9 Ways Entrepreneurs Can Get Started Making Money in a Hurry A few different enterprises that each make some money can add up to you making a lot of money.
By Murray Newlands Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
The digital nomad revolution is among us and the combination of this remote work trend coupled with the proliferation of technology and the internet means that news ways of making money have arisen. Worldwide, intelligent people are finding new ways to earn an income alongside their day jobs, some of which now do so in their sleep...literally.
If you're sick of keeping up with the 9-to-5 rat race and want to find new ways to earn a living, be it full-time or alongside your current job, you'll be happy to hear that the opportunities are now endless. To help you get started, I've highlighted 10 ways inspiring ways people make money.
1. Arbitrage
Arbitrage is when you hire a middleman to do your job for you. In other words, you work as an agency. For example, if you are a content writer who has been hired by a company, you would accept the work and then pay someone else to do it for you.
Although you would not generate as much money as if you were to do the work yourself, you can take on more projects, hiring freelancers to do the work while you market the services in question.
Related: Everything You Need to Know About Hiring a Freelancer
2. Writing a book.
If you have a specific area of expertise that you feel would be valuable to people, why not tell them through a book? Although you would have to invest a lot of time writing it, publicizing it to the world has been made increasingly easy, thanks to the internet and digital marketing.
Now, instead of spending money getting it printed, you can simply sell it in a digital format on websites, such as Amazon. You could also create your own website, with an optimized landing page that would organically attract potential readers.
Related: How to Make Over $100,000 a Month From Writing a Book
3. Drawing and designing logos and graphics.
No matter how many design and logo-building tools appear on the market, the results are not comparable to those seen from professional designers. If you know how to use applications such as Photoshop and have a knack for all things design, then why not start offering your services from home in your spare time?
You could start doing this as a form of side income and slowly evolve by growing your customer base through websites such as Upwork, People Per Hour and Freelancer. You could also create your own business website.
Related: 5 Ways Fiverr Jump-Started My Life as an Entrepreneur
4. Investing in stocks.
Investing in stocks has been a common way for smart people to earn money on the side for years. Luckily, nowadays, you don't have to figure out the stock market on your own because the internet provides you with all the information you need to know.
Aside from the fact that information is readily available at the click of just a few buttons, various educational platforms now offer trading courses whereby you can learn the basics for understanding the stock market and where to get started.
Related: 7 Quick Ways to Make Money Investing $1,000
5. Blogging
Similarly to a book or ebook, a blog is a great way to share your expertise on a specific subject or industry. All you need to do is a use a blog-creating platform to get your page up and running then create awesome content. To make your blog successful, you must:
- Optimize it to generate more traffic
- Update content regularly
- Couple your content writing efforts with well-structured social media marketing
Once you have all the above put in place, there are numerous ways you can start generating an income from your blog. You could:
- Become an affiliate
- Sell advertising space
- Create a course or webinar that people can sign up to
- Start a subscription business once you have grown a significant following
Related: How to Make Over $1,000 a Month by Blogging
6. Offering content writing services.
If you have a way with words, you can use that skill to write for businesses who need web content, articles, blog posts, and press releases. By creating a freelancer profile on some of today's online platforms, you could generate up to $50 an hour with the right clients.
In addition, you don't have to stop at just writing. Content creation comes in all shapes and sizes, and businesses worldwide are looking for various videos, infographics, and images for their websites, blogs, and social media channels.
Related: 4 Ways Guest Blogging Grows Your Blog Audience Quickly
7. Utilizing previous assets.
If you have been working on specific types of projects and have created a valuable template that has proven to be consistently bulletproof, then you can sell this. Templates go much further than simply web design, others include, but are not limited to:
- Presentation templates
- Proposal templates
- Sales and demo templates
- Infographic templates
- Resume templates
- Email templates
- Marketing templates
You can also make more money by offering people packages whereby your template comes with content specific to your clients' project. This could be anything from a marketing bundle to photography bundles and more.
Utilizing previous assets could also involve you:
- Selling your photography
- Selling notes you've taken from a book, video, film or conference
- Buying and selling websites domain names
Related: How to Sell Your Extra Stuff
8. Offering personal loans.
Investing in the right people can have its benefits, which is why smart people tend to make calculated decisions with their money, one of these being peer-to-peer lending. It may seem like a risky game to start playing, but lending companies have created new ways for anyone with money to become lenders, safely. Simply put, you sign up on the website, they find a borrower that matches your lending criteria, and you lend that person money (with interest).
Related: Why Peer-to-Peer Lending Could Be a Good Investment Choice
9. Property rentals
Smart people use all the resources they have to make a spare buck and this includes their home. If you have a spare room that is more often that not empty, spruce it up, and put it on AirBnB. You could generate enough money to pay your mortgage and even some spare cash, depending on where you live.
If you have a second home that you only visit during the holidays, rent it during the time you are not using it. By treating it like a business, you could turn this into your primary form of income.
Finally ...
The key to making extra money is not being smart, but finding smart ways to generate new forms of revenue. The creative ways outlined above may require a small initial time or monetary investment, but these can eventually be automated in most cases, creating a diversified money making machine that will ensure you don't have all your eggs in one financial basket.
