If you’re looking to create a new life for yourself, you’ve likely considered starting a side hustle or venturing into entrepreneurship. In 2024, it is easier than ever to earn passive income, make money online, and/or work remotely. These options give you more financial and personal freedom than ever. 🛫
Imagine a life where you can work from anywhere in the world, on your own time, and have more freedom to pursue your passions. With these income stream ideas, this dream can become a reality.
It’s not easy, but with enough dedication, passion, and hard work, you could make a monthly income of $10,000 or more by starting your own business! 💪
In this guide, we'll share the 10 best ways to make $10,000 per month, including:
Ready to learn more? Let's dive in!
Overview: 10 ideas to make $10k a month in 2024 💸
Idea | Average Monthly Revenue* | Average Startup Cost | Startup Needs |
PLR Products | $1,000-$10,000 | $1,000-$2,000 | PLR content, website, marketing |
Dropshipping | $5,000-$1,5000 | $100-$300 | Online store, marketing |
Starting a Blog | $3,000-$12,000 | $100-$300 | Website, marketing |
Freelancing | $4,000-$13,000 | $100-$300 | Website, marketing |
FBA Stores | $5,000-$15,000 | $500-$5,000 | Products, FBA account |
Vintage Flipping | $3,000-$10000 | $500-$1,000 | Flipping tools, products |
Affiliate Marketing | $5,000-$15,000 | $1,000-$2,000 | Website, social media, affiliate network |
Etsy Shops | $3,000-$12,000 | $100-$300 | Designs, Etsy account |
Teaching/Consulting | $5,000-$15,000 | $500-$1,000 | Website, marketing |
Remote Closing | $2,000-$14,000 | $100-$300 | Sales training or education |
*The monthly revenue varies wildly for most side hustles because the amount of time you put into your business will drastically affect your earning potential.
The best ways to make $10k a month in 2024 💸
Whether you just want to make some extra cash on the side or if you’re looking to quit your career and make good money, these 10 side hustles and ideas to make $10k a month have you covered. We’ll talk about several different methods with different levels of difficulty, startup costs, and time commitments. ⌛️
After reviewing the startup costs and potential monthly revenues in the chart above, compare the startup difficulty, time, and overall time commitment for each of the ideas below. The amount of money you could make with each side hustle varies, depending on how much time and effort you put into your own business. 💰
#1. Sell Private Label Rights (PLR) products
You can buy private label rights (PLR) to different products for inexpensive costs, which gives you the ability to edit these products and sell them yourself. PLR products include audio, blog posts, and e-books - mainly, these products consist of online content. 💻
A PLR agreement benefits both the original seller of the product, as they make money off of selling the original product, as well as the buyer of the PLR, who makes money off of selling slightly edited versions of the product. It’s a win-win! 🙌
🛠 Startup Difficulty: Easy
⏱ Startup Time: Short
📆 Overall Time Commitment: Low
Getting started with selling PLR products is pretty easy. Your main startup costs will come from the initial purchase price of the products, setting up an e-commerce website to resell the products, and any marketing costs to get your product on the market. It’s like flipping houses, but easier (and online!). 🔨
Once you’ve flipped the PLR products and put them on for sale, you’ll be able to make passive income. The more products you have available, the more you can make, but the day-to-day time commitment is fairly low. You’ll just need to maintain your website and marketing. 📲
💡Looking for more entrepreneurship tips? Check out our full guide to the best books for entrepreneurs here.
#2. Start a dropshipping online business
You’ve probably heard the term dropshipping before, but what exactly is it? Dropshipping is essentially choosing products to sell yourself, but allowing a third party to handle the logistics (such as warehousing and shipping). 📦
Your small business won’t keep the products it sells in stock. Rather, you’ll partner with producers to sell your products. Your main task is to handle the marketing and customer-facing end of the product buying process. 📱
🛠 Startup Difficulty: Easy
⏱ Startup Time: Short
📆 Overall Time Commitment: Low
You can get started with dropshipping with companies such as Shopify, which allows you to build an e-commerce store. You’ll want to have a good social media platform and marketing skills to sell your products. 🏷
When dropshipping, choosing high-quality products and maintaining excellent customer relations is how the money gets made. The time commitment is overall low, so you won’t need to go full-time (unless you want to).
#3. Start a blog and leverage ad income
Do you have writing skills and/or something you’ve always wanted to talk about? Starting a blog can be a great way to make money on the side. You can write about pretty much anything on a blog, and the startup costs are low. 🪙 Plus, you can write your blog from anywhere—so this is a great business idea for aspiring digital nomads.
Money from blog writing primarily comes from advertisements on your blog, sponsorships, and affiliate links. Having a healthy balance of these can bring in thousands of dollars a month depending on your business model. Eventually, you could even start a podcast or YouTube channel to generate additional attention to your blog.
🛠 Startup Difficulty: Easy
⏱ Startup Time: Short
📆 Overall Time Commitment: Medium
Becoming a blogger is fairly easy. You can start blogging with your own website and domain name for fairly little money. Most costs will come from joining an affiliate program and paying for any digital marketing or web design to make your blog more popular.
It’s recommended to choose a niche that you’re passionate about or an expert in for your blog. Study competitors and your audience closely. Learning skills like good copywriting and search engine optimization (SEO) can help expand your blog’s reach with quality content! ✍️
#4. Freelance your skills
In the new digital age, advertising your skills has never been easier. If you’ve got a hobby, passion, or skill that you’ve perfected (or come close to perfecting), you can freelance your skills. Examples of freelancers include freelance writers, graphic designers, and social media managers. You could even start a creative agency by bringing together multiple different types of freelancers under one roof. 👥
Even if you don’t think your skills are marketable, there are so many platforms perfect for beginners. Examples of freelancing platforms include Fiverr and Upwork, where you can post your services for free to your local area or even worldwide. 🗺
🛠 Startup Difficulty: Easy
⏱ Startup Time: Short
📆 Overall Time Commitment: High
From fiction writing to graphic design, your skills are likely in need somewhere. While you can work part-time with freelancing, the money really comes from working additional hours. Luckily, a freelancing career is incredibly customizable in terms of what clients you take on and how many hours you work. ✒️
#5. Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA)
Amazon offers Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA), which is a service that allows you to outsource order fulfillment to Amazon’s warehouses. This helps eliminate logistics and gives you tools such as two-day free Prime shipping and customer service for your products. 📦
Keep in mind that you will need to have products to sell to use FBA. However, if you’ve already got a way to make or source products, FBA is a great way to streamline selling. Amazon also has helpful step-by-step resources for starting your FBA business.
🛠 Startup Difficulty: Easy
⏱ Startup Time: Medium
📆 Overall Time Commitment: Medium
FBA is perfect for entrepreneurs who already have products to sell. With its incredible popularity, Amazon has plenty of tools to get your products to customers quickly and handle any unhappy customers.
#6. Flip vintage apparel, furniture, and decor
Vintage items are making a comeback, and you can capitalize on this trend! Shopping at thrift stores, finding items for free, or sourcing items from estate sales and garage sales and then turning them into vintage treasures is generally called “flipping”. 🔁
To get started with this business idea, research trends, colors, and styles that are “in." Then, grab your tools (and a few paint cans) and transform older furniture and decor into modern styles. You can also find apparel in thrift stores and at estate sales that can be washed, dyed, or fixed up to become new treasures. 🎁
🛠 Startup Difficulty: Easy
⏱ Startup Time: Medium
📆 Overall Time Commitment: Medium
Getting started with vintage flipping isn’t hard. You can acquire items like paintbrushes, sanders, and basic tools online or in stores, and there are plenty of thrift stores and estate sales open every day. 🧰
Make sure you choose items that will sell well. Flipped items can be sold in person or online, but keep in mind that larger furniture items will have to likely be sold locally. 🪑
💡Looking to improve your business skills? Check out Relay’s full guide to the best podcasts for entrepreneurs here!
#7. Become an influencer and use affiliate marketing
It might seem like a faraway dream, but becoming an influencer is likely more possible than you think. You don’t need a million followers to make money as an influencer (although it would surely help). Most influencers make their money using sponsorships, brand deals, and affiliate marketing. 🔗
With affiliate marketing, you can promote products that you like or enjoy and receive a small portion of the profits when that product is sold through a link you provide. Even though each individual profit is small, it adds up over time. 💵
🛠 Startup Difficulty: Medium
⏱ Startup Time: Medium
📆 Overall Time Commitment: Medium
To get started as an influencer, you’ll want to pick a niche and an audience. Then, you can promote your affiliate links and referrals with a website or through social media. It can be tough to get started and gain traction, but once you do, your personal brand can quickly take off! 🚀
Many products offer affiliate links, and smaller brands especially may be more likely to partner with micro-influencers as they start out. You’ll have to certainly commit some time to growing your followers or subscribers, but it can really pay off in the long run.
#8. Start an Etsy shop
Etsy is one of the easiest online shops to start. You only need photos of your product(s), a description, and a price to create an Etsy shop, and it’s free to get started! Keep in mind that Etsy does take a percentage of each sale, so price your items accordingly.
You can sell virtually anything on Etsy, but selling digital products can be a really good way to earn passive income. Once you design things like printables or templates and post them on Etsy, customers will be able to instantly download them without needing any help from you. 💻
🛠 Startup Difficulty: Medium
⏱ Startup Time: Medium
📆 Overall Time Commitment: Medium
Another way to make money on Etsy without having to keep inventory or create physical products is to use print-on-demand services like Printify to print your designs on all sorts of products. You can link your Etsy store to on-demand printing services to print your designs on t-shirts, tote bags, canvases, and much more. These services will handle the shipping, too. 📬
It can take some time to create Etsy listings and to get the best bang for your buck, you’ll want to make sure each Etsy posting is designed with an apt title, description, and tags. However, once you’ve posted enough content, let the passive income roll!
#9. Teach others via online courses or consulting
Have you always wanted to teach others, without the hassle of getting a teaching degree? Good news: you can! You can create and sell online courses and tutorials on sites like Udemy or Coursera. Once you publish these courses, you've become a teacher capable of earning passive income. 🪙
Or, if you want to take a more hands-on approach, you can offer consulting services in nearly any industry. Becoming a freelance consultant isn’t easy, but it’s definitely accessible for those willing to put in the time to build their network and grow their skills.
🛠 Startup Difficulty: Medium
⏱ Startup Time: Medium
📆 Overall Time Commitment: Medium
Some sites charge an upfront fee for users to access all of their courses, and other sites charge by the course. Be sure to do your research on which platforms you prefer. You can also use tutoring platforms like Superprof to teach online if you prefer to teach your course live.
As for consulting, you can find consulting firms to work for, or you can do freelance consulting. Getting into a good consulting firm is generally harder and requires more skill, but it does offer the advantage of clients that you don’t have to do the work to find.
#10. Become a remote closer
What is remote closing? Essentially, a remote closer is a remote salesperson who closes deals on high-value or high-ticket items like homes or other expensive products. Additionally, it’s an inbound sales role, where the customer has already shown interest in the product. No outbound sales calls here! 📞
🛠 Startup Difficulty: Medium
⏱ Startup Time: Medium
📆 Overall Time Commitment: High
The timeline of becoming a remote closer will largely depend on your current sales experience. Luckily, gaining sales experience can be as simple as taking online courses or working in a low-level sales position. As long as you’re teachable, you can learn sales skills. 🪜
However, being a remote closer is basically a full-time job, and your income will be determined by the hours you work. It’s certainly a career that offers more locational freedom than traditional jobs, but it's not going to allow you to passively earn income.
How to start your journey towards $10K per month 💸
It’s recommended that you start with why you want to start your own business, go into freelancing, or have a side hustle. Consider making a list of things you’re looking for in your new venture, including income needs/wants, time and location freedom, and skills you're hoping to learn.
If you’re unsure of what business you want to start, and you want more options, check out this article on finding your next business idea!
You can also interview people who are working in the businesses listed above. This will give you an understanding of what their day-to-day life is like. Look for people with job titles similar to what you’re wanting on sites like LinkedIn to find these interviewees. Then, just send them a simple message and they might be willing to meet you for a virtual coffee chat! ☕️
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