Want to build a side hustle but aren’t sure where to start?
Today we are going to share seven ways to make extra money from home!
Businesses, academic institutions, and independent labs use microtask platforms to gather data for product research, market research, and scientific research purposes.
You can make some money on these platforms by doing simple, low-paid work like answering quizzes, filling out surveys, and tagging AI training data.
The vast majority of these tasks only take a few minutes to an hour to complete. If you have random chunks of downtime in your schedule that you’d otherwise spend doomscrolling, this might be a good way to put that time to better use.
However, if you are looking to establish a source of income equivalent to a part-time or a full-time job, the viability of making that much money on microtask platforms will depend on where you live.
Realistically, if you work across several platforms and put in eight hours a day, five days per week, you might be able to make $15-20 per day, which works out to $300 to $400 per month.
If you are based in a low-cost-of-living country, that might equal or surpass the national minimum wage, in which case doing microtasks full-time might be a pretty sweet gig considering that you get to work from home.
However, if you are living in a medium or a high cost of living country, you’d likely make more money working a minimum-wage job at McDonald’s, so it may not be worth it.
The most popular microtask platform is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk – MTurk for short – so it’s probably best to start there.
However, there seems to be a consensus among MTurk veterans that it has been going downhill for at least half a decade now and that a newcomer working full-time on it is unlikely to make more than $5-10 per day.
That’s why you should also register on Prolific and CloudResearch, which can help you reach the aforementioned $15-$20 per day.
Just keep in mind that the approval process might take a while and that once you get approved, your access to gigs will be limited so you won’t be able to reach those numbers immediately.
Also, the pay for completing microtasks will likely continue trending downward. It’s best to see this work as something temporary. Don’t get too comfortable and keep looking for better opportunities!
Freelancing can be a great way to make money from home if you have a marketable skill that allows you to work remotely.
Such skills include:
The process of building a freelance business is going to be more or less the same regardless of the service that you decide to offer:
Start by niching down in terms of:
This may seem limiting at first glance but it will actually make everything else much easier!
Your next step should be working for free to acquire social proof.
For example, if you decide to become an email copywriter and target B2B SaaS businesses, start writing copy for companies like that for free so that you can get some testimonials.
In fact, you don’t even need anyone’s permission to do that, you can simply identify B2B SaaS businesses with subpar email marketing, write welcome sequences for them, put them into Google Docs, and share them with the founders.
Tell them that they are free to use these welcome sequences if they like them, all you ask for in exchange is a testimonial.
This approach to getting social proof can work well for any kind of freelance business!
Once you have a few solid testimonials, create a business website to display them.
Then, go on Fiverr, find a lead generation expert who has good reviews, and order a spreadsheet with 100 leads.
(You can order 1,000 leads straight away but it’s better to start with just 100 to check the lead quality).
Then, start reaching out to these leads. In your cold emails, you want to:
End the email by asking them if they are interested and invite them to schedule a Zoom call. Provide a link to your appointment calendar.
Follow up one week later and continue following up until you get a clear yes or no answer from them.
In your follow-up emails, include a “P.S.” section like the one below. Hopefully, this will dissuade people from flagging them as spam.
Whenever someone takes you up on your free offer, do a good job and then pitch them a productized service package.
For example, if someone took you up on your free welcome sequence offer, you can pitch them a weekly email newsletter package for a fixed monthly price.
Also, make sure to ask every happy client for a testimonial so that you can continue building your stack of social proof.
The more social proof you have and the more impressive it is, the easier it will be for you to land new clients!
Create a list of everything that you are currently doing to run your business. Ideally, it should be based on time-tracking data as opposed to your memory. Then, go through that list item-by-item and automate everything that can be automated.
You can probably eliminate a lot of busy work by integrating the apps into your workflow, setting up a solid customer relationship management system, and using good invoicing software.
For an online service business like yours, a webinar funnel is probably the best bet.
Create a 45-minute presentation designed to teach your dream customers how to do what you do step-by-step so that they can do it themselves. Don’t worry, if they can afford it, they’ll probably want to hire you instead!
Then, create a 15-minute pitch for your service where you explain what it’s all about, present a ton of social proof, and encourage the attendees to book a free call with you.
These 60 minutes are your webinar script. But how can you get people to show up for the event?
Build a webinar funnel that consists of these three pages:
(You can easily set this up with our software, ClickFunnels. Check out our free 14-day trial!)
Then, use paid advertising to promote your webinar and drive traffic to its registration page.
We recommend hosting at least one webinar per week, every week, live for at least a year. That will help you get good at it, optimize your script, and maximize your conversion rates.
After that, you can consider automating this funnel by replacing the live event with a pre-recorded webinar!
Twitter has a creator revenue sharing program that has been dubbed “elonbuxx” by the platform’s users.
At the time of writing, if you want to monetize your account, you need to:
It’s worth noting that you only get paid for premium user engagement on your tweets. The payouts are processed every two weeks and made via Stripe. The minimum payout amount is $10.
So how can you build and monetize a Twitter following? Here are the two most viable options:
It’s possible to build a following and generate a decent income from it by simply sharing your thoughts with the world.
If you are intellectually inclined and good at expressing yourself in writing, this is probably the best way to go.
See if you can make a name for yourself in what’s known as “tpot”, which is a loosely defined Twitter community that revolves around discussing various intellectual topics.
If getting into online arguments about the existential risk of artificial intelligence sounds like fun to you, the chances are that you will fit right in!
Note that you can either post under your real name or under a pseudonym. There are plenty of “anons” who are making money on Twitter!
That theme can be anything, from aesthetics to popular culture to niche hobbies.
For example, if you are a history buff with a special interest in the Middle Ages, you can create an account that is exclusively focused on that period and start posting book excerpts, interesting articles, photos and paintings, etc.
Generally speaking, the more high-brow the theme of your account, the easier it will be for you to build a following where premium users are over-represented. However, the content itself will have less viral potential.
You can also make money with a gimmick account focused on low-brow content such as Reddit screenshots, memes, or cute animal videos. Premium users will likely be under-represented among your followers but the content itself will have more viral potential.
Ultimately, both the high-brow and the low-brow approaches can work, so it boils down to what resonates more with you. It’s probably best to choose a theme that you have a personal interest in because that will make it more enjoyable!
Did you know that Twitter users often refer to the platform as “hell app” and “hellsite”?
That shouldn’t be surprising considering that:
To summarize, while the negative effects that Twitter usage has on people’s mental health vary from person to person, the consensus seems to be that some damage is unavoidable.
It’s also worth noting that popular Twitter users, especially the ones posting under their real names, often end up attracting stalkers. That’s why it’s important to learn how to protect your privacy.
Ultimately, if you want to make extra money from home, we only recommend going the Twitter route if:
Don’t sacrifice your mental health for “elonbuxx”!
It has become common for Twitter “poasters” who have sizable followings to launch paid email newsletters.
Typically, they use Substack for this, add a sign-up link to their bios, and then promote their newsletters to their Twitter followers.
For example, an anonymous writer known as CartoonsHateHer has been “poasting” on Twitter since 2018 and has amassed 35k+ followers with her humorous takes and funny cartoons.
In early 2024, she launched her newsletter, which she then grew to more than 12,000 subscribers in less than a year. This helped her realize her lifelong dream of becoming a writer. Now she’s working on a book!
This approach can work really well because if people like reading your short-form content on Twitter, they might be interested in your long-form content as well. The transition from the former to the latter is pretty seamless!
That being said, you don’t need a Twitter following to grow a newsletter, you can also do it with paid advertising.
Also, your newsletter doesn’t need to revolve around personal essays. In fact, if you want to build something that you can sell later on, it’s probably best not to tie it to your personal brand.
For example, the Milk Road newsletter, which is rumored to have been acquired for eight figures, provides daily crypto news. This format seems to be really popular.
If you want to learn more about selling newsletters, you can check out the Duuce marketplace to see the current prices.
If you have a marketable skill that people are paying you for, you can package your knowledge into an eBook and create an extra source of income that way.
It’s probably best to publish it independently on your website because that will enable you to maximize its revenue.
For example, today Nathan Barry is best known as the founder of ConvertKit, but he used to be a designer and some of his early entrepreneurial projects were ebooks about design.
In fact, “Designing Web Applications” is still available on his website, with pricing tiers ranging from $39 (just the book) to $249 (the book + tutorials, interviews, and resources).
So how did Nathan make money with his eBooks? He would use a free chapter as a lead magnet, create a landing page for it, and then promote it to build a pre-launch email list, to which he would eventually launch the eBook.
His launches were wildly successful. For example, “Designing Web Applications” brought in $26,679 in just 24 hours!
Some of this success was due to his clever approach to pricing, in particular having several pricing tiers and arranging them from the most expensive to the least expensive.
This same methodology proved to work well for other people as well. For example, UX designer Samuel Hulick, who learned it from Nathan, used it to make $37,000 with his eBook about user onboarding.
It can probably work well for you, too!
You can also make extra money from home writing fiction and self-publishing it on Amazon via its Kindle Direct Publishing service.
However, if you want to succeed at it, you need to understand that it’s not about writing Nobel-prize-worthy literature, it’s about providing high-quality niche entertainment to an existing audience.
This means that you need to choose one of the popular genres, niche down to a popular subgenre, and then start churning out novels that give the readers what they want.
Popular genres include science fiction, fantasy, horror, thrillers, and romance, with the latter probably having the most demand.
Subgenres are things like “Amish romance”, “military science fiction”, “Scandinavian noir”, etc. You can browse Amazon’s best-seller lists for each genre to see which subgenres are dominating them.
If you want your books to sell well, they should conform to the genre and subgenre expectations, from the covers to the characters to the plotlines. Straying too far from those expectations will annoy readers, lead to bad reviews, and tank your sales!
Writing entertaining genre fiction is difficult so it’s probably best to limit yourself to one genre until you master it. But if you insist on writing across several genres, do it under different pen names, with one genre per pen name. Otherwise, you risk confusing and alienating your readers!
Also, in order to make decent money with this, you’ll need to put out at least 1 full-length novel a year, though once you go full-time you should start publishing 2-3 novels per year instead. Sounds like an insane pace?
Well, that’s the pace you will need to maintain if you want to make it as a self-published fiction author. There’s no way around it unless you write a mega best-seller like “Twilight”, which you shouldn’t bet on.
Maybe “How To Write A Novel In 6 Months: A published author’s guide to writing a 50,000-word book in 24 weeks” by Thomas Emson can provide some guidance here!
If you either know how to code already or are interested in learning it, you might want to consider becoming a software solopreneur (an “indie hacker”).
There’s a survivorship bias in the indie hacker scene where you constantly see people who have succeeded but rarely hear from those who failed.
We can’t know for sure but we believe that “Ask HN: Starting a business is way harder than Twitter-bros claim. Any advice?” is probably representative of the average aspiring indie hacker experience.
After all, 90% of startups fail, a statistic that can be helpful when it comes to managing your expectations.
However, having a full-time job that pays the bills and building software products in your spare time can enable you to limit the downside of entrepreneurship while retaining access to the upside.
Skills, experience, and luck all play a role in entrepreneurial success, with the latter being the most tricky component.
Indie hackers use a methodology that allows them to essentially roll the dice an unlimited number of times provided that they don’t burn out and give up on it.
They take the Lean Startup concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to its absolute extreme by building MVPs in a matter of weeks, days, or, in some crazy cases, hours.
The reasoning behind it is that you cannot predict which product will take off so it’s best to just keep building them until you stumble on one that does.
For example, the indie hacking superstar Pieter Levels has shared that more than 95% of all his projects have failed.
His <5% success rate may not seem particularly impressive until you realize that it has enabled him to become wealthy. At the time of writing, Levels’ apps are generating more than $4.2M per year!
Marc Louvion is another notable indie hacker who used this approach. He built 23 products in the last few years and made over $1M with the one that took off, ShipFast.
Meanwhile, Nico Jeannen built 17 products in just one year and sold two of them for $265,000.
There are no guarantees in entrepreneurship. However, the “ship more” advice does seem to work. After all, in theory at least, if 90% of startups fail, then if you launch 100 products, you’ll have a decent chance at success!
If you genuinely enjoy creating software and can see yourself doing that indefinitely in your free time, the indie hacker path might be the right choice for you. Read Pieter Levels’ book “Make” and start building!
Our co-founder Russell Brunson used sales funnels to take ClickFunnels from zero to $100M+ in annual revenue in less than a decade.
He is now widely considered to be one of the top sales funnel experts in the world. Want to learn from him?
His best-selling book “DotCom Secrets” is the best place to start because it covers everything you need to know in order to build sales funnels that convert.
This book is available on Amazon where it has over 2,500 global ratings and a 4.7-star overall rating.
But you can also get it directly from us for free…
All we ask is that you pay for shipping!
So what are you waiting for? 🧐
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