18 Ways to Make Money Online Fast From Your Laptop in 2021

If you’re looking for easy money online, taking online surveys is the first place to start. Surveys sites help companies gain valuable market research so they can improve their products and services.

Survey sites all work pretty much the same way. You sign up with an email address, enter demographic information about yourself, and then start finding surveys to take. Surveys can take anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes, and you can make money from your laptop or phone.

Many survey companies pay in points that you convert to cash or gift cards, and you can realistically expect to make $1-$5 per survey.

You won’t be eligible for every single survey you try because companies are often trying to survey specific demographics of people. But the more information you add to your profile, the more surveys you’ll be matched with.

Survey Junkie is a company I highly recommend. In addition to surveys, you can make easy money online using their browser extension, through online focus groups, phone surveys, and product testing.

Taking surveys online isn’t going to make you rich by any means, but it’s a fast way to put some extra money in your pocket.

IMO, starting a blog is one of the best ways to make money online. It isn't the fastest on this list, but the upside potential is definitely the highest. For example, a blog called The Penny Hoarder recently sold for $100 million (and no that's not a typo).

I started this blog back in 2015, but even now in 2021, 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.

Blogging legitimately changed my life. I used to hate my job, and now I wake up in the morning, pull out my laptop, and write about things I genuinely love to talk about.

Even though it takes considerable work to build a highly profitable blog, it’s extremely affordable to get started. You can start a blog for as little as $2.95/month when you start a blog using my exclusive Bluehost link.

You can learn more in my in-depth guide: How to Start a Blog  – An Easy Step-by-Step Guide for 2021.

I bet that if you looked through your closet you could find a basketful of clothes, shoes, and accessories to sell online. Selling stuff online is one of the fastest ways 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 sell or buy on Depop.
• 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.

Data entry is repetitive work, but it’s an extremely flexible way to make money online from home. 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.

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.

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  – I just learned about this one
• Home decor
• Wedding decor, invites, attire, and more
• Baby items  – my wife decorated our son’s nursery almost exclusively with stuff she bought on Etsy
• Printables  – things like invites, checklist, planner pages, calendar sheets, thank you cards, gift tags, etc. Learning how to sell e-printables on Etsy can turn into a really passive side hustle because you’re selling digital files that can be sold and delivered indefinitely without much work on your end

There’s a lot of income potential with teaching online courses. It’s been a part of my business model for a couple of years, but you don’t need a blog to sell courses online.

One of my readers leveraged her background in graphic design to create a series of extremely successful courses that she sells on Udemy and Skillshare. Her courses typically sell for around $20, and she’s making around $60,000 a month in sales.

The most successful courses help people solve a problem or teach a marketable skill. I am a big believer that video-based courses are the way to go. They’re great for visual learners and you can give an over-the-shoulder look at how you’re doing things.

Creating a course may sound like a big undertaking, but you start with a larger topic and break it down into the most important things or steps someone needs to know. Then, divide each of those steps into short 5-10 minute lessons.

As far as selling your courses, which can turn into a pretty passive way to make money online because you’re not actively teaching, I highly recommend Teachable – it’s what I use for my courses.

If Teachable doesn’t fit your price point or if you want more features, here’s a comprehensive list of the best online course platforms for 2021.

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 as a freelance writer. It doesn’t hurt, but the most important thing is that you know how to write well.

The hardest part of getting started is learning how to find a niche and market yourself, but you can learn more about how to get started in How to Become a Freelance Writer. This article explains how to find a niche, courses to jumpstart your career, and how to start building your portfolio.

Writing isn’t the only freelance business idea to make money online in 2021. There are now over 57 million freelancers in the U.S., and more and more businesses have started outsourcing to freelancers.

Here are some freelance business ideas to consider.

• Web development: There’s a growing need for web developers who can work with coding languages like Java, Ruby on Rails, Python, etc.
• Transcriptionists: Take audio or video files and turn them into text documents. You can make money as a general, medical, or legal transcriptionist.
• Proofreading: If you are good at spotting punctuation and grammatical errors, freelance proofreading is a really flexible way to make money online.
• Bookkeeping: Bookkeepers manage payroll, billing, keep track of business transactions, and prepare reports. You do not need a background in accounting to work online as a bookkeeper.

I recommend starting by leveraging an existing skill because you can make money faster if you’re spending less time learning a skill. But if you’re up for learning a new skill, look for areas where there’s a high need for new workers, like digital marketing (i.e. Facebook ads).

According to a study done by UpWork – a well-known freelancing platform – freelancers say they love the way they work because it’s so flexible. Some say that they can make more freelancing compared to what they would make at a traditional 9-5 job.

This is technically another way to make money online as a freelancer, but there’s such a high need for virtual assistants that I wanted to give it it’s own section.

Virtual assistants (or VAs) are people who work online from home 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.

I have several VAs that help me run this site, and I honestly couldn’t do what I do without them. One of my VAs manages my schedule, does keyword research, does email inbox management, and pays the people on my team. She’s a huge asset to me and my business.

Virtual assistants can make $15-$25/hour depending on the kind of skills they offer and what their clients need.