The mornings bring pain. Discomfort. Unease. You don’t welcome the day. You dread it. At night, while everyone at home is fast asleep, your mind spins. It races a million miles a minute. Money problems will do that to you. They’ll make you lose sleep and dread the day. You often wonder how others seem to have it all figured out. They seem to know how to make money. It’s like a walk in the park for them. But not for you. You’re drowning in a sea of debt. Suffocating. It’s a slow and painful financial death. And you’re sick of it.
What about those other people? The ones who seem to have it so easy? What makes it so easy for them to make money? How do they always seem to be traveling and living life to the fullest while you’re stuck in a life-sucking job that you hate? Look, making money isn’t easy. Not when you’re struggling to survive. Not when your back is against the wall. And especially not when you make barely enough money to get by. But what if I told you there was another way? A different route? A way to make money from your laptop? In your sleep? While traveling? Would you believe me?
Can You Really Make Money From Anywhere?
The truth? You can make money from anywhere. You can make money from your phone or your laptop. From a remote tropical island or a bustling metropolis. And you can certainly do it in any industry or niche. You know that you can deep down inside. But something is holding you back. Something keeps getting in your way. And you just can’t figure it out. That doesn’t mean you’re incapable of making money online, offline or from home. It just means that there’s a mental block. A lack of belief, if you will. After all, we all have the potential to make millions (if not billions). Every single one of us.
But this isn’t about some pep talk. I’m not here to cheer you up. I’m here to lay the groundwork in front of you. To give you a roadmap. To be a guide. And to help you navigate this murky money-making landscape that seems to make us all get lost in a digital Bermuda-esque triangle. Is it hard to make money from your laptop or your phone? No. It’s not. But I won’t sit here and tell you that it’s easy. It may be simple. But not easy. And there’s a big difference between the two.
How to Make Money From Your Laptop
The laptop lifestyle is intoxicating. When you close your eyes you can just picture it. A remote sugary-sanded beach. Towering coconut palms swaying in the cool breeze. The gentle sounds of waves caressing the shore. You can just smell the saltwater in the air. Picture it. You’re lying on a lounge chair sipping a frozen umbrella-topped drink without a care in the world. You close your eyes as your phone dings. Another sale. You glance briefly. A thousand-dollar purchase. The ninth one today.
Is this just some pipe dream or can you actually make money from your laptop? Can you earn enough cash to not only survive but to thrive? Yes, you can. As long as you believe. Belief is the core of everything. And not just the belief in some specific way to make money. People make money in every niche doing and selling just about anything. From real estate, to graphic design, web development, copywriting and everything else under the sun. Nope. That’s not the kind of belief we’re talking about. I’m talking about your belief in you.
Once you believe that you can do something you’re nearly there. And I do mean nearly. We’re talking most of the way. But what happens when you don’t believe you can do it? What happens when negative beliefs get in your way? We all know how that goes. It’s a spiral straight down to the bottom. And it hurts because deep down you know that it’s belief that’s getting in your way. But if you can just overcome that even for a brief moment, a world of possibilities opens up. That’s where the real magic happens.
1. Build Sales Funnels
Sales funnels offer a proven way to make money from your laptop. Whether you call them sales funnels, marketing funnels, business funnels, customer funnels, or purchase funnels, it’s all the same thing. Think of them like magical little money-printing machines. A virtual ATM that spits out cash. I’m not saying that it’s easy to make money with sales funnels. All I’m saying is that there is a proven and simple process.
Sales funnels allow you to cut through all the noise online. They help capture awareness, create interest, stir up desire, and solicit action. These four stages take the prospect on a journey from a browser to a buyer. That’s why sales funnels convert at 137% higher (on average) than websites. So if you want to make real money then build sales funnels.
You can build sales funnels to sell a product or service. To generate leads. For applications to masterminds or coaching programs. You can build them to get people to register for webinars. To sell subscriptions. And to get customers to spend more money with you. There are sales funnels for every single application. And the biggest businesses in the world use simple sales funnels to increase sales, boost revenue and grow their businesses fast. It doesn’t matter if you have an online business, a small business, a side hustle, a big business or no business at all. Use sales funnels.
2. Launch YouTube Channel
YouTube is one of the best ways to make money online. But it’s certainly not the easiest. YouTube takes time. It takes time to shoot videos and edit them. If you’re passionate about making videos then launch a YouTube channel. It’ll help you generate passive income once you’ve monetized your channel. That’ll happen after you pass 1,000 subscribers and also attain other metrics such as 4,000 public watch hours in the past 365 days.
Most people don’t want to start a YouTube channel because they think they need to show their face. But there are plenty of faceless YouTube channels with millions of subscribers. Some have tens of millions of them. One popular YouTube channel that’s faceless is called, Be Amazed. Be Amazed is an educational channel that uses video clips, animations and voiceovers to create their videos. The videos are engaging and entertaining. Those are two important factors for getting views.
YouTube channels require you to build an audience. But once that audience is built you can tap into them to help sell products or services, promote affiliate links, and more. The goal is to stay in one lane and build your audience in a specific niche. Whatever niche you decide to build your audience in should be the one you stick to.
3. Flip Real Estate Contracts
There is money to be made in real estate. Lots of money. Real estate produces the most millionaires across the board in every region on earth. And to make money in real estate does not mean you have to be a real estate agent or do fix and flips. You can simply flip real estate contracts. We call this wholesaling real estate. It’s a viable way to make money in real estate in the United States and a select few other countries. It all depends on how the real estate laws work in those areas.
Two approaches exist for this. The first approach is a traditional wholesale contract. That means finding a distressed seller. You can use expired listings, pre-foreclosure lists, tax liens, or look for other distressed signs on the exterior of the property. Once you find a property, contact the owner and make a deal to purchase at a reduced rate that’s at least 30% below market minus any potential repairs that need to be made. Then, you can go out and find cash buyers in the area using many tools.
Wholesalers make money by flipping the contracts to cash buyers. However, reverse wholesaling works more efficiently. That’s because you’re finding the cash buyers in an area first and asking them what kind of properties they’re looking for. Then, you go out and find those specific types of properties. This is a form of arbitrage. It works because you’re lining up the cash buyers first. You don’t need to hunt for them after you have a deal in hand.
4. Graphic Design
Companies will always need graphic design. That makes it an in-demand skill. If you’re skilled at design, then you can certainly make money as a graphic designer. To be a graphic designer you must understand some of the popular programs like Photoshop and Illustrator. While many programs allow you to do graphic design, those two are the most popular. And those programs now have AI tools built into them. That makes your job as a graphic designer far easier.
To find graphic design clients you can use any of the freelancing websites. You can use Upwork, Fiverr, Freelancer, and others. You can also build out a sales funnel that helps you sell your graphic design services. To do that you should approach graphic design from a problem-solution standpoint. That means you must identify a problem people are experiencing with graphic design and then present a solution.
Although that might sound confusing, it’s straightforward. The best people to target are business owners and entrepreneurs because they have the need and the money to pay for graphic design. That’s an important distinction. Then, ask yourself what problem they’re facing. Maybe it’s the problem of not having enough designs or creatives for social media posts. Maybe it’s a lack of good graphics on their landing pages. Whatever it is, figure that out first. Then present your solution to that problem.
5. Edit Videos
Videos are an important part of business today. Especially short-form videos. If you have a knack for editing videos you can make money doing it for others. Businesses around the world need videos for many purposes. They need short-form videos for social media. They also need long-form videos for YouTube. And they need promotional videos for landing pages too. Entrepreneurs also need videos. Even people who just have side hustles. So the options are limitless for how many people need good video editing.
You can find video editing clients on popular freelancing websites. You can also tap into your network on LinkedIn. And you can ask friends on Facebook. You can even launch a video editing service that gives people unlimited video editing for a flat fee. Since so many people need videos today, a service like that might become very popular.
You can also build a sales funnel for your video editing services. Create a great lead magnet at the front end that helps people solve a problem. Educate them and teach them how to do something. Then, you can sell the implementation. People will gladly pay you because you delivered real value to them. You opened their eyes and taught them something. That’s why sales funnels work so well. It doesn’t go for the direct sale always. Instead, it takes prospects through a journey. And that’s an important distinction.
6. Narrate Audiobooks
You can make money from your laptop by narrating audiobooks. It’s simple and straightforward to do. And you can use a platform called ACX to do audiobook narrations. ACX is owned by Amazon and it’s the primary platform used by Audible. And you don’t need any credentials or experience to make money with audiobook narrations. All you need is a good mic and a great voice. If people like the sound of your rehearsal script, they might be included to hire you.
Narrating audiobooks on ACX is straightforward. All you need to do is audition. Get a good mic and read a simple script. That’s all it takes. And you can make money in two different ways. The first way is that you can get paid per finished-hour of work. So if the finished audiobook is 5 hours long, you’ll get paid for 5 hours. It doesn’t matter how long it takes you to actually finish recording and editing that audiobook.
The other way you can make money is through a royalty-share agreement. Typically, this splits the revenue down the middle for the author and the narrator. That’s harder to come by unless you’re dealing with a newer author. Established authors are less likely to offer a royalty-share agreement. They’ll simply pay you per-finished hour. Either way, they’re both good. But the royalty-share agreement could deliver passive income for years to come.
7. Affiliate Marketing
Making money as an affiliate delivers real freedom to those who don’t want to run a business. As an affiliate, you don’t need a product or a service. All you need is some kind of audience somewhere. Affiliate marketing provides the perfect opportunity to earn money from your laptop or your phone. And you can do it from anywhere in the world. But you do need an audience you can market to. That audience needs to either be an existing one or it must be created.
An existing audience means that you either have an email list, a YouTube audience, followers on social media, or elsewhere. This allows you to market directly to them. The best way is to do it through email marketing. Because, when you already have an email list, you can speak directly to those people. You don’t need to hunt for an audience. It already exists. And you’re not struggling with any of the existing filters that exist between you and those people.
Affiliate marketing is really all about promoting affiliate links. You need an audience to promote to. But the best way to build that audience is to create a bridge page. The bridge page links your affiliate offer with a lead-generation component. This allows you to build your list and communicate with the prospect even after they click the link. This way, if they don’t join the affiliate program, you can still market to them via email with the hopes of getting them to join at a later date.
8. Social Media Management
Social media binds us all. It’s the medium that connects everyone and everything on the planet. But one thing most businesses lack is a social media presence. After all, most business owners are busy working in their business instead of working on it. That presents an opportunity. The lack of a social media presence is a problem for business owners. They know they need to have a presence and to post more often, but they don’t. That’s where you come in.
Can you make money on social media? Sure. You can do it in many ways. But the best and fastest way you can make money is to offer social media management. Social media management means that you take over posting on a social media account. And those posts are designed to help increase traffic, leads and sales for a business. They’re not random posts. They must educate and entertain. Create awareness. Invoke emotion. And solicit action.
Social media isn’t for everyone. But if you’re good at social media, consider doing this for others. Create a professional profile first. Then, make sure you have a link on your profile to a hero page. A hero page is just a lead generation funnel that allows you to capture a prospect’s information. This way, you can schedule calls and communicate with that person in the future.
9. Create Online Courses
Online courses are a great way that you can share your knowledge and wisdom on a large scale. And it’s a great way to make money from your laptop. You can do it without leaving home or while you’re traveling off to some remote destination. It doesn’t matter where you are because you can track your sales from your phone. However, to create an online course you must be skilled at solving a particular problem. The more skilled you are at solving that problem the better you can help others to do the same.
For example, you might be skilled at web development. In that case, you can create courses about building applications in different languages. You may be be skilled at a language and can teach an innovative way of learning that language. It could be a musical instrument, a trade, or something else. It doesn’t matter as long as you’re good at that thing. Because, if you’re not good at solving that problem it’ll be hard to make money from a course teaching people how to do it.
To create your online course you can use an existing platform like Udemy or Teachable. You can also build the entire online course in this online course builder here. This gives you more control over your course and the promotion of it. It also allows you to make more money without sharing it with one of the course platforms out there. You’ll need to find a good way to generate leads and make sales with your online course. Create a powerful lead magnet that helps solve part of the problem they’re experiencing. And make it available inside of a lead generation funnel.
10. Copywriting
Copywriting is a great way to make money. And you can do it from anywhere in the world. Especially from a laptop. But copywriting is a skill that not many people have. Although there are clients at every level, to maximize your income as a copywriter you have to be really good at your craft. Some copywriters can demand $50,000 for a single sales letter. That’s because a single sales letter can move millions of dollars in products or services. And the copy is at the core of that success.
Sure, the best copywriters can make a lot of money. But what about the average copywriter? It all depends. Companies of all sizes need to hire copywriters and not all of them can afford to hire the best. That means there is a lot of demand for copywriting. Copy is used on landing pages, sales funnels, email communications, product descriptions, and everywhere else. So it’s an integral part of sales.
You can find copywriting clients on freelancing websites. You can also tap into your network on LinkedIn or Facebook. And you can build out a sales funnel for finding copywriting clients. Some copywriting services like this one do copywriting for a flat fee. So that’s always an option going forward. Either way you look at it, you need experience before finding actual clients. But when you do have experience, this is something you can do from anywhere in the world.
11. Sell Digital Products
Digital products offer an incredible opportunity to make money today. You can sell them and create them from anywhere. It doesn’t take much to create a digital product. But it does create a high desire to deliver real value and solve a persistent problem. People will pay you a lot of money to solve a problem for them. That’s always been the case. But digital products are particularly important because there’s no fulfillment involved outside of an email. There’s no boxing, shipping, or hassling with returns.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy to make money with digital products. It just means that it’s much simpler to do so than with physical products. There’s no inventory to purchase or warehousing involved. You just have to create something that is highly valuable. And it must be something that a person is willing to pay money for because it solves a real problem that they’re facing.
What types of digital products can you create? You can make cheat sheets to help people pass an exam or figure out how to enhance a skill. It provides a shortcut for them to learn. You can make checklists, PDF guides, video tutorials, and more. The type of product doesn’t matter. What matters is that it actually helps them solve the problem.
12. Email Marketing
Email is a powerful means of marketing. It’s an intimate form of communication. You can use email to share stories and build rapport with prospects. That makes it very effective in sales. And one of the most important things that you can do in business is to build up your email list. You can do that with a lead generation funnel and a powerful lead magnet. If you don’t have one of those think about the type of problem that you want to solve and create a lead magnet around solving that problem.
Email marketing is often used in conjunction with sale funnels. Once you create awareness and generate interest by getting someone to raise their hand, you can generate desire and solicit action through email. Email is powerful when done right. But most people don’t know how to use email marketing to make money. Instead of attracting, they repel prospects.
To do email marketing the right way, you have to get vulnerable. You have to share stories that help form a deeper connection with the prospect. Oftentimes, the prospect is where you are right now before you started your journey. So you can use that insight to share stories that shift their beliefs. That helps drive conversions. If you want to learn more about email marketing, then read this book.
13. Digital Marketing
Many people are using digital marketing to make money. Digital marketing comes in all shapes. It can simply be paid ads management. Meaning that you are managing a company’s ads for them. It can also be other forms of marketing such as helping to create a customer avatar, building out lead magnets, or spearheading other forms of marketing.
Today, we live in a very digital world. And companies are using the Internet to find new customers. This will only accelerate into the future. That’s where you come in. You can launch a digital marketing agency and make money from anywhere in the world. Certainly from your laptop. And maybe even from your phone. Especially when you’re using social media to find new clients.
Digital marketing can also be search engine marketing. That’s not just SEO. It’s also SEM. Search marketing can take on a lot of forms and not just direct search ads. Many other ways exist including retargeting, in-content ads, in-stream ads, and more. It’s a big genre with a lot going on. And it’s certainly not difficult to find clients for your digital marketing agency. Especially when you use the right lead-generation funnels.
14. Do Print-on-Demand
Print-on-demand (POD) is a popular niche. You can sell all types of POD products. But the point here is that you never have to manufacture, store, or ship the products yourself. POD platforms like Printful and Printify do all the work for you. It’s very low friction in terms of the amount of effort it requires. The primary work here is in finding the customer. They do everything else. It requires far less effort than launching your own affiliate product.
You can sell POD products in all categories. However, the popular type today is the merchandising category. That means shirts, hats, hoodies, and so on. You’ll need to create vector artwork and upload that art to the POD platform. Then, you can generate mockups of the products. And you can use those mockups to sell them.
Most POD platforms integrate with popular selling apps. You can use Shopify, Amazon, and many others to sell your POD products. Plus, you can branch out into selling mugs, posters, pillows, phone cases, and more. All of these are branded with your branding. They include your logo. It’s your business, except you’re not responsible for actually creating and shipping the products.
15. Launch a Membership Site
Membership sites offer recurring revenue. You can create a membership site in any niche. And then you can track that progress from your phone or your laptop. That means you can manage it from anywhere that has an internet connection. The question is this. What type of membership site should you launch? It should be any membership site that delivers real value and helps people solve a problem they’re struggling with.
That problem could simply be an information problem. Maybe they lack information on what stocks or crypto to trade. It could also be a training problem. They might lack training to solve a problem that they’re struggling with in your industry. It could also simply be a knowledge problem. Maybe they lack the proper knowledge or insights into sales and marketing. And solving that for them would help increase their sales and grow their business.
You can create membership sites for all types of problems. But remember this. Membership sites must be maintained. They’re not difficult to build. You can actually use this membership site builder to build them. But they must be maintained and kept up. You can’t just create it and leave it. You have to continuously add to it and engage with your customers. Especially in certain scenarios.
16. Vacation Rental Management
Vacation rental management is a mainstream business idea that you can do from anywhere in the world. You don’t have to be present or in the same city to be in this business. And you can certainly use your laptop to make money with this type of business. Vacation rental management is a simple marketing play. You’re helping to market and promote properties. The hope is that you get a booking and can secure a commission.
Depending on what market you choose and the caliber of properties you go with, vacation rental management can be very lucrative. Consider this. People spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single week at a vacation rental in the most sought-after destinations in the world. Especially during the peak seasons. That allows you to make a lot of money. After all, it takes the same amount of effort to manage low-priced vacation rentals that it does to manage luxury vacation rentals.
You can use the standard sites to promote your vacation rentals. You can list them on VRBO, Airbnb, and other places. However, the best approach is to build microsites and promote those microsites using SEO. This allows you to maximize your potential return. After all, organic marketing is the most relevant form of marketing. And if you can master that, you can make limitless amounts of money.
17. Blogging
You can blog from anywhere in the world. And you can use this skill to make money from anywhere. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to make money. It just means that the process is simple. It requires hard work and effort. And it requires creativity. Blogging isn’t just about spewing knowledge or information. People can get that anywhere. Blogging is about allowing your creative juices to flow. It’s about engaging and entertaining people.
The best bloggers are empathetic. They speak from the heart because they’ve been through the wringer. All of the ups and downs in life have impacted them. And their voice shines through. You can create a personal blog or you can blog across many platforms to earn money. Pick one industry or topic and stick with it as much as possible. That’s how you’ll grow your blog fast and make the most amount of money possible.
When you blog, you can make money through affiliate marketing or by selling products and services that you’ve created. You can promote your online courses, sell digital products, build your email list, and much more. It takes time for a blog to gain traction. But once it does, it provides the freedom and security you need to really enjoy life.
18. Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a specialized skill that many chase but few ever truly attain. Most SEOs think that it’s about tricks and employing shady tactics. Some use AI to generate content and PBNs to help create artificial link-building. That’s not how real SEO works. But for those who do attain this skill, the world is their oyster. Because organic traffic is highly relevant and leads to higher conversions. That’s because everyone knows it’s difficult to rank organically on Google. And if you rank organically then your stuff must be good.
You can certainly make money from anywhere in the world when you’re good at SEO. So if there’s one skill to acquire it’s definitely this one. You can help other companies rank their content, sell more products, get more signups, and generate leads with the right approach to SEO. That doesn’t mean that it’s easy. SEO is probably one of the hardest ways you can make money because it takes a lot of time. And it takes the right approach. It’s not about gaming the system. It’s about creating high-value content that actually helps people out.
You can also use SEO to rank content in affiliate marketing. It can be used to help you generate more leads for any affiliate offer. You can also use it to sell digital products, enhance digital marketing efforts, and more. There are many applications in business where SEO is crucial. And an investment in SEO is one of the highest-returning investments in business behind email marketing. Learn and study this skill if you care about earning real money online.