If you’ve landed here you are looking for ideas to make money and you have probably been attracted by the title: no-nonsense. I promise you won’t find nonsensical ideas in this article!
Actually, while I was writing this article, it became so massive I had to split it into two parts. In this first part we are going to be looking at ideas to make money that you can safely realize from home and from your computer.
Now, let me tell you what I mean by no-nonsense ideas. Most articles on the subject you’ll find online are unfortunately filled with a lot of filler ideas, things that make no sense or are impossible to pull off without vast experience.
Don’t get me wrong, any money-making endeavor is serious business, and I would not dream of suggesting that making money is easy because it’s not. What I am saying is that there are ideas that while being hard, can be implemented with a bit of old fashion elbow grease and others that are just too out there and require a big-time investment or the correct skillset to pull off.
What you won’t find here
- You won’t find the suggestion to borrow cash as the main way to generate money.
- I won’t advise you to sell or pawn valuables in exchange for cash. Yes, this is a way to generate money but only if you are desperate.
- I won’t introduce pointless or obvious ideas such as getting a new job at Target.
- I won’t suggest ideas to make money that needs vast experience or years of training for you to pull them off.
- I won’t suggest ideas that require a consistent financial investment to start with. Every idea you’ll find on this massive list requires either zero initial investment or something that can be drawn from a basic credit card.
In this article I have tried to focus on the former.
I have clearly ranked these ideas from easy to hard. Now, and this is most important, even the hardest ideas, which require a bit more logistics and skills can be achieved with commitment within a period of three months. On the other hand, for most of these ideas, you can get them to work within days or weeks at most.
Without further ado, here is the rationale behind my choices of money-making ideas. Instead, here is what you can actually expect to find in this comprehensive article:
What you’ll find here
- Proven methods or ideas that can absolutely make money when implemented correctly.
- Every single idea on this list requires no more than 3 months (at the most) to be actualized. In fact, most methods can be put to work within hours or days depending on your commitment.
- All ideas are ranked from easy to hard, according to their earning potential and required time commitment.
- All methods require either minimal knowledge to get started or where knowledge and skills are necessary, require a relatively short time commitment to acquire such knowledge and skill.
I think you have read enough. Are you ready to start learning new ideas to make money online?
Disclosure: Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, I may earn a commission. When you purchase a product using one of my affiliate links, the company compensates me, which helps me run this blog and keep things free of charge to you. Know that I also only recommend products I personally stand behind.
30 Ideas to Make Money
from your computer
Ranked from easiest to hardest
All ideas in this initial big chunk of 30, have the same thing in common. They can all be realized from your computer at home. Some can be put into practice in your spare time while the most difficult and profitable ones may require a more consistent time commitment.
The top ones are more casual, require no commitment at all but provide only a minimal return. The last ones, on the contrary, are definitely more involved and some are full-fledged business ideas that can easily create a good, reliable income.
To each its own. No one is really better or worse, they are all equally good in their own right but different people might prefer different ideas. We are ready to start but allow me to start with an outlier, something that is not easy to implement but it’s so powerful it needs to be in your head when you finish reading this.
1.[EXCEPTION!!] Money making idea: Create a niche website
I promise this is going to be my only exception to the list! But I had to put it here in the first place because I do not want you to miss it.
So, why is this an exeption?
The reason this is here is because this is an incredible opportunity to create a stream of income working from home. In fact, it’s so powerful it can easily become your main and only source of income. Furthermore, it’s a stepping stone for building a rich structure of different income streams (which we’ll look at in a sec). The only drawback is, it’s by no means easy to accomplish.
On paper, the idea is very simple. You create a website on a specific topic, exactly like the one you are reading this article on. You work to create compelling content and market it to the right audience and once you start accruing a decent amount of readers you can start to monetize your content. And this is where your options start to open up, allowing you to customize your earning avenues as you like. The possibilities are endless once you get a captive audience who loves your content.
Here is a taste of some of the options available to you:
(2) Sell Ads on your personal website
One of the easiest things you can do to monetize your content is to sell your virtual real estate to advertisers to show ads to your readers while they are browsing. This strategy is mainly for websites with very high traffic as conversion can be pretty low nowadays.
There are several ways to implement this and this is not the right time to talk about it, but you could set-and-forget it by offering your space to Google Ads, for example, or, you could partner with one or more Ad agencies out there to deliver content specific Ads for your audience.
(3) Become an affiliate marketeer
This is more involved than setting up auto ads campaigns but potentially more lucrative. With this option, you partner with an advertiser, either directly or via big affiliate platforms, and promote one or more of their product to your audience. Every time a reader decides to purchase or even inquire about a product, you get a commission, which, depending on the product can be quite substantial.
(3) Sell a digital product/service to your readership
Well, of course, if your website is about solving a specific problem or showcasing your creative abilities, one option is to sell your ebook or product/service, directly to your audience.
Now, this is just the tip of the iceberg really and once you start comunicating meaningfully with a captive audience and start seeing a nice chunk of traffic coming your way the options become endless.
This all endeavor though does require a lot of knowledge and time to get started and I am sure we’ll talk more about it on this site. For now, I just wanted to let you know that the option is there and it’s incredibly powerful.
However, from now on, this list will move forward as a promise, from simpler to more complex ideas to make money from home. Let’s have a look.
Easy Ideas to Make Money
4. Money making idea: Deposit savings in a high yield account
Difficulty: Very Easy
Time to Implement: Hours
Skill Required: None
Earning Potential: Fixed % on investment
Ok, this one is a no brainer. If you have any type of saved up money that you usually park idly in your everyday cash account, you should immediately change that! Take your money and put it instead into a high yield saving account. Earn interest and compound interest and make your money work for you. There is really no reason not to adopt this simple strategy. The only work required from you is hunting for a good saving account offer.
Related: USA Best saving accounts as of 2020
Related(2): Australia Best saving accounts as of 2020
5. Money making idea: Fill up online surveys
Difficulty: Easy
Time to Implement: Minutes to Hours
Skill Required: None
Earning Potential/month: 100$
If you just want to lay back and relax in front of your computer, feel your opinion valued, and earn some money along the way, there’s plenty to earn on several sites that specialize in this activity. This is strictly a pocket-change, money-making avenue and should be regarded as such. Don’t count on making a full income on this type of online activity. Depending on the number of surveys you fill and if there are available to you you can expect to make 10 – 30$ top per day.
Obviously, the more you queue up to fill a survey the more you are going to earn but there is a ceiling to the actual dollar/hour you can make and it is, sadly, pretty low.
The real challenge to get into online surveys is to find trustworthy websites that don’t mess with your personal info and pay on time. Check out Toluna.com, Lightspeed as trustworthy sources.
6. Money making idea: Do online tasks for cash and rewards
Difficulty: Easy
Time to setup: Hours – days
Skill Required: None
Earning Potential/month: 200$
If filling surveys is not your forte or the idea gives you nightmares, don’t you worry, there is still plenty to do online requiring practically no skills (besides being able to read and click) and that can net decent pocket change, particularly if you are diligent about it. A handful of respectable and trustworthy websites partner with companies and advertisers and are able to offer cash in exchange for your time. You just need to join their platforms and start performing a variety of tasks online, such as browsing, answering questionnaires, and even playing games.
Related: Try our selection of the Best Apps and sites to make money online
7. Money making idea: Rent your car
Difficulty: Easy
Time to Implement: Hours – days
Skill Required: None
Earning Potential/month: 250$ – 700$
Did you know that you can rent your car and have it work for you instead of letting it sit in your garage all day? What better opportunity to make use of a depreciating asset and instead, transforming it, into a money-making machine. The beauty of it is there is not much to it at all. You list your car with one car-sharing platform such as Turo.com and they take care of the rest, booking, insurance, payment.
This is near the top of the list because it’s really easy to do, in fact you just have to join up and decide when to make your car available.
Related: Start earning immediately by listing your car with Turo
8. Money making idea: Rent a room on AirBnB
Difficulty: Easy
Time to Implement: Days
Skill Required: None
Earning Potential/month: 600$+
With sites like Airbnb, it has become very easy to put a bedroom in your home up for rent and make it accessible to a very large audience. Furthermore, if you live in a desirable touristic area, it is very possible to keep that room occupied pretty much all year round (minus weird pandemics going on obviously!) and racking up a very decent income.
If you are lucky with your location and proactive in making sure your guests have a nice experience, you can make a respectable amount out of this activity. If you go full in with this activity though bear in mind it can get more involved than just renting up a room once or twice a year. Cleaning and resetting the room plus interacting with guests can get, as I said, quite involved if you have a lot of bookings but the reward is there to get if you enjoy this activity.
Related: Put up a room on AirBnB or Learn how to run a succesful renting side-hustle
9. Money making idea: Do micro tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk
Difficulty: Easy
Time to setup: Hours
Skill Required: Basic writing
Earning Potential/month: 200$+
Amazon Mechanical Turk platform was created to allow businesses to outsource and crowdsource their processes and jobs to a collective workforce who can perform these tasks remotely. There are many tasks that can be performed here from data validation to survey, content moderation and so much more. These micro-tasks are called HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) on the platform.
By offering your services on the platform you gain access to a multitude of HITs requests, asking to perform a variety of tasks at different prices. Don’t expect to turn this into a full-time job though as the average rate seems to be around 6$/hour.
Related: Join amazon MechTurk now or learn how to make the most out of the platform
10. Money making idea: Website testing
Difficulty: Medium
Time to setup: Hours – days
Skill Required: Good communication, following instructions, basic computer work
Tools Required: A microphone to record your voice during the testing session
Earning Potential/month: 200$
That’s right, you can earn very respectable amounts (10$ – 15$ for 20 minutes of work) online, from the comfort of your computer, by testing other people’s websites. This works because a lot of people are creating new websites for business or for other reasons and want to test the usability, the design, the structure of their websites before they go live, or for improving existing ones.
A few agencies have popped up, offering to mediate between you (the tester) and the person/company who wants their website scrutinized. You are required to browse the website and comment on your experience.
Related: Check out our list of the simplest ways to make money online with website testing
Moderately Difficult Ideas to Make Money
11. Money making idea: Earn by sharing your expertise
Difficulty: Medium
Time to setup: Days
Skill Required: Excellent communication, excellent writing skills
Earning Potential/month: 400$
If you have acquired special expertise of some kind during your life, you should know that expertise is valuable.
However, sometimes finding ways to get rewarded or paid for a specific type of expertise can be troublesome. You’d have to set up a consultancy firm, market yourself, etc
This is where companies like JustAnswer come in, bridging the gap between people seeking curated and authoritative answers to their questions and those who know those answers.
Joining the platform is relatively simple although you will have to be screened to show you have the credentials (but this is a good thing, trust me). Once you are approved, you will be paired up with people seeking answers related to your topic of expertise and paid accordingly.
12. Money making idea: Setup a Print-On-Demand T-Shirt Store
Difficulty: Medium
Time to setup: Days
Skill Required: Good writing skills, problem-solving, marketing, online search
Earning Potential/month: 400$+
Setting up and launching a successful online store selling physical products is much, much harder than you think. Even with seemingly simple products like t-shirts, the competition, as well as the knowledge required to succeed are steep. Definitely a no, no for an entry-level, no stress, business startup idea.
Luckily for you, It is possible to launch an online store, in fact, a full-fledged business online, selling custom t-shirts without the hassle of having to deal with the technical sides of things. On websites such as RedBubble.com, you can create a personal shop, upload your designs, customize your store, and let the platform do the rest for you.
As you can imagine the competition is fierce with a barrier to entry practically nonexistent but the opportunity to make money if you play your cards well is definitely there.
Related: Check out our guide to build a successful store on RedBubble.com
13. Money making idea: Create a Fiverr Gig
Difficulty: Medium
Time to setup: Hours to Days
Skill Required: Excellent writing skills, problem-solving, marketing, customer support
Earning Potential/month: 130$ – 2000$+
If you do not know about Fiverr is time for you to change this, sign up and start making use of this incredible opportunity to earn real money online working as a freelancer.
What makes Fiverr different from other freelance platforms is the fact that you can proactively create your own gigs instead of reactively replying to job offerings. This and the fact that you can offer microtasks for as little as 5USD, has been a powerful propelling force for the platform. Nowadays most of the top earners on Fiver start at a much higher rate and have created for themselves a full-fledged lifestyle business paying a full salary.
Related: Discover 3 great strategies to create lucrative gigs on Fiverr
14. Money making idea: Become a freelance writer
Difficulty: Medium
Time to setup: Hours – weeks (going via Freelance platform or solo)
Skill Required: Excellent writing skills, problem-solving, marketing, customer support, online search
Earning Potential/month: 130$ – 2000$+
Ghostwriting skills are in very high demand as more and more people are trying to get into the information business, creating niche websites or nurturing their online presence with well-written content. It’s only natural that the potential income for a good writer offering their skills online can be nothing to be sneezed at and going easily into the thousands of dollars for a well written and researched article.
If you want to explore this route for yourself you have two options, you can either create your own firm and offer your services online. Alternatively, you can work for an agency that will remove the hassle of having to market your work and dealing with financials and clients and allowing you to focus on the craft. This would be the perfect option if you are just starting.
If you want to give this a go but would like to give your writing skills a brush-up and take them to the next level take these excellent online writing courses and see if this business idea is for you.
Related: You can check sites like link-able.com, fundsforwriters.com to start exploring the possibilities online
15. Money making idea: Writing and editing resumes
Difficulty: Medium
Time to setup: Hours – weeks (going via Freelance platform or solo)
Skill Required: Excellent writing skills, problem solving, marketing, customer support, online search
Earning Potential/month: 130$ – 2000$+
If you dislike the idea of writing on a variety of subjects but feel that your writing and presentational skills are top-notch you could easily put them to work and help people writing and editing resumes to use for a job interview or simply to increase their chances of success looking for a new job.
This is a powerful job proposition and a straightforward and almost irresistible offer to potential clients. Who wouldn’t pay to drastically increase their chances of finding a new job and making sure their resumes are as perfect as they can be. It’s a no brainer investment, really. On the other hand, you want to make sure you play your A-game as you could have a massive impact on people’s lives if you perform poorly.
When it comes to how to start this activity the options are endless. You can offer your skills on Fiverr or eLance or you could set up your private organization online and market your services directly to prospective clients.
Obviously you might want to brush up or straight up develop your resume writing skills if you have not done this before but I am sure that with a bit of training you can master this subject and start offering your services for a fee.
16. Money making idea: Become a freelance translator
Difficulty: Medium
Time to setup: Hours – weeks (going via Freelance platform or solo)
Skill Required: Excellent writing skills, problem solving, marketing, customer support, online search
Earning Potential/month: 130$ – 2000$+
If you happen to be fluent in another language this money-making opportunity is wide open to you particularly if you happen to know one of the languages that are in high demand like Asian and middle-east languages.
Don’t get me wrong, translating is a proper gig and requires intelligence, commitment, and professionalism however it has never been this convenient to get into this activity. The easiest route in is through an agency or via a Freelance work platform. However, you can work solo if you so desire.
The best place to start looking for info is probably translatorscafe.com where you can access a huge community of translators, learn about the trade and even post and apply for jobs.
17. Money making idea: Review new artists
Difficulty: Medium
Time to setup: Hours – weeks (going via Freelance platform or solo)
Skill Required: Excellent writing skills, music knowledge
Earning Potential/month: 130$ – 2000$+
If you love listening to music and are knowledgable about it in general plus you feel you have what it takes to review new up and coming musicians and singers then this side gig on Slicethepie.com might just be for you.
According to their website: “Slicethepie launched back in 2007 as a fun and interactive site to identify the best up and coming artists. We rapidly evolved into the web’s largest music review engine that now provides on-demand feedback to most of the major US record labels and thousands of independent artists every month”.
The payout is between 1 and 20cents per review (about 25 words) depending on the quality of your review so don’t expect to be making full incomes. Nonetheless is a nice little side hustle that allows you to listen to free music and voice your opinion for a small tip. If you were doing it already on other platforms there is no reason not to try it out.
18. Money making idea: Sell stock videos
Difficulty: Medium
Time to setup: Hours – weeks
Skill Required: Recording and editing video footage
Tools Required: 4k video camera or a 4k capable phone
Earning Potential/month: 130$ – 2000$+
Shooting and selling beautiful pictures to royalty-free websites used to be an excellent money-making opportunity when the market was new and there were only a few players.
Nowadays, platforms offering royalty-free pictures are struggling to break into the business while the big players completely own the space. This means that there are millions of pictures available and only a small number of photographers making decent money.
However, there’s hope for the videographer. Only recently, in fact, 4k is becoming more and more the standard expected by content creators who actually purchase video footage on these platforms and there aren’t so many videos available as there are pictures so the space is ripe for conquering. If you own a 4k camera (many phones actually can shoot 4k videos these days) you could sell your footage to these platforms and reap huge financial gains particularly if you can tap into the high spending market of bloggers and content creators constantly hungry for royalty-free 4k footage.
Shutterstock is the biggest payer among all the free stock creator, followed closely by AdobeStock, Pond5, and Storyblocks.
Related: Check out this course to learn to master shooting and editing of 4k videos, also check out this idea to create low effort 4k videos to upload
19. Money making idea: Become a virtual assistant
Difficulty: Medium
Time to setup: Hours – weeks (going via Freelance platform or solo)
Skill Required: Excellent writing skills, organizational skills, communication, dependability
Earning Potential/month: 130$ – 2000$+
With more and more people working from home and creating a business that requires heavy management, the ability to lean onto a virtual assistant to take care of highly critical yet time-consuming tasks has become more prevalent.
As a virtual assistant you want to have great organizational and communication skills but besides this, you can work from home in your pajamas while taking care of someone else’s appointments and travel arrangements. As a VA you might be asked to perform important everyday tasks, such as checking and replying to emails and maintaining professional communication with third parties.
Check out this great Youtube video by Kristi explaining her experience as a Virtual Assitent, her energy is infectious.
Of course you can offer your services on freelancing websites such as eLance or Fiverr but you can also join a reputable Agency such as MyOutDesk which will take care of the burdensome stuff of your work and allow you to focus on serving your clients.
More Challenging Ideas to Make Money
20. Money making idea: Do voice-over work
Difficulty: Medium-Hard
Time to setup: Weeks – Months
Skill Required: Writing, video recording/editing, communication, organization
Tools Required: Good quality microphone, quite an environment, audio editing suite
Earning Potential/month: 130$ – 2000$+
Another money-making possibility that it is truly exciting to me is that of becoming a voice-over artist. I know you might be thinking this may be out of your league but if you have the right attitude and tools it’s an avenue that that is not terribly competitive and the returns are handsome. The great thing is that you can join one or multiple agencies, get a feel for the type of job requests, and see if it’s something you’d like to do.
Again, if you have no prior experience doing this kind of work, it is highly advisable you take some kind of course and build up your experience a little bit before offering your services for a fee. You can follow this course on Udemy for example. Once you have build up a bit of courage and have the right equipment you can work from home as the opportunities for voice-over gigs are varied.
21. Money making idea: Create a course on SkillShare or Udemy
Difficulty: Medium-Hard
Time to setup: Weeks – Months
Skill Required: Writing, video recording/editing, communication, organization
Earning Potential/month: 130$ – 2000$+
Now we are starting to get into more complex ideas to make money online. You can still actualize these ideas just from your computer but you will see that each brings added complexity to the formula. What I am presenting here is a powerful money-making idea that requires though a set of skills (that can be acquired) plus some form of shearable knowledge. I am talking about the idea of creating an online video course and posting it on platforms such as Skillshare or Udemy where your course will be offered to a large audience of eager students and sold to them for a fee.
This is certainly enticing and there are people finding a great deal of financial success and personal satisfaction creating one or several courses on different subjects. Of course, you will need a subject that you feel confident enough to teach and a minimum skillset to record, edit and submit your course to these platforms.
Related: Check out our comprehensive guide on how to create a successful course on Skillshare
22. Money making idea: Become an online tutor
Difficulty: Medium-Hard
Time to setup: Weeks – Months
Skill Required: Writing, video conferencing, communication, organization
Earning Potential/month: 400$+
With the worldwide spread of coronavirus, many teaching institutions have had to adapt and offer their lessons via zoom chat or other online means. This has literally taken the world of online learning by storm as traditional methods had to be quickly changed and adapted to modern necessities. All this is normalizing online learning and transforming it from an eccentricity to an accepted and effective method for teaching and learning.
This is the perfect time to take advantage of this opportunity and if you possess the necessary skills to teach something, offering online tutoring sessions has never been easier or more widely accepted so it’s a perfect business opportunity if you have the skills for it.
Check out platforms such as VIPKid, and Chegg which help you set up your tutoring sessions and deal with the technicalities of this money-making idea.
23. Money making idea: Start a Patreon funded project
Difficulty: Medium-Hard
Time to setup: Weeks – Months
Skill Required: Marketing, communication, project managing, customer support
Earning Potential/month: 300$+
Patreon is a platform that allows you to create content for a specific niche of people who may be willing to support you and your work by pledging a fixed amount every month starting at as low as 1$. The more supporters you have the bigger your income and there are content creators on Patreon who are making thousands of dollars a month using this seemingly simple concept.
It all depends on what kind of content you are creating and how good you are at constantly exciting and enticing your new and existing audience. Many artists and independent content creators have found the perfect home on the platform and created for themselves a very profitable business.
24. Money making idea: Start a YouTube Channel
Difficulty: Hard
Time to setup: months
Skill Required: Writing, video recording/editing, communication, organization, social media marketing
Earning Potential/month: 100$+
Starting a YouTube channel nowadays is as easy as it gets, however, starting a profitable YouTube channel, now that’s a completely different proposition.
YouTube is used by billions of people and every minute more than 500 hours of video footage are uploaded to the platform. Being discovered is a huge hurdle let alone making decent money from this activity. However not everything is lost, if you are really passionate about a subject, your videos are entertaining and engaging and have high production value plus you spend time marketing them and promoting your channel you still have hope to pull this one off.
Check this great video by excellent Gillian Perkins fleshing how she grew her channel into a successful financial endeavor.
There are plenty of examples of relatively young channels that have been able to amass millions of views in as little as few months but I have got to be honest with you there are hundreds that struggle being found and are quickly buried under the overwhelming volume of constantly uploaded content.
So, you need a clear strategy to succeed but for those who persist there can be a rewarding career option creating content that you are passionate and deliver it to an eager adience.
25. Money making idea: Start a DropServicing business
Difficulty: Medium-Hard
Time to setup: Weeks – Months
Skill Required: Marketing, communication, project managing, customer support
Earning Potential/month: 130$ – 2000$+
When you sell your skill or expertise online as a freelancer, the main limiting factor on your earning potential is time. In fact, there are only so many projects you can tackle within a time frame and if you are good at what you do you might find your schedule getting full superfast, and sooner rather than later you might hit the ceiling of your earning potential.
A way to overcome this problem is to start a dropServicing business. The idea here is to move away from doing the actual work and, instead, outsourcing it to a carefully curated team of freelancers whilst you focus on marketing/growing the business and interacting with the clients. Very much a managing role.
While this might not be for everybody, you can see that if you have the skills and inclination to create these kinds of businesses you can practically remove the earning ceiling as you can grow your team over time and serve more and more clients.
Related: Learn a simple strategy to start a dropservicing business
26. Money making idea: Start a Kickstarter campaign
Difficulty: Medium-Hard
Time to setup: Weeks – Months
Skill Required: Marketing, communication, project managing, customer support
Earning Potential/month: 130$ – 2000$+
What if I told you you can validate and sell your product even before entering production, with no need to build a website or any web infrastructure to launch your business? Seems too good to be true right? Well, that’s exactly the proposition of Kickstarter.com. You come up with a powerful product idea, detail it on the site, market it on social media, and ask people to pledge only if the like it. Pledges go from 1$ to an upper limit that you can decide depending on what you are offering in exchange. It gets complicated fast obviously if your project is ambitious and you need to do a lot of convincing if you are asking for a conspicuous amount, however, it is completely doable if you start small.
There is a grace period where you collect all the pledges and if you meet the minimum amount you are asking, you can start the project and eventually deliver it to your eagerly awaiting customers. Hundreds of small and big businesses are finding success on Kickstarter.
27. Money making idea: Start an eCommerce website
Difficulty: Hard
Time to setup: Weeks – Months
Skill Required: Marketing, communication, project managing, customer support
Earning Potential/month: 130$ – 2000$+
You might be surprised to find this one so down the list but be assured, while it has never been easier to launch an eCommerce website, making it a success within a reasonable time frame is becoming more and more difficult and requires mastery of a whole gamut of skills that take a long time to develop.
That said, if you think small, local and use the website to take orders and sell your items to a small crowd of selected clients to start with, then this might actually work for you within a reasonable time frame. Trust me, there’s nothing that beats the feeling of having a working website taking orders and making you money like a well-oiled machine. But, it takes time and patience to create and optimize it, so my advice is to start very small and local expand only when you start seeing positive returns.
28. Money making idea: Start a DropShipping business
Difficulty: Hard
Time to setup: Weeks – Months
Skill Required: Marketing, communication, project managing, customer support
Earning Potential/month: 130$ – 2000$+
This idea has been floating on the interweb for a few years now and has become a very, very successful business for many people but you have to have the right mindset to make it work.
On paper the idea entails sourcing products directly from the factory, market and sell them from your website but ultimately having them fulfilled directly by the factory while you make a sizeable margin on the final retail price. Sounds easy enough right?
Well, it’s way more involved than you might think. Yes, there are plenty of videos on YouTube showing how you can create a dropshipping store in minutes and start making money magically almost instantly (please do not believe everything you see online) but there’s so much more to it if you want to create a respectable and lasting business.
You need to understand that with this money-making idea you become a full-blown online marketeer, following trends, scouring social media for product ideas, and investing in marketing campaigns or shoutouts to put your product in front of your potential customers. Very, very involved, and potentially costly. But there’s plenty of tools nowadays to help you set this all things up if you fancy the idea of running a store of any imaginable type without ever having to deal with stock or physical product management.
29. Money making idea: Start a white labeling Amazon business
Difficulty: Hard
Time to setup: Weeks – Months
Skill Required: Marketing, communication, project managing, customer support
Earning Potential/month: 130$ – 2000$+
Maybe you have never realized that a good proportion of products selling on Amazon are one-man operations orchestrated by someone who might have not even ever seen the product they are selling.
Furthermore, most products sold on Amazon are produced and branded by the manufacturer according to the specification of the seller and delivered to Amazon’s warehouses directly and ready to be fulfilled.
This idea is really simple in principle and goes like this. You browse a manufacturer marketplace (Alibaba.com for example) to find a product you believe is going to sell well on Amazon. Then you contact that manufacturer and order an initial run of say 1000 pieces that are produced and labeled according to your specifications. The products are then shipped to Amazon warehouses and from there they are fulfilled by Amazon after someone purchases them on the Amazon store. Very attractive model isn’t it?
If you have great managerial qualities and have a knack for finding great products, this incredibly lazy idea (lazy only because you can do everything from your computer but trust me there’s a lot of work involved) might just be for you. It does require an initial investment but it can be as low as a few hundreds of dollars depending on the product you choose, the size of your first run, and where you are geographically located.
30. Money making idea: Create an online membership program
Difficulty: Very Hard
Time to setup: Weeks – Months
Skill Required: Marketing, communication, project managing, customer support
Earning Potential/month: 130$ – 2000$+
This is potentially one of the most lucrative ideas on this list, one that provides a regular monthly income and almost infinite potential for growth, however, sadly, it’s also one of the most difficult to pull off. It requires a lot of work and commitment and you must be somewhat technically minded to then understand the implications of creating and delivering content for your subscribers.
In a nutshell, the idea behind this business model is that you create some form of online content that is highly desirable and then you grant access to this content via a membership site. i.e. a place where your customers will pay you a monthly fee to access the content. A simple calculation shows the potential of this system.
Say you offer access to a continuing program to become a better musician or access to art lessons, and the monthly payment is 9.99$. With only 100 paying subscribers you would be getting around 1000$ a month. Let me tell you, 100 subscribers can be very achievable if you know what you are doing. Once you have established a foothold and sold your first few hundred memberships the sky becomes the limit.
Point is, it’s a great opportunity and there are many professional tools online that can definitely help you set it all up but they obviously come at a price and even if they can help you create your platform and streamlining the accounting and content delivering you’d still be left with the task of creating very high-quality content, communicating effectively with your subscribers and marketing your content to attract prospects and leads. Not child’s play for sure.
However, if you find yourself in a situation where you feel you have very valuable content to share to a specific audience and are not afraid of embarking in a challenging but potentially very rewarding endeavor this idea might just be perfect for you.
Wrapping up PART 1 of Ideas to make money
And this is all for Part 1, stay tuned for Part 2 where we’ll be looking at 30+ ideas to make money, this time though with activities that require you to work away from your computer.