach a potential audience of buyers and customers much more quickly. What’s not to like?
Regarding what you can sell on Etsy, the sky’s the limit. You can sell things like homemade jewelry or other arts and crafts, or even digital designs if you have some graphic design experience. If you’ve ever wanted to run a small, charming store online or wondered how to make money online, Etsy could be the easiest, most profitable way to do it. Plus, with a bit of Etsy know-how, this is a business idea you can do from home.
Related: 3 Things You Must Know Before You Start Your Etsy Business
16. Start a podcast
Podcasts are crazy popular these days. If you have an idea for a podcast, why not pick up some new recording equipment and start putting up episodes? Most podcasts start pretty slowly. As yours gains popularity, you’ll attract advertisers and be able to make money online. This is even more relevant if you tie your podcast into an existing online brand, like your online store or YouTube channel.
However, choose the right niche and audience for your podcast if you want to make real money. The true-crime podcast arena, for example, is utterly inundated with shows. Oddly, you’ll have better luck making a podcast about a lesser-known topic or niche.
Don’t forget that your podcast may also be successful if you invite interesting guests or cohosts from time to time. If you have a friend, consider running your podcast from home with them a few times a week or even once weekly.
Related: 8 Ways Podcasters Can Profit From Their Shows
17. Run a dropshipping business
Dropshipping is a commercial model where you sell products to customers without paying for any shipping, product storage, or anything aside from marketing. Sound too good to be true?
It’s not. Through dropshipping, you form a partnership with third-party product manufacturers, many of which are based overseas. Then you handle the marketing and customer outreach services for those companies.
When you sell a product, you route the order to the dropshipping product manufacturing company, which fulfills the order and ships it to the final customer. What is the benefit for you? You can run your business from home without worrying about product storage or shipping costs.
All you have to do is sell the product to its target customers. In exchange, you get a commission for each sale. It’s hard work but a cost-effective and excellent way to make money from home, particularly if you are just starting an online business.
18. Build an audience on YouTube
YouTube influencers, pop-culture personalities, and entertainers make a ton of money, at least once they build up audiences. Building up your audience on YouTube might not be a bad idea.
Create a great-looking YouTube channel, start posting videos, and refine your brand over time with experience. As you get more views and subscribers, you’ll be able to put ads on your videos and earn a little bit of money from AdSense.
Plus, if you build up a YouTube brand, you can tie it into your other online endeavors, like your podcast or Etsy store.
Related: 6 Ways You Can Use YouTube to Reach Your Intended Audience
Many bloggers use YouTube to build an audience across their social media accounts, boost the position of their WordPress site in search engine rankings, and incorporate a multi-media social media presence in their spare time.
You can funnel your customers or followers into various income streams, making even more money from home.
19. Take surveys online
Survey websites like Swagbucks are perfect opportunities to make money from home. In a nutshell, these sites have you sign up with a basic profile or account, then take surveys from major brands like McDonald’s or Walmart.
As you answer online surveys, you earn points. You can exchange the points for cash or, more often, gift cards, specific products, and coupons. Taking surveys online isn’t the best way to make a lot of money from home, but it could be a great way to make some extra income while watching your favorite streaming shows or otherwise just hanging out on the couch.
20. Work as an online assistant
Lastly, you can work as an online assistant for a business or an individual. They’ll have you handle bookkeeping and accounting tasks, data entry tasks, online shopper tasks, user-testing tasks, scheduling tasks, and even customer service tasks. You can accomplish this at home with a basic webcam or headset (plus a working Internet connection).
If you already have secretarial experience but can’t head to an office for one reason or another, this could be a great way to continue your career and make some good money.
In conclusion
There you have it: 20 great ways to work from home and make money simultaneously. Try out at least one of these methods today, and you’ll have some extra bucks in your pocket in no time.
Looking for more ways to expand your financial knowledge? Check out Entrepreneur’s Money & Finances resources here.
