Are you looking to start a side hustle or work from home job to earn more money? About 3.9 million Americans earn a regular income stream working from home and you can too.
Here are 10 ideas for earning money from home on your own time. The strategy you choose would be based on your skills, experience, passion, and personal situation.
1. Start A Blog
While blogging was originally meant for people to express themselves, building a blog can be a great way to earn passive income.
The first step to blogging is to identify a niche. Identify what you’re passionate about or experienced and make it your niche. You can start a travel blog if you love traveling, a finance blog, news blog, food blog, technology blog, and more.
The first step is to build your blog. There are several platforms out there that allow you to create a blog, from Blogger to
WordPress, Weebly, Wix, and more. With WordPress, you’ll need to buy a domain and hosting to build the blog.
Once your blog is set up, you can start publishing content to drive traffic. Typically, it will take time to grow your blog. But once you have enough traffic, you can start earning from ads and other forms of monetization like affiliate marketing, brand sponsorship, paid posts, and more.
2. Become A Freelancer
Most people attribute freelancing to being your own boss, but it’s more than that. If you are a skilled writer, editor, graphics designer, video editor, and more, you can start freelancing as a side hustle.
To get started, you just need to sign up on a freelancing website like Fiverr, Freelancer, and Upwork.
Once you signup, you can create gigs about your service offering, and those interested will contact you. Most platforms require that you bid for available jobs to get one.
In addition to freelance platforms, you can create a website and social media accounts to promote your services.
The amount you earn from freelancing is dependent on your skills, the services you offer, and the interest you’re able to drive for your services.
3. Start a Podcast
Do you enjoy talking about diverse issues? Then you can make money by starting a podcast.
The first thing you have to do is to choose a name for the podcast. Then you’ll need to buy a microphone, a stand, and other necessary devices. Next, create a website for the podcast or signup for a podcasting platform like Buzzsprout, Apple Podcast, PodBean, Spotify, or Megaphone.
Once you have everything in place, you can then brainstorm your podcast ideas for the first few episodes.
Podcasting isn’t a get-rich scheme. However, if you consistently dish out good content, your following will grow gradually and so will your income. There are plenty of ways to earn from a podcast including subscriptions, affiliate marketing, sponsorships, advertising, and live events.
4. Create A YouTube Account
There are people out there earning hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars from YouTube. JoJo Siwa earns around $9,600 each day from her YouTube channel.
But you have to put in the work to get up to that level. YouTubing is like blogging, you first have to decide on what you want to focus on. You can create a food channel, review channel, tutorial channel, depending on what you’re passionate about.
Once you know what to vblog about, pick a name for the channel and sign up on YouTube.
You can start recording the videos with your mobile phone and buy a digital camera later on. You’ll also need editing software to edit the video. For every million views, you get on YouTube, you can expect to make $1,000 –5,000 in ad income. You can earn more money by placing affiliate marketing links in your video description.
5. Make Money from EBooks
Thanks to technological advancement, you no longer need a big publisher to earn money from your books. You can share your experiences and knowledge in an eBook or write a fiction book to sell on platforms like Amazon Kindle, Kobo Books, and eBooks.com. With Amazon Kindle, you’ll get 70% of the sale if you sell your book for £1.49 to £6.99.
In addition to these platforms, you can advertise your eBook on Social Media for more sales. Not knowing how to write shouldn’t stop you, you can get a freelancer to write the eBooks for you.
6. Become A Coach
There’s a high demand for coaches as people try to make sense of this new world. If you love helping people achieve things, then you meet the criteria. Depending on your expertise and experience, you can become a life coach, business coach, financial coach, health coach, and more.
You can earn as much as $40 – $200 per hour for a 1on1 or group coaching session on Skype or Google Hangouts. Also, consider creating a website and social media account to grow your brand.
7. Start Dropshipping
Starting a traditional eCommerce store requires buying and storing products, maintaining inventories, and hiring employees. But you won’t need to do any of those with dropshipping.
Instead of using your own money, you’ll use the customers’ money to buy what they want.
To get started with dropshipping, you’ll need to build a website and upload images of various products. Remember you don’t have to buy the products, just get the photos from the manufacturer or wholesaler’s site, and post them on yours. Then set your prices including shipping fees.
When a customer visits your website and orders for items, you’ll use their money to place an order for that item from the manufacturer or wholesaler, and have it delivered to them.
8. Create an Online Course
In addition to writing an eBook, you can create online courses. You can create a course on how to build a website, cook a dish, do taxes, do simple DIY repairs, and more. People are willing to pay to learn different things, and your course will just be filling a demand. Udemy, Skillshare, Uscreen, and LearnWorlds are some of the sites that allow you to sell your online courses.
The eLearning market is projected to grow to $336.98 billion by 2026. You’ll be earning money while helping people improve their lives.
9. Rent Out Your Spare Room
Vacation rentals have become a big business thanks to Airbnb. While the market existed before AirBnB, it has grown in leaps and bounds since then.
Asides from Airbnb, there’s Homestay, Vrbo, Rent like a champion, and more. These platforms allow you to earn a regular income stream by renting out your place.
The amount you charge would be influenced by the location, available amenities, and other factors.
10. Become a Social Media Manager
Do you use social media and can post on behalf of other companies? You’ll need excellent organizational and communication skills, as well as a thorough understanding of the various Social Media platforms.
To begin, it’s highly recommended that you take a social media management course. You can find some on Udemy, or YouTube. Once you’ve acquired social media management skills, you can start looking for clients. Start by offering your services to small businesses and companies, or sell on marketplaces like Fiverr.
You could earn $1,000-$10,000 per month as a social media manager, depending on how many clients you have.
Summary
There are lots of opportunities to make money from in your spare time. However, growing these businesses takes time, so it’s important to be patient and persistent.