40 Ways To Make Money From Home That Are Not Scams

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If you want some fun business ideas you can use to make money from home that are not scams, you’ve come to the right place! I’m going to share with you some creative ways to make money on the side from home. With these ideas you can work part-time in your spare time or make it your full-time job.

I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life and love finding fun ways to make money especially if it’s something I can do as my own business. There’s nothing better than having the freedom to work when you want to, take time off when you need to, and have time to do the things you love and spend time with family.

It can be difficult to find ideas to make money from home that are legit so I wanted to put together a list of creative ideas so that you can make money working at home whether you want to make and extra $1000 a month or $100 a day.

These ways to make extra income can be great to do in your spare time or you can turn them into a full-time business with a little work if that’s what you want. Maybe you just want a little extra cash to get debt-free or you want to be able to be a stay at home mom to enjoy your babies.

This list will inspire you and hopefully spark some amazing ideas of how you can make your life and money situation better doing something you enjoy.

Many of these creative things you can do to earn money are hobbies that can make money.

Creative Ways To Make Money From Home That Are Not Scams

This post contains affiliate links. See my disclosure.

Make Money With A Craft Business

Of course this is one of my favorites. I love to make things and it is so rewarding to have people want to buy the things you make with your own two hands. If you love making crafts and DIY projects, a craft business could be the perfect way to make extra income in your spare time. You can start an Etsy shop with 40 free listings, which I highly recommend!

You can also sell at craft fairs and other events. Many people are also having success with their craft businesses by setting up a Facebook page and selling locally. If you have an extra room in your house, you could set it up as a little shop where people could come and see your creations or have parties at your home around holidays where you have products that people can buy for gift giving.

RESOURCES FOR SETTING UP AN ETSY SHOP:

ETSY SHOP SETUP TOOLKIT

PROFITABLE HANDMADE PRODUCT PLANNER

If you want some fun ideas of crafts you can sell to make money on the side, be sure you see these posts

Sewing ideas to sell

No sew ideas to make and sell

Cricut crafts to make extra money

Easy Christmas crafts to make and sell

Start Your Own Blog To Earn Extra Income

Another of my favorites from this list! If you have a subject you really love to talk about, a blog can be a great way to make extra income. If you decide to start your own blog, please realize that it isn’t a get rich quick scheme. It takes work just like anything else you want to be successful at.

You have to really be sure you love your topic and that it can help people in some way. You also need to consider how you can make money with your topic. You can place ads on your blog, have sponsors pay you to write posts featuring their products, use affiliate marketing, or create your own product to sell. If you want to learn how you can set up your own blog quickly and easily, I have a step-by-step post for starting your blog.

The best blogging idea to make money from home is to make a blog about something you love doing. Usually a hobby is a great place to start. You’ll want to consider how much money you can make with your topic as well.

Some blog topics make way more money than others.

Are there affiliate products that you could link to and make money that way?

Is this a topic that people spend a lot of money on? If so, advertisers will pay more money on your blog for an ad.

Consider these things before starting your blog if you want to create the highest paying work from home job.

Become A Travel Agent For Extra Cash

If you love finding the best deals on airfare and hotels or really enjoy finding fun things to do on a trip, being a travel agent could be the perfect legitimate way to make some money on the side.

I know it takes me forever to plan a trip. I don’t mind doing it, but I don’t necessarily have the extra time to take out of my busy schedule to find the best deals and fun things we can do on our trip. It kind of makes a vacation more stressful to have to do that. You can start your own business or work for a company. Companies may require a certification in order to work for them.

This is a great way to make money from home if you want to change careers.

Did you know Disney has their own travel agents?! How fun would it be to help people book their fun Disney vacations for their family?

Freelance Writing & Proofreading Side Hustle

People are always looking to have content written for them or proofreading to be sure their content is perfect. If you enjoy writing and editing, this is a realistic way to earn money from home. Just about anyone who has a decent sized online business hires people to write some of their content for their site.

Find Etsy sellers or local business owners who want to have content written for their customers but don’t have the time. You can get paid for writing blog posts for them and make a living from home.

Make Money With Your Own Catering Business

Catering events can be a great creative way to make money on the side from home. If you have a love for cooking, this might be the gig for you! You can start out with small events to get started and move on to larger events like weddings once you have more experience and work out all the glitches. Be sure to check your state laws on cooking in your home.

One of my friends built a business catering from home after she quit her teaching job. This is a legit way to make money from home part-time or full-time.

Baking/Cake Decorating Business

Do you love baking? This could be a really amazing business to make money in your spare time or as your full-time work from home job to earn money from your hobby. You could make baked goods for coffee shops, bookstores, and other small businesses.

You could make cakes and cupcakes for parties and weddings. You can set up a booth at fairs and events.

There are so many possibilities to make extra income from home with baking! If you aren’t quite perfect with cake decorating, you can take classes at craft stores. Be sure to check your state laws for baking in your home.

Virtual Assistant Side Hustle

If you’re organized and enjoy administrative work, you should consider being a virtual assistant as a side job from home to make extra money. Your tasks will vary with each job because different people need help with different things.

This is sort of like being an administrative assistant but from the comfort of your own home.

Lots of people with an online business use virtual assistants to do things for them that they just don’t have time to do.

Become A Computer Tech To Make Extra Money

If you are awesome with computers, you could be a computer tech/repair person as your side hustle to make extra income. People get in a jam with their computers all the time. You could offer an over the phone computer troubleshooting service or go to people’s homes and do the repairs or both.

Personal Assistant Side Hustle

If you would love helping people keep their lives organized and on track, you should consider being a personal assistant as your way to make money on the side. People will hire you to help them with business and personal tasks depending on what they need.

The spectrum of duties can be pretty wide on this one. You could be making phone calls and answering emails or picking up dry cleaning and scheduling doctor appointments.

Pet Sitting For Extra Cash

Consider pet sitting as your side gig to make money from home if you have a soft spot in your heart for animals. When I think of pet sitting, I mostly think of dog sitting, but people have all types of pets they need taken care of while on vacation.

If you live in a rural area, people may have goats, horses, chickens, etc. If you know a lot about a certain type of animal, make that your specialty and target those people.

Dog Walking Side Hustle

So many people work long days and their poor dogs are at home all day alone. If you love dogs, this could be a great way to feel fulfilled and do something you love to make extra money in your spare time. Plus you get some exercise too!

Teach English To Kids Online For Extra Money

You can earn extra income by teaching ESL to children online. If English is your native language, this could be a real work from home job for you to make extra cash.

Create An Online Course To Make Income While You Sleep

Do you know a lot about something that you could teach people how to do? You could create your own online course and sell it for extra income. This one can earn you passive income after it is created.

Just be sure it is something people want to learn how to do. Do your research to be sure people have an interest before you spend time creating a course. Also, you need to think about how you will promote it so that people can find it.

Creating a course may seem like a big task and then you have to market it and get people to buy it. You don’t have to go it alone though. You can sell your course on platforms like Skillshare and Udemy that already have customers.

Write An Ebook To Make Passive Income

Just like the course above, you could write an ebook to make some extra cash on the side. Teach people how to do something or write a fiction book. If you love writing and are great at it, this could be an excellent source of extra income.

Is there a hobby you have or something work related that you’re really good at? Do you have a special way that you do something? Write about it and get paid.

This is a great way to make passive income from home because once you’ve written the book, you don’t have to make anything else in order to earn income.

You can also consider selling your Ebook on Amazon. You can sell it as a Kindle digital book or you can have Amazon print it and ship it to customers. It’s called Amazon KDP. This is a great way to publish your own book without all the hassle.

Start A Print On Demand Store To Make Money While You Sleep

Print on demand is a fun way to use your creativity to make extra money without the hassle of shipping products to customers or having to make anything or deal with inventory.

It’s almost free to start. The only thing you need is a store which is really inexpensive and easy if you use a platform like Shopify. You can also sell print on demand items on Etsy.

To make print on demand products, you can use Printful. It’s super easy. You can make your design right in Printful or if you have a software you like to design in, you can upload your design.

They have tons of different products you can put your design on like t shirts, mugs, aprons, phone covers, pillows, towels, and tons more.

Once you’ve designed your products, this is completely passive so you can make money while you sleep.

Sell Printables Or Templates To Make Passive Income

One of the ways I make money while I sleep is by selling printables and templates. You can make so many things in programs like Canva or Photoshop and sell them online in your own store or on Etsy.

A few ideas for printables and templates to sell are planners, journals, and social media templates.

The great thing about this type of product is that you can literally make money while you sleep.

You create it one time and it sells over and over without any additional work from you.

Tutoring As A Side Income

You could do this online or in person. Create your own business or go to work for a tutoring company. If you have a subject you’re especially good at, this is a great way to earn some extra cash in your spare time.

Party Planning

If you love planning parties and events, this might be the perfect creative way for you to make money on the side from home. You can plan birthday parties, bridal and baby showers, weddings, etc.

Planning a party can be super stressful for someone who doesn’t love it or have time to deal with it. You can take that stress off their shoulders and do all the hard work for them so all they have to do is enjoy their event.

You can make some serious money from home as a party planner.

Childcare

If you’re wanting to stay at home with your own kids, taking care of other kids in your home could be a good way to make some extra income. My mom did this when we were kids and it gave us extra money, but she didn’t have to have a job outside of the house.

The great thing is you can choose to watch only one other child or a few depending on how much you need to make and what you can handle. Also, if you take care of school age kids, you will only have them before and after school, leaving you with the rest of the day for yourself or to spend with your own children if they aren’t in school.

Airbnb Host

Did you know you can rent out a room in your house, your guest house, or your entire house as a vacation rental? You can even just rent your house when you are gone on vacation through Airbnb. What a great way to pay for your vacation!

More and more people are staying in vacation homes because they have dogs or just want the experience of living in the place they’re visiting rather than staying in a hotel.

Renting out your home or extra rooms is a legit way to make money from home without having an extra job.

Pop Up Shop

This is a great idea for crafts, baked goods, or even items you buy and resell. You can set up shop at events and fairs or anywhere you’re allowed legally to set up your little shop and sell.

You can also do this to promote your services if you start up any of the businesses on this list and want local customers.

Fiverr Jobs To Make Extra Income

You can list just about any kind of job on Fiverr. Help people with writing, graphic design, design logos for businesses, the possibilities are endless. If you have a special skill to share with the world, get on Fiverr and start making money one the side with it.

Social Media Manager

Are you awesome at social media? I’ll tell you as a blogger and business owner, social media can be one of the most difficult things for people with an online business.

If you are amazing at getting followers, posting intriguing things that drive traffic, running social media ads, etc., people will want your services. You can specialize in one platform or if you’ve mastered all of them, manage people’s complete social media presence.

Being a social media manager is the perfect work from home job that you can make money being creative from home.

Amazon FBA Passive Income

If you’ve ever wondered about selling on Amazon and how it works, you can learn all about it here. This is a great way to make extra income from home.

You just have to check that what you want to sell is in demand on Amazon so you don’t end up with a bunch of stuff that doesn’t sell.

If you want to start a craft business and sell on Amazon, you can also use FBA (Fulfilled By Amazon) to have your items shipped out.

This becomes a passive income because you just ship your items to Amazon and they ship them out when the customer orders.

Online Coaching Creative Income Idea

If there’s something you’re really great at and know a lot about, consider coaching people on it for extra money. Some examples are health coach, fitness coach, business coach, etc. You can coach people on anything they have a need for.

Think about what you love and what you’re good at or educated on and how you can help people with that knowledge and create your own work from home job.

Photography

If you love photography, you should consider taking photos as a way to make money on the side. You could photograph events like weddings and parties, take portraits, or take photos of things and sell them as stock photos online.

This is a fun creative thing you can do to earn money and the perfect example of a hobby that makes money.

Another avenue you could pursue with photography is working with online sellers to photograph items for their stores. I have issues with product photography no matter how hard I try and I know this is a common problem with Etsy sellers.

Sewing & Alterations

If you love sewing, you could start your own alterations business or sew your own items to sell. You could start an Etsy shop selling your items, have a pop up shop, or use a room in your home to do alterations.

Be sure you check out my 49 sewing projects you can make and sell for some amazing ideas for your shop.

Running Errands Side Hustle

This would be a great way to create your own job from home. You could target busy business people who need help getting errands done or elderly people who can’t get out to run their own errands.

Be sure you account for gas and mileage in your prices so it’s worth your while.

Bookkeeping For Extra Income

Besides social media, accounting is my other part of running a business that I could definitely live without.

If you love working with numbers and have an eye for detail, you could make some extra cash keeping the books for online businesses or local businesses in your spare time.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is when you make a commission for referring a customer to a product. You can do this using a blog, social media, or pinning on Pinterest.

If you want to learn all about affiliate marketing, you have to check out this course. Michelle who teaches this course went from making $0 on her blog to making over $50,000 per month with affiliate marketing!

I was really struggling with affiliate sales. I was putting links in my posts and no one was clicking through or buying anything. I recently took the course and within the first week after implementing her ideas, I made my first sale and my affiliate income has continued to increase since then! Now I know what I was doing wrong before to make people not click and how to do it correctly.

Brand Ambassador

If you have a large following on social media, you should consider being a brand ambassador. You can get paid to endorse a company’s products. You will have to have a huge following to land these gigs as a side hustle, but you can make some serious money if you do!

Car Detailing

If you love cars and making them sparkle and look like new, you could do car detailing as work from home business. You can go to people’s homes or businesses and detail their cars without them having to go anywhere.

If you can get in with someone in a business, you may be able to have several customers in one place and detail their cars while they work!

House Cleaning

If you love cleaning, you could make a side income cleaning houses. So many people are busy and don’t have the time for deep cleaning their house or just don’t enjoy doing it.

Once you get a customer, you can offer them a discount if they refer their friends to you. If you’re an honest person and hard worker, people will gladly refer you. It makes people nervous having a stranger in their home so they would much rather use someone their friend already uses and trusts. Word of mouth will be a great marketing tool for this side gig.

Floral Design

Floral design is a hobby that makes money.

If you love arranging flowers you could make flower bouquets as a creative way to make money on the side from home. You can promote yourself for weddings, parties and holidays.

You could also make flower bouquets out of other materials and sell them. Flowers that don’t die such as fabric flowers or flowers made of wood have become quite popular for events. You can sell them locally or open an Etsy shop and sell online.

Direct Sales

This is also known as network marketing or MLM.

For direct sales you definitely need to have the right type of personality. You need to be a go-getter, but if you do have what it takes you can make a lot of extra money from home. Direct sales companies have some of the best products on the market a lot of times.

The only downside to this is that you are required to buy a certain amount yourself each month and there’s usually some sort of initial investment of a few hundred dollars. I work with this company and their products are amazing! I was able to lose 40 pounds when I couldn’t seem to lose weight any other way.

There are direct sales companies for just about everything from travel to makeup.

Home Organization

If you love organizing, you could make a side hustle from organizing people’s homes. There are so many possibilities with this! You could go to people’s homes and organize for them, you could create a course or write a book teaching people how to organize, you could create a blog about organizing, or you could create organization printables and sell them on Etsy.

Flea Market Flipping

Do you love creating new things out of old things? If so, you could make a business of flea market flipping. Search Craigslist in the free section and go pick up items that you can make into something new and cool. Or go to yard sales, flea markets, etc. and look for some awesome stuff you can repurpose. If you love upcycle projects, you should check out my Pinterest board for upcycling and repurposing!

Yard Cleanup/Junk Removal

If you have a truck and some basic yard tools, you can start a landscaping and junk removal business. If you’re reliable, people will use your services again and again. You can book people on a regular schedule every few weeks to keep your schedule full.

We’ve actually hired people from Craigslist to do this for us after we tore down an old chicken coop. They took everything away for us and made some extra cash.

Window Cleaning

Window cleaning can be a great side business from home. You can target businesses or homeowners.

The startup costs should be minimal, but be sure you have a ladder or means to reach windows on 2 story houses or tall buildings if you try to get jobs for those. Anyone can do this, but you’ll need to practice to perfect your technique. It’s not as easy as it looks!

Vehicle Advertising

If you drive around a lot and live in a busy area, you can try to get a business to pay you to advertise on your car for them. You can do a vehicle wrap, window advertisement, or side of the car magnets. You will have to decide what works for you and the business you’re promoting.

I hope you have some awesome ideas swirling around in your head now for the creative ways you can make money on the side from home! I can’t wait to hear which ones you’ve tried and how you did! Don’t forget you can always combine more than one of these to make even more extra income depending how much spare time you have.