Looking for easy ways to make money from home part-time? You’ve come to the right place. This is a list of 24 real ways to make money from home you can do in your spare time.
Whether you’re a stay-at-home mom, a student who wants to make a few extra bucks, or an entrepreneur looking for a side hustle that can replace your day job, there’s something here for you.
Best Ways to Make Money from Home Part-Time
Making that first dollar online is a major milestone. The ideas below are the quickest ways I know of to help you do just that.
#1. Sell Stuff Online
Earning potential: Opportunity for $100 to $1,000 of short-term income, depending on the amount of stuff you own.
If you need to make money in 24 hours or less, there’s no better way than selling some of your extra or unused stuff. Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace are my go-to resources for selling stuff online fast. For unique items, I turn to eBay as the nationwide audience will increase the number of potential buyers.
For selling low-cost items in quantity — such as kids’ clothes, low-cost household decor, books, etc. — it’s best to hold a garage sale over a weekend. This way, you can get rid of everything in one fell swoop.
How to get started: See our list of the best items to sell online.
#2. Take Online Surveys
Earning potential: $1 to $50 per month.
If you’re looking for a flexible way to earn extra money from home, start with online surveys. How it works is that you sign up for a paid survey site (for free), and then you’re notified by email or through an app when an online survey is available.
How to get started: When we researched the top survey sites — taking into account our experience, BBB ratings, app reviews, Trustpilot scores and more — the two sites listed below were the absolute best options that we found.
- Survey Junkie. With over 5 million members, Survey Junkie is one of the largest survey sites on the internet. Survey Junkie has an “Excellent” rating on Trustpilot, which ranks it highest among all survey companies. Read our in-depth Survey Junkie review to learn more.
- Swagbucks. Swagbucks is a favorite of mine, as well as many readers of The Ways To Wealth. In total, the site has paid out over $800 million in rewards. What’s nice about Swagbucks is the variety of ways to earn, as surveys are one of over a dozen ways to earn rewards. Read our in-depth Swagbucks review to learn more.
#3. Test Websites and Apps
Earning potential: $5 to $20 per hour.
Website and app developers need feedback from real users to optimize the design of their products, and to ensure there are no technical glitches that would negatively impact functionality.
With user testing, you’ll take notes on your experience with new sites and apps, and then provide feedback to the development team — sometimes in written form, but often via live or recorded video.
How to get started: UserTesting.com is one of the main sites for finding paid testing opportunities. It pays between $4 and $10 for every test, and between $30 to $120 for live interviews.
#4. Test Products
Earning potential: Less than $50 per month.
Product testing is a legitimate way to make money from home. There are a small number of legitimate product testing websites that pay you to test and share your feedback. Many product testers then sell the product they receive for additional earnings.
The big downside is that earnings are very unpredictable. A month or two might go by without any companies looking for feedback on their products from your specific demographic. So don’t count on this to pay your bills; see it as a fun way to make some extra cash on the side.
Pro tip: A similar idea with a bit more potential is making money as a mystery shopper. Since you have to leave home to visit businesses, this idea didn’t make the list, but mystery shopping is a real way to make money.
How to get started: To learn about product testing opportunities, we recommend Ipsos, a well-known and legit market research company that provides the occasional product testing opportunity along with paid online survey opportunities.
#5. Play Games
Earning potential: Beginners will earn close to $5 to $10 per hour. Potential for intermediate gamers to earn between $10 and $25 per hour.
From professional gaming to video game testers to the quickly-growing blockchain game economy, there are a number of ways to get paid to play games.
For beginners, Mistplay is a free app that allows you to earn extra money playing games on your Android device. After downloading the app, you’ll get a list of games to try. There’s a mix of both popular games and new games in their test phases, and the list changes frequently.
How to get started: See our complete list of different ways to make money playing games.
#6. Become a Freelance Writer
Earning potential: 5 to 10 cents per word for beginners.
As a freelance writer, you can make money writing blog posts, news articles, press releases, product descriptions and an almost infinite number of other types of content.
Businesses are hungry for people who can deliver quality work that contains accurate information and doesn’t require hours of editing. If you’re able to meet that need, you can earn rates equivalent to $50 per hour or more once you get some experience and references under your belt.
How to get started: Check out our in-depth guide on how to become a freelance writer.
#7. Proofread Books, Documents, Transcripts and More
Earning potential: $15 to $40 per hour.
Over the past decade, there’s been an explosion in the amount of written content produced on a daily basis. And that means there’s surging demand not only for writers (see above) but proofreaders, the final line of defense against typos, misspellings and errant apostrophes.
You don’t need any special training or certifications to find work as a proofreader — just an obsession with details, an eye for spotting mistakes that other people miss.
How to get started: Read our post on how to become a proofreader and earn $40+ per hour working from home, where we get into the specific steps to launch your freelance proofreading career.
#8. Work as a Virtual Assistant
Earning potential: As much as $45 per hour, depending on your skills and specializations.
Many small business owners need assistants to help with everyday tasks like correspondence, schedule management, research, basic bookkeeping and more.
When you become a virtual assistant (commonly referred to as a VA), you’ll do the same work as an in-office assistant — just without the commute, and often on your own schedule.
How to get started: Get a step-by-step plan of action in our guide on how to become a virtual assistant.
#9. Start a Bookkeeping Business
Earning potential: Up to $60 per hour.
One of the most time-consuming aspects of running a business is keeping the books in order, which means tracking income and expenses, categorizing receipts, making sure bills get paid on time and more.
This is necessary work because it helps ensure that the business is running smoothly. But it’s not always the best possible use of a business owner’s time. So in many cases, they hire a part-time bookkeeper to take the burden off their shoulders.
Here’s the good news: you don’t need a certificate or license to work in this role, and more businesses than ever are cutting costs by hiring part-time remote bookkeepers (instead of uber-expensive bookkeeping agencies). So, while it requires some education upfront, it’s a lucrative long-term way to make money from home.
How to get started: Everything you need is in our article on how to become a bookkeeper at home.
#10. Online English Tutoring
Earning potential: $15 to $30 per hour.
While teaching English online isn’t necessarily the most lucrative work-from-home option you can find, it can be both one of the most sustainable and one of the most rewarding.
This field has exploded in size over the past five years, with more and more families around the world viewing English fluency as a skill worth investing in. That means good instructors have no trouble staying busy with all the work they can handle.
With most companies, you don’t need teaching experience or certification as long as you have a four-year college degree (in any field).
How to get started: Learn more about the leading companies in the field and their specific requirements in our guide to the best online tutoring jobs.
#11. Social Media Management
Earning potential: Between $20 and $100 per hour.
The #1 thing local businesses want is new, high-quality leads. That means if you can generate these leads, you can get paid a lot of money. And right now, one of the best ways to generate them is through social media.
The best social media managers charge $10,000+ per month, plus a slice of revenue. Good social media managers charge $3,000 to $5,000 per month per client. And to the surprise of many, some beginners get paid as much as $1,000 to $2,000 each month.
What’s also great about becoming a social media manager is that it’s one of the steadiest sources of income around. I know social media managers who have five or six clients, each paying them $1,000 to $2,000 every month. And after the work is done in getting a client’s campaign set up, they only have to dedicate a few hours per week to each project.
#12. Design Websites
Earning potential: Around $25 per hour to start, and $75 per hour with experience.
These days, having a good-looking website that loads quickly and functions properly is almost essential for doing business, regardless of the industry.
That means there’s enormous opportunity in the field, both for freelancers who can fix and maintain websites and for those who know how to design them from the ground up.
How to get started: Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to be a coding wizard to make money as a website designer. In fact, no-code web designers are one of the fast-growing trends in the field. Learn more about how to get started in our guide on how to make money building websites.
#13. Monetize Your Typing Skills
Earning potential: Between $5 and $20 per hour for data entry, and between $10 and $40 for transcribing.
If you’re a fast and relatively accurate typist, you can earn money and set your own schedule with data entry and transcription work.
When it comes to data entry, be aware that it’s low-skill work that doesn’t require any training, education or experience. As a result, competition from freelancers in the developing world drives down the hourly rates and limits your earning potential.
You can do better with transcription (which requires near-perfect English fluency), especially if you establish yourself in an in-demand niche like medical transcription.
How to get started: Learn more about the best data entry jobs and check out this list of the best transcription jobs for beginners.
#14. Edit Videos
Earning potential: Between $20 and $45 per hour to start.
The amount of video content produced for the web is exploding, and that fact is creating enormous demand for capable video editors.
Bloggers, social influencers, business owners and all kinds of other clients are hungry for video editors who know how to cut film, adjust coloration and lighting, add graphic overlays and transitions, add properly synced captions and more.
How to get started: Get the training from LinkedIn’s Become a Video Editor course. They offer a free 30-day trial on their training courses, where at the end, you’ll get a badge of completion to list on your profile.
To win clients and projects, you’ll need to have a portfolio of work samples. But they don’t have to be from paid gigs — you can create them specifically to showcase your skills.
Focus on building your portfolio with the type of work you enjoy most, like captions and whiteboard videos. From there, Fiverr is a great place to find individuals looking for video editing help.
#15. Design Graphics
Earning potential: $15 per hour to start, with strong potential.
Graphic design encompasses a wide swath of work types, from low-skill tasks like removing backgrounds from product photos to expert-level projects like creating mock-ups of entire websites and apps.
At the low end of that spectrum, you’ll be competing with people from all over the world, which means you won’t earn a ton of money. But as your skills and experience grow, the earning potential in this field is almost unlimited.
If you currently fall somewhere in the middle of those two extremes, you can earn solid money (think $40 to $60 per hour) designing things like graphics for social media (there’s strong demand for effective Pinterest graphics), t-shirts, and other small one-off projects.
How to get started: If you’re brand new to the field, check out our guide to getting started as a graphic designer. If you need to brush up on your skills, LinkedIn has a free 30-hour online course that goes over some of the most in-demand proficiencies.
#16. Start a Blog
Earning potential: $1,000+ per month after one year, and greater long-term potential.
Many people think blogs peaked a decade ago, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Today, there are more six-figure blogs than ever — many of which get sold to big publishing companies for huge sums of money.
That’s one of the reasons why starting a money-making blog is such a good idea: you’re able to generate income through an array of monetization strategies, but you’re also building a sellable asset that can lead to a significant lump-sum of income a few years down the line.
You won’t make much money in the weeks after you start your blog (if you make any at all). It takes anywhere from six to 12 months to build an audience and generate enough traffic to start seeing any meaningful income. But once you hit that point, you can easily generate $1,000 to $2,000 a month with a minimal amount of work.
#17. Launch a Shopify Store
Earning potential: $1,000+ per month.
Shopify makes it easy to get started selling products online without having to know the first thing about web design or coding. Just sign up, choose a domain name and customize the look and details of your site through an easy-to-use interface.
And while you can sell almost anything you can think of — from handmade crafts to digital products like consultation packages — one of the best ways to take advantage of the online shopping boom is by starting a dropshipping business.
As a dropshipper, you’ll sell products without ever touching them. For example, you might launch a website that sells different types of smartphone cases and accessories. Whenever a customer places an order, you’ll place a corresponding order with your supplier, who will ship the item directly to your customer.
#18. Sell Crafts on Etsy
Earning potential: $1,000 per month.
While you can sell almost anything via a Shopify storefront, you’ll have to spend money driving traffic to your new website (or wait for the search traffic to start rolling in).
So if you’re planning on selling soaps, crafts, jewelry or other unique handmade items, it makes sense to start your business on Etsy, where millions of customers search for exactly that type of product.
Etsy has categories for clothes, toys, art, household goods and more, so there’s plenty of opportunity to find a niche that matches your crafting skills.
Many Etsy sellers make a full-time living on the site, but your earning potential will depend on the type of products you offer, as well as how fast you can produce them.
How to get started: Check out our complete guide to making money on Etsy.
#19. Sell Products on Amazon via FBA
Earning potential: $1,000+ per month long-term.
Many of the products sold on Amazon are offered by third-party sellers who leverage the company’s warehousing and delivery infrastructure through a service called Fulfillment by Amazon (or FBA for short).
With FBA, you simply send your products to Amazon, or have them shipped directly to Amazon by the manufacturer or supplier. Amazon handles all aspects of storage and fulfillment. You don’t have to deal with packaging the products, figuring out the cheapest shipping option, or handling customer returns.
There’s no minimum for getting started on FBA, so if you don’t have much to invest you can start by sending in as little as one item at a time.
On the other hand, if you decide to source products directly from a manufacturer or supplier, you should expect to spend a few thousand dollars on your initial batch of products.
How to get started: Learn more about selling on the platform, including the best strategies for sourcing products and leveraging FBA, in our complete guide to how to make money on Amazon.
#20. Make YouTube Videos
Earning potential: $1,000+ per month long-term.
Starting a YouTube channel is a lot like starting a blog: it takes time and dedication to build an audience, but the rewards can be significant as you start getting enough views.
And as with blogging, many different types of content work well on the site. There are full-time video creators who publish product reviews, how-tos and tutorials, comedy videos and almost anything else you can think of.
As a general rule, you’ll earn between $2 and $5 for every 1,000 views on your videos.
You don’t need top-of-the-line video production equipment to make successful YouTube videos. Your smartphone or iPad will work just fine. However, you will need a low-cost mic (plus the cables to connect it to your device); otherwise, the audio quality will be subpar.
How to get started: Check out our post on how much YouTubers make, which also outlines the best monetization strategies to consider.
#21. Create an Online Course
Earning potential: $1,000+ per month long-term.
If you have expertise — whether in a profession, a sport, a hobby or anything else — consider sharing your knowledge with others through the creation of an online course.
Think of this as a more specialized version of becoming a YouTube creator. Instead of walking people through the basics of something like baking sourdough bread or starting a blog, you’ll help them become an expert in the topic by going in-depth into the specific details and nuances that most casual viewers don’t care about.
Courses can be monetized in a number of different ways. You might create a series of videos and offer them on-demand for one lump-sum fee. Or, you might charge a monthly subscription fee and release new content periodically.
How to get started: Check out Udemy and Teachable, two platforms that make it easy to set up an online course.
#22. Stock Photography
Earning potential: $500+ per month long-term.
Anyone can submit photos to online repositories like Shutterstock, Adobe, DepositPhotos and many others. If your photo is accepted into these sites, it can then be licensed out on an ongoing basis to anyone who may need it in the future.
Photographers also do their own promotional work by selling individual photographs through their websites or social media channels.
When shooting for any profession in the world of stock photography the goal is to create high-quality images that businesses can use on their websites and marketing material. The more businesses use your photos, the more you can get paid.
How to get started: We go in-depth on the best stock photos sites, apps and more in our guide to getting paid to take pictures.
#23. Complete Microtasks
Earning potential: $100 to $400 per month.
Microtask websites, the most popular being Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk), offer a way to earn money from home that anyone can get started with quickly. On mTurk specifically, there are jobs called HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) that can be completed to earn money.
Tasks can be anything from transcribing audio to analyzing images to writing product descriptions. There is a huge range of tasks that can be completed, and each task pays differently. For very basic tasks, the pay tends to be around $5 an hour. While this is below minimum wage, the hours are flexible and the work is readily available.
How to get started: Read our guide to the best microtasking sites to learn about the opportunities in this field.
#24. Search the Web
Earning potential: $25 to $500+ per month.
There are numerous ways to get paid for searching the web.
Search engines like Google pay tens of thousands of people around the world to evaluate results showing within the platform. Becoming a research assistant is a solid entry-level work-from-home job, and a good way to get your foot in the door launching a career as a virtual assistant.
For a bit of extra income, you can even switch your search engine to earn rewards.
How to get started: Check out our article on legit ways to get paid for searching the web to learn more.
How Make Money From Home FAQ
There are many at-home jobs that pay over $50 an hour, which equates to roughly a six-figure annual salary.
These types of six-figure work at home jobs fall into two categories:
1. High-paying traditional jobs, such as an actuary or information security analyst, which have been around for over a decade. Due to the scope of the work, they can be performed 100% remotely. Extensive experience and credentials are typically needed to land a job in this category.
2. Jobs that didn’t exist until more recently, or those for which demand has increased. Examples include app developer, podcast producer, SEO specialist and or social media manager.
What’s beneficial about the second category is that you can build the skills required to land such a job in a short amount of time and with little to no money. In some cases, you can get paid to gain experience in a field by freelancing.
For example, if you’re looking to land a job managing paid media, you can work on the side managing ads for small businesses.
Similarly, instead of freelancing, you can build a business to gain experience. As an example, to land a high-paying job as an SEO specialist, start your own website with the intent to grow traffic via organic search.
It can take one or two years to gain enough experience to land a job. But it’s still one of the fastest ways to quickly grow your income, in both the short-term and the long-term.
Fiverr and Upwork, the two largest freelance marketplaces, are excellent places to get started freelancing. At first, you’ll have a very low success rate with proposals, as your profile lacks feedback.
A good way to get around this is to:
1. Create your own portfolio sample to prove to the client you’re capable of completing the work.
2. Work at below-market rates for the first two to three jobs until you gain that valuable feedback.
3. Create a highly customized proposal that shows the client you understand their needs.
We’ve written a lot about strategies for succeeding on these two sites. Here are some of our favorite resources:
– Fiverr vs. Upwork: Which Is Best For New Freelancers?
– How To Get Your First Job On Upwork [Beginner’s Guide]
– How To Make Money On Fiverr: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide
– How To Apply For Upwork Writing Jobs (+ Online Freelance Writing Tips)
– 7 Expert Upwork Tips For Beginners (+ 9 Mistakes To Avoid)
Selling in-demand products (such as old cell phones, TVs and computers) on sites like Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace is one of the fastest ways to make money online in less than 24 hours.
It’s our view that there’s no true set-it-and-forget-it, totally passive business idea. But at the same time, there are many passive income business ideas where you perform work once and then benefit from that work over and over again.
Take blogging as an example. There are posts on your website that are a few years old that will continue to generate revenue from advertising and affiliate marketing sales. It’s for this reason that blogging tends to be one of our favorite semi-passive income ideas.
Creating an informational course, earning recurring affiliate commissions, and stock photography are among other lucrative passive income opportunities.
Avoiding Work at Home Scams
Unfortunately, there are a lot of work at home scams out there. The FTC has an overview page about avoiding these types of scams.
I’ll echo one of their more important pieces of advice, which is that if you’re questioning whether something is a scam, do a Google search for reviews of the company.
What you’re looking for is real reviews from real people on a legitimate third-party website. In addition, I’ve found a Reddit search is another great way to get actual user reviews of many products and services.
How Make Money From Home: Wrap-Up
It’s never been easier to find a lucrative work-from-home opportunity that aligns with your goals and skills. The options on this list are just a spattering of what’s available.
Here are some other resources we’ve put together that can help you find legitimate ways to make money from home on your own terms:
You may also want to check out FlexJobs (read our FlexJobs review) which is one of the best remote job boards on the internet, thanks to the fact that every listing is vetted to ensure there are no scams.
If your goal is to start an online business rather than a side gig or a freelance career, keep in mind that you may not start earning a full-time income right off the bat.
Building a business takes time, and that’s just as true for blogs and e-commerce sites as it is for brick-and-mortar storefronts.
So take a look at your financial situation and don’t be afraid to ease into it if necessary. You don’t have to spend 40 hours a week working on your blog. Invest the time you can, and ramp up as you start to build momentum.
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