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I've been getting this question a lot in the comments section of my articles. I'm not an authority on making money... I'm sure there are plenty of guys who know better than I do. However, since I'm getting asked, I figured I'd just get up a post with everything I know on it to refer guys to in the future.
If you want to make money in the short-term, with a limited skill set, there three (3) ways I know:
FREELANCE
If you have a skill of some sort, even just a little bit, you can freelance. Here are some sites you can freelance on:
To do this, first decide what you're there to do. Your headline should be based around this. If you do what most people do and give yourself a headline like
... no one will pay attention. It's vague.
Give yourself a headline instead like:
or
... folks start to notice you and get intrigued.
Profile design's important too: focus on numbers and achievements. Leave out the vague generalities and business codespeak. xx% income boost from the copy I've written, modules that do xyz written, bug-tested, and launched to production in 7 days, 400 emails / day handled as a virtual assistant (and I could've done twice that!), etc. Use numbers and talk achievements: what you have done. Not what you "could" do. No one trusts could, not when he's hiring.
If you go the Fiverr route, study the folks who are good and have lots of reviews. They focus on upsells. They offer a small part of their services for $5, and to get more (often to get the real package), you pay more. Often substantially more.
Things you can do as a freelancer:
Neat thing about freelancing is you can start off with just a basic skill set, and if you bid low and look for jobs that don't need a huge amount of skill you can learn on the job and get paid to do it. You may even find you have people recruit you specifically to train you, which is always fun.
When you're starting off, you won't have ratings, so bite the bullet and be the low bidder (only on short-term / fixed price deals. Don't take a $2 / hour job for the next 6 months for Christ's sake). You'll have crap assignments with lots of work and little pay at the start, but do a good job, get your 5-star ratings or "Job completed successfully" reviews and then you can start ramping up your asking price.
GET A JOB
Easier said than done?
Check out this post on building a résumé that gets past online recruiters' digital guardians and gets you tons of interviews.
On preparing for the interview: go to Hoovers.com, research the company you're interviewing with, and learn as much as you can about these areas:
Plan, at some point in the interview, to discuss how you want to work at the company because its values are a good fit with your own, then discuss examples of your own work experience that are examples of that value. For instance, if one of the values is "Technology that serves people", discuss how you were working at a company with a customer support system that wasn't really serving your customers and you were able to get changes made that made the system more customer friendly.
Then plan, at the end, when they ask you any questions you have, to bring up one of the growth markets for the company, and express your interest in that area and ask if there are opportunities at some point to get involved with that aspects of the business. For instance, if they're growing their consumer products business in South America, let them know you speak Spanish and have been to Chile and Bolivia and you'd love to help grow their Latin America consumer products division at some point down the line.
If you need help with interviewing, sign up at Big Interview for 25 bucks a month, and take the training there - the videos interviews are expertly and realistically done, and they hit you with all the standard questions you'll face in an actual interview, plus guides on how to answer them.
ARBITRAGE / DEAL-MAKING
This is the one everyone who's desperate for cash wants to do, and the hardest one to do effectively unless you've got unusual amounts of pluck or an uncommonly good network.
Arbitrage is buying something low to sell it high. Buying cheap goods in bulk from a supplier and selling them piecemeal on eBay, for instance. I had a buddy who made a bundle selling iPhone cases like this in 2008; when he tried doing it in 2010 though, he really struggled to sell off his inventory and ended up getting rid of the cases at cost, because eBay'd been flooded by vendors at that point and the opportunity to make any real money in arbitrage had vanished.
To make money in arbitrage, you've got to 1) identify an opportunity to buy something cheap and sell it higher, and 2) make sure you're one of the few folks who've identified it, like my pal in 2008, and aren't walking into a saturated market where arbitrage no longer exists, like my pal in 2010. The guys who are successful at this are either really lucky, or have excellent instincts (and do lots of homework). Most folks who try arbitrage just bleed money.
Day-trading (or any kind of short-term trading) is something I'd lump into the arbitrage category. You're buying something you think is undervalued, to sell it later when it is (hopefully) more valuable... or overvalued. Again, most of the folks I've met who've tried day-trading are breaking even at best, even if they've worked places like Goldman Sachs. Read some Nassim Taleb before you do any of this.
Deal-making I also lump into the same category. It's another middle man role, where your value is to spot the opportunity and connect the parties. Real estate agents, M&A specialists, the "money guy" who's good at hooking up investors with investment vehicles, all these are deal-makers. The problem with being the deal-maker is everyone wants to cut you out, so you've got to have pluck and know your way around social situations (especially social situations where folks are trying to screw you out of your commission - when they start saying, "Hey, wait a minute; John's got the oil field, Frank's got the mining equipment - what do you do, Ben? You just introduced us! You don't get 8% for that..."). If you want to be a deal-maker, read Robert Ringer's book To Be or Not to Be Intimidated?: That is the Question.
IT'S ALL WORK, AIN'T IT?
I feel like half the time I get asked this question, the guy wants me to tell him where he needs to go to scratch off that winning lottery ticket or where he needs to swing his pick axe to get black gold shooting out of the ground and into his face. But chances are as you read this post you're thinking, "Damn, that takes a lot of work. And THAT takes a lot of work. It ALL takes a lot of work!"
Well, sure. If you didn't want an income source that was going to take a lot of work to get, you could just go work for Starbucks or McDonald's.
This is for how you can make SERIOUS money, in the not-too-distant future.
If you just need ANY kind of money, right now, go work retail. Someone will hire you so long as you wear a button-down, speak articulately, and make sure to shower before your interview.
Otherwise, if you want something that's going to pay you well, and have the perks of flexibility (like freelancing), the appeal of stability + decent pay (like the job), or the promise of a high payout (like arbitrage), you'll have to do some work to get there.
Just like picking up girls, eh?
Chase
If you want to make money in the short-term, with a limited skill set, there three (3) ways I know:
- Freelance
- Get a job
- Arbitrage / deal-making
FREELANCE
If you have a skill of some sort, even just a little bit, you can freelance. Here are some sites you can freelance on:
- UpWork (arguably the best one as of 2016)
- eLance
- Guru
- Freelancer
- Fiverr
To do this, first decide what you're there to do. Your headline should be based around this. If you do what most people do and give yourself a headline like
- "Serious Professional Experienced at Marketing and Programming"
... no one will pay attention. It's vague.
Give yourself a headline instead like:
- "PHP Whiz w/ 5 Years Exp - Nothing I Can't Do"
or
- "Hungry Copywriter: My Copy Will Always Be Closing!"
... folks start to notice you and get intrigued.
Profile design's important too: focus on numbers and achievements. Leave out the vague generalities and business codespeak. xx% income boost from the copy I've written, modules that do xyz written, bug-tested, and launched to production in 7 days, 400 emails / day handled as a virtual assistant (and I could've done twice that!), etc. Use numbers and talk achievements: what you have done. Not what you "could" do. No one trusts could, not when he's hiring.
If you go the Fiverr route, study the folks who are good and have lots of reviews. They focus on upsells. They offer a small part of their services for $5, and to get more (often to get the real package), you pay more. Often substantially more.
Things you can do as a freelancer:
- Graphic design
- Video work
- Audio work
- Proofreading and editing
- Writing (creative writing, blog writing, copywriting, technical writing)
- Research (web research, contact research)
- Programming (PHP, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Python, you name it)
- Customer service (answering phone calls, email)
- Management roles, often managing teams of virtual assistants
- All manner of odd jobs you couldn't possibly guess at until you start surfing these sites and seeing what people are selling
Neat thing about freelancing is you can start off with just a basic skill set, and if you bid low and look for jobs that don't need a huge amount of skill you can learn on the job and get paid to do it. You may even find you have people recruit you specifically to train you, which is always fun.
When you're starting off, you won't have ratings, so bite the bullet and be the low bidder (only on short-term / fixed price deals. Don't take a $2 / hour job for the next 6 months for Christ's sake). You'll have crap assignments with lots of work and little pay at the start, but do a good job, get your 5-star ratings or "Job completed successfully" reviews and then you can start ramping up your asking price.
GET A JOB
Easier said than done?
Check out this post on building a résumé that gets past online recruiters' digital guardians and gets you tons of interviews.
On preparing for the interview: go to Hoovers.com, research the company you're interviewing with, and learn as much as you can about these areas:
- Its company values
- Its history
- Its growth markets
Plan, at some point in the interview, to discuss how you want to work at the company because its values are a good fit with your own, then discuss examples of your own work experience that are examples of that value. For instance, if one of the values is "Technology that serves people", discuss how you were working at a company with a customer support system that wasn't really serving your customers and you were able to get changes made that made the system more customer friendly.
Then plan, at the end, when they ask you any questions you have, to bring up one of the growth markets for the company, and express your interest in that area and ask if there are opportunities at some point to get involved with that aspects of the business. For instance, if they're growing their consumer products business in South America, let them know you speak Spanish and have been to Chile and Bolivia and you'd love to help grow their Latin America consumer products division at some point down the line.
If you need help with interviewing, sign up at Big Interview for 25 bucks a month, and take the training there - the videos interviews are expertly and realistically done, and they hit you with all the standard questions you'll face in an actual interview, plus guides on how to answer them.
ARBITRAGE / DEAL-MAKING
This is the one everyone who's desperate for cash wants to do, and the hardest one to do effectively unless you've got unusual amounts of pluck or an uncommonly good network.
Arbitrage is buying something low to sell it high. Buying cheap goods in bulk from a supplier and selling them piecemeal on eBay, for instance. I had a buddy who made a bundle selling iPhone cases like this in 2008; when he tried doing it in 2010 though, he really struggled to sell off his inventory and ended up getting rid of the cases at cost, because eBay'd been flooded by vendors at that point and the opportunity to make any real money in arbitrage had vanished.
To make money in arbitrage, you've got to 1) identify an opportunity to buy something cheap and sell it higher, and 2) make sure you're one of the few folks who've identified it, like my pal in 2008, and aren't walking into a saturated market where arbitrage no longer exists, like my pal in 2010. The guys who are successful at this are either really lucky, or have excellent instincts (and do lots of homework). Most folks who try arbitrage just bleed money.
Day-trading (or any kind of short-term trading) is something I'd lump into the arbitrage category. You're buying something you think is undervalued, to sell it later when it is (hopefully) more valuable... or overvalued. Again, most of the folks I've met who've tried day-trading are breaking even at best, even if they've worked places like Goldman Sachs. Read some Nassim Taleb before you do any of this.
Deal-making I also lump into the same category. It's another middle man role, where your value is to spot the opportunity and connect the parties. Real estate agents, M&A specialists, the "money guy" who's good at hooking up investors with investment vehicles, all these are deal-makers. The problem with being the deal-maker is everyone wants to cut you out, so you've got to have pluck and know your way around social situations (especially social situations where folks are trying to screw you out of your commission - when they start saying, "Hey, wait a minute; John's got the oil field, Frank's got the mining equipment - what do you do, Ben? You just introduced us! You don't get 8% for that..."). If you want to be a deal-maker, read Robert Ringer's book To Be or Not to Be Intimidated?: That is the Question.
IT'S ALL WORK, AIN'T IT?
I feel like half the time I get asked this question, the guy wants me to tell him where he needs to go to scratch off that winning lottery ticket or where he needs to swing his pick axe to get black gold shooting out of the ground and into his face. But chances are as you read this post you're thinking, "Damn, that takes a lot of work. And THAT takes a lot of work. It ALL takes a lot of work!"
Well, sure. If you didn't want an income source that was going to take a lot of work to get, you could just go work for Starbucks or McDonald's.
This is for how you can make SERIOUS money, in the not-too-distant future.
If you just need ANY kind of money, right now, go work retail. Someone will hire you so long as you wear a button-down, speak articulately, and make sure to shower before your interview.
Otherwise, if you want something that's going to pay you well, and have the perks of flexibility (like freelancing), the appeal of stability + decent pay (like the job), or the promise of a high payout (like arbitrage), you'll have to do some work to get there.
Just like picking up girls, eh?
Chase
