Real Ways to Make Money From Home
Why? The Internet is a land of opportunities for anything you want to do with your life.
There are literally hundreds of ways to employ yourself and make money from home with just a computer, an internet connection, and your brain.
By choosing self-employment, you’re basically choosing the entrepreneurship route. Basically, the entrepreneurship route is fraught with risk especially if you don’t have a clear, backup plan.
A self-employed person or entrepreneur is a person who chooses to take all the risks and rewards at the same time.
If you’re coming from employment, then the risk you’re taking is that of forgoing the security of a 9 to 5 job and a monthly paycheck.
As always, the risk is the price you pay for the opportunities you get.
The success of self-employment depends on your determination, passion, and hard work. This requires a change of mindset with the full realization that you’re making a conscious decision to go on your own and become your own boss. This prospect can sometimes be scary especially when you realize that henceforth, you will not get a monthly paycheck (if you’re employed).
The fact is that you only earn if you work. If you stop working, the money also stops coming.
The first thing you should do is settle and write down all the risks, rewards, opportunities, and threats on a notepad. These may include the prospect of going without an income for several months.
How with you pay the bills? Do you have some cash stashed away somewhere?
If you currently don’t have a job, then this does not apply. The only thing you will ask yourself is:
How do I start?
Where do I get capital?
Do I have a plan?
If you can answer these questions, you’re probably on your way to self-employment.
Either way, you should have a clearly written plan. A plan is simply a statement of the things you want to do, the cost of doing those things, and the income that will accrue from your activities.
The plan will be informed by what you want to do. This will be derived after exploring the opportunities available, your skills, and your prospective market.
The first question you should ask yourself is:
“What skills do I have?”
Write them down as “Strengths” in your plan.
Also, list down all the risks as “Weaknesses”. For example, making losses in your first six months is a risk.
List all the “Opportunities” in your plan. This could be your target market, which you have already studied and found it to be viable. If unsure, find an accountant to do it for you.
Finally, list down the things that may go wrong with your plan as “Threats”. For example, not getting enough capital is a threat.
This will give a clear perspective about why you want to go into self-employment.
That being the case, let’s look at some opportunities available. They range from offline to online business opportunities.
1. Florist/Landscape Designer
Arranging flowers can be both fun and exciting. Making beautiful flower arrangements into a beautiful design can bring you a nice, consistent income over a short time.
Landscape design is another work-from-home opportunity for someone with an eye for design.
2. House Cleaning
Most people are either too or too busy. Taking advantage of this, you will find house-cleaning gigs around your area within no time. Take advantage of this fast-growing home opportunity. Depending on your attitude, a house cleaning service can bring you a steady income over time and move you to financial freedom
3. Pet Trainer
People love their pets. But most people are too busy to walk their pets let alone train them. If you love pets, you can become a pet trainer-cum-walker and collect a nice, consistent fee for doing what you love.
4. Photographer
Photography used to be only a hobby — Not anymore. If you enjoy photography and you have a good camera, you can build a successful photography business and make a good living off it.
5. Fitness Trainer/Yoga Instructor
Nowadays, people are so unfit that they need the services of a fitness trainer. You don’t even need to have a bodybuilder’s body to do it. You just need to understand the routine; what to do to keep someone fit. Of course, you should be reasonably fit yourself. Yoga is an oriental fitness technique that’s driving almost everyone crazy.
Assuming that your clients already have some training gear, you can go into this business without investing any capital. The big advantage of this is that you become fit yourself while making a comfortable living in the process.
6. Clothing Designer
Clothing design is as old as the world. People love good design and will continue to do so for as long as humans exist.
Amazingly, the clothing design business continues to grow exponentially. If you’re adept at stitching intricate gowns, creating hand-painted scarves or designing t-shirts, the opportunities for making money from home are almost endless
7. Massage Therapist
Massage therapy is an evergreen type of business with no shortage of clients. Most people need a massage, especially after a hard day’s work. To become a massage therapist you only need to become certified as a massage therapist and register a business.
As long as you meet the basic requirements, you can collect a steady sum of money doing this age-old business.
8. Interior Designer
Interior design and home décor are one of the oldest types of business for anyone with a knack for style and design. Offer decorating services to businesses and homeowners. You do not need a physical location to offer this kind of service. You can do much of the brainstorming and administrative work from home and visit clients on-site.
9. Sell Homemade Products
If you have a knack for creativity, you can sell homemade products and make money. There are many types of products you can make depending on market demand including, homemade laundry detergents, dishwasher detergents, ant-killer, toothpaste, homemade dog food, homemade jams, peanut butter, soaps, deodorants, decorations, clothing, etc… the list is endless.
You can start small and end up becoming a full-fledged manufacturer. Much large manufacturing started like this.
10. Start a Dropshipping Store
The dropshipping model is an e-Commerce type of business, where a third party produces, stores, and ships your products to your customers on your behalf, leaving marketing and customer service as your chief responsibilities.
With drop shipping, you don’t need to hold any inventory as everything is produced and stored by a third party. You make your profit by putting a markup on the cost of products.
Dropshipping is a multimillion-dollar type of business with every large company embracing the model. You can enter the industry at a niche level where there’s little or no competition and grow the business to generate millions of dollars.
11. Start a Print-on-Demand Business
Print-on-demand uses a similar business model as dropshipping except that, a print-on-demand business doesn’t require you to hold any inventory or ship anything yourself. Print-on-demand even offers you more flexibility than dropshipping because it gives the opportunity to customize or band your own product labels, which are then shipped as your own.
If you have a knack for design, you can design all sorts of printable designs on t-shirts, hoods, cups, mugs, face masks, shirts, tanks, sweatshirts, jackets, books, accessories, jewelry, and just about anything you can think of.
Print-on-demand is fast becoming a profitable type of business for work-from-home entrepreneurs, stay-at-home moms, and anyone who wants to make an online living from home.
12. Sell Your Service or Expertise
If you have some skills like web design, coding/programming, graphic design, SEO, digital marketing, public relations, content writing, copywriting, video production, legal, financial, investing, or accounting, or just about anything you can think of, you can offer them online and make a tidy sum of money.
Just go to websites like Fiverr, Freelancer, Upwork, Toptal, PeoplePerHour, etc… and myriad other websites and discover a ton of other services you can offer online.
13. Offer Online Services
The demand for emerging services like social media management, YouTube, and content management is growing at an all-time high, as the internet keeps growing at an exponential rate.
As new social media platforms emerge like Tik Tok, Lasso, Vero, Caffeine, and Steemit, new opportunities for marketing are also emerging and so are opportunities to manage the accounts on those platforms.
This has created a haven for online entrepreneurs who have trained themselves not only to take advantage of those platforms but also to manage and market using the platforms.
This means your opportunities to make money online are endless.
14. Teach Online Classes
As new challenges emerge in the world today, the demand for learning is growing at an all-time high. The global pandemic outbreak has forced people to stay at home and even invent ways to work from home with the computer.
As the pandemic rages, schools have closed down. Universities have closed down. Schoolchildren have missed nearly a whole year of schoolwork. Universities have postponed their academic programs, and basically, teachers are jobless.
They say that necessity is the mother of invention. Teaching platforms have been developed that simulate learning in every subject under the sun, and you can make a neat sum of money teaching online classes.
If you have a passion for teaching, you can teach anything including languages, science, math, arts, elementary courses, degree courses, technology, and just about anything you can think of.
However, the most money is made when you package your courses into consumable online content like video-on-demand or PDF products that can be marketed or sold either online on various platforms or via your own website.
These types of products are also referred to as information products.
Numerous online platforms are available to sell your online courses like Udemy, Coursera, and Skillshare.
15. Start an Online Business
The internet is the great equalizer. In business, in particular, it has leveled the playing field. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection can start an online business, and start making money immediately.
FACT: virtually no technical experience is necessary. Anyone can start virtually from nothing and build a multimillion-dollar online empire. Besides, today there are plenty of tools you can leverage to build an online business that makes the technical work a lot easier than it was in the past.
An online business is basically any business that conducts its entire or partial operations and generates revenue from online sales.
Basically, many online businesses, such as what we have mentioned earlier, qualify in this category, including blogging, vlogging, eCommerce, dropshipping, online courses, social media management, online marketing, affiliate marketing, and a myriad other online business models.
16. Affiliate Marketing
A review of online business models cannot be complete without a mention of Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate marketing is the easiest way to build an income online without much start-up capital.
According to Wikipedia,
“Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or lead generated by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.”
Basically, as an affiliate marketer, you earn a commission by promoting other people’s (or company’s) products.
To become an affiliate, you only need to apply and join one or more affiliate networks. Fill out a simple online form and submit the form and wait for approval to start promoting the affiliate network’s products.
Once approved, you can just browse through the affiliate network’s database, find a product or products you like, start promoting it to others, and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make.
Bear in mind that you can actually automate the whole process, thanks to today’s technology.
There are popularly two affiliate marketing models, namely, cost-based or cost-per-sale (CPS), and action-based or cost-per-action (CPA).
In cost-based affiliate marketing (CPS), the affiliate must generate a sale, whereas, in action-based affiliate marketing (CPA), you get paid by generating a lead.
Find traffic or an audience, which you can easily get in a social media network like Facebook groups or Twitter, and start sharing your affiliate links on those platforms. When someone clicks on your link and purchases a product through that link, you earn a commission. It’s as simple as that. No technical skills are necessary.
However, I must caution you. Many social media platforms hate affiliate links and the reason is obvious — you are leaking their revenues. The way to promote affiliate links on a social media platform is to send your traffic to a landing page. A landing page acts as a shield between your affiliate link and the product offer you are promoting.
Affiliate marketing is the ideal online business model to start earning passive income, meaning you can set it up the system once and continue to generate commissions perpetually, with little or no work on your part.
If you want a proper introduction to affiliate marketing and how to start an online business making a daily income of $1000, there’s a link in the description area of my Quora bio.
What’s more?
The reason I’ve chosen to discuss affiliate marketing more is that I think it is the easiest online business to start from home even if you don’t have any money.
The big advantage is that you can run an affiliate marketing business from anywhere, not just your home as long as you have a computer and access to the internet. Although there are dozens of other types of online businesses you can run from home, nothing gives you flexibility and freedom like affiliate marketing does.
It is a real set-up-and-forget business, meaning if you set it up properly, you can do it once and continue to earn commissions for the rest of your life.
Editorial Disclaimer: This article reflects the opinions and perspectives of the author. It does not represent the publication’s point of view. In addition, we kindly ask that sources of information be appropriately documented. Illumination and all its publications keep a neutral perspective on this topic to allow diverse voices.
