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There are a lot of real and legitimate ways to make money from home. The ideas that I am going to share with you today have been tried and tested by either myself or other people. From this list of idea, you will find how you can make money from home without any investments, how to earn an income online from home as well as some of the most creative ways to make a living at home.
If you read until the end of the article, you will see two creative (and little-known) home-based business ideas that you can use to start earning an income at home.
How To Make Money From Home Without Any Investments
1. Find A Work From Home Job
If you want to make money for free at home, then getting a work from home job is probably the best for you.
Today, an increasing number of companies are hiring people to work at home either full-time or part-time, thanks to advancement in technology.
So, what does it take to get hired for a work-at-home job?
There are more home job opportunities for certain fields such as IT, Programming, Sales, Marketing, Accounting, Project Management, Writing and Customer Service.
If you are an experienced software developer, there is a very good chance (about 2000 job openings based on the screenshot below) that you can get hired for a software development job working from home.
If you can speak a second language very fluently, there are also plenty of work at home jobs that require people who are bilingual.
Below is a Flexjobs.com screenshot of the job categories for work from home jobs that are hiring now:
So, how do you find a work from home job that matches your experience and skills?
You can go to any one of job portals mentioned below, and search for online job listings.
By applying the appropriate filters, it will return you a list of all the job openings that meet your search criteria.
Here are some popular job portals you can use:
Job Portals For Online Work From Home Jobs ONLY
- Flexjobs.com
- Skip the Drive
- WeWorkRemotely.com
- Remote.co
- JustRemote
- Virtual Vocations
- Pangian
- Remote OK
- Working Nomads
- Jobspresso
- EuropeRemotely
- Jobscribe
- Wfh.io
- Outsourcely
Job Portals With Remote Options
2. Freelance From Home
If getting a work at home job is not something you want, what you can do is to sell services online from home as a freelancer.
What skills do you have that you can turn into services that other businesses or individuals already want and are willing to pay for?
Selling services is actually one of the quickest ways to make money.
It is all about solving problems and providing value for other people.
Are you helping other businesses solve their problems?
Or are you helping individuals?
Here are some service business ideas for each:
Ideas For Business Services:
- Digital Advertising Service
- Graphic Design Service
- Social Media Marketing Service
- Copywriting Service
- Translation Service
- Website Design Service
- Legal Service
- Accounting Service
- SEO Service
- Project Management Consulting
- PR Service
- Tax Service
- HR/Payroll Service
- Video Editing Service
Ideas For Personal Services:
- Career Consulting/Help (Resume editing / Interview Prep / Finding job)
- Give Lessons (Music, Language, Arts, Sports)
- Fashion Consulting
- Relationship Consulting
- Travel Planning
- Tax & Financial Planning
- SAT Prep
- College Application Review
Finding a profitable idea is just half the battle won. You must be able to get paying clients for the services you are selling.
There are quite a few freelancing platforms that connect freelancers with potential clients:
Of course, you can also start your own website and market your services yourself through blogging, social media and paid advertising.
How To Make Money Online From Home
3. Selling Advice Online
Selling advice is probably the best online business to start with if you have very little money to invest in your business or you want to start making money quickly.
When you are selling your advice, you just need to have a working email address or Skype account to get started.
A website is a good-to-have because you can use your website to build an online presence and establish authority in your niche.
In fact, you can get a proper website set up and running with less than $50.
With one less Starbucks coffee for 10 days, you could used the saved cash to start an online business helping other people solve their problems with your knowledge and expertise.
Domain Name & Web Hosting:
Free WordPress Theme: 70+ Best Free WordPress Themes For Your Website
Email Marketing Software:
Here’s a complete case study on how Davis Lin started a 5 figure per month business selling his knowledge and expertise online.
4. Blogging
Blogging is a proven method to make money online. If you are new to the online business world, blogging is actually a good starting point for you for a few reasons.
Reason #1: It’s easy and quick to get started. All you need is a domain name and web hosting. Even if you are not tech-savvy, you can set everything up with a few clicks.
Reason #2: You can build and grow your blog on the side without quitting your job. It’s extremely flexible. If you have other commitments, you just need to fit your blogging schedule around them.
Reason #3: There are many ways to earn money from your blog. Most of them are truly passive income such as affiliate earnings and advertising earnings.
There are quite a few bloggers who are making at least 5 to 6 figures every month. One such example is Pat Flynn of SmartPassiveIncome.com.
BUT, for every successful blogger, there are also hundreds of bloggers who are struggling to make a full-time living.
What do you need to succeed in it?
- Master blog traffic strategies (i.e. get people to visit your blog)
- Master blog monetization strategies (i.e. turn blog traffic into money)
Wanna find out how YOU can make at least $1000 a month online with a blog even if you have a full-time job?
In this email course, I will share with you EXACTLY what I did to take my blog from ZERO to $100 A day in less than 6 months!
5. Sell Online Courses
There are many advantages of creating and selling online courses.
First of all, It requires very little capital to get started.
Unlike selling physical products, you can keep your cost very low to create your online courses.
And you don’t need to worry about inventory and shipping.
Once your clients make the payment, they can access it instantly.
Also, you only have to do the work once – creating the course.
Then you can sell it over and over again and sell to as many people as you can.
So, it’s a very scalable business model.
it might take weeks, maybe even months, to put it together a good online course.
Secondly, it’s just a one-time sale, so you always have to get new customers for your online courses.
The only way you can increase the lifetime value of your customers is to keep creating new courses to sell to your old customers.
Lastly, creating your online courses is only half battle won. You need to know how to market your online courses well.
If nobody sees your online course, you won’t get any sales.
That’s also why many course creators are struggling to make sales for their online courses.
What do you need to succeed in it?
- Create an online course that people actually want and are willing to pay for it ( i.e. market demand)
- Marketing know-how (i.e. get eyeballs on your online course)
- Conversion skills (i.e. converting them into paying customers)
Read Also: A Beginner’s Guide: How To Make Money Selling Online Courses
6. Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing means that you promote other people’s(or company’s) products/ services and earn a commission for each sale you make.
How it works is that you find an affiliate program that you want to join, then you apply to become an affiliate.
Once they have approved you as an affiliate, you will be given a personalized tracking link.
When people click this link to buy the product or service, they will know that this sale comes from you.
Typically, when you join an affiliate program, you will have an affiliate account set up and you can monitor all your sales and earnings from there.
Some popular affiliate programs include Amazon affiliate programs and ShareASale affiliate programs.
For each affiliate program, it has its own payout structure.
Some offer you a one-time fixed dollar amount payout while others give you a percentage of their sales as your commission.
So, how much can you make from affiliate marketing?
It all comes down to two factors:
- How many people you can get to click your affiliate links to check out the product or service that you are promoting
- What percentage of them you can actually convert into buyers
The income potential from affiliate marketing can be quite high if you follow the right strategy.
For example, Pat Flynn of SmartPassiveIncome is making more than $100,000 every month just from affiliate marketing alone.
Read Also: Affiliate Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide
7. E-commerce
When it comes to e-commerce, I think many of us are very familiar with it.
Personally, I buy a lot of things online, especially groceries, children’s toys and baby care products.
I have never sold physical products before, but I have friends and relatives who have done it and had success with it.
So, now let’s dive in and decode how thousands of e-commerce business owners are making money online.
If you want to sell physical products online, you either create your own or you can sell private label products.
Private label products are those manufactured by one company for sale under another company’s brand. Private-label goods are available in a wide range of industries from food to cosmetics. Simply put, a private label product has your brand name on it but is manufactured by someone else.
-STARTUPBROS
To sell your physical products, you can either sell it on platforms such as Amazon or Etsy, or you can start your own online store.
One of my friends started an online store selling private label products – handphone case covers.
He sourced the products from China at a very low cost per unit. Then he spent some money running Facebook ads to promote his products.
In the first two months, he made 5 figure in pure profit.
BUT, other sellers started to bring in the EXACTLY same products and sell at a much cheaper price.
His sales suffered and was forced to find other products.
When you sell private lable products, you don’t really have any competitive edge. Your competitors can easily go into the same market and squeeze your profit margin.
But, if you can design and create your own unique products, then it’s entirely a different story.
You can compete with your competitors on so many levels such as branding, product quality and customer service.
Read Also: 7 Most Successful Shopify Stores (Ecommerce Inspiration Guaranteed)
Creative Ways To Make Money From Home
8. Service Arbitrage
A few years ago, both my husband and I lost our jobs unexpectedly (The company that we both worked for suddenly closed down).
So, we needed to make some money quickly to help pay the bills.
After some research, I found out that the fastest way to make money was to sell services.
But, there was one problem – no sell-able skills.
Then, an idea struck me.
Why not sell other people’s skills?
Then, I noticed that there are literally hundreds of thousands of talented freelancers selling their skills on freelance platforms such as Fiverr & Upwork.
And, a lot of them are always looking for more freelance work.
So, why not get clients for the service they offer and outsource the work to them?
And I call this business Service Arbitrage.
So here’s how it works.
First, you find in-demand services that freelancers are already offering at a super low price on freelancing websites.
Then, you market their services to businesses that need it. Once you get a sale, you hire the freelancers to deliver the work for you.
How you make money is that you quote a higher price to your clients than what your freelancers quote you and pocket the price difference as your profit.
This can be considered another variant of freelancing.
The only difference is that you are outsourcing the work to other freelancers instead of doing the work yourself.
Want Me To Show You Exactly How I Started My Service Arbitrage Business From Scratch And Got My First Paying Clients?
9. Flipping Websites
You might have heard of flipping houses where people buy a house and renovate it and then resell it for a profit quickly.
Flipping websites is kind of similar to that.
The only difference is that websites are digital properties instead of physical properties.
To flip a website for a profit, you also need to “renovate” it in terms of improving its traffic numbers and content.
Once you have managed to publish more high quality content and grow your website traffic, you are able to command a higher price for your “property”.
Here are some of the most well known website brokers for buying and selling websites:
Here’s a very detailed case study on website flipping.
Summary
All of the above are tried and tested ways to make money from home. Regardless of which one you use, you need to understand that to make a full time living from home takes not only learning the right strategies but also putting in the hard work and time to implement the strategies.
Hey, Gladice! Great post, thanks for sharing your knowledge! By the way, I love the content you have been posting lately.