10 Ways To Generate Extra Income While Working a Full Time Job

2. Invest in Real Estate

In a recent post, “5 Incredibly Boring Ways to Make A LOT of Money,” I explained and outlined the feasible path forward to high-level real estate investing for someone starting out from scratch, at the very bottom, with nothing. The Bare minimum to do this you will need to have a steady job and a reasonably good credit history. It will help even more if you have a reliable partner who is also holding down a steady job and has a good credit history.

What you do, if you’re feeling stuck in a dead end career, going around in circles, never really getting ahead financially, always just running and running on the hamster wheel, is move. Move from where ever you live now into a duplex. Get a mortgage and buy a duplex with a bank loan, and get tenants for the other unit in your duplex. This is the practice stage and as easy as it’s going to be for you to invest in real estate and manage your property and tenants.

You use this to learn how to screen tenants, what the responsibilities are of being a landlord, everything about it in the safest, easiest way, biting off the smallest amount you can chew. After you’ve cut your teeth on real estate investing with a duplex for a while, hopefully, your rent from your tenants is helping you to save up a little more money than you were saving before.

Now you can use some savings as a down payment to buy another duplex with the bank’s help, and use your experience to get good reliable, rent-paying tenants and manage the place well. Rinse and repeat. This is a year to decades-long strategy to become very wealthy, but if you move with the right level of aggression (while never biting off more than you can chew financially or in terms of your time and energy) you can start earning an extra income for a while, and eventually quit your job and become very wealthy investing in real estate.

3. Launch an Info Product

Info products are easy and low cost to make, but if the information in them is valuable, then people will pay for them, and your profit margins are insane because of the low cost to make and the virtually zero cost of distribution.

So what are you an expert in that you could turn into an information product and sell online? Besides that, what is there a demand in the market for people to learn, that they would be willing to pay for if an info product seemed good enough?

You can find that out by doing research in Google AdWords Keyword Tool, which gives you a sense of how many searches a given search query receives in an average month (within an order of magnitude, so 1 – 100, or 100 – 1000, or 1K – 10K, and so forth), as well as the cost you can expect to pay per click if you were to display an ad on the search engine results page for that query.

The key is to think of an info product (like an eBook with worksheets and instructional videos included that you make with screencasting software or your webcam) that you could price in such a way that enough people would buy it (say 2% of everyone who clicks to your web page) to cover the costs of advertising and make you a profit.

You have to risk a little bit of money to do this one, but not too much, and you might start down a path that could change your life.

4. Sell Fiction on Amazon

Hey if you’re like many people, you’ve always wanted to write a novel. You have some story idea in mind that you would love to bring to life and that you think a lot of people would enjoy reading about. Why not write it and publish it (for free!) on Amazon’s marketplace full of millions of avid and voracious eBook readers?

You can do this in your spare time while working a full-time job, setting a goal to write just a thousand words a day, and you’ll have a full novel in two months. If the novel sells, you can save up some extra money from your labors, and if it doesn’t, you fed your soul be doing creative work and made your life more fun and meaningful.

If you’ve never finished a novel, it’s not possible to really explain in a way that you can understand just how satisfied you will feel when you accomplish that. You may never write another novel again, and yet you’ll be changed because of it, and it will be for the better, and it will make your life easier somehow. Or you may make a little money, write another one, and do even better on your second one. You may end up good enough to quit your job and write full time.

If you want your book to sell, take a look at what’s popular on the bestseller pages of Amazon’s Kindle store. Take note of the covers (that’s a big deal) and maybe spend a little money (under $50) to get someone to design one professionally, learn from the book blurbs, and read the reviews to see what the readers like and don’t like.

5. Join the Sharing Economy

The sharing economy is all about using the connectivity of the Internet, apps, and mobile devices to turn underutilized capital (like your spare bedroom, your car, your entire house when you’re not using it) into cash for those who own it and value for those who want to use it.

You can turn your spare bedroom or basement into a one-room hotel and rent it out over AirBnB to make some extra money. Or rent out your entire house while you’re on vacation for a week to defray some of the costs. Or rent out your car on Turo and carpool with a coworker. Or drive your car yourself for Uber or Lyft. Or rent out your camera on Cameralends. Or your bike on Spinlister.

6. Plan and Host a Seminar

You can make extra money (and create incredibly powerful credibility and authority indicators for a given field on your resume) by planning and host an event. Just start a group on MeetUp about a topic you’re an expert in and get a small, loyal following by hosting free events.

After you’ve built up a good number of people- and this does take time- you can get a guest speaker for an event and charge for it. If you are offering to teach something amazing and very useful at your events, you can charge more. The more value you create by teaching something that might save people time or money somehow, or help them make money, the more you can charge- if you can deliver on your promises.

Just imagine charging just $25 a head for a three-hour seminar on search engine optimization for small businesses, and 50 people showing up. That’s $1250 for a three-hour seminar. That’s $416 an hour! What’s your current rate of hourly pay?

7. Get paid to do what you’re already doing

Why not get paid to do what you’re already doing on your downtime after work hours? Say you’re really into some hobby like music or snowboarding? Why not become a musical or snowboarding instructor and make some extra money while teaching a craft you love?

This can really work for anything if you get creative enough. Even if all you like to do is hang out at a bar all day on your day off or during the evenings after work, you could even ask the bar owner if you can help run a trivia night there once a week and get paid to organize and promote it, and to MC it to ask each question over the mic and announced all the team’s scores after each round of questions.

Right now there are kids literally becoming millionaires playing video games on camera and uploading it to YouTube. So put yourself out there. Start thinking about how you can make money from what you love!

8. Trade on Stock Exchange

The world of stock exchange may seem confusing and mysterious, but it is, in fact, easier to buy stocks while you are still working. Stocks play a critical role on your way to generate extra income. It is a great way to make an extra income and you are passively involved.

You will need to purchase a share of stock from a company which wants to be listed on the stock exchange. These companies sell stock to the public in what is called an Initial Public Offering (IPO) in order to raise funds for their operations. When you buy a share of the stock in these companies, it means you are buying the right to your pro-rata profits plus whatever the company will generate in future.

You can make extra income from your stocks depending on how your funds are being used by the management and the board of directors. The company can give you a cash dividend or return on your investment by reinvesting it to make more funds. Whichever way you choose, you still make extra cash on your investment. If the rate of return is high, you can choose to reinvest your money but if you need to use the money you can opt for a cash dividend.

It’s important to note that any money you make on the stock exchange is a result of an increase in the share price. When the business you have bought shares in has increased their profits, you get a good return on your money. Furthermore, when that company pays out to you it does that in the form of dividends, you receive cash, a check, a direct deposit into your account or in the form of additional shares that are reinvested on your behalf.

Making a decision to reinvest in the company should depend on your assessment of the performance of the company. This performance can be determined by the management efficiency in using the shareholder’s funds.

9. Launch a personal blog

Years ago it was access to capital that set you apart, people who had money were generally in a better position to make more money. Now it is the quality of your business idea and ability to execute it that positions you to make extra income. Launching a personal blog while working on a full-time job is an easier way to earn you extra money.

One way is to do product reviews for companies on your personal blog. Being a new blogger, you might require building some ad networks or you can even look for a sponsorship on your own. If you are lucky, you may be contacted by some companies who need to run marketing campaigns for their products. This is where you can choose to offer the price for your services.

There is a payment variation which can range from small amounts to thousands of dollars for a single project. However, it is important to have a written contract with the companies to ensure transparency and clarity. It is advisable to start small with simple product reviews until your site starts getting more traffic. At that point, you can set the standard rates and negotiate for the better packages.

Affiliate marketing is another option you can pursue. There are many companies that have affiliate programs such as Amazon Associates. You will need to link a product using your referral code and then you get a certain percentage of earnings if that product is bought. However, you need to pick a few products at a time to post on your blog as this will prevent your readers from getting confused.

This is easy to do while you are still working and all that you have to do is add affiliate links to your blog. You can also post on your blog some of your favorite products and even make some product reviews. This helps as well in getting more traffic to your blog.

10- Teach, Sell online course and tutoring

This works well if you are already in the teaching industry. There is a high demand for teachers for online teaching, courses, and tutoring that can be done after school hours or during the holidays. It is better to choose teaching during school holidays to avoid interference with your regular work.

There are sites offering teachers an opportunity to teach and some of them are the same as taking a regular teaching job. It works better if you already have a subject of specialization. In addition, to teaching, you can also sell worksheets, lesson plans, create and sell courses.

The advantage of selling courses online is that there is an investment in time and a little fund. The main work is creating the courses but the rest is all about marketing the courses. Another good part is also that the courses will sell for sometime before you decide to change them. Even the marketing part is less involving and this works well when you are in a regular job.

Teachers are opting for online tutoring to generate extra income. This can work in two ways, the first option is to start with a single or few students who require extra help through online tutorials. Once the other students take note of this, they will start asking for your services. You can start at the place of your work by offering your services to a few students outside the normal working hours. It works really well when you stick to your area of specialization because it will be common knowledge that you know your area.

Another option is to join the local tutoring companies in your area or you can get tutoring sites on the internet. Though the payments, in this case, might be lower, you can still make some extra income while working. This option will also be helpful to those who don’t have an experience in tutorials gain the appropriate experience.