Sell your services as a freelancer. One of the best ways to make money is to offer services including but not limited to web design, graphic design, copywriting, translation, etc. Some of the main freelancing websites include: Elance, Freelancer, Guru, vWorker, GetACoder (not just for coding) and oDesk. For a more comprehensive list of freelancing sites, visit this FreelanceSwitch article. Run a college moving service. Do you have a truck or van? Run an end-of-the-school-year college moving service for fairly local students. Hang up flyers at the start of the finals period. Become a holiday chef for hire. If you don’t celebrate Christmas and/or Thanksgiving, advertise yourself as a holiday dinner chef for hire. This will give your employer(s) more time with family. Take headshots. Advertise on bulletin boards near college theater departments. Take care of laundromats. Do you live near an unattended laundromat? The two biggest issues the owners of unattended laundromats face are (1) cleanliness and (2) the presence of quarters in the change machine (they also face security concerns, which they address with video cameras). You can take these two major concerns off the owner’s plate by just checking in once a day for a fee. The owner won’t have to go out of his/her way to do so and you’ll make some easy money. Become a campus rep. If you’re in college, you can make money as a campus rep for a company. Here are some campus rep programs: Apple, Uloop, Koofers. Just search “campus rep” in Google. Learn to build simple WordPress.org (self-hosted) websites (there are plenty of online guides). Provide these services to local businesses that don’t yet have websites. There are 1000s of free WordPress themes available, meaning you don’t need to know anything about design to be successful building simple WordPress.org websites (you just have to buy hosting, install WordPress and a free theme and add the business’ content). Sell unwanted clothes to thrift shops. Become a certified massage therapist. Here’s how: National Certification Board for Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork Apply to work for a temp agency. Go to nursing school. While most of these ways to make money describe part time businesses, I couldn’t leave nursing school off of the list. That’s because, for many nursing students, it results in a nearly recession-proof, well-paid job that even allows you to move around quite freely. Wait tables at comedy clubs. People often think about waiting tables at restaurants to earn extra money, but don’t forget to check out your local comedy clubs. Comedy clubs generally offer great weekend and night hours that work very well as a second job. Replace home locks. I’ve tried to keep this list as accessible to as many people as possible (it’s mostly part time business opportunities that don’t require a lot of technical skill that you might not already have), so you might be asking yourself why a skilled task like this is on the list. The answer to that is that installing new locks on a door is very easy. Just go to a hardware store, buy new locks and read the minimal directions. You can also offer to install bars over people’s windows at the same time, if local crime is an issue. Make sure your advertisements (try Craigslist) appeal to the security conscious and to people who recently moved into a home and want the locks changed. Create scrapbooks and photo albums for other people. This is a great part time job and one of the most enjoyable ways to make money because you can watch movies while doing it. Rent out your garage. If you have extra space, you can make money by renting it out to the same group of people who would otherwise be using a company like PublicStorage. Find out how much companies like Public Storage cost and offer your garage at 25% less. Put both rates side-by-side on a flyer and post it on community bulletin boards. As with all of these suggestions, be sure to obtain proper insurance and legal protection. Paint house numbers on curbs. Here’s how: eHow Model for an art class. Call university art departments to see what opportunities are available. List all of your unwanted books on Half and Amazon’s used book marketplace. Hold a Saturday bike safety clinic. Find a list of key bike safety topics on the Internet beforehand. What wealthy parent wouldn’t pay $25 to have their children learn all there is to know about bike safety? Advertise through the local PTA’s/elementary school’s newsletter and/or mailing list. Also consider advertising in church announcements. Change jobs. Check out these articles: “Ten jobs that pay $20 an hour,” “10 Careers that Top $30 per Hour” and “10 Jobs That Pay $30 an Hour“ Sell cold bottles of water on a hot day. Buy a large case from a wholesale store. A case of 24 bottles of water is $5-6 at a store like Costco. That’s less than $0.25 per bottle. Chill them and sell them for $1 each — a huge margin. Sell or rent out your wedding dress via WeddingDressMarket. Become a part time wedding photographer for inexpensive weddings. Professional wedding photographers are extremely expensive. It wouldn’t be difficult to parlay your amateur photography skills into a part time business that could drastically undercut expensive wedding photographers. Start a pick up and drop off laundry service. You’d pick up your clients’ dirty clothes and return them clean and folded within 24 hours. You’d need to do this in neighborhoods in which people’s lack of a laundry machine is not because of a lack of money, but because of space constraints. Get as many customers as possible, because adding another client doesn’t add a lot of work; you can do that customer’s laundry (and your own) at the same time. To advertise, hand out flyers in your city’s financial district (to reach wealthy potential clients) and post flyers near laundromats. Share your home or apartment wireless network. You can make money doing this with HotSpot System, Tomizone, Silver Lining Networks and Zonerider. Sell unwanted items on Ebay and Craigslist. Lead hikes. You can advertise yourself from a few different angles: An experienced woodsman, a person who will expose kids to the outdoors (i.e. “educational babysitting”) or someone who knows the local natural history. Become a part time handyman. Hand out flyers (better yet, attach refrigerator magnets to those flyers) to all of the houses in your area. When homes in your area have a problem, they’ll know to call you. Add your business to Google Places and always ask for referrals. Become a college note taker. If you’re a college student, one of the easiest ways to may money is to become an official note taker for some of your classes. Contact your university’s disability office to see if there is any current demand for notes from your class. You can get paid to supply notes to those who are hard of hearing or have other disabilities. The best part is that you theoretically don’t have to do any additional work; just show up to the classes you’re already taking, take organized notes and then submit them. Resell college furniture. Buy college student furniture for wildly depressed prices at the end of the school year (i.e. a used couch for $15 that someone is going to have to throw out because they don’t have anywhere to store it over the summer) and sell the pieces for higher prices at the start of the following school year (i.e. $100 for that same couch in the fall). Help people declutter their homes. Some people simply don’t have time to organize their lives. Others simply can’t bring themselves to give their things up. Market yourself as an “organization consultant” (it’s an actual job, Google it). Redeem cans and bottles for money. This can be especially profitable in areas that lack recycling receptacles. How? This will allow you to ask your neighbors for their cans and bottles because they’ll consider your offer to remove their cans a service and not a nuisance. In fact, you can just ask your neighbors to deposit their cans in a box on your front porch and you’ll recycle all of the cans for your neighborhood. That’ll make this money making opportunity as passive as possible. Become a street performer. While a little far-fetched, if you know how to play an instrument, sing, juggle, do magic or even just stay perfectly still for a very long period of time, this could be an option. Digitize photos using a scanner. How many of your neighbors have many of their older family photos in physical form only? Many people would pay for you to take their irreplaceable family photos and digitize them, so that they are much safer (in addition, they can now send them to whoever they would like, make infinite copies, etc.). All you need is a scanner and time. Put together a flyer describing your services and distribute it to all of your neighbors. In addition, post an ad on Craigslist. This is an excellent way to earn extra money because you can watch movies while scanning photos. Rent out your DVDs. Make a list of your DVDs and print it on a flyer. Put the rental rate for your local video store side-by-side with your lower rate and distribute the flyers to neighbors/hang them in your neighborhood. Be sure to collect a security deposit from renters that would cover the replacement of the DVD should it break or not be returned. This will allow you to derive fairly passive income from DVDs you have sitting around. You can also list your collection on a DevHub site so people know which DVDs are available and which have been checked out. Sell your gold (just be sure to sell it to a reputable company). There are lots of companies that buy broken and unwanted gold jewelry and melt it down. Sell your product idea. Here’s how: Entrepreneur Make soap at home (there are plenty of online guides) and sell it online. Try emulating the business model of this successful online soap salesperson (her Han Solo soap sells out almost every week): Luxury Lane Soap Rent mini fridges to college students. A fraternity did this on my college campus. They bought a number of mini fridges and allowed students to rent them for the year for a fee. This was great for the renters, as they did not have to buy a bulky machine they weren’t going to take with them after college and they didn’t have to worry about storing it over the summer. The fraternity also delivered the bulky mini fridges at the beginning of the year and picked them up at the end of the year. If you’re renting out mini fridges, you could provide a deal to anyone who also rents a microwave. Also, you don’t need to purchase the mini fridges prior to the first time you rent them out. Just set up a booth with an example fridge and take orders. On call flower and chocolate delivery. This one’s a little far-fetched: Start an on call flower and chocolate delivery service. When someone messes up, they can have your business card in their wallet and call you. You’ll have chocolates and flowers to them within a half an hour (that they can then bring home to their loved one). Hand out flyers in your city’s financial district. Advertise on your car. I’ve covered wrapping your car in an advertisement elsewhere on this list, but that’s a situation that involves going through specialized companies that (1) recruit people who are willing to wrap their car in an advertisement and (2) recruit the companies looking to put their advertisements on people’s cars. You can cut out the middle man; go straight to local business owners and offer to put an advertisement for their businesses on your car for a small monthly fee (i.e. $50/month). Tell them how many miles you generally drive monthly and whether that driving is primarily local, regional or long distance. For ease, you can have the business owner print out a large magnetic ad from a site like VistaPrint that you can easily attach to your car and remove later on. Once you’ve struck an advertising deal with a local business (or a few), the income is entirely passive. Rent out an extra room in your house to a long term renter (as opposed to renting a room out as a vacation rental with airbnb, as I suggest elsewhere on this list). Even if you don’t have a free room, consider all options: Can you share your room? Can you repurpose a room as a bedroom? Can your renter sleep on the couch? Can you sleep on the couch? Start an innovative knitting business. Do you knit? Try repeating the business model of this really amazing home business: Reknit Become a part time bike messenger. If you already exercise, why not get paid for it? Search Google for “bike messenger jobs” in your area. Clean the outsides of people’s windows safely. Hardware stores sell hose attachments that allow you to turn a normal hose into a window washer (some even inject cleaning fluid into the stream of water). Provide lunch catering services to local businesses, particularly to businesses that do not have cafeterias and are not near restaurants. You can create a system in which individual workers order simple meals from you (i.e. sandwiches) and you deliver them en masse at particular time; you can get permission to visit an office with a prepared array of food that workers can buy directly from you; or you can work with office management to provide a larger array of offerings for the whole office (the office’s management buys from you on behalf of the employees). Sell your plasma. Here’s how: eHow Sell umbrellas and ponchos. Buy umbrellas and ponchos in bulk and sell them in cities when it starts raining. Selling on the street without a permit might be illegal in your area, so always do your research. Pawn or sell items at a pawn shop. If you’re considering either of these options, however, consider whether or not you really need the items. If not, why not just sell them on Ebay, Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace? Host an exchange student. These websites should get you started: CCI Center for Cultural Interchange, EF Foundation for Foreign Study and the Pacific Intercultural Exchange Train other people’s pets. Dog training is expensive. Read a few books on dog training techniques and watch a few DVDs. You’ll then likely be able to offer dog training services at a lower price than many of your competitors. Become a late night motel attendant. This is a “cushy” job in the sense that most motels just need someone to sit at the front desk late at night and this attendant doesn’t really have to do much (you could use this time to make money in a different way). Get a list of motels in your area by searching your city’s name and “motel” and visit each of them to see if there are job openings. Become a part time personal chef (either for regular meals or for specialty meals, like gluten-free meals or vegan meals). Search for groups of celiac disease sufferers, busy people and/or vegans in your area. Sell earthworms. This is a bit of a far-fetched way to make money for most, but I like it for three reasons: (1) It allows you to turn your kitchen waste into something useful to you (it’s my understanding that worms eat everything from coffee grinds to moldy bread), (2) it requires very little effort to maintain and (3) after you establish a good relationship with a local bait shop, no advertising is necessary. Here’s a guide that describes how to breed and sell earthworms: eHow Search for money you might be owed. The National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators (NAUPA) estimates that one out of eight Americans has unclaimed property with an average amount of $1,000. This is money that can come from a number of sources such as a returned utilities deposit, a lost inheritance check, a check from cashing out your savings account when you were a kid, etc. If at any point these or similar items couldn’t be delivered to you, there’s a chance that they are in a state warehouse waiting for you to claim them. Visit Unclaimed.org to begin the brief search process for every state you’ve ever called home. Hand wash cars (your customers can drive them to your house and your spouse can feed them lunch while they wait). While customers could just go to a mechanized car wash, some car-nuts prefer the precision of a hand wash. Become a part time personal assistant. Save people time and make money by washing dishes, picking items up from the grocery store, collecting their mail, etc. Copyediting: Jobs.CopyEditor Become an au pair/live-in nanny: GreatAuPair and AuPair. Tutor. Everyone has something they can teach, from basic math to college level English. You could help recent immigrants learn English or young kids learn cursive. Tutoring can be one of the most rewarding ways to make money, and it doesn’t matter if you didn’t do well in school; you can still teach young children how to read or other basic skills. Advertise on Craigslist. Hang Christmas lights on people’s homes. This is a task that takes forever and many people would prefer to hire someone else to do it. Use Claz.org to find part-time jobs (it’s an excellent website that searches Craigslist, which can be hard to navigate on its own). Sell poinsettias door-to-door during the Christmas season. People can place their orders with you and you’ll only need to buy and deliver those you sell (the only real expense before you have customers is your time). Be sure to target wealthy neighborhoods. Resell used furniture and computers from universities and schools. Contact educational institutions and see if they’re getting rid of large quantities of computers and/or furniture (they normally liquidate them at fire sale prices). Friends bought card catalogues for $50 each from the Yale University Library right before it was renovated and sold them for $800 each on Ebay. Used university computers are great targets for this because schools often upgrade them when they are still functional and liquidate the used ones en masse. Advertise for stores at intersections. Approach restaurants and stores about holding a sign that advertises the restaurant or store at a nearby popular intersection. Here’s what you can tell them: (1) Hiring you is cheaper than what it would cost for a fixed advertisement at that intersection for a day, (2) most stationary advertisements are sold through contracts that last at least a month but you’ll work for as short as a day at a time, which means you can advertise short term events like a sale), and (3) your advertisement will pay for itself because you’ll bring in new customers. Start a college laundry service. Start a laundry service for wealthy/lazy college students. You can do your own laundry at the same time. Advertise your services on campus bulletin boards. Sell Mother’s Day cards to college students. Buy Mother’s Day cards in bulk and sell them on the street on college campuses just prior to the holiday. Your presence will not only serve as a reminder, but it’ll be a quick and easy way students can buy a card while they’re stressing about the end of the semester. Renegotiate your salary. Prepare by looking over salary negotiation tips. Offer green cleaning services (including green carpet cleaning). I’ve discussed cleaning houses to make extra money elsewhere on this list, but consider offering a higher end, more specialized service: Green cleaning. Here’s a great guide to green cleaning practices to help you get started: PlanetGreen Pet sit. List your services in directories like these and see who calls: PetSitUSA, CatSitter and PetSit. Hang flyers for local businesses (you can do this for many businesses — including your own flyer-hanging business — at the same time). Approach business owners offering to hang their flyers on community bulletin boards for them (within delis and supermarkets, on local kiosks, etc.). For an additional fee, you can even design the flyers. Earning money hanging flyers works best if you can create a sizable client list early, as then you can hang flyers for multiple clients in the same locations at the same time (very little extra work for each additional client). Participate in paid focus groups. Use Google to find all of the market research companies in your area that hold paid focus groups. Get on their mailing lists. After filling out a brief questionnaire, they’ll email you when you might qualify for one of their focus groups. You can also try this website: FindFocusGroups Teach a university gym class (sometimes general university fitness courses like “Abs Boot Camp” aren’t taught by certified fitness instructors). Buy items at garage sales and resell them on Ebay (check the prices of similar goods on Ebay using a smartphone before you buy an item to resell on Ebay). Sell quilts. Do you quilt? Design and sell custom quilts. Start a furniture moving service for Craigslist. Do you own a truck or a van? Start a furniture moving business that caters to people buying furniture over Craigslist. In college, the biggest obstacle to buying dorm furniture on Craigslist was not the price (the prices are generally quite low), but that I didn’t have any way to get the furniture to campus. If you have a truck or van, you can make money by picking the furniture up and delivering it. The best part: You can likely advertise your services right in the furniture section of Craigslist and just wait for people to call. Don’t forget to advertise on college campuses as well, especially at the beginning of the year when students would like to buy dorm room furniture (you could also deliver from places like IKEA and Walmart). Resell other people’s unwanted textbooks. Are you in college? A lot of people throw out textbooks at the end of the year. Collect them and resell them on Half and Amazon’s used books section. You can sell used textbooks that people were throwing out for $20-$150. Host a gold party. Here’s one company that can help: MyGoldParty Go metal-detecting on the beach. While this is one of the more far-fetched ways to make money, if you’re the type of person who both needs to get some sun/be outdoors and could use some extra cash, why not pick up metal detecting as a hobby? Become a part time youth sports referee or umpire. Offer home energy audits. Read a few books about conducting home energy audits like Do-It-Yourself Home Energy Audits: 140 Simple Solutions to Lower Energy Costs, Increase Your Home’s Efficiency, and Save the Environment by David S. Findley. Come up with a comprehensive home energy audit checklist and go through the checklist at your clients’ homes. Grocery shop for other people. Not only can you make money while doing your regular grocery shopping, but you can likely broker a deal with your clients in which they pay the full retail price for items and if you can find a coupon, you keep the savings (on top of your per trip fee). The best part: In addition to shopping yourself, you can shop for several other clients at the same time. Some online retailers like Walgreens offer free shipping on high volume purchases (and you can use coupon codes from sites like RetailMeNot), which means you might not even have to leave home to do your shopping. Deliver food to hungry bar goers. Cook a dish at home, put it in a rolling cooler and bring your food to bars (particularly around closing time). The “Tamale Lady” is famous for this in San Francisco. Become a direct sales representative (sell products directly to friends and others in your neighborhood). Some of the most popular direct sales companies include Mary Kay (makeup), Avon (makeup), Silpada (jewelry), PartyLite (home decor), Vector Marketing (knives) and Amway (home products). For a longer list of direct sales organizations, click here. Participate in a paid clinical trial: ClinicalConnection Embroider birth samplers to make some extra money. Find the Lamaze classes in wealthy areas and pitch your services to expectant mothers with money. Clean houses for extra money. Start a part time carpet cleaning business. Rent a carpet cleaning machine from a grocery store or hardware store and charge people a bit below what professional carpet cleaning services charge. Take outdoor photos of high school and college seniors. Soon-to-be-graduates often purchase graduation photos, many of which are taken outside and thus don’t require a studio. If you have a passion for photography, this is one of the most enjoyable ways to make money. Post ads on Craigslist and hang flyers on college bulletin boards. Sell gift cards you have (even partially used ones): PlasticJungle Lead long distance bike rides. Get to know the trails/safe streets in your area and lead long distance bike rides. This is one of the best ways to make money on the weekends. Become a surrogate mother: SurrogateMother Work as a golf caddy (the nicer the golf course, the larger the tips). This is great part time weekend work. There are also college scholarships available to past caddies: Evans Scholars Foundation Sell leftover garage sales goods on Ebay. Approach people having garage sales about selling their unsold stuff on Ebay and Craigslist for a large commission. They’re likely going to throw these items out or repack them anyway. Repair electronics and appliances. Can you fix nearly everything? Then you can easily make money by starting an electronics/appliance repair service. People would drop off their broken items at your house and you’d call them when you’re ready. Be sure to add your business to Google Places. Sell other people’s stuff on Ebay. Many people either don’t know how to do this or simply don’t have the time. If you don’t know how to list an item for sale on Ebay, don’t worry; it’s easy. People could drop their items off at your house and you could spend a month trying to sell them (try listing them on Craigslist too). If an item sells, you’d take a commission. Sell your old video games. You can sell them on Ebay or take them to a video game store that buys used games. Here’s a way to decide which games you’d like to sell: Put a piece of tape over the part of the game that you insert into your console. If, after three months, you haven’t removed the tape, sell the game. Polish other people’s silver. Advertise in senior citizen communities. Become a substitute teacher. Here’s how: Teacher-World and eHow Become a cheap alternative to a professional exterminator. Home Depot and similar stores sell home pest control kits as well as bug traps for a variety of insects. Buy a home pest control kit and start advertising your part time pest control services, provided local, state and federal laws permit you to do so.
Posted on: Sun, 06 Jul 2014 22:58:11 +0000
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