So, you want to learn how to make money online? There are so many options for beginners, and that’s awesome news if you’re looking for a side hustle, a new career path, or you just want to make extra money to offset inflation.
We’ve compiled a list of our best and easiest options for beginners. If you're looking for a quick and easy way to make a few extra bucks, taking online surveys with Branded Surveys is a very beginner-friendly option, and you're paid $1 to $3 for each online survey you complete.
1. Bookkeeping
Freelance bookkeepers help business owners record and manage daily financial transactions. This can include paying bills, managing payroll, and collecting payments. If you’re good with numbers, bookkeeping is an excellent way to make money online!
Bookkeepers need to be familiar with popular financial software like Quickbooks and know how to read and create balance sheets. Pay averages $20-$40/hour. Check out our course Bookkeeping Launchpad to learn how to get started.
Make up to $5,000/month bookkeeping
If you're good with numbers, work as a bookkeeper from the comfort of your home.
2. Freelance Writing
With more and more brands focusing on content marketing, companies are increasingly interested in hiring skilled freelance writers to create great content for their websites. Freelance writers are hired to write articles, blog posts, ad copy, sales pages, emails, and more.
You don’t need to have a background in English, journalism, or creative writing to make money online as a freelance writer. It doesn’t hurt, but the most important thing is that you know how to write well.
Make $1,000 to $5,000/month as a freelance writer
Go from “I don’t know what I’m doing” to “I landed my first client!”
3. Proofreading
Are you the kind of person who can spot spelling errors in menus, grammatical errors in online articles, or spelling mistakes in your favorite books? Then you would make an excellent proofreader.
Proofreaders earn around $15-$40 an hour putting the finishing touches on written work. They are some of the last people to look at content before it’s published. That’s why you need a good eye for spotting mistakes if you want to make money online as a proofreader.
Want to make money proofreading?
This FREE seminar teaches you the five steps to becoming a well-paid proofreader.
4. Participate in Market Research
Taking online surveys won’t bring in a serious income, but it’s very easy money if you’re looking for ways to make money online for beginners. Online surveys are how companies gain market research insights that help them create better products, services, and more effective advertising campaigns.
We’ve ranked the top online survey sites, and Branded Surveys is our top pick. They have a brand new mobile app and pay $0.50-$3 per survey, and you’re paid in points that convert to PayPal cash or direct deposit. Branded Surveys is currently offering new users a 100 point sign-up bonus.
New users earn 100 points with Branded Surveys
Claim your bonus today, and start making up to $3/survey.
5. Earn Cash Back
One of the easiest ways to passively make money online is by using a cash back app or website. You can easily claim discounts and make money shopping like you normally do! Ibotta is one of our favorite cash back apps.
You can earn up to 30% cash back when you shop in-store or online at thousands of retailers nationwide. If you're already shopping, this is one of the best ways to make money online for beginners.
Cash back & save!
Ibotta is an easy-to-use app that pays you up to 30% back on purchases.
6. Get Cash for Gas
Even if you want to make money online, you have to leave the house at some point. The Upside app will give you up to $0.25 back per gallon of gas.
You can sign up in 5 minutes or less, Upside will even show you where the cheapest gas stations are.
7. Churn Bank Bonuses
Churning bank bonuses is an unusual way to make money online for beginners, but it’s an excellent source of passive income. The way it works is that you move your savings around every few months to take advantage of different cash bonuses that banks offer to new customers.
For example, SoFi is currently offering new customers up to a $300 cash bonus. New customers must set up direct deposit and will earn a bonus of $50 to $300 if deposits of $1,000-$5,000+ are made in the first 30 days.
Make up to $300 when you open a SoFi account
Put your savings to work and open an account with SoFi. Terms and conditions apply, and the bonus is for new customers only.
8. Become a Virtual Assistant
Virtual assistants (or VAs) make money online and help business owners use their time more effectively. If there’s a task that can be done by someone else, like running reports or scheduling blog posts, having a virtual assistant handle those jobs frees up time for the business owner to handle high-level work.
Virtual assistants can make $15-$25/hour depending on the kind of skills they offer and what their clients need.
Fast track your VA business
Get the FREE resources you need to start a successful side hustle as a virtual assistant.
9. Start a Blog
Starting a blog is one of the best ways to make money online for beginners. But in case you’re looking for ideas to make money fast, you need to know that blogging is a loooong game (it can take a few months to start generating income from your site).
Still, blogging is a viable way to make money online. You can take a passion, interest, skills, or hobby and turn it into a profitable blog. There are lots of monetization options: affiliate marketing, sponsorships, sales of digital products, display ads, consulting, coaching, freelancing, and course sales.
If you’re interested in starting a blog, we highly recommend Bluehost, and here’s why:
- Bluehost has a ton of free themes to choose from, and that means you can get a professional-looking blog without paying for web design services.
- They have stellar customer service.
- You get a free domain name for your first full year.
- WordPress is included with Bluehost — that’s the platform THIS blog was built on!
- When you sign up for Bluehost using our link, our team will set up your blog and install key components at no additional charge with Launch That Blog.
Start a blog for less than $3/month
Sign up through our Bluehost link and receive exclusive pricing — you save up to 60% off the regular price.
10. Digital Marketing
Running Facebook and Instagram ads for small businesses is simply digital marketing through Facebook, which continues to be one of the best online platforms for small businesses to increase their traffic and visibility. And you can make around $1,000-$2,000 per month/client with just a few hours of work each week.
Surprisingly, this is an excellent opportunity to make money online for beginners because you don’t need a degree or background in marketing to get started. The Facebook Side Hustle Course was designed to teach beginners how to run social media marketing campaigns, find clients, and get those clients to say “yes!” to their services.
Want to make $1,000-$2,000/month online?
Learn how to run Facebook and Instagram ads for small businesses. You only need an extra 2-3 hours a week and no previous experience.
11. Negotiate for Remote Work
If you love your job and you simply want to work online from home, you can always try to negotiate for a remote work arrangement. Even if it’s moving to remote two days a week, this can provide some much needed flexibility.
Here are some tips for negotiating:
- Make the conversation about how this arrangement will benefit your company
- Focus on the impact you can make working from home
- Use data to prove you can successfully work from home
- Be patient and be prepared to circle back
12. Sell on Etsy
For creative people, starting an Etsy business gives you the option to make money online while still feeling like you can get hands-on with your arts or crafts. There are legitimately so many options for selling on Etsy, including:
- Jewelry
- Snapchat filters
- Home decor
- Wedding decor, invites, attire, and more
- Baby items
Another really excellent item to sell on Etsy are printables. Printables include invites, checklists, planner pages, calendar sheets, thank you cards, gift tags, etc. There’s a fantastic free ebook called Seasonal Products Secret that outlines printables ideas for each month of the year and how to capitalize on them.
13. Tutor Online
Book Nook is a platform that hires online tutors for K-8 to boost critical reading and math skills. Tutors work with kids in 1:1 settings or in small groups.
BookNook is currently looking for new tutors, and you must me any of the following criteria to sign up:
- You have a bachelor’s degree or higher, and you have at least one year of teaching or tutoring experience.
- You are in your final year of a teacher credentialing or education degree program, and you have at least one year of teaching or tutoring experience.
- You have at least two years of teaching or tutoring experience.
15. Trade in Your Gently Used Electronics
If you want to make money online fast, you should check out Decluttr. They will pay you cash for your gently used electronics — like cell phones, video games, game consoles, tablets, e-readers, even textbooks. Decluttr even pays for shipping, and you’re paid 24 hours after they’ve received and reviewed your item.
16. Teach an Online Course
There is a lot of income potential with teaching online courses, and surprisingly, even beginners can create and sell a successful course. See, the best online courses are helping people solve a problem or teaching a marketable skill, and you can teach everything from time management skills, baking bread, creating a budget in Excel, and so on.
Our guide How to Sell an Online Course teaches you everything from developing an idea to marketing your course.
The cool part about online courses is that they can become a fairly passive source of income, so you can focus on other ways to make money online!
17. Download Money Making Apps
Whether you want to get paid to watch videos, play games, or earn cash back, there are so many excellent apps to make money from your smartphone. Swagbucks is one of our favorites. This app pays you to take surveys, watch videos, shop online, and more. New users can earn $10 when they sign up!
18. Rent Out Your Car
If you’re learning how to make money online for beginners, there is a good chance you won’t be using your car as much. So why not put it to work to make even more money?
Hyrecar is a company where you can list your car to be rented out to food delivery drivers, and the average car owner makes an extra $720/month! You’re in control of how much you charge, when your car is available to rent, and HyreCar protects you with up to $1,000,000 in liability coverage.
19. Rent Out Your Space
Neighbor is a platform where you can list unused space in your house and people in your area can rent it for self-storage. Here’s an idea of how much you can make with different types of space:
- Garage: Earn $100-$600 per month
- Driveway: Earn $50-$150 per month
- Shed: Earn $50-$200 per month
- Parking space: Earn $50-$300 per month
It’s free to list your space on Neighbor, and you can learn more in our full Neighbor Review.
20. Open an eCommerce Site
Shopify is an easy-to-use platform for setting up and running your own ecommerce store. And you can make money online passively if you use Shopify for drop-shipping.
Here’s how it works:
- Use Shopify’s platform to build your ecommerce site, and they have over 70 customizable themes and a drag-and-drop editor.
- Select items to sell on your site that can be drop-shipped. That means you don’t touch, store, or ship these goods. You’re listing them for sale, and then connecting the customer with the supplier.
- You still need to run traffic to your site, but Shopify can help you make somewhat passive money online.
There are already over 1,000,000 businesses powered by Shopify, including many brick-and-mortar businesses that use their point of sale technology. You can learn how to get started in our Shopify for Beginners Tutorial.
21. Start a YouTube Channel
Making money on YouTube is a lot like starting and monetizing your blog — you need to start with a niche and grow your traffic, and you can make advertising income, affiliate income, create sponsored content, and sell branded merchandise.
The top YouTubers earn crazy money. For example, Ryan Kaji is one of the most successful YouTubers. He’s only 10 years old and made $27 million in 2021. His parents run his channel, but that’s still wild!
22. Data Entry
Data entry is repetitive work, but it’s a good way for beginners to learn how to make money online. Most data entry jobs these days are helping with machine learning tasks that help artificial intelligence work even better.
Because humans are still better than computers at doing a lot of things, like evaluating speech and annotating images, companies pay for quick machine learning tasks.
Data entry does not require any previous experience, and there is a growing list of companies offering data entry jobs from home. One of the most well-known ones is Amazon MTurk. It’s a crowdsourcing marketplace where you can get paid to do research, validate data, and moderate content.
23. Sell Your Photos
Whether you’re an amateur or professional photographer, you can make money online selling your photos.
Sites like Shutterstock, Twenty20, Adobe Stock, Getty Images, and Alamy are all platforms where you can license your images to be used as stock photos. You typically don’t get paid until one of your photos is used, but it can turn into a fairly passive way to make money online.
24. Write an eBook
This isn’t fast money online because you have to write an entire book, but ebooks don’t need to fit the traditional book format, meaning that they don’t have to be 200-300+ page novels.
An ebook can be much shorter, and you don’t have to go through the traditional publication steps when you publish a book on Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing).
Amazon KDP makes it easy to upload, list, and sell your book on Amazon. These are considered self-published books, and your book is available for purchase worldwide 24-48 hours after you hit the publish button.
25. Sell Unused Gift Cards
Most people have a stash of partially or unused gift cards sitting in their house, and selling them is one of the easiest ways to make money online for beginners. There are a bunch of legitimate websites to sell unused gift cards, so instead of letting those gift cards sit in your wallet or drawer, why not make extra money with them?
26. Sell Gently Used Clothes Online
Selling stuff online is probably the fastest way to make money online right now — sometimes it’s even same day cash depending on how you sell your stuff.
As far as clothes go, here are a few ways to sell things:
- Poshmark: This site is for on-trend gently used men’s, women’s, and children’s clothing and shoes. You set your own prices and are contacted when someone is interested in buying.
- ThredUp: ThredUp is the largest online thrift and consignment shop for women’s clothing, shoes, and accessories. You can request a free Clean Out bag, which you fill with gently used, on-trend items and ship back to ThredUp. ThredUp has high standards, so they won’t accept everything you submit. But you get paid for the items they keep.
- Facebook Marketplace: Using Facebook is a really easy way to sell clothes (or anything else!) online. Besides Marketplace, you can also sell in local buy/sell/swap groups.
- Depop: This platform skews towards a younger audience, and is especially great for unique, handmade, and on-trend items. There are no fees to list on Depop, but the site does take 10% from all of your sales.
- eBay: Selling on eBay is another option to make money online selling clothes, but it’s also a good platform to sell collectibles, sports equipment, home goods, antiques, and more.
The Final Word on How to Make Money Online for Beginners
Technology has opened the door to more and more opportunities to make money online. The best way to make money online will depend on the kind of commitment you are willing to make.
Do you want something simple and mindless like taking surveys on Branded Surveys? Or are you willing to put in the time to start a freelancing side hustle, like proofreading or writing?
Think about what you’re interested in, what kind of skills you have, and your financial goals. There’s something online for everyone.
FAQs
Taking online surveys is the simplest way to make money online. It’s incredibly mindless, there’s no skill required, and you can do it anywhere. Of course, online surveys won’t make you rich, but you can earn $1-$3 per survey with Branded Surveys or Survey Junkie.
Selling your stuff online is the easiest way if you want to start making money today. Go through your house and find things you’re no longer using, like clothes, workout equipment, furniture, kids’ stuff, home decor. Facebook Marketplace is probably the fastest place to sell things, and people will come to you to purchase.
But, be safe whenever someone is coming to pick up your items. Many sellers arrange PPU (porch pick up) and do payments via Venmo or PayPal.
Start by thinking about what your goals are. Are you looking for some extra quick cash, then start by selling stuff online, earning cash back when you shop with Ibotta, or taking online surveys with Branded Surveys.
If you’re able to invest a little more time, you can earn even more money online working as a freelancer. There are dozens of freelance industries, from freelance writing, proofreading, web development, and bookkeeping.
Many of the online jobs mentioned in this article have the potential to net you a steady $1,000 a month or more. Running Facebook ads, for example, pays $1,000 to $1,500/month per client. Once you have the ad system set up and running, it takes around 2-3 hours a week to manage ads for one client.
About Millennial Money Man
Bobby Hoyt is a former band director who paid off $40,000 of student loan debt in 18 months on his teaching salary and then left his job to run Millennial Money Man full-time. He helps other Millennials earn more through side hustles, save more through budgeting tools and apps, and pay off debt. He is a personal finance expert who has been seen on Forbes, Reuters, MarketWatch, CNBC, International Business Times, Business Insider, US News, Yahoo Finance, and many other personal finance and entrepreneurship media outlets.
