It's always nice to have a side hustle that earns you some passive income at the comfort of your home. You don't need any fancy degrees for these online jobs. All you need is some time, interest, a laptop with an internet connection, and the will to make some money.
Ever since I left my 9-5, I've been doing a lot of research on creating various passive streams of income that don't require a lot of my attention or have dreadful deadlines. I needed them to be credible but not too stressful.
So, after a few months of testing the water, I found a few jobs that offered exactly that. These can be done in the comfort of your home. They have flexible hours; you decide when you want to work.
Freelancing
Freelancing platforms have been booming, especially since 2020 and many youngsters working from home have started preferring freelance work. There are thousands of buyers who are ready to work with people on small projects and they pay really well too.
Since it's freelancing, you do what you're good at and get paid for doing what you love. Among the various freelancing platforms, I'm going to be talking about Fiverr today.
Fiverr
Fiverr is an online marketplace for freelance services. It provides freelancers a chance to offer services to buyers from all around the world. Freelancers can provide their services as a one-time job or a recurring service for a certain price. You can buy or sell a variety of services for clients from all over the world.
Fiverr calls a freelancer's service, a gig. For instance, let's say you are offering a service of writing articles for blogs. In this case, your gig would contain what service you're offering, your pricing, and your delivery time for writing one article.
You can create multiple gigs and offer a number of services like blog writing, copywriting, proofreading, graphic designing, photo editing, and a lot more. The minimum price that you can set for your gig is $5.
Getting your first order might be a task at first, but once you optimize your gig enough and stay positive, you'll start seeing orders pouring in.
The only disadvantage to this platform is that they deduct a whopping 20% commission fee. So, for every $5 you earn, Fiverr will take $1 as a platform fee. Other than that, it is a great platform to make some bucks on the side.
Average earnings: $100/week
Difficulty rating: Moderate
Transcription Jobs
You can make a good amount of money by offering your transcription/captioning services to clients online. Transcription is nothing but transcribing audio into written language; captioning is adding subtitles to a video.
There are a number of platforms that are taking in freelance transcriptionists and captioners. A few of them include Rev, TranscribeMe, and GMRtranscription. They pay almost $0.50 - $1 per minute of audio transcribed. So you earn $4 -$5 for 5 minutes of audio or video.
The working schedule is very flexible and you can work whenever you want. The more work you complete, the more you earn, it's simple as that. They conduct a test after you apply for the job, which is quite easy to pass. Once you're approved, you are ready to start earning.
There are a few services that pay a lot more as well. For instance, platforms like Voices pay $150-$300 for voice-over artists for just a few minutes of work.
Average Earning: $150/week
Difficulty: Easy
Selling Digital Products
Did you know that you can make money by selling digital products like online courses, e-books, and digital planners online? I didn't either, until very recently. I came across a few people who have been doing exactly that for years and making a living out of this.
All you have to do is create the digital product and start marketing it. You can list your product on online selling platforms like Etsy, Amazon KDP, or even your own blog or website.
First, identify something you're good at. Are you an expert at digital marketing? Brain dump a few key concepts with practical examples and start putting together an online course. There are so many people who would love to learn about such things.
Are you an aspiring writer and have something valuable to offer? Start writing that e-book today. Are you good at designing? You can transform them into viable products by putting your designs on t-shirts, posters, mugs, you name it.
Initially, you'll have to work on marketing your products to your niche audience and try out various marketing techniques to figure out what works. It will take some hard work and time for the money to start coming in, however, once your business starts gaining some traction, this is a great way to earn some passive bucks.
Average Earning: $100/week
Difficulty: Moderate
Amazon KDP
Amazon KDP is Amazon's self-publishing platform where you can publish your e-book at no extra cost. With Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), you can publish your e-book in just a few steps and start earning money right away.
You might be thinking, it's hard to come up with an idea for a book, let alone actually write one. There are two ways to do this. One, you can sit down and write your book word to word and publish it. Two, you can simply create low-content books and sell them online.
So, what are low-content books? A low-content book contains little to no content like a composition notebook, journal, planners, sketchbooks, puzzle books, etc.
There are a number of tutorials out there to teach you how to make one and how to rank them on Amazon. All you have to do is start making them and selling them. Amazon pays a good amount of royalty for each book sale.
Average Earning: $50-$100/week
Difficulty: Easy
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a type of digital marketing where you promote a brand's product and earn commission from it. If a person purchases a product or takes a particular action on a product through your affiliate link, you earn a certain amount of commission.
This is a really good way of earning some bucks, considering you marketing it to the right audience. Bloggers, YouTubers, and content creators use affiliate marketing that generates an average income of $500-$1000 (depending on the product commission rate).
A number of affiliate programs are available out there. Some of the notable ones are Click Bank, CJ Affiliates, and Impact. Most of the product-based companies usually have their own affiliate programs that you can sign up for.
Average Earning: $50-$80/week
Difficulty: Moderate
Online Tutoring
Are you good at English? Then, this is the perfect opportunity for you to earn some money by tutoring people online. Some of the online tutoring platforms are Cambly and Engoo.
Cambly is one such online tutoring platform where you can earn up to $10 per hour teaching English. You can make a full-time income with this job if you're living in a second or third-world country. As a tutor, you teach Non-English speakers and kids through live video chat.
Signing up is quite easy and you can get started almost immediately. The teaching schedule is very flexible and there is no minimum hour commitment on the number of hours you should teach per week, which is great. They pay weekly through PayPal.
Average Earning: $70- $100/week
Difficulty: Easy
The potential to earn an income online is endless. A few others ways are running a blog, YouTube, data entry jobs, completing surveys, and a lot more. A point to be noted is that these jobs do take some time and effort, and you cannot expect to become rich in just a few days. The key is to stay consistent and patient throughout the process.
Take care.