5 Side Hustle Ideas to Make Money From Home

Are you someone who is looking to improve their financial situation by starting a side gig and dedicating an hour or two every day? Or perhaps you are looking to quit your day job because you are unhappy with it?

Regardless of the circumstances, there are quite a few different methods to make some money from home. Some of these methods are pretty restricted in terms of how much you can profit, but there are those that are scalable, especially when you get the basics down and have the willingness to learn.

Having said that, let’s take a look at some potential methods to make money from home that you can hopefully pick from for yourself.

#1 – Custom Merchandise

You might think that starting a print-on-demand business and selling custom merchandise requires graphic design skills. The knowledge certainly helps, but you can take a different approach and find someone who does the design work for you while you focus on marketing the store and working on customer service.

Considering how competitive the custom merchandise niche is, try to narrow down your niche to specific products and designs first. For instance, instead of selling t-shirts or hoodies, you could sell fanny packs or tote bags. The latter two options might not seem obvious, but there is a demographic interested in them.

As far as designs go, you can target a specific group of people. Just make sure to research the market to confirm that a demographic for your idea exists. And if you are lucky, you might land on a niche that hardly has any competition, which should make it much easier to manage a POD business.

#2 – Online Surveys

As far as simple and straightforward methods to make money online go, hardly anything compared to online surveys.

Create an account for Swagbucks and other similar online survey platforms, and you should gain access to a number of surveys that you can fill out every day, week, or month.

Some surveys pay money directly, whereas others offer discount coupons and various gift cards. 

Expect to spend about an hour or so every day until you run out of available surveys. The limitations prevent you from making a lot of money, but the idea is still worthwhile if you have some free time and want to make the most out of it.

#3 – Live Streams

If you have an entertaining personality and like to interact with other people, live streaming could be an option to kickstart your career of making money on the internet.

Twitch TV is usually the go-to option for streamers, but YouTube has been investing a lot of money in its streaming platform as well. 

You will find that most streamers play video games, especially on Twitch TV. There is no need to focus on that niche since demographics for other types of content exist as well. Music, cooking, traveling, working out, podcasts, politics, etc., all have their place on Twitch as well as YouTube. It is about how you present it.

As for monetization, direct donations from viewers and sponsorship deals (once you have decent viewership numbers) are the main ways to profit from streaming.

#4 – Blogging

Blogging is one of the oldest methods to make money online. Some bloggers start a website without any intention to monetize the content, but if they can attract enough readers, the transition works out by itself.

Since you are planning to make money right off the bat, you will need to take a different approach. Writing about topics you are passionate or knowledgeable about is an ideal scenario because you can find more motivation and offer better in-depth content to the blog’s readers. 

Bloggers usually monetize content with the following methods:

• Affiliate marketing
• Sponsorship deals
• Ad networks
• Crowdfunding platforms
• Digital goods (e-books, webinars)

There is no need to limit yourself to just one method. If you can utilize multiple monetization ideas without sacrificing the quality of your blog, you should do it.

#5 – Virtual Assistant

The role of a virtual assistant varies. You can start from the bottom and work your way up little by little, thanks to the experience and trust you gain while offering your services.

It helps if you have specific knowledge, such as coding or SEO, but the basics, like data research and entry or email inbox management, can be great starting points.

Note that virtual assistants do not make that much money early on because they need to earn the trust of the person who employs them. In addition, if you are doing simple things, you will need to lower your demands salary-wise because the competition is quite fierce.

With time, however, you should get better and find more opportunities. It is about finding the right gigs and collecting experience and connections.