The solution for the rest of us is not trudging away at some job that barely pays you enough to live off of.  It is to value yourself more than that.  You deserve more then the bottom of the barrel.  So how  do you do it.  Well the road will not be easy but it will lead you down a better path in the long run.  That path is to start your own side business.  Many people have done it and succeeded at it as well.  The place to break out is the Internet.  There are so many ways to make money online it is obscene.  There are 2 billion people out there with money to burn and wanting what you can be selling.  So I will outline many business strategies you can start today!

Affiliate marketing is one of my favorite models for making money.  It takes some work to get started, but in the long run it is well worth it.  This is because you can leave your websites on autopilot and people pay you for your time many times over.  Here is how it works you start a blog it can either be a free blog or one you buy the domain of, granted that one you buy will convert better.  You find niche you want to focus on and have that be the focus of your blog.  Once you have been established you find ways to monetize your blog you can either use Google Adsense or go directly through affiliate marketing.  You can also use a combination of both.  With the affiliate marketing approach you find a product or service that offers you a commission for every referral you send their way.  You build out a great blog that gets people reading and they will click on your affiliate links and earn you money for a more in-depth look at this model try this article I wrote.  If you are interested look into my review of Wealthy Affiliate it is one amazing service that will show you all you need to know about affiliate marketing.

Drop-shipping is another model that can net you a very decent living with some people making upwards or $10,000 a month.  This is a more involved model though then affiliate marketing.  You build a website or you can go through places like Ebay or Amazon.  Your own website is preferred and that is because you own it.  Amazon and Ebay are sometimes hard to work for they do not care if someone noses you out of business just so long as the prices are low and they get their commission.  So we will proceed assuming you will get your own website, but the steps here are the same for if you want to sell on Ebay Or Amazon as well.  First you build a site that is an e-commerce site.  You can have a blog but you really don’t want to muddy the experience too much.  You find a company that will ship directly from their warehouse to anywhere you want.  This way you never have stock on hand and you never have to package and mail off the products yourself.  You find something you can brand from this company.  Something you can call your own this way people will seek out your product and want only it.  You direct people to your website and sell them there.  The company that makes the item ship it for you to their house and you collect their money and pay the company their asking price for the item.  All the while keeping a good portion of what they paid for yourself.  This works well because first if you brand it you can ask a little more for the item rather then having to compete for the lowest price on Amazon or Ebay.  For a more thorough look into the world of drop-shipping check out my article here.  It does have its benefits, but it does have some detractors too.

Arbitrage is a neat way to exploit the market inefficiencies in your favor.  This model has you go on Craigslist or some other job seeking site and look for people looking for tasks to be done for money.  It is important that you can do this all online if it is a face to face job forget about it.  Look for something like graphic design or web design.  You are not going to do the work yourself so don’t worry.  You are going to act as a sub contractor and find someone who will do the job for significantly less.  You make a deal with the person seeking the service then you find someone who will do the job for way less you send the job to them they get it done and you deliver the finished product to the consumer.  You get paid you pay your worker and you make an amazing profit.  A great service for this is Fiverr, they do any job for five dollars.  Now this is a hit or miss site so make sure the person you are talking with has a good high rating and you make sure you get infinite revisions.  You can make upwards of a hundred dollars a job this way.  Now a warning this market was flooded a year back when I looked into it and the reason was of a program called ArbitrageUnderdog.  They automated the entire process they even had form letters to sent both parties to help you maximize your sales.  This became bad though because people caught on to the process and started seeking out cheap workers themselves or just rejecting people with the same form letters.  My suggestion is if you do this come up with your own letters and make this your own don’t just cut and paste the form letters you may find somewhere and sound sincere that you want to do the best job for your customer.

Craigslist flipping is an interesting way to make money and it requires a little hustle and some means.  You go on your local Craigslist and look for things that are either free or very cheap.  Make sure the items are of demand and of good quality.  Certain items like technology and good furniture go for a lot.  You go get the item haggle the price to lower if you can and then take the item home clean it up take really nice photos of it showcasing it in all of its glory and sell it for much more then you paid for it back on Craigslist or Ebay.  One word of warning and this is important some antiques lose value if you clean them up so research before you touch them.  This business is a good model and one which can net you a lot of money.  Like I said before it does require some hustle you have to monitor Craigslist all the time and jump on the good deals.  Then you have to drive over and haul the item away which can mean some really heavy items sometime.  It is worth it though there are some things that people are giving away that you can sell for big bucks.  This is because some people do not know the value of their items and sometimes it is laziness they don’t want to bother with it so they just want to get rid of it.  You buy low and sell high and you will be in the green.  This is also a good strategy for garage sales and storage unit auctions as well.  Just know what you are buying and what would be a reasonable price to pay and to ask for it.  You don’t want to be stuck with a garage full of worthless junk that you can’t offload for even half of what you paid for it.

Fulfilled by Amazon, just a couple of paragraphs ago I was saying you shouldn’t go through Amazon, so what is different.  Well yes you are subject to Amazons whims and fancies, but they are the biggest market place in the world and if you can get a product selling on their platform you can make tons of money.  Like everything it isn’t as easy as you might think there are always pitfalls and road blocks.  So here is the nitty gritty of how to make money via Fulfilled by Amazon.  For this you should come up with your own product.  It doesn’t have to be something entirely new just think newish.  Like a redesigned cat scratcher post, or a redesigned mp3 player.  For this you need to contact a manufacturer in China or some other country where production costs little.  Did I mention this is going to take some capital because it will.  You can start small but sooner or later you will have to go into full swing and start making your product and having it shipped to Amazon for them to sell for you.  You will have to pay R&D costs and prototype costs and even have models shipped to you so you can see if it meets your standards.  So here is how you do it.  China has manufacturer trade shows.   You fly over there they treat you like a king or queen and you talk with multiple manufacturers about making your product.  You find the right one and they start developing your product for you.  Once you are satisfied you go to market and have them shipped to Amazon under your label.  It is important to make sure the product is one that you own the rights to.  The reason for this is there will always be imitators and they will go under your sale on Amazon and undercut you and take what is called the sale box from you.  Now you are listed under other sellers and they are selling a knock off of your product.  You suffer a hit on reviews and lose sales.  Whats worse is you have to fight to get the sale box back and have them banned, this can be done, but Amazon doesn’t make the process easy.  This is why you have your own brand so you can show that it is your product and yours alone and all others are imitations and not the real deal.  Other pitfalls are others will try to file a claim on your product claiming it is not legit and try to have you removed from the system.  Also if you are selling things that are not your brand some unscrupulous people will send you an e-mail trying to scare you off saying that the product is theirs and you are stealing it.  All of these detractors aside it is well worth it to try this strategy it can make you millions alone.  Oh and one pro tip with this strategy is if you are trying to start a product rolling the way to get to the top of Amazon’s search list is to spike the algorithm and do a product roll out where you sell a certain number of the product for a dollar or something small and in return ask for people’s review.  This will show Amazon that your product is selling well and will get you a bunch of reviews.  Yes you will lose some money at the start, but you will gain it back very quickly after that.

Etsy store is another great way to make money for yourself.  If you have a passion and a craft that you want to do and make money with, this is the outlet for you.  How it works it pretty simple you find a craft you like to do or want to learn to do you start making pieces that can be sold and through Etsy you sell them to people and Etsy takes a small fee.  First Etsy has some rules the chief most being that you must sell only things you have made yourself.  Some people have made a great living doing what they love and getting paid for it.  Some suggestions are resin pieces, parachord, crochet, sky is really the limit.  Another part of this business model is selling your items at the farmers market or somewhere on the street where tourists go.  I met a man who made his entire living doing this in Victoria Canada.  You can make anything and sell it and be creative.

Deviant art sale is another way to make money similar to Etsy, it mainly deals in art in picture form.  You can make a picture and multiple copies of it through your followers on your deviant art profile.  The cool thing is you can make different products from the same piece of art.  You can make t-shirts, book marks, coaster, and so much more and sell them.  They will produce them for you and you can make a profit.  There is even commission work through them where someone can request a personal piece of art to be made.  It isn’t the best strategy but if you want to be paid a little to make beautiful art then here you go.

Write an e-book this is a business model that can really net you some great cash.  First you have to have a topic it doesn’t have to be new, new just better new.  Like say if you can really add some knowledge to fly fishing then write an e-book about it.  Make it unique and compelling and you will get amazing sales.  There are a couple of platforms you can use to distribute your e-book.  The two main ones being ClickBank and Amazon.  I believe you can publish on both so why not spread a wide net.  ClickBank will net you more money per sale but Amazon will net you more money in volume.  Some people suggest selling the big version on ClickBank and a smaller version on Amazon since they have a set price structure and ClickBank does not.  ClickBank is an interesting platform you solicit others to become affiliate marketers of your content and you offer a good commission.  The accepted commission is normally around 70% of the sale price.  That means 70% to them and 30% to you minus ClickBank Fees.  With so little going to you I bet you are wondering how you will make any money for yourself.  That is simple with a high commission you will get way more people promoting your product pretty soon hundreds of sites will pop up singing your e-books praises and each one will get thousands of visitors a month.  I can add up very fast.  Some people have made $8,000 in their first week.  That is a very high number normally, but it is a good place for making a living and all you have to do is make sure your e-book stays up to date.  You do minimal work and other people hustle to sell your e-book.  One tip to get things started is to create your page and ask some friends to purchase your e-book and pay them back this way your book will not have a gravity of 0.  This will boost your gravity and entice others to start selling your e-book.  Just don’t purchase it yourself it wont help you.

Picture sales are an amazing way to earn some cash all the while getting rid of your shutterbug itch.  You take photos weird random things like the world around you or office supplies the sky is the limit, and you get paid for your time many times over.  The people who are more then likely to buy your photos are corporations trying to sell something or put a picture on their website so aim in that direction.  Some times the most random photo wins in this economy.  The great thing is you can earn commissions off of the same photo forever.  So once you build up a portfolio that generates you income over and over again with minimal work.  You can potentially make a lot of money doing this, so go out and start making some interesting pictures.

While similar to affiliate marketing this is slightly different, and can be used differently.  The main gist of this strategy is instead of building a site and waiting for people to come to you, you instead put an add infront of them and hope they click on it.  Now this has its benefits and detractors.  First off you have to pay for every click of your ad with no guarantee the person who clicks will do anything that nets you any money.  You can gain a lot of money doing this and lose a ton of money as well.  My suggestion is to split test on a small campaign first then if it nets a positive return then proceed with a bigger budget.  The chief players are Google Adwords, Bing, and Facebook.  Google is the largest one but the bidding for keywords is fierce with some words going higher then $15 a click.  Bing is a little more reasonable, but can get up there too and reaches a smaller audience.  Facebook is a different platform where you can really narrow down your audience tremendously, this helps a lot in the long run.  Sadly Facebook is also not cheap.  It costs less to link internally through Facebook but if you want to link externally then it is going to cost you.  One business strategy is to sell t-shirts through Facebook find a niche and create a facebook page where people can buy.  One PPC I did not mention is Plenty Of Fish and there is a reason it is because their registration is closed to new people.  When they will open back up is anyones guess but they have been closed for years.  Some other dating sites may offer a similar program, but I have yet to find one.  This was a great market though and would be nice to have open up again.  If you can find a good paying offer and have low cost clicks, PPC can net you good money.  I suggest a landing page with a sales pitch seems to help with conversions.

Virtual assistant is another great job to do from home.  You do everything an assistant can do like schedule appointments, answering phone calls, transcription, taking minutes, finding other workers, the jobs are limitless.  The best thing is you can do it from home and a computer and you get paid the same as a regular assistant.  Upwork is a great place to start it is where most people look for workers.