Having specific goals — such as earning a set dollar amount every day in order to reach a larger goal — is an effective way to go about your savings journey. And the good news is there are actual, legitimate ways that you can make $500 a day.
This includes gigs you can do to consistently average $500 a day in earnings, or one-time gigs that you can complete within a day to bank $500 quickly.
9 Ways to Make $500 a Day
Here are some great ways to start making $500 a day:
- Start a Blog
- Freelance Write
- Do Odd Jobs
- Service Arbitrage
- Rent Our Your House
- Print on Demand
- Become an Amazon FBA Seller
- Become an Influencer
- Side Hustle
1. Start a Blog
Blogging is far from dead, and a reliable way to earn $500 or more a day through affiliate marketing partnerships, display ads, brand sponsorships, and other paid content.
It can take a couple of years to create enough articles and gain enough traffic to reach the $ 500-a-day figure, but once you reach that mark you can keep growing your blog revenue and branch out to create more blogs on other topics.
You have to have patience, a willingness to learn about content writing and search engine optimization (SEO), and pick a niche that you’re knowledgeable in and passionate about. Picking a niche you love will help you stick with it when it’s slow going and deliver genuine value to your readers.
Read more about my personal journey to reaching financial freedom and how starting this very blog, MillennialMoney.com, was a huge step in my path to FIRE.
2. Freelance Writing
If you’re a word whiz and you love writing, freelance writing is a great way to earn a full-time income.
Whether it’s blogging, social content, or other more specialized form of written content, businesses always have a need for more of it.
It’s perfectly doable to make $500 a day if you’ve got the chops and the experience.
Different fields of writing work to specialize in include:
- Blogging (B2B or B2C)
- Proofreading and editing
- Technical writing (i.e., instruction manuals)
- Medical writing
- Grant writing
- Email writing
- Copywriting
- Scriptwriting
- Product descriptions
- Social writing (text posts, reel hooks, and captions)
To make money at writing, experience is a must. Look for freelance writing jobs for beginners.
Platforms to check out include:
You can also reach out to friends and local business owners and offer to write a free blog article so you can build your portfolio.
The more content you create and share, the more writing gigs you’ll be able to get — unlocking higher-paying projects along the way.
Read more about my friend Parker’s journey to working for herself and becoming a full-time freelance writer.
3. Do Odd Jobs
TaskRabbit is an extremely lucrative way to book work online, offering a variety of services you can perform for individuals who need household tasks done.
On TaskRabbit, you can advertise your services for furniture assembly, lawn care, gardening, snow removal, plumbing, painting, house cleaning, ironing clothes, and more.
Or you can peruse the chores that people want done, which could include folding T-shirts into cellophane bags or setting up folding chairs at an event.
New taskers need to set their prices low until they get a couple of reviews under their belt, but taskers can command $20 to $50 an hour. The more dreaded the chore, the higher the rate you can get.
And if you’ve got a truck or a vehicle large enough to haul yard waste or furniture, you can make even more. There are some taskers who make $100+ an hour.
4. Service Arbitrage
You may have heard of sales arbitrage, where you sell items at a markup on Facebook Marketplace, Etsy, or other online platforms. But you can also sell services at a markup, which is called service arbitrage.
You take one service from one provider — offered at a lower price — and then sell it to someone else at a markup.
Through service arbitrage, you could make $500+ a day for selling high-ticket services like:
- Website design
- Graphic design
- Coding
- Content creation
You don’t need to know how to do any of these services yourself. But you can sell the skills of others at a markup.
You just need to be able to find:
- People who can provide these services
- People who need these services
And connect these parties together as a middleman. It’s a highly scalable business model but you will need to focus on providing exceptional project management to make sure the final deliverable is on time and exactly what’s needed.
5. Rent Out Your House
With Airbnb, you can rent out your home or investment property by the night and cash in.
But did you know there’s an option to rent out your home by the hour, too? With Home Studio List, you can make a massive amount of money without ever having to leave your house.
Photographers, creators, and filmmakers are flocking to these rent-by-the-hour spaces. It’s a big hit with large global companies like Starbucks and L’Oreal, and for smaller businesses too like photography studios and local shops.
Sometimes, these hourly home renters need a specific aesthetic like quirky, ultra-posh, or mid-century modern. Or they may just need any old living room with a couch and curtain to be a home backdrop for a video shoot. Whatever their interior design preference, these hourly renters are willing to pay big.
As an example, at the Tiki Jungle House, a tropical urban oasis home for rent in the Minneapolis area, the owners charge $300 for a 2-hour rental or $800 for a full day.
Read my friend Jerry’s personal story, an Airbnb super host who brings in six-figures a year.
6. Print on Demand
Print-on-Demand (POD) services are still a thriving online business. It enables you to sell T-shirts, hoodies, hats, bags, stickers, wall art, and other items without having to print or store any inventory yourself.
You’ll need a few standout, eye-catching designs. Then you can upload them to a Shopify website or POD platforms like Zazzle, Etsy, Redbubble, Printful, Printify, or CafePress.
The margins generally aren’t very high. For example, a printable wall art design on Etsy may only sell for a few dollars. But you’ll be relying on a high volume of orders, and again, there are very few upfront costs and no physical inventory to manage.
7. Become an Amazon FBA Seller
Joining the Amazon FBA(Fulfillment by Amazon) Seller program is another lucrative business idea. You can sell products to Amazon customers, but with Amazon fulfillment centers handling the order processing, packaging, shipping, and delivery.
You’ll need to do some research to see what sells well on Amazon — and at what prices.
After you’ve determined what you want to sell:
- Set up an Amazon FBA account
- Ship your products to the nearest distribution or fulfillment center
- List your products, prices, pictures, and item descriptions on the platform
As an Amazon FBA seller, Amazon will take a significant cut from your sales — typically 10% to 15%, with additional fees for oversized products. After all, they’re handling all of the storage and logistics.
But you can still make a tidy sum. 26% of Amazon sellers make $25,000 or more every month — which shakes out to a little over $833 a day.
8. Get Started as an Influencer
Just one influencer reel alone can pay thousands of dollars if you have a large, engaged following.
Most of us are familiar with celebrity influencers or large “Instafamous” Influencers who’ve achieved major fame through social media alone.
But there are also micro-influencers, with 10,000 to 50,000 followers, and brand ambassadors. While they have a smaller reach, they have a devoted following keen to try their recommendations.
If you’re interested in giving it a go, think about what you want your personal brand to be. What sort of content do you want to be an influencer for? You should have 2-3 main pillars or categories (i.e., pets, makeup, food, etc.) so followers and social algorithms know what to expect from you.
Then, look for related brands or products and services you could promote.
- Concentrate on posting consistently, not as much as possible.
- Commenting and responding to popular reels and hashtags is a great way to insert yourself into the conversation and requires no content creation.
- Look for ways to tie your content to current events or popular trends.
To find businesses and brands who will pay you to post about their brand or products sold on their e-commerce site:
- Rebaid
- Influenster
- Captiv8
- Reach out directly to brands and businesses
9. Stack up the Side Hustles
You don’t have to limit yourself to just one side hustle to boost your personal finances. You can do 2-3 gigs or more if you want to make $500 a day online.
Side hustles you can stack together include:
- Rideshare Apps: Driving for Uber and Lyft
- Delivery Apps: Delivering for UberEats or Instacart
- Side Gig Apps: Looking for day gigs on Craigslist and tasking on TaskRabbit
- Investment Apps: Acorns, Stash, Robinhood, AcreTrader, Groundfloor, or Zoho — enable everyday consumers to build wealth in real estate and the stock market by buying fractional shares.
Investment apps can be risky, but if you are cautious and only invest small amounts of money — that you can afford to lose — you can earn a nice chunk of change and grow your confidence in learning about financial markets and how to make money.
How Do I Know if a Side Hustle to Earn $500 a Day is Legit?
If you’re exploring a potential side hustle to start earning $500 a day, there are a few things you can do to find out if it’s legit:
- Do your research. This includes reviewing the company’s website, terms and conditions, reviews on third-party sites like TrustPilot and the app store, and talking to people who have tried that gig.
- Look for bad reviews. This seems counterintuitive, but a legitimate brand or business will have bad reviews and good reviews too. If a company only has glowing, perfect reviews, that is a red flag.
- Look for a social media presence. Scam sites can set up fake websites to try to lure in consumers, but a social media presence is harder to fake. They can stand up social media accounts, but there will be telltale signs to look for: the account is more recent, and there are plenty of posts but they were all published within a short period of time.
- You’re promised easy money in unrealistic amounts, like $200 for a 5-minute survey or thousands of dollars per day. Most surveys will pay $0.25 to $5.00. Side hustle gigs, like walking dogs or delivering food, rarely pay more than $25 per hour. And the most (potentially) lucrative gigs, like being an influencer or freelance writer, are not an easy way to make extra money. If you’re starting from scratch it’s doable, but it’s still a grind.
- Upfront payment is required. You shouldn’t have to pay money to make money. Some sites or apps require payment upfront in order to take surveys or access job listings; this is a scam. If you want to flip thrift store goods or sell on Amazon, obviously you will need to acquire the product but in general, your side hustle should be free.
Similarly, you should also stay away from MLM (multi-level marketing) work, Ponzi schemes, or envelope-stuffing jobs.
Is it Hard to Make $500 a Day?
For most entrepreneurs and entrepreneur-minded individuals, making $500 a day is not unreasonable. It’s not easy, but with hard work, it’s not impossible.
Making $500 a day — five days a week over one full year — is $130,000.
For some hustles — being an Influencer, freelance writing, affiliate marketing, monetizing online courses, or service arbitrage — it can take several months or longer to scale up your services to a full-time job that pays $500 a day or more.
For other hustles — like odd jobs you can find on TaskRabbit — you can start out making a lot of money quite fast. But some of the tasks — like yardwork or dog walking in 110-degree weather — may be more exhausting.
Bottom Line
While there’s no simple way to start making $500 a day overnight, we’ve given you plenty of ideas and inspiration to get started. Because it is possible to get there.
Whether you start bringing in $5 a day ($1,825 a year) or $100 a day ($36,500 a year), there are a lot of ways to get started.
With all of the different options, it can feel overwhelming to just pick one and get started. But the best side hustle for you is going to be something that you enjoy. If you don’t like it, you won’t want to stick with it.
And it’s a good idea to try sticking with a couple of side hustles at once so when one gig gets slow — or starts to feel a bit tedious — you can mix things up.
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