Better Ways to Make Money Online

Thankfully, there are safe and effective ways to make money from the comfort of your home (even using the home itself) to make some extra side cash.

1. Become an Airbnb Host

Airbnb is a great place to start earning liquid cash with the assets you already have. Every spare room in your home can be rented out to short-term guests. Obviously it’s not as easy as just listing and making money. You’ll need to market yourself, follow the accommodation rules, and be responsive to be successful.

Like any other marketplace, if you put in the administrative work, you can easily grow Airbnb into a business. Many people are already making enough as Superhosts that they leverage earning to secure Airbnb financing on a second rental property.

Think of Airbnb as starting your own Subway or McDonalds franchise. But instead of paying massive five-figure fees up-front, you use your existing resources to learn the ropes of the business. The platform then makes it easy to work with third-party lenders like us to finance your expansion, whether in the same town or a completely new market.

2. Mine Cryptocurrencies

Since its inception, Bitcoin miners have earned over $23 million in revenue. It’s no longer viable (or even legal) to run a cryptocurrency mining rig at home. But you can use the computer equipment you have lying around to earn extra cash.

If you’re not technically savvy, essentially you leave a computer, tablet, or smartphone running. The devices process computations in exchange for digital currencies. There are over 2000 of these currencies on the market, and if you can exchange it for Bitcoin or deposit it into a government-approved crypto exchange like Coinbase, you’ll have cash.

It doesn’t matter if the cryptocurrency can be spent. Whether Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Facebook’s Libra, or Bananacoin, if it can be converted into the US Dollar on an exchange, start earning it.

3. Provide a Creative Space

Everyone from musicians to visual artists, movie production crews, writers, and even small-home dwellers, are looking for a place to stay. If you convert your garage, Arizona room, backyard, or other portions of your home into a workshop or creative space, you can draw in extra income while meeting new people.

Bands, for example, are always traveling on the road and looking for cheap places to stay that aren’t always accommodated by traditional hotels. Yoga retreats are possible too. Whatever hobby you’re into, make it a theme. These types of unique experiences do very well on Airbnb and financing other online marketplaces.

4. Open a Dog Hotel

While Airbnb and Uber take care of humans, platforms like Wag and Rover offer a pet-based approach. Instead of a bed and breakfast, you’ll be providing walking, feeding, and overnight care services to pets. This is a great way to get even your kids and pets involved in making money for the house.

Simply sign up on the marketplaces and fill out the forms to explain what types of services you offer, how much you charge, and what animals you accept. You create your own schedule and build your business out from there. Keep in mind, you’ll still need to market your services to see any kind of success.

Pet services especially look for animal lovers. Showcase photos of you with your own animals and be honest and transparent about exactly what you do and have. People often love their pets more than each other, so you are offering to house a very precious part of someone’s life.

With all that said, you can fit a lot more animals than people in a building, so it’s a good idea to offer housing and services for both.

5. Run an Online Business

All of the above services and platforms are great, but they’re not an instant solution. Once you’ve created a profile, you’ll quickly realize you’re just a drop in the bucket of everyone else reading this and trying the same things.

Get on your grind and start involving your social channels. Tell coworkers, friends, neighbors, people in the line at your morning coffee stop. Anybody with ears and a wallet is a potential customer and a potential brand advocate. 

Also, we’ve run through a handful of marketplaces already, and there are also listings on Craigslist, selling on eBay, and more. There’s no point in running each of these platforms separately. Build a centralized website where you can link to all of your listings across every online platform, from Airbnb to Etsy. This will increase your overall reputation on search engines like Google, along with each individual platform.

If you treat these side hustles like a real business, you’ll see a real financial return on your investment and can put those funds toward good use – such as Airbnb financing. It’s not instant, but once you get going, the residual success builds on itself, and you’ll wish you started sooner.

Airbnb, for example, has been around for a decade now. People already have a decade of reputation and experience under their belts. Etsy is no different, nor is eBay. You have to start competing now to have any chance later on down the road.

So if Airbnb is something you ever even considered, or even if it’s something you tried and didn’t find success at, keep reading our blog for updates on how to master these online marketplaces.