PROVEN Ways you can Make Money at Home

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Being in a semi as a full time passenger is awesome, but it sometimes leaves me feeling without a purpose. I need something to keep me busy, so began my search for an online side hustle.Pinterest is where I started, and I scoured it for countless hours, day after day. I skimmed through many a money-making-blog, and I’ve read more eBooks than I care to count. What I kept finding was disappointing.

No one seemed to have any actual pointers. I found “just take online surveys!”, “start a blog!”, or “proofread for money!”. Yeah I get that, but where exactly do I go to do those actions?  Honestly, I think  a lot of these other bloggers and writers were full of crap- they didn’t actually test these methods, or they were afraid to reveal *exactly* how they were making money. I had nothing but time on my hands, so I jumped in with both feet to start testing random sites on my own. Here’s what I’ve found (and I’m not afraid to share it with you!).

What DIDN’T work:

– Swagbucks. Yes, you can earn gift cards through the site, but I believe its more trouble than its worth. I honestly have no idea why so many people recommend this. “Watch 9 minutes worth of videos for 5 Swagbucks!” sounds great, until you realize it takes 500 Swagbucks to make one $5 Amazon giftcard. There’s also a lot of “download this $11 app and get 1000 Swagbucks“. No thank you.

– Starting a Blog. If you’re looking for a side hustle- that means you probably want to make money quickly. Not one or two years down the road, and definitely not one or two years down the road after already paying $100 in start up costs. I do believe you can make money (I’m beginning to 15 months later), but thats going to take a lot of time and money upfront.

– Uber. I’ve never worked for Uber because I couldn’t qualify. If you want to drive for them you need a vehicle that is less than ten years old, and four doors. I see this as a bit of a flawed business model. If someone is wanting a side hustle, its probably because they don’t have a lot of money and/or they are frugal. Which means you’re probably not going to buy a newer vehicle, but oh well.

– Transcribing sites. You listen to audio, then type down everything that is being said. I had some difficulty getting into this one, because you need to have quick typing skills (55-65 wpm) and/or a college degree (I don’t have either of those). However, I did keep at it and start making money (more on that later), but I do not recommend this to the average stay at home wife if you don’t have those qualifications.

What SORT OF worked:

– Amazon mTurk. If you haven’t heard of it, its short for Amazon Mechanical Turk. You sign up on Amazon, and do lots of quick tasks. Sometimes its a two question survey, sometimes its clicking boxes that have certain pictures in them, sometimes its confirming a video has sound. You can make money doing this, and its around $7-9 an hour (some people reported making up to $11 an hour, but they’re apparently much quicker than I am), but it will drive you to tears with boredom. I did one task 15 times within one hour, each time for $0.23. The tasks will keep popping up in your feed, and so many are repeats. You do get a few tasks that are worth $2-3 but they went faster than I could click them. This is a good task all in all, but it’s oh-so-boring.

– OnGo Surveys. This is an app that sends you 1-5 surveys per day. You don’t make a lot of money at once, but you do steadily earn money which I appreciate. Each survey tells you exactly how long it will  be, and how much you’ll earn. Most are between $0.50 and $3.00 each, and they take less than fifteen minutes. If you take every survey as you get it, you should have enough money for cheap dinner date within a week.

What ABSOLUTELY worked for me:

– IZEA. This is an app you can download on your phone, or you can go to the website on your computer. You connect all your social media to it (instagram, twitter, facebook, pinterest, etc..) and then you get paid for doing sponsored posts. You probably won’t have as much luck as I did if you don’t have a fair amount of followers. I used mine primarily for twitter, and it worked like a charm. Sometimes I would get paid a set amount for one tweet, and sometimes the tweet would have a link in it and I’d get paid for every click the link received. I have right around eleven thousand followers, and I make anywhere from $7-35 per tweet if its a set amount, and between $2-20 if its a per click tweet.

– UpWork. This is also an app, but I’ve found it works best if you go to the web version. Here, you fill out your resume, decide what type of work you’d like to do, and then start reaching out to people looking for the service you offer. For example, I know how to get people to engage with me on twitter, so I offered “help you grow your twitter account” as a task. I had a college kid who wanted to be more popular reach out to me, I worked with him for about 2 hours in total, and I was paid $100. A realtor paid me to fix some grammar and coding issues with her website for $50. I also had a magazine from India reach out to me wanting a list of the best backpacks for women from Amazon.com. It took me 30 minutes and I was paid $20. I started out with my rate as $6 an hour, and I kept increasing my price as I got more offers. Currently, I have more offers than I care to accept, so now I’m rejecting jobs I don’t absolutely love to do.

– Fiverr. I will be totally honest with you, I haven’t worked on there as much as I have with UpWork. I have made easy money there however, such as being paid $5 for 5 minutes of my time to make a logo for a small blog. I’ve also spent money on there as well! For $11, I had a guy set up my hosting on my new blog (you need a laptop to do that, and I didn’t yet have a laptop). To join,  follow this link and get your first $5 free.

– Resell items. I can’t do this now that I’m in the truck full time, but it is great money if you have money to put up. There are two options.

Option 1: Thrift shop, buy an item for $5, and sell it for $20 online.

Option 2: (The one I use!) Buy something that is worth a few thousand dollars, write up a contract for it, and then sell it to someone on payments. Some people are totally incapable of saving money, and they have awful credit- this is where you come in. Say you have a $3000 item (be it a trailer, a camper, a motorcycle, etc..) that they want. Have them sign and notarize your contract. Now, you take a low down payment. Say, $300. Every month, they owe you a check of $300 every month for 15 months. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that you’re making an additional $1500, and they’re getting an item they would otherwise never be able to purchase. Be smart about how you write your contract, I’ll share the contract I use in my next blog post.

What MIGHT work for me:

– I haven’t done it, but I probably will try AirBnB when we purchase property in Montana. I’d love to welcome people into my day to day life, let them see how I live, and just create a great experience for them and myself while making money from home. If you sign up under my link now, you’ll get $40 worth of travel credit- for free!

– Dog sit. I haven’t tried this either, but I know people who get paid $15-30 a day to simply keep an extra dog at their house. The owner feels good knowing his dog isn’t lonely while he’s at work/on vacation/away (while paying significantly less than what a kennel would charge!), your dog and the client’s dog get to play, and you make side money while getting to supervise them from the comforts of your own home. Sounds like a winner to me!

Where to now?

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What are some ways you make money online or at home? Do you have preferred websites, apps or methods? As always thanks for stopping in and reading!