How would you make an extra $500 in one month?
As the title says, how would you make an extra $500 in one month?
Some limitations, you can't use any product, connections you already have and you have to do it digitally/online.
As the title says, how would you make an extra $500 in one month?
Some limitations, you can't use any product, connections you already have and you have to do it digitally/online.
I'd make an online class for a programming concept. I can whip those out pretty quickly, and it's proven to be fairly successful so far.
Do you publish it on some platform? Which one?
Udemy has proven to be my most successful one so far! The lowest amount I've made in a month from it has been about $120, but the most has been like $2k.
Would love to hear more about this. Any example sites? How did you promote the courses?
Udemy has been my most successful experience with teaching classes so far! I also have tried out Skillshare and O'Reilly, which have been okay, but haven't had as much success cash-wise. Udemy, depending on the month, I get around $200-500 a month. Skillshare has never given me more than $100 a month (that being said, I haven't tried some of their more in-demand topic course ideas yet), and O'Reilly has given a max of about $200 a month (more typically like... $25 lol). I'm a software dev, so coding classes are the ones that are the most successful for me. If you launch a course a couple weeks before a big promotion (for example, Back to School or Black Friday), you almost always get included in the site's marketing materials. I tweet out my courses and share coupons in Facebook groups and on LinkedIn, and that has proven successful so far!
That is very insightful thanks! I think I will be most definitely be giving it a try!
Thanks for those details. I guess it is time to give Udemy another look :-)
Could you elaborate?
I responded to another comment in this thread, check it out :)
For stretching out buffers, I'd always look at cutting what expenses you can first, much easier than trying to make more money. After that, selling your stuff on ebay (if that counts), or the work from companies on this article looks interesting but I havent tried them.
https://www.lifehack.org/articles/money/5-real-ways-actually-make-money-online.html
As a dev, do some bounties on gitcoin.co. People put funding on their github issues on open source repos.
I kinda love this! Will defenately take a look at this!
Have you tried this out? It looks like the bounties are pretty low for the work involved.
Another option I have found through Google (so never used them) is https://www.bountysource.com/ The bounties seem to be higher there.
Yes, I made about $850 last month in gitcoin bounties. I prefer it over bountysource because gitcoin has an awesome github bot, slack community to talk to repo maintainers... some other nice tools.
This is pretty interesting. I didn't find anything on the website about how to actually exchange the etherium coins that developers get paid for actual cash. Google search led to a 10 minute rabbit hole that I've pulled out of.
Curious if you or anyone has experience on the ETH to USD process?
Yes, you need to find a reliable exchange. Most Bitcoin exchanges also support Ethereum, not all exchanges are trustworthy. I've had good experience with Bitstamp and Kraken. Coinbase is very popular, but I've never used them, so I can't vouch for them.
Thanks for the tips. I like that with these bounty type sites (1) you can see some code before committing to doing some work (2) the projects are open source (3) the projects are small bits of work rather than massive projects. I'm tired of trawling through bs freelancer.com posts.
Answer from a non-developer - I would register with specialist consultancy agencies for research calls. These companies have huge panels of experts they call on for different topics. I've seen everything come up from trends in the energy industry to cryptocurrency security to IT purchasing decisions to price comparison websites... topics are very very broad. Best ones:
https://glg.it/
https://www.colemanrg.com/
https://www.guidepoint.com/
They will ask you to choose your rate. I normally charge $150 an hour - they'll give you feedback on whether you're setting the right rate if you ask them. I normally get about two enquiries a month with these guys. You hold a call at a specified time (based on availability you choose) and it's usually talking about the subject with investors or banks who are considering a deal and have very little subject matter knowledge.
It's not life changing money, but it's an easy gig with little to no preparation required. I'd recommend registering for tech and non-tech founders looking to make some extra cash as the subjects they need are so broad.
+1 to GLG. The key for me has been to be extremely detailed in outlining your resume and focus on your specific areas of real expertise. I've been lucky enough to work at a few startups that are very relevant these days (devops, mobility, etc.) and there seem to be folks super-interested in getting details in these areas. I bill $450/hour and usually get a call request every few months. Not super regular, but $450 for an hour phone call talking about my relevant experience works for me.
Wow, never heard of this! Does anybody else have experience with this?
I'd copy write / ghost write.
I'll probably have to slave off and work crushing hours, but it seems to be one of the lowest entry yet "guaranteed" potential sources of income.
I'm guessing that would require you to be native in the language you are writing, or at least good enough not to have any grammatical or spelling errors?
What sites etc would you use to get clients/work?
Is your goal to get as close as possible to 500$ in a single month? i.e. I start today and should have 500$ more in the bank account in 30 days.
In this case, I will focus on low hanging fruit, small one-off jobs from Upwork, earning 25-50$ for something like a 2000-3000 words article.
You do need to have a good grasp of your target language, obviously, although at this range, I don't think clients will be too picky.
Maybe I would also try emailing websites with bad copy and propose my service, but I'm not sure about the conversion rate of this one, especially without a proven track record.
It seems to me that most other options (for example, joining a more specialized platform such as contently.com or greatcontent.com) would take some time and will pay off on a longer run, which would fail your short term goal.
Alternative idea, way more on the hustle side, if you live in a country where bottles have a deposit, recycling them could also net you a similar amount, although with more physical effort involved.
Hey! Thanks for such a great answer! Yes, the goal is to have $500 more in the bank account at the end of the month. I'm currently trying to stretch out my buffer to extend my travels later this year ;)
I'm not sure writing might be the best thing for me, I'll definitely give it a try though, I'm more of a developer, but some of the advice could probably be applied to getting freelance work as a developer too.
Being a developer will definitely make it easier.
If you have a great track record, bid for decent jobs, otherwise I'd advise you to still focus on entry level jobs and to differentiate with a thoughtful application message.
Keep in mind, platforms like Upwork are really the bottom of the market, and are only useful because the bar of entry is very low. The quality of your work won't be very impactful, as you'd be competing with a vast pool of cheap workers from low income countries on jobs that are mostly on a small budget.
Are you sure you cannot leverage your network at all?
A mistake I made in the past is to spread the message only with tech acquaintances of mine, however it turned out many projects I took came from non-tech people, who knew someone who needed something done.
I agree with Omar. One of the surest ways to making money is providing a service versus building a product.
A product is great, but the less defined nature of it results in more uncertainty:
Product market fit
Finding the right audience
Determining the right price
Agreed. And even more importantly, when you're building a product you're really building capital, not income. With a product, you expect what you've built to have a long future income stream (from months/years of people using it), rather than the one-off hit you get from providing a service.
Running Facebook ads is a pretty easy place to start for this.
Tons of resources online for how to win, service and succeed with this.
You could easily charge $500 per client, and depending on the value your delivering that could balloon to a couple thousand (before ad spend they'd have to invest on top of that fee)
Go to a smaller city and walk into a random small business, preferably something that could benefit from people searching 'x near me'
Ask to speak with the manager, though you'd be better off with the owner. Tell him or her you help get more people from Google to come to their business over others in the area (most don't know what SEO is & don't want to learn). Ask for 10 mins to talk more. Charge very little. For a small business, $250 shouldn't have them blinking an eye. Back it up by a guarantee that if they don't make x money in the first month, you'll refund them completely. After one, you've got a case study.
Go spend 20 minutes claiming pages and optimizing Google. Then, tell them to ask happy customers for reviews.
Ex. I met someone while in Naples who does this but not for Google. He just goes into (cold calls a week in advance) local restaurants and tells them for a couple hundred euros he'll give them an 'american tourist audit' to help appeal to traveling Americans. He said his success rates were really high because he had a video 'case study' and it's easy to buy on the spot.
I should note - this is not good SEO advice. The Local SEO bar in small towns is set so low that claiming your page, adding synonyms for what you do/what people search, and responding to previous reviews will make a $250+ difference.
I'd probably drive for Uber/Lyft or crash at a friend's house and rent my place on Airbnb. Something that you can squeeze into your time budget with a guaranteed return where another company handles revenue acquisition for you.
I'd teach english to Chinese kids. DadaABC are never not hiring.
3 hours a day, 4 days a week, you can make about $600 a month.
If you do more days, you make more.
A friend of mine does it. In fact, she's in the other room doing it right now. I've no affiliation other than that. It works. Takes about a week to get setup.
https://www.dadaabc.com/teacher/job
I would try consulting, which I have yet to do.
The quick answer is to do consultant work. Be able to help a potential client solve a huge challenge with minimal effort.
For example: being able to help someone with a landing sales page vs building a full website.
You might not be able to charge as much as the full website, but it will take a fraction of the time and it could be a significant enough solution where you can charge at least $500 for it.
Create saas or services which making recurring revenue. For example,i create hosting services for local business in my country,i was resseling from bigger hosting company. I making about $600/month.
"Create saas or services which making recurring revenue" - in one month?
Yup,in a month i will contact local business as much as possible and tell my services or product. I contact them by phone,about 50 potential customer a day. It is about 1500 potential customer. My conversion rate about 2%, i was selling $20/month product. 2% from 1500 is 30 customer. 30 x $20 = $600/month
What's your product? Do you have a link? I'm curious to see how this goes for you. Please keep us posted!
i was resselling hosting from another company. My main business is software development,i selling hosting to suplement my income. Sure,nightprojects.co
You should look at getting an email address with the same domain name as your website, considering your doing hosting it should be easy. A gmail domain isn't massively professional.
Thanks for feedback. But as long as it work,i dont care:) https://medium.com/@tylertringas/customer-support-for-solo-founders-df7dd7a97749
what do you mean reselling? You basically bought hosting space and then offered a better hosting price than the clients had at the moment, while that price was higher than what you purchased the host plan for? ...or was it something else?
hosting company in my country have resseller plan. For example,i bought 10Gb space for $5,then i was selling for $20/Gb,some people don't care higher price,as long as you give value for them..
My feeling says that you can make more money if you reach out to 50 potential customers a day :)
Yeah,but i got bored if contact more than 50 people. I live in growing country, people rarely open email,i will contact them by Whatsapp or Sms.
https://baremetrics.com/blog/long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death
Thanks,i think extra $600/month not unrealistic expectations,at least for me:)
I think more the point, of building, marketing and selling a saas with $500 revenue in one months is a very tall ask
yes if you think like that.
Sell off some stocks or other investments that have done well in recent years. Can't be any faster than that (would literally take less then 10 minutes).
Next best thing would be doing contract work.
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