17 Best Ways to Make $5000 Online From Home (2023 Update)

Let me guess…

You’ve woken up to the pointlessness of treading the excruciating 9 to 5 corporate grind and are trying to find a way to earn your living while working flexibly from the comfort of your own home.

Or you may be unemployed, on sabbatical leave, or a stay-at-home mom seeking to invest your ample free time in building a source of full-time income online like millions of other people have already done before you.

Or maybe, bringing in five grand monthly from your laptop is your golden ticket to fulfilling your dream of traveling the world as a digital nomad.

Whatever your case is, earning $5000/month from home will almost certainly alleviate most, if not all, your financial struggles and enable you to live a more comfortable and satisfactory life aligned with your values and desires.

If that’s what you’re after, I’ve got good news for you!

In this article, I’ll be walking you through the 17 most tried-and-true ways to make $5000, or more, online from home or anywhere else in the world.

Let’s take a closer look.

17 Best Ways to Make $5000 Online From Home

1. Shifting careers

The simplest and possibly most sure-fire way to earn $5000 a month from home is shifting to a new career path with job positions that pay as much and offer the option to permanently work remotely.

Some of the highest-paying remote jobs include, but aren’t limited to:

• Cloud architect
• Cyber security analyst
• Finance director
• Front-end developer
• Mobile app developer
• Psychologist
• Research engineer
• Tech support manager
• Graphic designer
• Project manager
• Content writer
• SEO manager
• Virtual assistant
• Office manager
• & more

While there are clear benefits to sticking with your current career, such as familiarity, expertise, progression, security, stability, etc., for many people, the biggest pay boosts come from taking career leaps.

As a matter of fact, according to a workforce report from the ADP, job hoppers earn 15% higher salaries than those who stay in one job for the long term.

The first step to shifting careers is doing your due diligence regarding remote professions that appeal to you.

Once you’ve zeroed in on a specific career path, start taking the necessary steps to make the shift.

This might mean putting some money aside as a safety net, going back to school, attending seminars, going part-time at your current job, networking with people in your target industry, revamping your resume, and even remaining jobless for a while so that you can focus all your time and energy on transitioning to your desired career.

2. Freelancing

One of the fastest ways to earn $5000 per month from home is by offering skills you already possess as a freelancer.

For example, if you’re a copywriter you could start working with people or companies who’d be willing to pay for your copywriting services on a per-gig basis.

Some of the most in-demand freelance skills nowadays, include, but aren’t limited to:

• Web design & development
• Graphic design
• Digital marketing & SEO
• Video production & editing
• Voiceover
• Proofreading & editing
• Copywriting
• & more

If you don’t have any skills that can be monetized in the freelance market, you can always invest some time and effort in developing new ones.

Do some research, self-reflect, and once you’ve zeroed in on a specific skill set, make sure to sign up for a relevant course to shorten your learning curve, expedite your progress, and master it as fast as possible.

After you’ve grasped the basics of your chosen skill, start marketing your services to potential clients via your social media, paid ads, word of mouth, your personal website, or even digital freelance portals, such as:

• Upwork
• FlexJobs
• Fiverr
• Freelancer
• Outsourcely
• PeoplePerHour
• & more

Please note that building up a decent client base as a freelancer is no walk in the park.

Landing high-paying gigs as a beginner will almost certainly prove to be impossible, unless, of course, you are either extremely skilled or incredibly lucky.

In reality, your first few months or couple of years into freelancing will probably involve going the extra mile and delivering high-quality work to low-paying clients for the sake of building up an appealing portfolio that’ll eventually start attracting higher-paying customers down the road.

3. Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is an online business model that involves promoting products or services created and distributed by third-party online merchants in exchange for getting paid a commission for each customer sale you refer.

Here’s how the process of making money online with affiliate marketing works.

Step 1: You join a merchant’s affiliate program.

Step 2: The merchant gives you a unique affiliate link that points to their e-shop.

Step 3: You start promoting your affiliate link via one or more digital marketing channels such as a website, forums, social media, paid ads, etc.

Step 4: Every time someone clicks on your unique affiliate link and makes a purchase on the merchant’s e-shop, the merchant will pay you a commission.

 

 

Affiliate marketing is currently being implemented by more than 80% of brands around the world, including some of the most well-established ones, such as:

• Amazon
• Apple
• Nike
• Ikea
• eBay
• AliExpress
• & more

Therefore, almost any product or service you can think of, even those you’re currently using yourself, can be promoted in exchange for affiliate commissions.

According to statistics, the affiliate marketing industry is growing at an average rate of 10% per year and is expected to surpass $30 billion by 2025. This places affiliate marketing among the fastest-growing online business models out there.

In addition, the average earnings of affiliate marketers according to Glassdoor, range between $61,000 and $103,000 per year.

Affiliate marketing offers numerous benefits that other business ventures don’t, such as:

• Minimum startup & operational costs
• Huge income potential
• No product development costs
• Passive income potential
• Ridiculously simple
• Monetizing a topic you love
• No shipping, customer service, returns, refunds, etc.
• & more

Those are some of the reasons affiliate marketing is my favorite method of making money online.

As a matter of fact, about 40% of my current total income is generated via affiliate marketing.

If affiliate marketing sounds like something you might be interested in, I suggest that you check out my free crash course to making $5000 a month from home with affiliate marketing.

4. Dropshipping

Dropshipping is an online business model that involves having a third-party wholesale supplier automatically process and ship your customers’ orders without you having to deal with any kind of shipping procedure like maintaining inventory, packing, arranging pickups, labeling, etc.

Here’s an overview of how dropshipping works:

Step 1: Launch an online dropshipping store.

Step 2: Find a dropshipping supplier.

Step 3: List one or more of the supplier’s products in your dropshipping store.

Step 4: Set your retail prices.

Step 5: Start promoting your dropshipping store via social media, paid ads, blogging, etc.

Step 6: Every order placed on your online store is automatically forwarded to your dropshipping supplier.

Step 7: The supplier charges you a wholesale price and then processes, packages, and ships the order directly to your customers.

Step 8: The margin between the wholesale price you paid to your supplier and the retail price your customers pay you lands in your pocket.

The global dropshipping market size was valued at over $102.2 billion in 2018 and is expected to grow to over $550 billion by 2025.

The mechanics of dropshipping are kinda similar to those of affiliate marketing.

However, compared to affiliate marketing, dropshipping is a little more complicated and requires a larger monetary investment up front.

5. Blogging

Blogging is the process of regularly publishing content in the form of articles (aka blog posts) around one or more specific subjects.

To give you an example, on dearboss-iquit.com, I focus on publishing blog posts about making money online and career development.

Blog posts come in many shapes and sizes, such as:

• How-to guides (How to Start a Blog)
• Entertaining (Job Quitting Stories)
• Product reviews (Wealthy Affiliate Review)
• Roundups (Best Affiliate Marketing Courses)
• Informative (Affiliate Marketing Statistics)
• & more

The primary purpose of blogging is to build an audience that you can then monetize via:

• Display ads
• Affiliate marketing
• Sponsored posts
• Selling your own services and/or products
• Selling leads
• Renting ad space
• & more

Blogging is one of the oldest and most foolproof methods for building a source of income online.

If writing content around topics that interest you on a daily basis sounds like something you’d enjoy, you should definitely consider starting a blog of your own.

Launching a blog nowadays is simpler and more affordable than ever and requires having neither coding knowledge nor technical know-how whatsoever.

6. Selling on Amazon

Another pretty popular endeavor for creating a substantial income from home is selling products on Amazon.

If you don’t own products to sell, you can leverage selling methods like retail arbitrage, private labeling, and buying wholesale.

• Retail arbitrage is the process of buying discounted products from online or offline retail stores and then reselling them on Amazon at higher prices. RA is a great way to get an idea of what selling on Amazon looks like without having to invest a lot of money upfront.
• Private labeling is probably the most scalable model for selling on Amazon. This selling technique involves purchasing a generic product from a manufacturer in bulk at a cheap price, tweaking it, adding your logo and business information, and selling it under your own brand.
• Buying wholesale refers to purchasing products directly from an already established brand (e.g., Nike, Samsung, Fisher-Price, etc.) at wholesale and then selling them on Amazon at retail.

Once you’ve settled on a selling technique, you’ll need to do some in-depth research and collect the necessary data that’ll help you zero in on the products you’ll be selling. That’s one of the most important steps of the entire process as picking the wrong product could set your project up for failure.

If you’ve never sold anything on Amazon before, I suggest that you focus on finding and selling just one product so that you don’t overwhelm yourself right from the get-go.

Amazon offers two kinds of order fulfillment approaches – FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) and FBM (Fulfillment by Merchant)

• FBA is a service provided by Amazon that enables sellers to delegate all order fulfillment processes such as storing, picking, packing, shipping, customer service, returns, etc., to Amazon.
• FBM is the process of handling all the aspects of storage and order fulfillment yourself.

7. YouTube channel

Running a YouTube channel is pretty much the same as blogging with the only difference being that instead of written content you’ll be publishing content in video format.

Just like blog posts, your videos can center around any subject you want, from makeup tutorials and cooking to pranking and working out.

Unlike blogging, launching and maintaining a YouTube channel is completely free. Also, getting traction on YouTube is technically somewhat easier. That’s because once you start uploading videos, YouTube’s algorithm will pick them up and start distributing them across audiences that might be interested in spending time watching them.

Once your YouTube channel gathers 1,000 subscribers, you’ll be able to start monetizing your content via ads that’ll be running at random or predetermined intervals throughout your videos. On top of that, YouTube gives you the liberty to monetize your channel using additional monetization models such as affiliate marketing, sponsorships, selling your own services, e-commerce, etc.

According to ZipRecruiter, as of 2022, the average annual pay for a Youtube Channel in the US is $60,000/year. That works out to be precisely $5,000/month.

If you find the idea of making your living by publishing video content appealing, becoming a YouTuber is definitely the way to go.

8. Lead generation

Lead generation is the process of gathering the contact information of people who express interest in a specific product/service (leads) and then selling it to companies that offer similar products/services.

Here’s an overview of how lead generation works:

Step 1: Create a niche-specific website (e.g. Pest Control, Yoga, Wood Removal, etc).

Step 2: Drive traffic to your website. Usually, lead generation sites attract traffic via SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and blogging.

Step 3: Sign up for an email marketing platform (MailerLite, Aweber, SendinBlue, ConverKit, etc).

Step 4: Create a lead magnet (e.g. guide, e-book, report, etc).

Step 5: Set up an opt-in form on your website that captures your visitors’ contact info (email, phone, name, location, etc.) in exchange for free access to the lead magnet.

Step 6: Reach out to companies that might be interested in purchasing the contact info of the leads you’ve gathered.

Step 7: Sell them the leads.

Lead generation can be used to make a full-time income from home in many different ways, including without running a website (see video below).

In general, lead generation isn’t such a popular online business model.

Maybe that’s because it’s considered less profitable and flexible, harder to gain initial traction, and more challenging to scale than affiliate marketing, dropshipping, blogging, or running a YouTube channel.

Nevertheless, it’s undeniable that the model has the potential to help you build a monthly income of $5000 while working from home.

9. Creating digital courses

Are you very proficient at a sought-after skill? Do you have extensive experience in a specific subject? Have you managed to overcome a challenging hardship or achieve a highly demanding goal?

If so, you can compile your knowledge and experience in a course and potentially make a killing by selling it to other people.

There are literally thousands of online courses around any topic you can possibly imagine, from affiliate marketing and web development to cooking Mexican food and grooming a cat. Heck, a while ago I came across a woman who was making over $10,000 per month selling a course about dealing with iron deficiency in goats.

If you have trouble pinpointing the subject matter of your course, you can always leverage your previous work experience. For instance, if you’re working as an accountant, you could launch a course that teaches small business owners how to do their books.

Nowadays, the vast majority of course creators set up their courses through Teachable, a platform that allows you to host all your course materials (videos, PDF guides, etc), manage your customers, and handle your payments.

The main downside of creating and selling a course is that you always run the risk of investing tons of time and effort upfront only to find out later that nobody wants to buy it (ouch!).

The good news is that you can mitigate such risks to some extent by doing some proper market research before you begin developing your full course.

For example, you could piece together just 1-2 short modules and distribute them for free to 10-20 people in exchange for feedback, conduct a few polls on relevant social media groups, run a couple of paid online surveys, etc.

Selling online courses is a fairly booming market internationally.

According to LearnWorlds, the value of the e-learning industry was estimated at $190 billion in 2018 and is expected to exceed $319 billion by 2029.

In addition, the average earnings of course creators range between $1000 and $10,000 per month while seasoned course creators can make as much as 7 figures per year.

Does producing and selling digital courses seem like something that would interest you?

If so, make sure to watch Pat Flynn’s step-by-step tutorial for creating a profitable course from scratch below.

10. Social media influencer

The term “social media influencer” refers to a social media user who has enough reputation and credibility to influence the purchasing decisions of specific social media audiences (hence the term “influencer”).

The primary job of a social media influencer is to publish written, auditory, and visual content (images, quotes, stories, videos, etc.) that delivers value to their followers.

The most common technique influencers use to monetize their content is sponsored collaborations. All too often, influencers with large follower bases get approached by multiple established brands willing to pay them hefty sums of cash in exchange for endorsing their products.

The money paid to an influencer for a single sponsored post ranges anywhere between $10 and $10,000 and is usually determined based on a bunch of different factors such as:

• Size of following
• Social media platform
• Industry
• Follower engagement
• Type of content
• & more

However, social media influencers can maximize their earnings by leveraging additional monetization models, such as:

• Affiliate marketing
• Selling custom merchandise
• Speaking gigs
• Freelancing
• Consulting
• & more

According to Vox, an influencer with 10,000 to 50,000 followers can earn anywhere between $3500 and $8500 per month.

Here are the nine steps to making $5000 a month from home as a social media influencer:

1. Pick a specific niche
2. Select your social media platform
3. Publish relevant content
4. Experiment with both written, audio, and video content
5. Maintain consistency
6. Engage with your followers
7. Pay attention to your audience’s feedback
8. Collaborate with other Influencers
9. Let brands know you’re open to sponsored partnerships

If becoming an influencer on social media is something that piques your interest, make sure to check out this step-by-step guide by Influencer Marketing Hub.

11. Selling media

Whether you’re an avid photographer, a music producer, a graphic designer, a videographer, or a painter, you can start monetizing the media you produce in a multitude of ways.

First of all, you could start selling them on stock marketplaces like:

• Shutterstock (photos & images)
• Epidemic Sound (music & SFX)
• Storyblocks (video footage & templates)
• DeviantArt’s Printshop (artwork)
• Envato Elements (doodles, illustrations, fonts, etc.)
• ThemeForest (website templates)
• etc.

Secondly, you could start selling usage licenses of your work to companies and individuals that may want to use them on their projects.

For instance, if you specialize in food photography, you could sell usage licenses of your pictures to food blogs and food magazines. If you design cat illustrations, you could sell usage licenses of your designs to cat food brands, pet shops, and pet toy stores.

Lastly, you can leverage a personal portfolio website in conjunction with social media to showcase your work and attract clients willing to pay you either by the hour or on a per-project basis for delivering custom pieces of media tailored to their specific needs.

12. Print-on-demand

Print-on-demand is the process of working with a third-party supplier who will print, package, and ship white-label products (t-shirts, hats, mugs, books, etc) with your own custom designs on a per-order basis.

Here’s how the process of making money with print-on-demand works:

Step 1: Pick a niche.

Step 2: Select the white-label products you’d like to be selling. Some of the best-selling ones are t-shirts, hats, mugs, hoodies, stickers, stationery, and bags.

Step 3: Start creating your designs. If you don’t have the time or expertise, you can outsource the design process to a freelancer or use designs bought under an extended license from stock websites like Shutterstock and iStockphoto.

Step 4: Choose your white-label product suppliers. Some of the most popular ones are Printful, Redbubble, TeeSpring, CustomCat, and Printify.

Step 5: Set your profit margins.

Step 6: Launch your own eCommerce store (optional).

Step 7: Start promoting your store and designs via social media, paid ads, blogging, SEO, etc.

Step 8: All orders of products with your designs will be automatically sent to your supplier.

Step 9: The supplier will then charge you for the white-label product, print your design on it, process, pack, and ship it directly to your customer, and lastly, pay you the profit margin you set earlier.

According to a report published by Grand View Research, the global print-on-demand market size was valued at $4.90 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach $39.40 billion by 2030.

If you’re interested in getting started with print-on-demand, make sure that you watch the following in-depth tutorial.

13. Selling handmade goods

The worldwide demand for high-quality handmade goods has never been higher.

Therefore, if you’re into handmade crafts, you can easily generate significant profits by selling them online.

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine launched a side hustle of creating and selling custom lapel pins online.

He purchased a pin punch press for $30, 1000 blank pins for $50, and started creating custom pins with royalty-free images which he’d then list for sale on eBay and Etsy.

The whole process of creating, listing, and shipping the pins took him no more than 3 hours per day.

Within 4 months he was bringing in approximately $1000 a month without even launching an online store or actively promoting his work.

If he’d invested more time and effort in marketing and scaling his gig, his profits could’ve easily grown to $5000 per month and maybe even more.

About half a decade ago, another friend of mine developed a passion for making natural soaps.

At some point, he invested some money in purchasing soap equipment and ingredients, made around 1000 soaps in various colors, scents, shapes, and sizes, and listed all of them on Etsy.

His soaps made such a killing that he managed to make enough money to launch his own soap brick-and-mortar business within just one year.

Based on Yahoo Finance, the global value of the handicrafts market reached $680 billion in 2021 and is anticipated to surpass $1.2 trillion by 2027.

Some of the best-selling handmade items include, but aren’t limited to:

• Beauty products
• Clothing
• Jewelry
• Hats
• Rugs
• Scented candles
• Home decorations
• Knitted goods
• & more

14. Streaming video games

Video game streaming is the process of broadcasting yourself playing video games in real-time, on one or more online live streaming platforms, such as:

• YouTube Gaming
• Twitch
• Facebook Live
• HitBox
• Beam
• etc.

At the time of writing, the most popular platform for streaming and making money off of video gaming is Twitch.

Twitch is quite similar to YouTube… It involves channels, followers, subscribers, live streaming, and more.

A Twitch channel can be monetized in a variety of ways, such as:

• Paid subscriptions
• Twitch Bits
• Video ads
• Donations
• Sponsorships
• Affiliate marketing
• Selling merch
• & more

To ensure the highest financial returns for your Twitch streaming efforts, it’s recommended to experiment with as many monetization methods as possible.

This report published by Future Market Insights, reveals that the video game streaming market was valued at $2.3 billion in 2022 and is expected to reach $7.2 billion by 2032.

Moreover, according to Influencer Marketing Hub, the average full-time Twitch streamer makes anywhere between $3,000 to $5,000 per month for streaming 8-9 hours per day while seasoned gamers can bring in tens of thousands to millions of dollars per year.

All you need to get started with video game streaming is:

• Gaming device (computer, console, etc.)
• Microphone or headset
• Webcam
• Internet connection
• Game of your choice

The top video games for streaming in terms of viewership, popularity, and earnings potential are:

• League of Legends
• Grand Theft Auto V
• Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
• Minecraft
• Apex Legends
• VALORANT
• Fortnite
• Dota 2

No matter which video game you pick, chances are you’ll be competing against hundreds or even thousands of other streamers. Therefore, to avoid getting lost in the shuffle, you’ll need to bring something unique to the table that sets you apart from everyone else.

Developing an app involves an upfront commitment of a lot of time, effort, and money.

To ensure that your investments won’t be in vain but rather yield maximum returns, conduct in-depth market and competition research to discover if there’s a healthy demand for your app, how similar apps in your target niche perform, and whether or not you could compete with them.

If your app doesn’t check all the necessary boxes, you’d better go back to the drawing board and come up with another concept.

If it does, you may proceed with developing it either by coding it yourself or by hiring a specialized app developer to code it for you.

Once your mobile app is up and running you can start distributing it on several app marketplaces such as Google Play Store, Apple’s App Store, and Amazon AppStore, either for free or in exchange for a small fee per download.

In most industries, the demand for acquiring knowledge, advice, and insights from proven experts is constantly growing.

According to Yahoo Finance, the global consulting market was valued at $890 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach $1.3 trillion in 2026.

Furthermore, this report from Salary reveals that as of 2022, the average salary of US consultants is over $100,000 per year. That’s equivalent to $8000+ per month.

17. Investing in rental properties

Investing in rental properties is one of the best and most reliable ways to build up a steady monthly passive income from home.

The process is rather simple.

First, you buy properties.

Then you rent them out.

And lastly, you collect rent from your tenants.

The primary downside of leveraging this money-making method is that if you currently possess no properties to rent out, you’ll have to invest hefty sums of money to actually buy some.

Even getting a mortgage loan for purchasing property is no walk in the park. It involves making a down payment of at least 20% of the purchase price of a property and having a very good credit score.

Other common setbacks regarding rental properties include:

• Lack of tenants
• Repairing damages to your properties
• Late or no rent payments
• High tenant turnover rates

According to GlobeNewswire, the value of the global real estate rental market was estimated at $2.1 trillion in 2021 and is expected to grow to $3.5 trillion by 2026.

Lastly, the average salary of landlords in the US is approximately $60,000 per year. That’s equivalent to exactly $5000 per month.

Conclusion

Apparently, earning $5000 per month online from home is undoubtedly possible.

The 17 money-making methods I shared with you in this article have been tried and tested by millions of people throughout the world over the years, so if I were you, I’d consider getting started with one of them.

Most of them have the potential to bring in even more than $5000 a month down the road.

Freelancing in conjunction with affiliate marketing is what enabled me to ditch the 9-5 rat race and earn my living online while working from home.

Regardless of which approach you choose to implement, always keep in mind that they all involve tremendous learning curves, massive hard work, tons of trial and error, mastering new skills, stretching your comfort zone, and a long-term commitment over a significant timeframe that could span months or even years.

If you lack the patience or willingness to stick with this kind of arduous process, I can practically guarantee that your chances of reaching your financial goals are practically nonexistent.

 

Do you have questions or require further help?

Leave a comment right below or contact me right here, and I’ll do my best to get back to you as soon as possible.

All the best, stay safe, and succeed big,

Harry, Founder & Creative Director at dearboss-iquit.com