25 Ways to Make Money Online, Offline and at Home
Make money with a side gig and learn how long it will take to see the extra income, whether it’s freelancing online, driving passengers or selling your stuff
Want to make money, but you’re not sure where to start? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.
And you're not alone. More than one-quarter (27%) of Americans earned extra income from side gigs last year, according to the Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2020, released in May 2021 by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
NerdWallet rounded up 25 legitimate ways to make money — at home or out and about — and listed each option based on how fast you can get started and get paid. While most people prefer fast cash, don’t discount the “slow” gigs, as they may pay more in the long run.
1. Pick up freelance work online
Make money online through websites such as Upwork, Fiverr and Freelancer.com. These sites offer opportunities to do a variety of freelance jobs, such as writing, programming, design, marketing, data entry and being a virtual assistant. Fluent in a second language? Check sites such as Gengo or One Hour Translation, or drum up business through a site of your own. No matter what kind of freelancing you do, keep track of the going rate for the kind of work you provide so you know if you’re charging too much or too little. Learn how to get started on Upwork.
2. Test websites and apps
Another way to make money from home is on sites like UserTesting.com. You get paid for your thoughts on how well — or not so well — certain websites and apps worked. You’ll have to pass a short test to be accepted, then you’ll be paid $10 for each 20-minute test, which involves a recording and answering four follow-up written questions. Or you could earn up to $120 to participate in a video conversation with a customer after your test.
Easy Ways to Make Real Money Online
The past few years encouraged all of us to embrace the great indoors. No surprise, then, that interest in making money online—from the safety of our homes—is on the rise.
The magic of the web is that it’s a sales channel, marketing network, and community hub all in one—plus so much more. There are many creative ways to make money online beyond surveys and selling used goods on Craigslist.
That said, some businesses and side hustles are better suited to the laptop lifestyle than others. In this guide, we’ll break down the strengths and shortcomings of 30 of the top money-making option.
1. Dropshipping
Last year, many worldwide trends experienced decades’ worth of acceleration. One such trend was the rise of ecommerce. There are a number of ways to run an ecommerce business, some of which allow for minimal need to carry and hold lots of inventory.
Enter dropshipping—a business model where you don’t keep the products you sell in stock. Instead, when a customer buys something from your store, a third party fulfills and ships the order for you. Because startup costs are low, it’s an increasingly popular way to make money online for beginners and pros alike.
Dropshippers have a habit of chasing the latest trends. And while there’s nothing wrong with catching a trending product wave, there are many steady product categories that offer similar opportunities to do well.
Startup time: A few hours.
Effort to start: Very easy with little ecommerce knowledge.
Time to first payment: Two weeks to one month, on average.
What to know:
- At Shopify, we regularly see these categories on our list of top performers: clothing and accessories, jewelry, home and garden.
- You can create a Shopify store and use it for free for 14 days.
- The pay period using Shopify Payments is five days plus the number of days remaining until your payout day.
Requirements:
- You must be 18 years or older to start a Shopify store. If you’re under the age of 18, your parents can start one on your behalf.
- Requirements vary by state, but you need to have licenses or permits to sell online.
2. Print on demand
Print on demand allows sellers to customize white label products with their own designs and sell them only after a customer buys, eliminating the need to hold inventory (which is what makes it a subset of dropshipping). When a customer places an order, a print-on-demand company will add your design to the product, fulfill the order, and ship it to the customer.
The most significant advantage print on demand offers over dropshipping is that you control the aesthetic of your products—a key differentiator for product categories where the design is the distinguisher, like t-shirts or fan merch.
When it comes to making money online, you can also use print-on-demand services to:
- Test online business ideas or new products lines without the risk of buying inventory.
- Monetize an audience you’ve already built, whether it’s on YouTube, social media, or a personal blog.
- Offer diverse products by selling t-shirts, books, shoes, bags, mugs, phone cases, laptop skins, wall art, and more.
- Sell photos online by placing your images on physical products to sell to your fans.
Overall, print on demand lets you create customized products quickly. You don’t have to worry about shipping or fulfillment—it’s taken care of by your suppliers. And since you have no inventory to worry about, it’s a low-risk, low-investment way to make money online.
Startup time: A few hours to set up an ecommerce platform, then however long it takes to create your designs.
Effort to start: Very easy with little ecommerce knowledge.
Time to first payment: It depends on when you get your first sale and which ecommerce platform you decide to use, but Shopify’s pay periods are five business days.
What to know:
- You can set up accounts with ecommerce platforms like Shopify that have the logistics included in their services.
- Payments will vary depending on how much you sell and your profit margins.
- Pay period using Shopify Payments is five days, plus the number of days remaining until your payout day.
Requirements:
- Most ecommerce platforms require that you’re at least 18 years of age. If you’re under the age of 18, your parents can start one on your behalf.
- Requirements vary by state, but you need to have licenses or permits to sell anything online.
3. Custom products
While the options above come bundled with the convenience of not holding on to expensive inventory, they also come with some limitations—mainly that you don’t have full control over the product you’re selling.
And when you think of most direct-to-consumer brands, this is what comes to mind: original products that make meaningful improvements or add interesting details to well-known items. Personally, I’ve purchased many messenger bags, but I’d never seen anything like the one made by Vermilyea Pelle until it reached my doorstep.
Making products by hand is popular among jewelry brands, fashion brands, and home décor brands. It gives you full control over the product development and quality of your items.
The only drawbacks are:
- It can be time consuming
- It’s difficult to scale
The costs associated with making products by hand are the cost of materials, storing your finished products, and labor.
Startup time: A few hours to set up your ecommerce platform, followed by however long it takes to create your custom products.
Effort to start: Medium, but it takes a lot of effort to maintain.
Time to first payment: The pay period using Shopify Payments is five days, plus the number of days remaining until your payout day.
What to know:
- Sellers must collect the state tax where their item is delivered to.
- Make sure to factor in your packaging costs when pricing your items.
- You can set up a Shopify store and use it for free for 14 days.
Requirements:
- Most ecommerce platforms require that you’re at least 18 years of age. If you’re under the age of 18, your parents can start one on your behalf.
- Requirements vary by state, but you need to have licenses or permits to sell anything online.
Best Websites to Make Money Online
Upwork
How it works: Upwork is essentially a meeting site where businesses and freelancers throughout the world can connect and collaborate on certain projects. Businesses hire freelancers for a variety of different services, including writing, web design, running SEO campaigns and pretty much any work that can be done on a computer.
Highlights: Upwork takes a commission from 5% to 20%, but the more money you make, the less the commission is.
Drawbacks: Upwork has been so successful that there is a lot of competition on the website, and that can be a real drawback for people who are new to the site, says Sacha Darosa, owner of a digital marketing agency in Toronto called The Shirtless Web Guy.
"Before I started my business in web design, I created profiles on websites such as Upwork. In the beginning it was a struggle to attract any attention from buyers on those platforms because there's so much competition. And much of the competition was from overseas, which made it impossible for me to compete with others on price."
So Darosa lowered his prices and for a while, he was working for next to nothing. But the positive feedback made his profile look better, and Darosa started charging more
Fiverr
How it works: This is also a popular website that can be helpful for freelancers. Know something about digital animation? You can work for someone who doesn't have these skills and pick up some extra cash. Even better, you can offer to compile web research for someone for fast cash.
Highlights: You can make good money from the site, asserts Dan Bochichio, a web designer and digital strategist in Albany, New York, who runs a two-person company called Bocain Designs. He says that his firm makes $3,000 to $5,000 a month from Fiverr. "To stay ahead of the competition, I make sure my Fiverr profile and gig descriptions are well written and communicate the value of the services I'm offering. When someone reaches out to me, I make sure to reply as quickly as I can and follow up with to inquiry by asking good questions. A quick, but carefully written reply will increase the odds of them hiring you drastically," Bochichio says.
Etsy
How it works: If you're artistic and are the type of person who can make custom jewelry or refrigerator magnets, Etsy is the place to sell your products.
Highlights: It's easy to navigate the site and set up a shop.
TaskRabbit
How it works: Are you willing to get your hands dirty? People come to this site to find those willing to do various tasks, such as putting together a bookcase, cleaning a garage or running an errand. Do as many tasks as you want, and this could become quite the part-time (or full-time) job.
Highlights: You can apply for tasks, but you can also put up a profile, explaining what tasks you're available for and skilled at, and people may end up seeking you out for work.
Wonder
How it works: People come to this site when they need research done. Wonder doesn't hire just anyone, but you can apply. The process takes about five minutes, according to the website. And if Wonder thinks you have the skills to do research, you'll get access to its dashboard. You can then choose to answer a question – perhaps coming from a business executive or an author writing a book.
The 5 best movies of all time
The greatest film ever made began with the meeting of two brilliant minds: Stanley Kubrick and sci-fi seer Arthur C Clarke. ‘I understand he’s a nut who lives in a tree in India somewhere,’ noted Kubrick when Clarke’s name came up – along with those of Isaac Asimov, Robert A Heinlein and Ray Bradbury – as a possible writer for his planned sci-fi epic. Clarke was actually living in Ceylon (not in India, or a tree), but the pair met, hit it off, and forged a story of technological progress and disaster (hello, HAL) that’s steeped in humanity, in all its brilliance, weakness, courage and mad ambition. An audience of stoners, wowed by its eye-candy Star Gate sequence and pioneering visuals, adopted it as a pet movie. Were it not for them, 2001 might have faded into obscurity, but it’s hard to imagine it would have stayed there. Kubrick’s frighteningly clinical vision of the future – AI and all – still feels prophetic, more than 50 years on.—Phil de Semlyen
From the wise guys of Goodfellas to The Sopranos, all crime dynasties that came after The Godfather are descendants of the Corleones: Francis Ford Coppola’s magnum opus is the ultimate patriarch of the Mafia genre. A monumental opening line (“I believe in America”) sets the operatic Mario Puzo adaptation in motion, before Coppola’s epic morphs into a chilling dismantling of the American dream. The corruption-soaked story follows a powerful immigrant family grappling with the paradoxical values of reign and religion; those moral contradictions are crystallized in a legendary baptism sequence, superbly edited in parallel to the murdering of four rivaling dons. With countless iconic details—a horse’s severed head, Marlon Brando’s wheezy voice, Nino Rota’s catchy waltz—The Godfather’s authority lives on.—Tomris Laffly
Back in the headlines thanks to David Fincher’s brilliantly acerbic making-of drama Mank, Citizen Kane always finds a way to renew itself for a new generation of film lovers. For newbies, the journey of its bulldozer of a protagonist – played with inexhaustible force by actor-director-wunderkind Orson Welles – from unloved child to thrusting entrepreneur to press baron to populist feels entirely au courant (in unconnected news, Donald Trump came out as a superfan). You can bathe in the film’s groundbreaking techniques, like Gregg Toland’s deep-focus photography, or the limitless self-confidence of its staging and its investigation of American capitalism. But it’s also just a damn good story that you definitely don’t need to be a hardened cineaste to enjoy.—Phil de Semlyen
Long considered a feminist masterpiece, Chantal Akerman’s quietly ruinous portrait of a widow’s daily routine—her chores slowly yielding to a sense of pent-up frustration—should take its rightful place on any all-time list. This is not merely a niche film, but a window onto a universal condition, depicted in a concentrated structuralist style. More hypnotic than you may realize, Akerman’s uninterrupted takes turn the simple acts of dredging veal or cleaning the bathtub into subtle critiques of moviemaking itself. (Pointedly, we never see the sex work Jeanne schedules in her bedroom to make ends meet.) Lulling us into her routine, Akerman and actor Delphine Seyrig create an extraordinary sense of sympathy rarely matched by other movies. Jeanne Dielman represents a total commitment to a woman’s life, hour by hour, minute by minute. And it even has a twist ending.—Joshua Rothkopf
Starting with a dissolve from the Paramount logo and ending in a warehouse inspired by Citizen Kane, Raiders of the Lost Ark celebrates what movies can do more joyously than any other film. Intricately designed as a tribute to the craft, Steven Spielberg’s funnest blockbuster has it all: rolling boulders, a barroom brawl, a sparky heroine (Karen Allen) who can hold her liquor and lose her temper, a treacherous monkey, a champagne-drinking villain (Paul Freeman), snakes (“Why did it have to be snakes?”), cinema’s greatest truck chase and a barnstorming supernatural finale where heads explode. And it’s all topped off by Harrison Ford’s pitch-perfect Indiana Jones, a model of reluctant but resourceful heroism (look at his face when he shoots that swordsman). In short, it’s cinematic perfection.—Ian Freer