22 Best Side Gigs That Pay Well (and you can do them today)

February 12, 2019 October 26, 2018 1 Comment

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You know all those “…make money from home with side gigs…” articles?

They’re all over the internet.

Heck, I even wrote a few of them, like these:

But let’s get honest here. Most of the side gigs you come across suck because they don’t pay much and are a big waste of your time!

Yes, I’m talking about you online surveys, beginner-level transcription jobs, rebate apps, and blogging. You’re kind of sucky ways to make money on the side.

I’m going to shake up the side gig phenomenon a little bit here. I’m going to share some real, legitimate online side gigs that actually pay for your effort.

Here they are:

Best Side Gigs That Pay Better Than Crap

Side Gig #1: Create A List

ListVerse is all about publishing lists, no matter what the topic is about. Unlike the many other places that pay you to write on a specific topic, this one pays you up to $100.00 to make a list of just about anything as long as the length of the article is at least 1500 words, is well written, and is composed in a list style.

You can write something like “10 things single women wish their married friends knew about dating” or “10 best hamburger joints in every state”. The possibilities are endless…as long as the idea is original. If ListVerse likes your writing, they’ll pay you.

Side Gig #2: Be An ECommerce Pro (without inventory)

You can sell just about anything online without needing to stock an inventory or going to the post office.

Better yet, you don’t need to go to garage sales and flea markets to scout stuff…”cough…ebay…cough”.

For example, If you can come up with catchy slogans and snappy designs, put them on a t-shirt and “sell” them on Teespring, Zazzle, SellMyTees and Spreadshop Or you can design hats, stickers, stationary, even baby bibs on CafePress.

Be creative. Design and sell merchandise without having to lift a finger. The places I mentioned will set you up with an online marketplace and do all the marketing for you.

Then there’s the little thing called Amazon FBA. This is where the big money can roll in. The FBA stands for Fulfillment By Amazon and that’s exactly what it means: Amazon fill customer orders for you. They also store the inventory, do the customer service, ship the orders, shipping, handle returns…all things you don’t have to worry about. You just have to come up with the items to sell.

Here’s Amazon’s guide to FBA

And here’s an great video that goes over a ton of stuff you need to know:

Side Gig #3: Teach Conversational English To Foreigners

This is a good side gig because – not only can you make anywhere from $18.00 – $24.00 an hour – you can work just a few hours a week.

And this isn’t like teaching English to High School students; it’s teaching people in other countries how to speak conversational English. Basically, teaching English as a second language so they can carry on a conversation with ease. It’s a popular work from home job because there always seems to be plenty of students, most of them being children living in China.

Places like DaDaABC, Magic Ears, and Qkids want you to have Bachelor’s degree and a youthful teaching personality but even if you don’t have a Bachelor’s degree you can still work with Italki.

Here are some of the best companies that pay to teach English to foreigners

Side Gig #4: Pinterest Guru

Pinterest is the hottest search engine trend among bloggers these days. But because so many bloggers are too busy managing their blog, they find it hard to keep up with promoting it on Pinterest.

So they happily pay to have their Pinterest account managed for them.

What does a Pinterest Manager do? They create, update, and pin content to Pinterest boards. This also may include setting up Pinterest accounts, creating and organizing boards, joining group boards, and creating graphics.

The nice thing about this kind of work is you don’t need any prior experience.

Here’s where you can learn how to make money managing Pinterest for bloggers

Side Gig #5: Launch An Online Course

E-courses are popular right now, with just about every topic at our fingertips ripe for the learning. People will pay to take an e-course (AKA online course) and learn whatever interests them on their schedule…which makes online courses so nice for you as a money earner. You create the course once and let it work for you.

You know a lot about something, right ? I know you do. Even if you don’t have a formal teaching certification, your personal experience is a treasure trove of knowledge. Know all about using Pinterest? WordPress is your thing? You’re a self-proclaimed expert at chocolate chip cookies? Check out places like TakeLessons, Udemy, and Skillshare where you can get an online course up and running.

If you’re a teacher, you can hit a goldmine by selling your original lesson plans and other course material to other teachers and homeschooling parents. Teachers Pay Teachers is a well-known website that gives you this opportunity.

The nice thing about these places, you don’t have to do a ton of marketing. The platforms are designed to do that for you. Plus, they’re well-known in the world of online training courses.

Side Gig #6: Virtual Food Server

There’s a huge trend in the restaurant take-out business these days and being a virtual server is right in the center of it. Restaurant Revolution is a virtual call center that hires people to work 20 hours a week, working from home, supporting restaurant chains and handling their incoming food orders and takeout operations. The starting pay is $9.00 an hour and after 90 days it goes up to $10.00 an hour.

Another place to check out is Uber Eats

Side Gig #7: Deliver While You Commute

The other day, I received a package from Amazon but it wasn’t delivered by FedEx, UPS or my mailman. It was delivered by a guy working for Amazon Flex, who happens to make $18.00 to $25.00 an hour delivering Amazon orders. Another non-traditional delivery service, Roadie, lets you earn $8.00 to $50.00 with local deliveries. Heck, you’re out running errands anyway, why not turn your commute into a delivery and make some money.

And while I’m at it, you can get paid to make food deliveries with Door Dash and GrubHub.

Side Gig #8: Write Poems

You’re a poet. Did you know it ? See what I did there ? I wrote my first poem. Maybe I could make money writing poems ? Nah…not me. But you can. The Sun Magazine will pay you $100-200 for a poem, Crazy Horse pays up to $20.00, Poetry Foundation will pay $10.00 per line of poetry.

Side Gig #9: Swap Gift Cards

While cleaning out the console of her car, my mother-in-law unearthed 14 gift cards ! 14 ! And most of them were still for their full face value. “Where the hell did they all came from ???” I asked, surprised at the opportunity I saw. “Oh, I don’t know. People gave them to me, I guess.” Lucky for her, I know of a few places where she can sell all those unused gift cards:

Card Pool
Gift Card Granny
Raise

Side Gig #10: Professional Grocery Shopper

Grocery shopping. One of those necessary chores that a lot of people hate to do.

But if you don’t mind doing it, why not make some cash at it ?

Shipt is one of the most commonly used grocery shopping services out there, which will pay you to grocery shop for others. It looks like this type of side gig is more common in the bigger cities but my local Meijer grocery store – in a little Michigan town – has Shipt shoppers. I see those familiar green-shirt Shipt shoppers in my grocery store every week.

Here are the requirements to be a Shipt shopper:

18 y/o minimum
Reliable vehicle, 15 years old or newer
iPhone (iOS 10 or newer) or Android (5.1 or newer)
Valid U.S. driver’s license and auto insurance
Thorough background check required
Insulated cooler bag
Knowledge of produce selection
Ability to lift 25+ pounds

As far as the pay is concerned, they say you can make up to $25.00 an hour but the reality is you are paid $5.00 an hour and then 7.5% of the entire order. So, depending on the size of the order, you can make barely over $5.00 an hour or up to $25.00 an order.

Other companies like Shipt, are Peapod, Postmates, and Instacart

Side Gig #11: Live Event Ambassador

This is a new one on my side gig radar and an interesting one to boot. Victory Marketing Agency hires people, on the behalf of other companies, to work live events as event and promotional staff. From doing promotion, trade shows, and even go-go dancing, use the app and apply for gigs in your area.

Side Gig #12: Be An MTurker

if making money FAST is your number one priority, then I would suggest getting on MTurk, Amazon’s division of “crowd sourcing”. You can make a bit of money by picking and choosing little jobs through their “marketplace”.

Here’s an example of how it works: A business might need people to do data entry, they post their “job” on the Mechanical Turk marketplace, you select to do the data entry, you get paid once your work is approved by the business who posted the job.

I have done a lot of super-quick data entry gigs on Mturk which consisted of typing in names, address and emails and was paid up to .10 cents per task. I have also done some “find the zip code for this address” kind of jobs that took a few minutes to complete and paid around .20 cents per task. Granted, the pay per job is pretty low, but they are quick and easy to do and you are paid, via Paypal, as quickly as it takes for the person who created the job to approve your work. I have never waited longer than a day.

Side Gig #13: Local Service Do’er

Back in the day, the kids in the neighborhood would mow lawns and shovel snow. I even hired my neighbor’s son to help me rake out my gardens. Best $20.00 I spent that year ! If you like a variety in your day and are up for helping others with miscellaneous tasks like cleaning, pulling weeds, moving, take a look at:

Taskrabbit
Gigwalk
Thumbtack
Amazon Home Services

Side Gig #14: Edit Or Proofread Content

From books, essays and ads to websites and blogs, content is everywhere. And thanks to the internet, more content is being written every second of the day. If you have some editing or proofreading experience, Scribendi, Cactus Communications and American Journal Experts are worth looking into.

Side Gig #15: Spruce Up Resumes

Do you have a knack for crafting career-getting resumes? Are you the one friends and family gravitate to when they want a free resume critique ? Yes ? Well, why not get paid for this talent ? Talent, Inc. and Rise Smart are two well-known companies that will pay you to write resumes from home.

Side Gig #16: Professional Phone Answerer

Answering phone calls when a business owner is unavailable is a nice side gig that can be done at home. You don’t need a whole lot of skills, but you do have to be extremely organized and have great customer support skills. Vicky Virtual is the #1 place that comes to mind in this line of side gigs.

Side Gig #17: Interpreter / Translator

This one’s for all you bi-linguists out there. You can get a work at home translation job with one of these companies: LanguageLine Solutions, Rev, and ProZ.

Just be sure English is you main language.

Side Gig #18: Personal Technology Expert

I seem to be the go-to person whenever my father is frustrated with his computer. Why me ? Because I can work my way around the program that’s ticking him off. Doing tech support might net you more than a side gig income, which isn’t a bad thing. Places like Apple, support.com and telenetwork look for people to do technical support for a variety of clients.

Toptal is an interesting place to get technology side gigs; they are a freelance platform that matches talent to clients – no bidding on gigs like other freelance sites.

Side Gig #19: App Tester

I think there’s an app for everything. And more added every day. App developers tend to have a bias towards their creation, which is why they seek people to test their apps for them. ErliBird and Apperwall are two places where you can earn a nice little side income per app test you do.

Side Gig #20: Live Chat Agent

A perfect job for introverts, or just anyone who doesn’t want to have a phone job, making money as a live chat agent for The Chat Shop is a great way to earn an income. I say income because this is a 35-40 hours a week kind of job. Although the company is based in London, UK, they look for anyone who has a distraction-free work space.

Side Gig #21: Online Moderator

There are a lot of places online where people get to post their comments and opinions: forums, social media, blog comments. And with all this posting comes the need for companies to hire moderators to make sure things don’t get out of hand. Being a moderator with Modsquad and The Social Element are great companies that pay people do user-generated content moderation for social media profiles.

Side Gig #22: Internet Research Expert

The internet is a big world, with oodles of information. And fortunately for us, information overload drives people to pay to have research done for them. So these info-seekers turn to knowledge delivery platforms, like Wonder.

A popular online Q&A platform, you can easily pick up an extra $50.00 a week doing some internet research. But before you start making money, you have to go through he application process and then do a few test questions.

Here’s how it works:
Log onto the Ask Wonder platform, look for submitted questions that appeal to you, do the necessary research, answer the questions, get paid.

Another option is Just Answer, where you’re paid for your expertise without having to do any research.

Start Making Money With Side Gigs

Finding the right side gig doesn’t have to can be tough, and doing them shouldn’t waste your time. Time is money, after all, so if you feel one gig isn’t cutting it for you, then move on to the next. There’s no shortage of ways to make money on the side, with the next hustle around the corner. Find one that interests you, dive in, and go ahead and start earning money…even if it’s just enough to pay that unexpected bill. And as always, let me know if you try any of these.