Long gone are the days when you had to apply for mind-numbing jobs just to get by.
Luckily the internet has put an end to all that and literally, anyone can now earn money from home.
The best thing about the ability to make money now, especially online, is that you don’t need much capital to get going.
The need for bank loans, a handout from your parents, or tireless saving is now unnecessary. The best thing is, a lot of opportunities don’t even require a college degree – you can get all the advice you need online!
So what are the benefits of working from home?
Benefits of Working from Home
- Independence
- More flexibility
- No commute
- Potentially higher earnings
- Less stress
- Better work life balance
So let’s have a look at 15 ways you can make $3000 a month from home but bear in mind that you may need to combine some of these to get to that target!
This post contains affiliate links. For a list of our partners, please read our disclosure.
Complete Online Surveys
It is quite surprising how much you can earn just by giving a few minutes of your time to answer online surveys.
Whilst this method isn’t going to make you a millionaire, it is very convenient and requires no specialist knowledge. You can literally make money online whilst sitting on your sofa watching TV. It’s definitely an easy way to make extra cash online!
They don’t require much brainpower either so you’re hardly going to be expending a ton of energy doing them, which means they’re great after a hard day at work.
Here are 2 of the best online survey sites for you to get stuck in with:-
Survey Junkie
(US, Canada and Australia Only)
Up to $75 per survey if you get on their focus groups. However, average earnings is around $10 per hour. Click my link, submit your email by clicking join and you are good to go. It couldn’t be simpler. You even get paid by them to just submit your email!
SwagBucks
(Only available in USA, Australia, Canada, India, Germany, UK and Ireland)
Earn up to $10 an hour with SwagBucks. You even get $5 free just for signing up. Simply sign up through my link, confirm your email and you’re free to start earning money.
Work as a Proofreader
Proofreaders scrutinize written text looking for grammatical, spelling, punctuation, and other written errors. Your job will be to note and correct those errors when identified.
You’ll be mostly analyzing documents like legal transcripts, websites, contracts, and even novels.
You will need to complete some training to become proficient but most of the time no university degree is required, although it can be beneficial to have one.
You’ll learn many transferable skills working as a proofreader:-
- You’ll learn to develop a keen eye for detail and an analytic approach to work;
- You’ll improve your written English skills and develop a better understanding of punctuation, grammar, syntax and vocabulary;
- You’ll learn how to work independently.
You can work on a freelance basis so you’ll be able to choose the hours you want to commit to – perfect for students or stay-at-home mums.
The salary is excellent too:-
Proofreading guru, Caitlin Pyle, has made a career out of proofreading court transcript documents, making 5 figures from the comfort of her own home.
She made $43,000 in her first year proofreading and that was part-time!
She’s put together a course that you can enroll in to learn how to become a professional proofreader.
The course offers a completely free 76-minute workshop to see if proofreading is for you. You can then decide whether to join the full course after!
Work is easy to find for a proofreader too. Check out these websites to get a feel for the amount of work out there for proofreaders:-
Virtual Assistant
Virtual assistants or VA’s are used by people when they need certain tasks outsourcing, usually to lighten their own workload.
For example, as a blogger, I use a VA to edit some of my posts and to keep my posts up to date.
VA’s do many different types of online tasks but here are a few examples:
- Responding to emails and managing email accounts
- Manging social media accounts
- Editing articles
- Creating pins for Pinterest
- Maintaining blogs and other websites
VA’s can earn extremely well and it’s not uncommon to make $3000+ per month with just a handful of clients.
For example, VA guru Gina Horkey started working as a virtual assistant and was earning $4000 per month within her first year.
She now teaches others how to do the same and has an amazing beginners course which she sells for just $19.
This course will give you an excellent grounding into what it takes to be a VA so you can start your own online VA business and learn from an extremely experienced virtual assistant.
Take Part in Study and Research Groups
One such company providing this service is Respondent.
Basically, you sign up to their panel, provide some basic details about your location and profession and you are then provided with a list of studies to join.
This can involve completing surveys, being interviewed about a topic, or simply just providing your opinion. They pay up to $350 for your participation too!
For some of the studies you do need to have specialist knowledge in that area but for others, anyone can join!
Definitely worth a look if you’re seeking some casual, effortless income.
Set up an E-Commerce Business
Why not make money online by opening up an online eCommerce store. It’s never been easier to set up an online store than it is today. The most convenient thing is that you do not even need to store inventory or stock.
By setting up a store that uses dropshipping, the supplier (usually in China) will simply send the product purchased from your online store straight to the customer.
There are literally thousands of YouTube videos and blogs showing you how to set up such a business.
One of the most popular methods for setting up an online dropshipping store is using Shopify to construct your store and then you ship your products directly from your supplier when you get a purchase.
You can also set up a store on Amazon and use fulfillment by Amazon to deal with all your shipping and returns. This allows you to set up an online store quickly with very little capital needed upfront.
Work Remotely From Home
One of the internet’s greatest attributes is its ability to connect people wherever they are.
You’ll normally think of this as providing mainly social benefits, but the benefits for business are just as important and profound.
There are now thousands of companies out there who don’t give a damn where you are – they’ll hire you anyway.
Here are some interesting facts about remote work from Hubstaff:-
- 68% of millennials said a work-from-home option would greatly influence their interest in working for a company
- 82% of telecommuters reported lower stress levels
- 80% of telecommuters report a higher morale, and 69% of telecommuters reported lower absenteeism
- Full-time telecommuters save more than $4,000 each year by spending less on a variety of costs.
There is a wide range of roles available if you’re interested in doing remote work, many of which don’t require a college degree. Such as:-
- Remote Graphic Designer – the average salary for a graphic designer is $48,000pa
- Remote Virtual Assistant – the average salary of a VA is $32,000pa
- Remote Customer Support Rep – the national average salary is $37,000pa
- Remote Development Operations – More specialist and skilled but they earn on average a whopping $104,490pa working from home
- Remote Proofreader – the national average salary is up to $58,389
I recommend the following if you’re looking for remote work:-
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a way of getting paid for marketing a business’s products or services. It works by rewarding you if you bring people to a business’s website and they buy something. You usually earn a percentage on the sale that your referral generates.
This method works best if you have a blog or website but even just sharing links on social media can generate referrals and sales.
How I made $3500 on Facebook with affiliate marketing
In around 2015, I started affiliate marketing on the only platform I had available to me at the time – Facebook. I didn’t have a blog back then.
Even so, I still managed to make around $3500 just by using Facebook!
Better still, I only posted on my Facebook wall around 20 times to do this. That’s the power of affiliate marketing!
I have written a full post about exactly how I did it.
Amazon has its own affiliate marketing program, Amazon Associates, where you not only get a commission from people clicking on a link and buying a certain product but also if the customer buys other things whilst on Amazon.
The problem with Amazon Associates is you normally need a blog or website to get accepted.
I would therefore have a look at Flexoffer’s affiliate network. They have hundreds of offers and products to promote and they are fairly easy to get accepted to:-
Here are a few others worth checking out:-
Run and Monetize a Blog
Blogging is one of the best ways to make money online today!
You can set a blog up for next to nothing and the income potential is huge.
I mean just look at the income of some of the top bloggers:-
- Ryan Robinson at RyRob.com – $50k+ a month
- John Morrow at SmartBlogger – $100k+ a month
- Michelle at Making Sense of Cents – $100k+ a month
- Alex and Lauren at Create and Go/Avocadu – $100k+ a month
- Tim Sykes at TimothySykes.com – $1m+ a month
You can monetize your blog in a number of different ways by doing the following:-
- Advertising affiliate products or services through programs like FlexOffers ;
- Selling courses you have made;
- Displaying ads with companies like MediaVine, Google Ads or Adsense
- Selling e-books;
- Sponsored posts where someone pays you to post about their product or services.
You can set up a blog here at Blue Host for as low as $3.95 per month and they even offer a 30-day money-back guarantee in case you decide blogging isn’t for you:-
To succeed at this you do need to have a lot of traffic coming to your page which will generally mean you have a successful and regularly updated blog or website providing helpful content, but if you do there probably isn’t an easier way of earning money. You literally earn money as you sleep.
Test Websites
Did you know you can supplement your income by testing websites? Pretty amazing!
Companies pay people like you to simply browse around on websites, complete a few forms and then provide feedback afterward.
They pay handsomely too!
The company UserTesting will pay you $10 per test and you only need to commit around 10 – 20 minutes of your time. That’s an awesome $30 an hour for little more than browsing the net, which I am sure you do plenty of anyway.
There are companies out there who are willing to pay you for your insight and experience of using products, services or your knowledge of a particular topic.
UserTesting comes well recommended!
Other website testing companies include:-
Write Online Reviews
There are a whole bunch of websites out there offering money or free stuff if you review their products or services.
Businesses are eager to get feedback on the products and services they provide as it helps them to enhance their marketing strategies and to test products before release. If you can write fairly well and have the time to put finger to keyboard, you can make a tidy profit from these companies.
A lot of the review sites pay depending on the quality of the review you provide, so it is helpful if you take your time and provide an honest, well-written and in-depth review of whatever you are reviewing.
The most well-known review site is probably Slice the Pie which provides an opportunity to review music, fashion lines, and adverts.
Some other ones worth looking at are as follows:-
Risk-Free Matched Betting (UK Only)
(This method is largely a method to make money online in the UK but I see no reason why it can’t work across the world in theory, although it will probably be a bit harder without a company to find you the free bets as you’ll see below!)
Fast, tax-free, and lucrative. Matched betting is probably the quickest way to make money in a short space of time with hardly any specialist knowledge required. Matched betting is a method of making money by using the free incentive bets that bookies give out to new customers joining them and to customers they are trying to retain.
The best thing about it is that it is risk-free (unlike standard betting aptly called a “mug’s game”) as you use the free bets the bookies give you. In simple terms, it works by simultaneously placing a back bet (a bet on something winning) and a lay bet (a bet on something losing). As you are using a free bet as your back bet, you make money either way, whatever the outcome.
In 3 months I made around £5000 using this method spending around 2 hours a night and that’s why it’s my favorite method to make money online in the UK. (You can see how I did this with my guide on how to make money matched betting.)
There are a number of websites online to guide you through the process but the best website I have found by far is Profit Accumulator. This website provides full support and guidance on how the method works and has some really excellent and knowledgeable support staff and a massive online community of thousands of members. They also have an excellent 5-star rating on Trust Pilot.
Profit Accumulator even provides a free trial so you can get used to how matched betting works and you make around £45.00 straight away for free. There is a monthly charge for the more premium package but this opens up a whole host of other offers that are worth literally thousands of pounds and gives you access to all the support you will need and some very helpful tools.
Sell Photographs Online
If you are a photographer, either professional or amateur, the internet is now a great marketplace to sell your work!
With the number of people now blogging, making websites, and designing, there’s a massive online demand for unique photographs for people to use in their projects.
There’s a huge demand for all sorts of photographs such as nature, people, food, travel, sports and everything in between.
Here are my top 5 places to sell your photographs online:-
Related article:
How to make $2500 a month
Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is a method whereby companies can engage the services of a wide number of people on the internet to get a big job done.
This normally involves tasks like product testing, filling in surveys, translation, data entry, form filling, and search engine optimization. When you’ve completed the task, you’ll be paid a fee directly into your Paypal account.
Most of the work you’ll be doing will be quite tedious, so it’s probably best to swerve this one if you like exercising the ol’ grey matter. However, if you are android-esque in your ability to concentrate, you’ll do just fine.
Here’s a list of my favorite crowdsourcing opportunities:-
Get Paid for Searching the Web
There are now a few websites out there that will simply pay you to search the web or give you cash rewards when you buy something. What a carefree way to make money online!
My favorite of these is Qmee. Simply add the Google app to your browser and every time you search for something and click on one of Qmee’s product links, you will earn a small reward. The money is paid straight into Paypal and can be withdrawn at any time.
Qmee also provides coupons and offers on certain items so you can make savings when you purchase things. They also allow you to make money by completing surveys.
There are also a bunch of others providing a similar thing:-
- Bing Rewards – Provides rewards when you browse and purchase certain items
- Ibotta – Provides cash back on purchases you make online
Rent out your Property
People are now making a ton of money renting out their properties to people.
You don’t even need to rent out your entire house. You could just rent out a room or two.
The good thing is that you can just do this as and when you want. Some people will rent out on a short-term basis. Others rent out to people wanting accommodation on a more long-term basis!
This is definitely worth looking at especially if you’ve got students at college nearby or if you live in the city where people are often wanting rooms for short stays.
You’ll have probably heard of them by now but Airbnb is the most well-known company through which you can get started if you want to rent your property or room out.
BONUS SIDE HUSTLE
I often supplement my side income with surveys and even earned $500 in one month last Xmas!
Surveys are a great way of boosting your side income if you haven’t got much time to waste and want something carefree and easy!
Doing surveys is all about joining up to the right survey sites so you can exchange your time for cash in the most profitable and effective way possible.
Top Survey Tip:
Survey sites don’t always give you the best surveys every day so you’re best to sign up to at least 5 quality sites so you can maximize your side income!
My favorite survey site by far is Survey Junkie. You can join up by clicking the link before and start earning morning for free straight away.
Related article:
How to make $3500 a month
