15 Industries Workers Find Great Success In

14. Specialized sports trainer

Sports training has always been a lucrative enough industry. Since its early beginnings, it has transformed into a true powerhouse of money and fame. We’re talking about specialized trainers that get hired by professional athletes. If you’re good enough at your craft and understand the inner workings of sports, you have a chance. It’s a grueling job that requires you to connect with your client on a personal basis. You have to tailor make your programs to the needs of a certain athlete.

Many trainers who work with NBA and NFL athletes get to charge around $10.000 per session. If you have many clients and have a side business, you can easily earn more than $1 million on a yearly basis. However, many people who do this job aren’t just jocks with a knack for sports. Many of them have a knowledge of anatomy that rivals even surgeons. This is important when you’re helping the best of the best rehabilitate.

Most sports trainers finish med school or a specialized sports medicine faculty. They have to know everything about the inner workings of the body and about all the injuries one can face. Whether it is ligament damage or fractures, you have to know what exercises to task your client with. A wrong move and you can damage someone’s career. A good move and you can bring someone’s sports career back to life.

When it comes to regular keeping in shape, you have to know the specific strengths and weaknesses of your athlete. You have to assess a plan on how to make them better at their job. Some trainers work with specific athletes, while others can do multiple sports. If you are willing to put in hours upon hours of studying, this may be the lucrative job for you.

13. Trap producer

This is another one of those less traditional professions. At the same time, it’s incredibly lucrative and able to set you up for life. Music has been a profession that has really taken off in the last century. However, recent developments and cultural changes have left a mark on the scene forever. Due to the rise of the internet, more and more people have the ability to earn a large paycheck due to music. One music genre is especially fertile when it comes to producing millionaires.

Trap is a subgenre of hip hop that is characterized by dark beets and lyrics about gang life and opiates. Despite the thematic, it has become mainstream, with trap artists becoming worldwide sensations. The men in the back of the project get their share of the pie too. Perhaps even more than some actual rapper. Trap producers that are established charge over $50.000 for a simple, 3-5 minute beat. These beats often take no more than 2 hours to make. That’s a nice hourly wage that can add up to a million yearly.

If you’re an aspiring trap producer, there is a long and weary road ahead of you. Despite the fact that the internet allows for better promotion, it can also cripple your plans. There are thousands of aspiring producers trying to promote their work through Soundclound. Similar platforms also contribute to the producer boom.

Famous trap artists often discover unknown producers and make them their regular co-workers. Even Future and the Migos do this with teenage virtuoso producers that work hard behind the scenes. Chances aren’t big, but a sufficient amount of persistence can get you somewhere. A lot of producers never make it, but some them do make it and they make it big. If you think you have what it takes, start producing!

12. Senior partner at a law firm

There are two things that people will always do – have sex and commit crimes. The erotic industry is another story, but the legal world holds plenty of lucrative business opportunities. If you have a knack for studying long passages and laws, it might be for you. What you need to know is that law school and the bar exam will take lots of work. It’s not for those who have problems putting in long hours.

After all that hassle, learning and time awaits a possibly lucrative career. Lawyers do work a ton, but they also earn a lot. Even though some people deem this kind of a job stressful and detrimental, it still pays a lot. The top senior partners in the US can earn more than $1 million on a yearly basis. They get this money from their stake in the firm, plus individual cases. Even though their lifestyle is lavish, they work they put in is almost slave-like.

High profile partners get the most complicated cases. If you want to chase that million, be prepared to deal with financial fraud, mobsters and other forms of crime. The clients may pay well, but the moral and mental strain can sometimes be too much. The cases are never simple, as they sometimes take months of preparation and learning. There is also one other downside to the business.

The legal job is not for the faint-hearted. If you get the wrong clients and don’t win the case, your life may be in danger. Whether you want to risk it all because of a lucrative paycheck, it’s up to you. Many lawyers retire young and simply can’t take the strain of the constant work and stress. If you think you’re up for the challenge, money awaits.

11. Plastic surgery

Now, we all know how pronounced plastic surgery is in today’s world. It’s become a pronounced trend in recent times. A long time ago, people were actually comfortable with growing old and aging. Since medicine is at an advanced stage now, people started to bypass that process. Corrective surgeries are at an all-time high, causing people to spend lots of money. Such outrageous amounts are not only characteristic when it comes to the rich and famous. Everyone is doing it.

And who gets to benefit from people’s insecurities and vanity? Plastic surgeons, of course. Renowned plastic surgeons can perform one surgery per week and still earn $1 million. These surgeries are not as complex as transplants or other types, but they are sought after. People choose to undergo such procedures and surgeons capitalize on that. In the US, even the lower ranked plastic surgeons can earn upwards of $100 thousand. It’s astonishing what people are prepared to undergo for beauty.

In Hollywood, the situation is at its extreme. Plastic surgeons in this part of the country charge insane amounts of money. Of course, with the rich residing their, there is no shortage of money whatsoever. Famous people have no problem spending tens of thousands of dollars on botox every year. Whether the business is ethical or not is up for debate. What is not up for debate is the profit that plastic surgery can bring you.

If you have no problem capitalizing on people’s vanity, sign up for med school. It may take a little longer than other colleges, but you will get fat paychecks. Keep in mind that only the most successful plastic surgeons open their own clinics. If you don’t reach that level, don’t worry. There is still plenty of money to go around.

9. Twitch

Now if you’re not into taking your clothes off or performing sexual acts on camera for anyone in the world to possibly see, even if it would pay you a million dollars a year, you can still stream live and make that sum yearly doing completely wholesome, G-rated activities, like playing video games. If you didn’t already know, you might be shocked how many people, mostly kids, have become millionaires just live streaming shows of themselves playing video games and making comments and jokes as they play. Seriously. Millionaires. From playing video games.

Twitch is a live stream video website created by Twitch Interactive, a subsidiary company of Amazon. Introduced in June 2011 as a spin-off of the multi-interest streaming video platform, Justin.tv, the Twitch website primarily focuses on video gaming, including playthroughs and walkthroughs of popular or obscure video games, broadcasts of eSports competitions, creative content, and more recently, musical broadcasts. Content on the site can either be viewed live or via video on demand after it’s been recorded.

Streamers on Twitch make income from ads, tips from views, and from sponsorships they independently put together with advertisers (if they’ve got a big stream with a lot of followers). The average professional streamer on Twitch is making a little living doing it, getting paid anywhere from $3K – $5K a month. But the top streamers– and they have put a lot of time into it, they are extremely funny and likable, and they do probably have no life outside of video games, so you’ve got to really commit to this if this is your path to $1M annually– make millions every year.

PewDiePie (some guy from Norway named Felix) who has the most subscribed YouTube Channel in history, also makes $4 million a year off Twitch. Markiplier also makes millions. Some kid named Michael Santana who goes by the username ImaQTPie (real original) makes $2 million a year, and actually, he’s not even that funny.

8. Blogging

Is blogging still a thing? Uhhh……. yeah!! It’s even bigger than it was back in like 2007. Much bigger. Because there are more people using the Internet than ever before. From more devices than ever before, to extract every last possible free minute in our days that we could be spending looking a glowing screen right in front of our faces emanating pure aspiration, entertainment, and delight!

And there are more channels for promoting blogging than ever before. (Thank you social media revolution!) And there are far more advertising dollars flowing into online digital content than ever before, and away from the old dinosaurs that serve up content on a dead tree delivered to your house every morning from a truck.

So how big is blogging in 2017? A million dollars a year big. For a lot of bloggers. No kidding. It’s common practice for a lot of successful bloggers to publish annual income reports with detailed breakdowns of where they’re getting their revenue from and what services and tools they use to manage their little one person financial media empires. Because they are experts at this, publicizing what they’ve done allows them to make yet more income consulting for other bloggers with paid information products like eBooks or seminars.

This personal finance blogger made $979,321 in 2016, and updates her blog three times a week while living out of an RV with her husband and traveling around the country. She started her blog for fun in 2011, started monetizing it in 2012, and by 2013, she made $117,000 from her blog alone and quit her day job as a financial analyst, at which she made barely half of what her blog was paying her. If you start Googling for blogger income reports, you can find a whole slew of bloggers who are making $1 million a year writing about something they love and openly share how they did it in detail.

7. Fiction

While erotic novels and short stories are a very popular genre on Amazon and other digital marketplaces for eBooks (by some estimates, it is the most popular genre, though other estimates disagree), they aren’t the only genre of fiction that is making millionaires every year. If you love to write, by all means, write whatever you want to write, write a lot of it, write it well, learn all about the market and what works to move books, and start hitting the keyboard hard.

Because you can not only make a fantastic living writing fiction every day and self-publishing it to digital marketplaces like Kindle and Barnes and Noble, but you could actually make a million dollars a year writing fiction, and the barriers to entry to the market are lower than ever before, while the ease of the tooling, researching, word processing, proofreading, editing, cover graphics, marketing, and promoting is just truly marvelous.

The key is to not be a perfectionist. The key is to not let doubt and procrastination keep you from ever getting started. The key is to become the kind of person who just sits and writes 2000 – 5000 words a day. Let it pour out of you. Go back and correct mistakes, polish, refine, and mop up later. Just start filling a page. When you achieve a state of unfiltered, uninhibited, unself-conscious flow, your muse will start to speak through you and you will be a prolific writer of positively magical stuff. You’ll wonder how you did. You’ll go back and read it and feel like the words are foreign, like they didn’t come from you, but through you.

This can be achieved if you sit in a quiet place, unclench and just start writing, and make it a habit to do that every single day. Once you reach this level of productive flow, you can then tackle the problems of how to publish, how to market, how to build up a following, but with no consistent work product, all of that is pointless, so remake yourself into a writer, and then study how to be a business person once you’ve become the kind of person who can fill your business with inventory (stories) daily.

6. E-Commerce

The eCommerce or online retail sector is absolutely massive, and you can get yourself just a tiny, infinitesimal sliver of that overall pie that no one else would even know is missing, but would amount to a million dollars in your yearly coffers. No kidding. It’s an entire universe. It’s an ocean you can dive into, start doing the backstroke, and just drink and drink and drink as much of it as you want and you’ll never put a dent in it.

Literally millions of dollars are yours to take. With a small investment of $5000 or less you can create a 7 figure a year business in eCommerce with a lot of work and careful, a well-informed strategy based on study and then refining the results you get based on the lessons you learn as you lean into selling online.

And of all the things out there to do, the amount of knowledge and learning that are required for this, considering how great the monetary rewards are, is very minimal compared to specialized professions and businesses that people are in that make comparable amounts of money. The things you have to learn are simple. You do not have to be that smart to do it.

To get started, just save up $500 to a thousand dollars and plan 2 -3 hours a day for your business. Devote that time to your business with full commitment and do not skip a day feeding your business 2 -3hours of focused work. Start by studying with a few well thought out Google searches to learn the sector and different angles of approach (as you research and read, you’ll come up with more things to research and read), then settle on how you’re going to put your foot on the ground and push.

Buy products online or in real life somewhere and start selling them online on websites like Amazon and eBay. I knew a guy who made $7000 a month with no college education just going around to bookstores, buying books, and listing them on eBay and Amazon for sale. Then he’d mail them when someone bought them. Easy. Now his operation won’t scale, so if you want something feeding you more like $70,000 a month, you’ll have to find products to resell in a way that you can scale.

5. YouTube

Just like Twitch, which is primarily for live streaming video, and primarily has an audience of video gamers, YouTube offers a video platform that is minting millionaires one after another just from uploading videos every week that people love and building a huge following of subscribers that will watch and share anything they upload.

The key difference between YouTube and Twitch is that YouTube has no categorical nature and doesn’t cater to any sub-culture or special interest. It’s just a general, multi-category video hosting platform that allows you to create a “Vlog” or “video blog” on your own dedicated channel, to which you post regular updates on anything you like.

The most popular YouTube channels make millions and millions of dollars for their proprietors. Now, in general, the top channels tend to cover video games or be comedic, so if you’re aiming to go as broad as possible, you may consider making a comedy channel. But hey no worries if you’re not comedic and don’t play video games.

There are also people making millions of dollars of YouTube with cooking channels, makeup channels, travel channels, technology, and electronics review channels, kids toy review channels (these monetize at a super high rate per view) and even just channels where they blow up expensive stuff and film it with slow-motion cameras.

So really whatever you’re passionate about, do make a channel about that if you’re hoping to net a million dollars a year from the online video sector, because if you don’t really care about what you’re vlogging about, and just covering it because you think it will make you the most money, you will not have the stamina to endure through the first couple years during which you will make pennies for hours of work while you build up a following. It’s how most YouTube millionaires started out.

4. Private Equity

Private equity funds. Now this is an entirely massive sector in which you can make a million dollars a year with no formal credentials or college education necessary, but it is a tough one to crack into, so you’ll probably want to take whatever marketable skill you have and offer it as a paid service to someone who is in this field and tell them you want to apprentice with them to learn how to raise millions of dollars on commission for private placement investments.

There’s not a lot of public awareness about this sector, but it’s huge, and certainly high net worth investors trying to diversify their portfolios, protect and grow their wealth in hard assets, and seek some above-average returns and are very aware of this investment vehicle.

Instead of raising funds publicly through an SEC-regulated IPO, a business might raise a small amount (like a couple million dollars) of funds it needs through a private equity fund that does private placement investments using money from high net worth investors who privately invest in a company to get some residual income from their wealth, grow it aggressively, or protect it from volatile paper assets like bonds or publicly-traded stocks.

There is a lot of money out there and the people who have it and aren’t putting it all into their own business don’t just want to bury it under the mattress to let it evaporate as inflation nibbles away at it every year. A lot of them also don’t want to put it on Wall Street during years like this one in which stocks are at record high valuations, so it’s probably not a good time to buy them unless you’re just one of those dollar cost averaging investors who’s going to stick through thick and thin with the market for fifty years and figure it’ll all average out.

3. Tech Startup

Now a tech startup is a fantastic way to make a million dollars a year. Some tech startups end up selling out to a bigger company like Google or Facebook or Microsoft for as much as $1 billion. Some tech starts ups became Google, Facebook, and Microsoft (and Amazon, and Apple, and Oracle, and Adobe, and McAfee, and… and… and…) and have an extra $1 billion just lying around to buy entire companies.

Now even if you don’t have that level of success, you can be on like the bottom rung of the great success section of the tech industry ladder and still be pulling in a million dollars a year in personal income from a productive business creating, distributing, or maintaining websites, mobile apps, desktop apps, server-side software, commercial software, enterprise management solutions, social media platforms, or some category of information technology that doesn’t even exist yet, but will disrupt everything for the better when it does.

Indeed the fastest growing industries in the world today are biotechnology (including medical tech), alternative energy, and information technology, and really the first two are growing so quickly in direct relationship to how quickly they are becoming information technologies and assimilating to the power and paradigm of digital computation. So go on and get you some, there’s still plenty of trillions of dollars left to be made.

You don’t think Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon are going to have the last word on this, do you? That would be like thinking Xerox and IBM had the last word on the computer and office electronics technology back in the 1970s before the current titans came along and disrupted them all. Not to say they aren’t here to stay, or that they are set up in a very nice position to continue to dominate markets well into the future, but don’t be betting that’s going to be the end of two kids in a garage or some guy in a dorm starting up the next wave of change. Could be you. Why not? At least aim to ride one of these big waves to the tune of a million. At minimum why settle for anything less than that?

2. Cryptocurrency

So I did leave one big field of information technology completely out of the discussion on the last sector because it deserves a mention and analysis all to itself. Cryptocurrency is not just a product, it is definitely an entire emerging sector of wealth creation in the world today and it has already created millionaires just from people buying some cryptocurrency, not even starting a cryptocurrency based business.

No kidding, if you had bought just $5 worth of bitcoin seven years ago in 2010, just $5, it would be worth over $4 million today in 2017. So there you go. Article over. What’s a sector you can make a million dollars a year in? In 2010, the answer would have been, buying $8 worth of bitcoin and then hanging out and eating pizza. That would have made you a million dollars a year on average by now. Easy. No guarantee that it will perform that well again for the next seven years. But it easily could. And it could perform even better. It’s hardly come close to mass adoption yet and it’s already seeing this kind of growth in value.

Shark Tank’s Mark Cuban predicted a little while back that an emerging tech trend would make someone the world’s first trillionaire. That very fortunate and powerful future trillionaire would just have one slice of a pie that could be valued as high as $20 trillion. If any emerging tech trend is going to be the one to do this as Cuban predicts, my money’s on cryptocurrency.

What’s so valuable about cryptocurrency? The anonymity of cash, combined with the portability of electronic bank accounts, combined with no transaction costs, combined with no central control by any one powerful institution, combined with no inflation. On top of that add in all kinds of amazing functionalities like escrow services and smart contracts hardcoded right into the system. It’s a modern marvel, a wonder of the world.

1. Skilled Maintenance and Construction Trade

As I’ve mentioned throughout this list. If you are serious about making one million USD annually, it will be pretty much impossible without starting your own business. Almost no one person can trade the amount of labor it would require at such a rate as to net a million dollars every year from their own job without having a scalable business operation that they are responsible for. I mean if you’re a neurosurgeon, then sure you probably have a rate north of $300 an hour, but you still might not be working the 70 billable hours a week 50 weeks out of the year that it would take for that hourly rate to pull a million dollars for the year.

Maybe a very high powered lawyer with god tier lawyering skills and top professional level skills in some technical area that is heavily litigated for hundreds of millions of dollars makes a million a year just from working. But other than that you’ll need to start a business. Now if all this stuff about online businesses has just turned you off throughout this whole article, just not something you have the interest in or aptitude for, then you can still pull a million dollars a year starting a business in one of the skilled trades like home construction and remodel, plumbing, painting, welding, tiling, landscaping, pouring concrete… something like that. Though if you want to have a million dollar a year business you’ll probably need to hire someone to do online marketing for you.

And you’ll also need to hire a lot of guys to work for you to score and complete big projects. You’ll have to be good at hiring, training, and managing. You’ll have to make payroll, deal with taxes and other administrative tasks, and grow your business and get clients on top of all that. So it’s a lot of work, but you can start small and build up.

If you’ve got a good technical trade business with a great reputation in your town and good word of mouth marketing. If you’ve got yourself a solid team of 20 to 40 reliable workers who are good at what they do, you can probably net a million USD a year from a business like that. These skills and services are highly in demand and not everyone thinks to get into these fields. Everyone wants to make the next big app.

But when the plumbing goes wrong, it absolutely cannot be neglected. It has to be fixed immediately. Overflowing sewage, water leaks, any kind of plumbing problem just can’t be ignored. And when new buildings are constructed, they have to have proper, up-to-code, modern plumbing systems. No one is going to step outside of their house or office to use an outhouse anymore. But no one knows how to do this incredibly valuable job except plumbers, and they can command great pay for this vital function of civilization. If you want to keep it real, sanitation has made such a difference in fighting disease and maintaining human health, it’s hard to imagine that plumbers haven’t saved more lives in human history than doctors.