Make Extra Money Right Now!

Truth be told, making extra money isn’t as hard as most people think. I actually know of several ways you can earn extra income that could be very sustainable each and every month. Notice how I added “right now” into the title of the article. I’m not here to peddle that garbage about filling out surveys, or going back to school for the next 4 years so you can increase your income. Nor am I going to regurgitate that same crap you have already read 1,000 times on countless other “I make a shit ton of money” blogs. I’m going to highlight some of the ways I have made extra money with my online side gigs over the past 4 years. These are actual things I have done, and some of which I am still doing, to continuously make additional money outside of my day job. Please keep in mind that I am 34, I have a full time job that I work 60 hours a week, and I have little to no technical skills whatsoever. In fact, when I bought my first domain and hosting account I couldn’t figure out how to setup a simple wordpress blog and actually forgot about it for a month before coming back to it. Had I not picked it back up my finances and overall net worth would be drastically different than it is today.

Article Writing

I currently pay $400 per month to two writers that ghost write a bunch of articles for me each month. Ghost writing means they write the article, but when I post it up on my blog it goes under my name. I personally write all the articles for this site, but I own quite a few other sites and I just can’t keep up. Google prefers to have fresh original content updated frequently in order for a site to remain in good standing. So I simply pay these guys to write articles of 500+ words each month on various different topics, then I schedule them to post every few days on each site. I actually know of quite a few bloggers out there that pay $25 per article for 1,000+ words, provided it is quality enough. Simple math tells me that writing 4 articles a month will earn you an additional $100…that’s no small amount of money for a side gig making extra cash. I used to make several hundred dollars a month writing articles for various bloggers, and now I pay several hundred to other people to write for me. I can tell you first hand that there is no shortage of site owners out there looking for semi-decent articles at a reasonable price. I currently average about 20 minutes for a 500+ article, so conceivably I could earn $60 an hour writing these up, how does that compare to your current hourly wages? I even know some media companies out there that pay upwards of $50 an article for 2,000+ word articles of the highest quality. Do a little leg work and search out the opportunities, get in contact with some bloggers (I know plenty!)…this is something that can be a great gig for a stay-at-home mom.

Take for instance an article I read over at The Penny Hoarder. Austin Robinson is able to earn $1,500 per month writing SEO related content! That’s no small amount of income. For a step-by-step method to duplicate his results stop by the article and give it a read.

Virtual Assistant

The hourly rate tends to be less than content writers, but for those of you who don’t fancy writing, then being a virtual assistant might be right up your alley! I have employed them in the past, but with the time I’ve freed up by outsourcing the article writing I am able to keep up on the simpler tasks a bit better these days. Just like in an office setting a virtual assistant can perform various different tasks, most of which don’t require an technical knowledge or training. For example, I know of several bloggers that employ a VA (virtual assistant) for blogger outreach. This typically means they go on other similar niche sites and leave thoughtful comments on articles with a link back to the bloggers site. This helps to spread the word of their own site, and often times you can generate quite a bit more traffic in doing so. Another common task I have seen is sorting through comments in general. If you have ever owned a blog then you know you get about 1,000 comments a day, and only about 5 of them are legitimate. That means I have 995 spammy comments from bullshit porn sites trying to sneak a link back to their site within a comment. I try to carefully parse through the comments to see which ones are real and which ones are fake. The last thing I want to do is insult a regular reader of my blog by not accepting their genuine comment and replying back to it. It can be annoying, but it’s all a part of the job. Bloggers will often pay flat rates to clean out their spam comments on a daily or weekly basis, I have seen common rate of $10 – $15 an hour for this type of work. I can say that right now I pay someone $200 every month just to submit my newest article on each site to blog carnivals. A blog carnival is typically a weekly post that goes up in a specific niche (like personal finance) and they host a collection of links to like minded articles. It helps me get some backlinks and good exposure to new readers! That’s the beauty of being a VA, you can literally be hired to do anything!

Logo and Theme Designer

This job is for the more creative folks out there, and perhaps ones with a little bit of technical knowledge. A blog theme is essentially the background and the general layout of each site that you see. Someone had to actually design those for you to use, and there are quite a few good ones out there that don’t cost a dime. The problem is that 1,001 people use the same site themes, so often times they pay to customize them and to build out their own custom logos and site banners. You can see mine on the top of the page. On one of my sites I paid a guy $80 to design a custom logo for me, and to his estimation it took about 30 minutes to complete…now that’s a good hourly rate I could handle! Unfortunately, I don’t have a creative bone in my body and wouldn’t even know how to begin to go about creating such a thing. But if you have the software and talent to do it, this can earn some serious cash.

Sign up on Fiverr

I haven’t ever performed any work on Fiverr personally, but I have bought a ton off of there! In fact, one of my current article writers came from Fiverr. I used to order 50+ articles from this guy every month at $5 a pop, so he was making out pretty good. Basically, Fiverr keeps a portion of any sales that are made. If you check out their site you can see all the different things people sell on there. Some people offer photoshop editing, while others will create customized business cards! The sky is the limit on these types of sites. The name of the site comes from the cost of each order, $5 bucks! Costs can get a bit higher if you add on to the basic order. For instance, a 500 word article that is delivered to you in 5 days might cost you $5…but if you want an additional 500 words then you can add another $5 on, and perhaps you want a rushed overnight order which can add yet another $5. I found another site similar to them called Fourrer. Yep you guessed it, everything costs $4 on here. I typically don’t see as many quality products coming off of this site, that extra buck less can add up. I’m waiting until someone creates Three’er!

Please remember these are real tangible ways to earn some decent extra money, and they don’t take an awful amount of work either. Heck, selling your car wouldn’t be much work either but it would be extra money in the bank! I wanted me readers to see ways I have actually gone about earning a side income. My next article is going to tackle how I made $200,000 blogging in 4 years! I’m also planning on rolling out some blog coaching services as well. I’m by no means the most successful blogger out there, but I know enough to help you earn a serious side income if you have the patience and determination to do so. My biggest challenge when I first started blogging was that I had nobody to help me out and show me the way, if I knew then what I know now I could have accomplished everything much quicker.

What do you think, is anyone interested in having a real live blog coach that they can consult with?