There were times in my life when I didn’t know what to do and how to make money.
I was daft. In capital letters.
However, things are different now and I’ve come to realize that there are actually ways to generate a steady income in the real world.
Maybe you’re like the old me right now and you have no idea what to do to make money.
If your goal is to make $3,000 dollars a month, the good news is that you can make more.
It’s only the way forward from here and everything I’ll share with you today is what works 100% of the time.
However, you just need to stick with what works for you.
Without further ado, here are 21 ways on how to make $3,000 a month.
Stay glued.
1. Start a YouTube channel
When it comes to making $3,000 a month, a YouTube channel can take you there.
Firstly, you’ll need to learn exactly how YouTube works and how to make YouTube videos.
There’s a learning curve to this, and there are a couple of skills you’ll definitely need to pick up to create YouTube videos.
Growing a YouTube channel from $0 to $3,000/month is not an easy task. It takes time, passion, and commitment.
Plus, there are multiple ways to monetize your YouTube channel once you start getting subscribers and views.
These methods include affiliate marketing, ad revenue, course or product sales, and YouTube membership subscriptions.
2. Sell printables online
People buy printables every now and then for different purposes on the internet.
If you’re great at designing them, then you can really make a fortune off them. Firstly, a lot of research goes into creating printables.
You need to know exactly the kind of printables people buy, and where to sell your printables when you make them.
There’s also the need to understand how to price printables according to the design and the kind.
On the Etsy marketplace, you can sell your printables to the global market or list them for sale.
Can you make $3,000 a month from selling printables online?
The answer to this is a big yes.
There’s a chance to make as much as $3k/month from selling printables online.
Once you get the hold of the entire processes involved, it’ll be easy to bootstrap and scale up.
3. Start a lemonade stand
It doesn’t take a lot to start a lemonade stand, but then you’ll need to have the capital to kick this off the ground.
Of course this is a way to generate up to $3k a month in the real world, and a business like this will need you to kick off from the right location.
It’s a physical business, hence the need to start it off from a place where it’ll be easy for people or potential customers to reach out.
Before starting a business like this, you want to make sure that you know exactly how to make lemonades and you know the flavors people buy around town.
Also carry out a feasibility study to make sure you’re doing something different from what other vendors out there are doing.
This will make you stand out, and will make it easy for your customers to notice your difference.
4. Freelance writing
Freelance writing is simply writing for clients online and getting paid for doing just that. You can do this to make $3,000 a month.
With the aid of freelance marketplaces like Fiverr, Upwork, Flexjobs, and Peopleperhour, you’ll be able to find real good freelance writing gigs.
For beginners, bidding for gigs can be challenging.
You’ll always get the gigs if you’re persistent.
Depending on your writing experience, you can earn anything from $0.02 bucks per word to as high as $2 dollars per word. You gain experience with time.
So, you want to set your charges around $0.08 or $0.3 as a starter or a beginner freelance writer.
Scouting for freelance writing gigs, you’ll be able to get more gigs within a short period of time.
With your pricing at $0.08, you’ll earn around $80 bucks per 1,000 words of text.
You set the bar higher for your per word income or a bit lower to attract clients.
But not too low as your clients will shy away from extremely cheap service offers.
5. Gutter cleaning
Do you know how to clean gutters?
Do you have any ideas how this works?
If you do, then you can simply make a simple search for gutter cleaning gigs on Google or Bing, and get the job done.
A gutter cleaning gig can earn you up to $250 bucks. So, you need about 12 gutter cleaning gigs in a month to hit the $3k goal.
You can create a professional social media page to promote your gutter cleaning services and even run social media ads targeting clients in your city.
If you have no idea how gutter cleaning works or how to do it, it doesn’t take all the time in the world to learn it. It’s relatively an easy skill to acquire.
6. Do ride-sharing
If you own a car, of course ride-sharing is one way to make $3,000 a month.
You simply just have to save up more money and be careful how you spend so that you don’t eat into your profits and be left with nothing at the end of the month.
Whether you’re driving for Uber or Lyft, if you’re thrifty, you can make upwards of $3k per month.
You can work for multiple ride-sharing companies unless some of them will require you to sign an exclusive contract with them. The biggest in the business remains Uber.
There’s also Lyft coming just after Uber.
There are others, but working for either Uber, Lyft, or both platforms guarantees a more robust profit margin.
Extra tip: Working very early in the morning and aggressively on weekends will also earn you more money as a ride-sharing agent/driver.
7. Write résumés for clients online
It’s no news that a lot of people right now are not conversant with the procedures involved in creating a good résumé.
You can help them out for some extra cash. Of course this is one of the many ways to make as much money as $3,000 a month.
It’s an arm of freelancing, and you need to strictly find gigs like this.
You can also work online as a resume writer for firms hiring; remotely or on-site. Résumé writing is not a skill that a lot of people have.
But it’s definitely some a lot of people want to do just so that they can secure their desired job.
8. Transcription services
A smart way to make $3k+ a month is to work online as a transcriber.
There are multiple websites that’ll allow you to earn from transcribing documents.
And they include Rev, TranscribeMe, and GoTranscript.
Freelance marketplaces like Fiverr and Upwork are also some good places to find transcription gigs.
For a single project, you can get paid as high as $150+ per hour. This figure can be lower or high.
In cases where you’re earning $50 bucks per hour, you’ll only need about 60 hours of work in a month to reach your financial goals of making $3,000 bucks.
9. Launch a blog
I blog for a living.
And although Google’s not in its right state of mind right now, blogging still comes in as one way to generate passive income online.
Firstly, you’ve gotta pick a niche, and then launch your blog.
Keep up with creating content around your niche that people haven’t completely covered just yet.
And then what you’ve gotta do next is to stay consistent.
Once you start getting some traction, you can monetize your blog.
Blogging is wild and there’s really no exact method to start or grow a new blog from scratch.
Find your strengths, focus on it and stick to original/quality content publishing.
10. Trade forex
This is probably one risky way to make money, but it’s one way to earn up to $3k per month in the real world.
To trade forex successfully, you’ll need to train your mind. Firstly, understand the basic terminologies of the Forex market.
And then you can learn about the different strategies for profitable trading.
Forex trading without a doubt is one of the quickest ways to generate income from the web.
It’s also a way to lose funds and you can really lose it fast.
To get started with trading the Forex market, you need to create a brokerage account.
Some of the best brokerage firms in my experience include Pepperstone, AvaTrade, IG Markets, and IC Markets.
11. Design print-on-demand items online
Nowadays it’s become nearly impossible to generate thousands of dollars from designing POD items online.
But then, if you put in the work and develop a large portfolio of POD items in your store, you’ll be able to generate real cash from sales.
Basically, you don’t spend a dime to make this happen. You simply sign up with POD websites like Zazzle, Printful and Gooten to design these items online.
When people browse them and place their order, the company prints and ships the items to them.
12. Start a mini grocery store
Quite an expensive fit, but launching your own grocery store isn’t just a way to make $3,000 dollars a month. It’s one way to build real wealth.
From a mini grocery store, it’s possible to generate upwards of $20k in profit per month depending highly on the location of the business.
When starting a physical business, you really have to put into serious consideration the location or the place from where you’re starting off.
It’s primal to the success of the business.
With that said, launching a mini grocery store isn’t cheap.
Of course you’ll need to have tons of money to get started.
13. Do laundry services
Performing laundry services would mean starting off a laundry house of your own and that’s pretty expensive.
However, you’ll also need to acquire heavy equipment for this purpose.
Running a business like this is a way to make $3,000 a month.
But then, it’ll take some time to recoup your capital and count your profits.
If you have a few thousand dollars, like $7,000 to $12,000 bucks, you can start up your own laundry service from your apartment.
Note, this isn’t a laundromat as it would require more capital to start one.
For a simple laundry house, you can start from your apartment and then promote your services online to reach local potential customers.
14. Social media influencer
As a social media influencer, you have thousands and millions of followers and you can influence their buying power.
Making $3,000 a month as a social media influencer is pretty easy especially if you have your own product or if you’re good at promoting affiliate products (specifically the ones you make use of).
From affiliate marketing to partnering with sponsors to create and post content, earning tons of money as a social media influencer is realistic.
Firstly, you have to become a social media influencer.
It only takes time to become one. And you also need to consistently publish great content to get there.
15. Live streaming on Twitch
Streaming live on Twitch is a way to make money but it takes time to actually start earning from the platform.
This is because it takes time for your content to go viral on Twitch.
And you don’t start making money the very first day or week you launch off your Twitch channel.
If you’re pretty good at live streaming, then this is a good idea for you to explore.
Streaming on Twitch means you have something of interest that people would want to have access to.
On Twitch, you earn from bits, subscriptions and donations from your subscribers or people who like your content.
It’s super easy to stream on Twitch, but you need to have the right streaming kit for Twitch.
16. Create an onlyfans page
On onlyfans, you basically create premium content that people pay for monthly to access.
Currently, explicit content thrives on that platform.
But you can dabble into anything that’s got the interest of a huge audience.
Onlyfans can really make you tons of money especially if you’re already the entertainment kind or you’re very creative.
You can create tutorial videos, interesting experiences, lifestyle content and much more “kind” of videos.
The subscription fee on onlyfans ranges from $4.99 to $49.99.
So, you’ll definitely have fans paying anywhere from $4 to as high as $40 bucks.
Obviously, the more subscriptions you have, the more cash you’ll earn.
17. Freelance programming
Programming is the bedrock of the internet.
Recently, I learnt about the deep web, dark web and other fascinating things about the internet.
All of these things couldn’t have been possible without web codes and the art (and beauty) or programming in general.
So, freelance programming involves performing programming services to clients and getting paid for it.
With websites like Toptal and Guru, you can easily peer with clients looking for programmers.
However, you need to be a good programmer to make this work.
Freelance programming is a way to make $3,000/month, and depending on your efficiency and dexterity, you could earn much more than that.
I’ve heard about freelance programmers earning as high as $10k per month.
18. Start a music school
Starting a music school is an expensive idea, and for sure you’ll be spending a lot of money.
Since music is a medicine for the soul, there are lots and lots of people out there who want to learn music, the technicalities and more about it.
Your music school will come to their aid.
Of course you won’t be teaching without charge.
It’s costly to set up a music school, but it can be less expensive if you’re starting off something like this from your home.
A music school from your home is a good place to start if you’re a good music maker and you don’t have the capital to rent a dedicated apartment or build your walls from scratch for the sole purpose of teaching music.
With a business like this up and running, you’ll definitely be able to make so much money from it; upwards of $3,000 per month depending on the city you’re in and how much your students pay per month, biweekly, or weekly.
19. Sell ebooks online
This is one way to make money on the internet; ebooks sales.
So, basically, you can create ebooks and sell them on digital marketplaces like Sellfy, Blurb, and Amazon KDP.
Pick a topic, do some research and then create your topic.
Regardless of the time it takes, create quality. It’s an ebook, and it should speak of quality.
At the end of the day, the quality of your ebook will determine the cost of it.
Quality comes first.
The good thing about creating ebooks is that you can create lots of them and they don’t take up a lot of time to create.
20. Sell your own course/product
Some of the biggest earners on the internet earn their income from selling their own products.
You can do the same – create a product of your own and promote it to get sales.
It’s definitely not an easy task, but it’s one of the realistic ways to make $3,000 a month (in passive income).
While creating a product or a course, prioritize quality and the need to help your potential buyers. Give value.
There’s the need to make money, but then, there’s also the need to provide value.
The more valuable your product is, that’s all the more money you’ll be able to make from selling it online.
If it takes you days or weeks, or even months to create your course or product, invest the time.
21. Affiliate marketing
There’s a mechanism behind affiliate marketing, and it works really well to generate real passive income.
You don’t need to have any product, you just need to promote affiliate products to earn some good cash.
Choose a good product you’d like to promote and sign up with the manufacturers as an affiliate marketer.
And then you can get a unique URL to promote affiliate products. A good place to start is Amazon.
You can also sign up with Clickbank and ShareAsale as an affiliate marketer.
Plus, you want to make sure that you really come up with some very catchy copies for the products you promote online.
This will go a long way to ensure that people actually click through to buy the products you’re promoting.
More sales equals more revenue for you.
Bottom line
From starting a YouTube channel to affiliate marketing or building an affiliate marketing system on the internet, there are multiple ways to hit the $3k/month goal.
The good thing is that you can even make more money than $3,000/month if you’re consistent and resilient.
With a good YouTube channel, you’ll be able to pull in thousands of dollars passively, but then it takes time and effort to build a YouTube channel from scratch and there are a set of skills you’ll need to develop your YouTube channel.
Ideally, some methods here will require you to spend some real cash.
Methods like starting a grocery store, music school, trading the Forex market, and launching your laundry service.
They’re cost effective.
But some other ideas/methods here like launching your own blog and delving into affiliate marketing are relatively cheap, but can generate massive cash for you with time.