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Extra money is great. At a minimum, extra income is more change in your pocket. Beyond that, it can diversify your income sources and make your finances less vulnerable to a disruption.

There are many types of non-salary income, but one way they’re often divided up is passive versus non-passive. Whichever attracts your interest, this article will provide the information you need to make money outside of your office job.

  • How to Make Money Outside of an Office Job
  • How Can You Make $100 a Day?
  • How Can You Make $100 a Day Online Without Investment?
  • What Apps Pay You Real Money?

How to Make Money Outside of an Office Job

Passive Income

Passive income tends to be investment income: Money you get for letting someone use your money or your stuff. Here are the classic categories of passive income. (By and large, this whole category is only available if you have money to invest.)

1. Interest

Interest is money you get from something like a bond, CD, or savings account, where someone pays you to use your money.

Not so long ago — before the financial crisis — there were plenty of reasonably safe interest-bearing investments that paid 3%, 4%, or even 5% over inflation. Those days are long gone.

Read Also: 10 Companies That Will Pay You Just to Use The Internet

Now, CDs or bonds can barely beat inflation, and that’s only if you’re willing to tie your money up for a long time. Still, interest income can serve as a secondary income stream, and the opportunities are likely to get better in the near the future. (So, be careful about locking up your money for the long term at current rates.)

2. Dividends

Dividends are your share of the income earned by companies in which you own stock, and are also earned from baskets of investments that hold stocks, such as ETFs or mutual funds.

Unlike the interest earned on a bond or CD, dividends can rise or fall unpredictably, depending on the success of the firm or the fund. Although some risky companies can pay high dividends, stable companies tend to offer modest returns, typically under 5%.

3. Rents

In theory, rents can be pure investment income, like interest and dividends, but in practice, being a landlord is more like taking on a second job — you have to find tenants, accept rent payments, keep the building maintained, deal with broken appliances, and so on.

You can hire a management company to do that work, but that’s an extra expense — and the income still isn’t purely passive, because you still have the work of managing your relationship with the management company.

Still, rental income can be an incredibly flexible second income stream. Airbnb, RelayRides, and similar companies now enable individuals to rent out things like spare bedrooms, vehicles not in use, and earn extra income with less effort.

4. Royalties

Royalties are money that you get for letting someone make more limited use of something that you own. If an oil company operates a well on your land, they’ll pay royalties. If a publisher sells a book that you wrote, they’ll pay royalties. The possibilities are vast, and in essence include anything people can use — land, books, photos, patents, trademarks, etc.

It’s worth noting that most people who sit down to write a book don’t end up getting any significant income from it. That’s probably even more true of people who sit down to invent something. Still, books, online stock photography, and even less-successful inventions can all generate extra income and diversify your earnings.

Non-Passive Income

Non-passive means you have to get out there and hustle up this extra income in your spare time. Some take a lot of hustle.

5. Working Another Regular Job

For someone working for wages, a second (or third or fourth) job is a classic source of extra income. If you’re working for a salary, you’d probably be breaking your employment agreement to work another job, but there are ways to work for pay without breaking the rules. Check with your employer to determine your company’s specific policies.

6. Working at an Irregular Job

Not all jobs require a regular time commitment. Some can be done on an ad-hoc fashion, such as:

  • Casual labor, like a handyman, house painter, gardener, house cleaner, or dog walker.
     
  • Freelance work (usually skilled or semiskilled labor done outside the range of regular employment), such as a web designer, photographer, adult education instructor, bicycle messenger, etc. Many occupations that fall into this category require special training, certification, or even licensing.
     
  • Seasonal work, such as a department store Santa, sheep shearer, etc.
7. Service Something That Makes Money

The classic option here is a vending machine. Your investment is modest — the cost of the machine, and the cost to stock the machine the first time. Your labor is modest — visiting the machine to restock it and remove the cash.

Vending machines can be a great way to make money if you’ve got a great location secured for it to be placed. Simply asking around can be an effective way of finding new placement locations, offering a cut of your sales or a one time payment can be a worthwhile investment in order to have a prime location. Modern payment technology has also allowed the top Vending Company (as well as those elsewhere more relevant) to offer machines with cash, coin and even contactless payment capabilities. Investing in an advanced machine like this can increase sales to people who only carry their phone, who can now pay for items via their phone. At the same time, those who carry bills and even simple coins can still make use of the machine, all you’d have to do then is collect the money on a regular basis and restock your machine (this depends on the kind of items you’re vending).

Back in the day when coin-operated video games were a thing there wasn’t even any restocking needed — you just went as often as necessary to take out the money.

8. Running a Small Business

Running a small business can be a great way to make money from a source other than your salary. The range of options for small business are infinite. Just for starters, virtually all the “irregular job” items from the previous section could be just as easily arranged as a small business.

Instead of painting houses or walking dogs, you start a house painting or dog walking business. Plus, running a business may confer certain tax advantages (deductions, anyone?) which can make it an even healthier secondary income source. The next two ideas can also be structured as small businesses.

9. Sell Something You Make

The list of things you can make and sell is endless — jellies and jams, soaps, jewelry, garden produce, baked goods, maple syrup, pottery, scarves, etc.

10. Sell Copies of Something You Made

This is a variation on the point above about royalties. Instead of letting another company sell copies of something that you’ve created in return for royalties, you can sell the copies yourself.

The classic case is self-publishing a book, but there are a lot of other possibilities that fall into this category. For example, If you know how to do something, you could create a video teaching how to do it, and then sell it on DVD.

This option really lends itself to digital sales, because the cost of production is zero — ebooks, online video courses, phone apps, etc.

It’s tough to make much money this way, because there’s so much stuff out there already, often for free. Sales are likely to be low, and unless you have a very narrow, very focused niche, you’re going to face a lot of competition.

Still, this can be a win, especially if you want to create something for your own reasons — a phone app that does something you want a phone app to do, a drawing that speaks to you, etc.

If you’re making the thing because you want to, the extra effort to sell copies is quite small, and will probably bring in a little money.

11. Sell Something You Gather

There are still places where it’s legal to collect things and sell them — mushrooms, pine boughs, sea shells, rocks, insects, etc. Success requires access to a place where you can collect, and usually requires more than a little skill in knowing what’s worth collecting, and how to sell it.

12. Sell Something You Buy

If you can buy something cheap and sell it for more than it cost, you can make money on the markup. To make a reasonable profit, you usually have to add value in some way. The two classic ways are: Import the item, or repackage a cheap, bulky item into smaller units.

Importation: Say you find something sold overseas that you really like — a clothing item or a gadget or a tool — that just isn’t a thing in the U.S. You can find the manufacturer, buy a modest quantity at wholesale, import them into the US, and sell them at a markup. Your added value is the capital to buy the stock and the effort handling the complexities of importation.

Repackaging: Almost anything is cheaper in bulk, sometimes a lot cheaper. My wife buys a brand of quilt soap that’s good for washing wool. She can get it in 8-ounce bottles for $8 or $9 dollars — about $17 a pound. The stuff has a single ingredient: sodium lauryl sulfate, the detergent in baby shampoo.

If you buy by the barrel, sodium lauryl sulfate costs less than $1 a pound — highly profitable, even after paying for bottles. Anybody can do the same thing with anything that’s cheap in bulk but can be sold for more in reasonable quantities.

13. Teach a Class

If you have some skill — and if you also have some skill at teaching — you can make money offering classes. Where I live, people can arrange to teach classes through the park district, recreation center, the local library, YMCA, community college, and at least two different senior organizations.

Many of the stores that sell arts or craft supplies also offer classes with local artists and craftspeople as teachers. And if you’re adequately entrepreneurial, you don’t need to teach under the auspices of some other organization at all. You can find your own students and teach out of a location of your choice.

14. Put Ads on a Website

Creating a blog or static website and putting Google Ads (or other affiliate programs) on it can generate extra income — just how much depends on the traffic and ad clicks your site generates. It’s a competitive space, but if you can produce a quality site with adequate traffic, it may provide a regular source of additional income.

If you have some sales skills, you can also market your site to individual companies and get them to buy ads for a lot more money. That’s another piece of work, however. It would make your income a little less passive, because now you’re a salesman on top of everything else.

15. Create a YouTube Channel or Podcast

If you like making videos, this can be a source of modest income. If making videos seems like a lot of work, you’re going to quit before you make any money from Google Ads on your YouTube channel.

Still, if you make videos that go viral, there’s the potential to make quite a bit of money. Some YouTube stars derive significant income from their videos.

Podcasts are a little more complex to monetize, because you don’t have the option of just putting ads on the page somewhere; you actually have to include the ad in the podcast itself.

On the other hand, the ads are worth more, because the listener is pretty much stuck listening to the ad from beginning to end.

There are podcast networks that offer tools to help with creating and making them easy for listeners to find. Some of them also have ad networks, although you’d probably make more money if you did the work of selling your podcast to sponsors.

How Can You Make $100 a Day?

If you’re interested in earning money online and in your spare time, check out these 8 ways you can earn $100 or more per day:

1. Google Adsense

With this income-earning strategy, you simply sign up and Google gives you a code to copy and paste onto your website. From there, Google does the rest and you get paid any time someone clicks on your ads and/or makes a purchase.

When you finally add Google Adsense to your website, you should be able to earn your first $100 payout within around three months. This is pretty cool, but a lot of people have asked how they can earn so much with Adsense at first.

You have to keep in mind that, as a financial advisor for example , most of the ads on your website will be for financial products that pay out rather well. If your blog is in a different niche like food or fashion, it may take you longer for your ads to pay off with your first $100 check.

2. Text Links

The second way you can made $100 at first might be via text links. If you’re wondering what text links are, check out any article on the web and you’ll see highlighted words you can click out to take you to another web page.

There are a ton of companies who are willing to pay $100, $200, and even $1,000 or more for you to link from your website to theirs.

However, note that selling text links is against Google’s terms and conditions. If you are doing this on a consistent basis, your website is going to tank over the long-term.

For that reason, selling text links isn’t a good long-term monetization strategy. You can do it every once in a while without any negative impact, but you’ll live to regret it if you get greedy and overdo it.

3. Sponsored Posts

With a sponsored post, a company pays you to talk about their product or service on their website. While initially you might make $100 to $200 for each sponsored post, you can keep jacking up my rates over time. 

How much can you earn? Blogger Alexis Schroeder of FITnancials says she frequently earns $3,000 per month with sponsored posts. However, some blogs with more traffic can easily earn $20,000 per sponsored post or more.

If you plan to do sponsored posts, we definitely recommend only working with companies you believe in and feel good promoting.

If you promote anything and everything without making sure it aligns with your values, you probably won’t gain a lot of trust from your readers. Over time, this could hurt your efforts to grow your website more than the income from sponsored posts helps.

4. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most lucrative ways to make money online. When you are able to add affiliate links to my website, you will watch your income surge in a big way in a matter of weeks!

In the financial planning niche, affiliates include companies like online brokerages, online banks, and financial tools. These kinds of companies pay very good money if you’re willing to promote them.

While the type of affiliates you work with will vary depending on the niche you’re in, keep in mind that some companies will pay you up to $100 per conversion. It’s not too hard to start earning real money with that kind of return on your time.

Check out Making Sense of Cents. Michelle Schroeder-Gardner is the entrepreneur behind this blog, and she is also the founder of a course called Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing. Through her website and course sales, Michelle consistently earns over $100,000 per month. No, that is not a typo.

5. Display Ads

Display ads are very similar to Google Adsense except that the reader doesn’t have to click on the ad for you to make money. Think of display ads as billboards that are on your website instead of on the side of the highway.

With display ads, you get paid based on the number of times your ads are viewed no matter what. For that reason, these ads will work better for you as the traffic to your website grows over time.

6. Freelance Writing

Freelance writing is another way to earn online income if you don’t mind earning some of your money with active work. Another benefit of freelance writing is that you can gain exposure by writing for larger websites.

Some freelance writers are even earning six figures or more writing from home each year. This includes blogger Holly Johnson, who earns over $200,000 per year writing articles for other websites.

7. Coaching

If you have expertise in a specific field, you can also use the internet to build up a coaching business. This is something that happened on accident for me.

How much you earn depends on the type of niche you wind up in. According to recent statistics, executive coaches make around $325 per hour while business coaches make more like $235 per hour. Life coaches, on the other hand, are able to charge approximately $160 per hour.

If you’re an expert in your field and people are constantly asking to “pick your brain,” you should start charging people . Your time is valuable and so is your advice!

8: Brand Sponsorships

This strategy runs alongside sponsored posts, but it’s much more involved. Many brands want more than a sponsored post when they work with you. In fact, they are often willing to pay for some sort of sponsorship package that includes written content, videos, social shares, and more.

They can be very lucrative but also a huge pain! But, if you’re willing to jump through some hoops and you have a sizeable following, you can absolutely consider brand sponsorships as yet another way to earn money online.

How Can You Make $100 a Day Online Without Investment?

It will take more than one of method, but through a combination of several ways to make money online, you can absolutely work your way up to making $100 a day. We have a vast list which has exactly what you’re looking for

Here are some examples from the list that are online-based:

Take Online Surveys

Taking online surveys is one of the easiest ways to earn extra money. And plenty of companies are looking for consumer feedback to improve their products or develop new ones.

Brands hire survey sites to conduct online questionnaires on their behalf, gaining access to precious customer feedback. The sites in turn pay you for participating in their surveys. Check out:

  • SurveySavvy
  • GlobalTestMarket
  • American Consumer Opinion
Test Websites

Many businesses pay people to visit their sites and test functionality and user friendliness. Check out:

  • StartUpLift
  • TryMyUI
  • UserTesting, which pays a $10 flat rate for each completed test.
Participate in Mock Trials

You don’t need to know insider lawyer secrets or earn a law degree to make money in the legal sector. Websites such as eJury and OnlineVerdict pay users to participate in mock trials for their clients, who are mainly lawyers.

Online juries give lawyers the chance to “pre-try” their cases before presenting them in court. The lawyers gain experience, and you earn a little something for your effort:

  • eJury pays $5 to $10 depending on the length of the case
  • OnlineVerdict pays $20 to $60.
Get Paid to Search

Services such as Microsoft Rewards offer incentives to users who search and browse the web with Microsoft. You can then redeem the points for rewards like movies, music, games and apps.

Another site where you can earn points while you search, shop and watch is Swagbucks, which has paid out almost $190,000,000 to its members to date.

Get Paid to Improve Search Results

Sites like Appen and Lionbridge pay users to help improve search results for their clients by making them more qualitative, relevant and useful. As an online content evaluator, you can earn money just by testing sites and answering questions.

Sell Junk Mail

You can earn rewards by recycling things in the virtual world, such as your junk mail. The Small Business Knowledge Center is a market research company that evaluates your direct mail and email, rewarding you with prepaid Visa cards once you earn enough points.

Work as a Virtual Bookkeeper

Bookkeeping can be a potentially lucrative work-from-home business, and it doesn’t require an accounting degree. For a comprehensive guide to starting a career in this field, check out Bookkeeper Business Launch and learn from the site’s founder, CPA Ben Robinson.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing involves advertising something in exchange for a commission on the sales. To cash in on affiliate marketing, you’ll need your own blog or website on which to promote an advertiser’s product. To promote, you could write a product review and provide a link to the product.

Check out these sites:

  • ClickBank
  • CJ Affiliate by Conversant
  • MaxBounty

What Apps Pay You Real Money?

If you have a smartphone, you can easily make some real money fast, with relatively little work on your part. According to one study the average American spends 5.4 hours on their phone, with 13% of millennials saying they spend over 12 hours every day on their phones.

Why not monetize some of that time you’re spending on the phone, instead of wasting it all on social media? The list below has a variety of apps that pay you money.

They can help you to save money on things you’re doing already, pay you for completing easy tasks, get cash back or even help you to grow your money by investing.

Read Also: How To Earn Income With Micro Job Websites

When it comes down to it, these money making apps allow you work from home or on the go, to make money fast, without a lot of work.

Something to keep in mind is that among research market moneymaking apps, be wary of potential scams that ask for a fee to register (stay away) or over-exaggerate the potential earnings.

Look at the app ratings and read the user reviews. You can also check with the Better Business Bureau to see the business’s rating and any registered complaints. 

iPoll

The iPoll app (available for iOS and Android) is a customized market research app that allows you to earn money through taking market surveys, writing down diaries (of dairy consumption over three days, for example) and completing missions around retail (e.g. going to the grocery store). 

You register and are asked some basic information, such as your preferences and consumer habits, to determine your fit for missions, and then you receive alerts when there are new missions available based on your preferences and location.

The beauty of this particular market research app is that it’s customized, so you get alerts for tasks and missions that are suited to your interests and what you may actually enjoy. 

Users like iPoll, too: It’s rated 4 out of 5 stars on iTunes — and less glowing 3.1 out of 5 on Google Play. One reviewer wrote, “I like that there’s usually not any technical difficulties or ‘glitches’…and that the selection of topics are interesting and fun. … Most of the time, surveys [are] easy to start and complete; also they’re not exceedingly long!” 

For each survey, mission or diary completed, you earn rewards that can be redeemed for gift cards, or you can cash out using PayPal. You need only have accrued $10 to do so. Another perk: You’re automatically entered into a quarterly sweepstakes to win $10,000 in cash.

Foap

Foap is a moneymaking app (available for iOS and Android) that allows both professional and amateur photographers to make extra money selling photos taken on a smartphone. It’s pretty genius.

Basically, it’s a crowdsourcing platform for brands and advertising and marketing agencies to find and purchase images from Foap’s registry of more than 2.5 million photographers around the world. 

You register an account, upload your high-quality photos with clear tags, and the photos get rated by the registered community — the higher the rating, the higher the photo’s visibility.

For each sale, you earn $5, and you can earn up to $100 per sale. There are also “missions,” where brands and agencies will make specific requests for images. And recently, those missions have expanded to include videos. 

The app is well-rated on both iTunes (4.3 out of 5) and Google Play (3.8 out of 5). One reviewer wrote: “I love this app! It’s entertaining, a new place to share my photos and I have the opportunity to earn money from them.” 

Money App

The Money App (available for iOS and Android) is a market research app that earns you rewards for completing tasks, which include offering opinions, playing games, checking store displays, mystery shopping, testing services and participating in free trials.

You open an account on the Money App and start completing tasks to accumulate rewards, which you can, in turn, redeem for cash using a PayPal account.

The beauty of this app is that you can get paid within two to three working days of redeeming rewards — which is unusual in the world of market research apps that typically pay once a month or don’t offer cash rewards at all.

What’s more, the app scores highly (4.8 out of 5) on both Google Play and iTunes. One reviewer wrote: “I got my first 10 dollars within 5 days. That’s pretty good for not getting up off the couch.” Couch potatoes, rejoice; you now have options.

Slidejoy

Slidejoy (available for Google Play) pays users for their lock screens. Once it’s installed on your phone, you’ll start seeing various ads featuring news or advertisers on your lock screen. You can swipe left to learn more, swipe up for additional ads or swipe right for the home screen.

The good news is you earn passive income regardless of whether or not you engage with the ads — just think about how many times a day you have to unlock your phone. If you wanted to earn more, you could do other things in the app, such as surveys.

You can choose to be paid via Square Cash or PayPal (select “normal” mode), or you can donate your earnings to charity. The catch is that when you first sign up, you have to wait approximately three months before you can cash out. After that, it’s a monthly cash-out payment.

It’s rated a highly respectable 4.3 out of 5 stars on Google Play, and one reviewer wrote about her experience: “Who doesn’t love free money?! Four Stars only because they changed the cash-out options.” One downside: Slidejoy has a rather steep 20 percent cash-out fee.

Swagbucks

You make money as soon as you sign up for Swagbucks (available for iOS and Android) with a $10 sign-up bonus. The boilerplate market research app allows you to accrue points by taking surveys, shopping online or playing games, things you can do as you wait in line or have some downtime on your commute.

You can also earn points watching videos. Swagbucks has been rated 4 out of 5 rating on both iTunes and Google Play. 

Perks for this app? Unlike other market research apps that aggregate third-party surveys, Swagbucks offers numerous opportunities for surveys, which leads to more opportunities to make cash.

Do keep in mind that even though there are many opportunities for surveys, you will be disqualified from doing some of them based on your demographics. Another perk is that you can redeem your points for gifts cards or cash back from PayPal (the cashing out threshold is 2,500 Swagbucks points, worth $25).

Users, for the most part, like the app. One user wrote, “Great way to earn extra cash during breaks at work or waiting for an appointment. Who doesn’t have time for that? I use the points for Amazon gift cards and have cashed out several times in the last year to spoil myself.”

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