how to make 100k a year
Updated December 29, 2021

How To Make 100k A Year After You Quit Your Job

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It used to be that making 100k a year meant spending long hours in the office and not having time to enjoy life.

Thankfully, that’s no longer the case.  Technological improvements since the turn of the century have made it possible to make six figures outside of the orthodox four walls of an office.

Here are some ideas on how you can make 100k a year from home.

Multiple Streams of Income

Keep in mind that you don’t have to make 100k all from one job or business.

For example, I make over $15,000 a year just from selling tradelines, which only takes me about an hour a month because my broker does all the work for me.

So with a revenue stream like that, I would only have to make $85,000 doing something else such as the ideas in this article.

1. Day Trading

Day Trading

I hesitated to include day trading on this list, but I decided to because it is actually possible to make 100k a year from home trading stocks.

Is it likely?  No.

But is it possible?  Yes.

That said, you’ll likely need a bit of a start-up cash — not to mention education and skill — to actually have a decent shot at clearing six figures a year trading stocks.

In terms of initial capital, Investopedia gives $30,000 as a starting point.

Please understand that I’m not recommending that you go out and start day trading stocks right this minute; it’s simply an example of a way to make six figures from home.

Related: All the Places Giving Away Free Stocks Right Now

For Visual Learners: Check out the YouTube video below where I share my personal investing philosophy.

2. Mine Cryptocurrency

Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) are hot again.

And while mining cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ethereum is a bit less lucrative than it used to be, there are other ways to mine cryptocurrency that don’t require a server room.

For example, I’m mining Helium coin using a simple hotspot that’s easier to install than a WiFi router.

If mining cryptocurrency isn’t your thing, check out all these ways to get free cryptocurrency.  You won’t make six figures off these free crypto opportunities, but you may make a few hundred.

3. Teach Online

Taking virtual classes is one of the most potent ways to make 100k a year online. You do not even need a degree nor previous experience as a teacher to teach virtually.

What Do You Need?

All you need is a requisite skill set and a video camera to mount on your laptop. You can then leverage your expertise and create an online course for people who are willing to gain the knowledge that you have – for a premium price of course.

  • For a minimal fee, websites like Udemy and Teachable have made being an online instructor easy and lucrative.
  • Moreover, virtual learning is becoming more and more mainstream. The Babson Survey Research Group recently published findings from a study that claim that over 6 million students worldwide are taking at least one distance learning course.

So, despite the fierce competition in the online learning marketplace nowadays, you can still get a substantial amount of students who are willing to pay to learn your specific skill.

A Great Example

Popular mobile and web developer Nick Walter is a prime example of someone who harnessed his programming skills early, and regularly makes over 100k a year teaching them to others online. He started with Apple’s programming language, Swift. Back in 2014, he compiled 50 Swift video lessons and uploaded them on Udemy.com. Within a few months, the one-time effort he put into creating the digital lessons translated to an income of over 100k.

Good to Know: You may not be able to hit the heights Nick Walter has reached today, but you can almost as quickly begin to make your living teaching online. Are you a chef who has secret recipes that make your meals stand out? Start a cooking course! Are you a financial market expert with donkey years of experience? You can start an investing class online today.

The possibilities are endless, and you can reap the benefits by doing very little work.

4. Create a Blog

Blogging is a real way to make 100k a year online. All you need to succeed at blogging is being a good writer and being passionate about a particular topic.

How Should You Do It?

  • It might take a while to build up a followers base, but if you keep churning out unique content, it will only be a matter of time before you’re able to monetize your blog. So long as you’re enjoying yourself, perhaps as a travel blogger or a recipe blogger, the opportunities from blogging are endless.
  • For example, apart from the money their blogs make, travel bloggers doing it right also enjoy free flights from airlines and tourism boards paying for all of their accommodations and food.
  • Some of the numerous ways to make money blogging include direct advertisement, affiliate marketing, selling digital products (your courses/ebooks) and consulting.
  • To get started, you need to choose a niche, set up your blog, focus on producing quality content for your niche, and promoting your content on social media.

5. Become a Business SEO Consultant

In this digitally conscious world, businesses with an online presence tend to thrive more than those without one. Forbes Insights recently released a study which claims that 82 percent of customers research products they want to buy online first.

What Do You Need?

  • For consumers to notice any company’s product, their website needs to first come up as one of the top search engine results. At this point, search engine optimization (SEO) becomes a necessity. SEO is the process of increasing the visibility of a website in a web search engine’s natural results – usually referred to as ‘organic’ results by strategically using keywords throughout the site.
  • Generally, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a website appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users; these visitors are then converted into customers.
  • Being able to do that takes skill. If you are proficient in SEO and know what you have to do to rank a website on the first page of Google during a search, then you could make 100k a year optimizing websites for companies.

From construction and sports to pets, there is no limit when choosing a niche topic to optimize.

A Great Example

Andrew Graham, who is currently the Director of SEO at Beacon Marketing consistently made over 100k a year, for the past few years working as a freelance SEO consultant for about 25 hours per week. Graham was laid off from a corporate sales job when he dabbled into SEO. Now, he is back in the corporate world but as a legend in his new field of expertise. Having a sales background or experience with WordPress is a bonus if you want to go into SEO consultancy, but all it takes is the dedication and willingness to stay abreast of industry trends as search engines modify their algorithms regularly.

SEO consultancy is a vast field to make a living and also have lifestyle freedom.

6. Sell Photos Online

Unless you’re a celebrity, a selfie lying around on your smartphone will not make you any money. If taking photos is your hobby or you have a knack for angles and perspectives, you should take this seriously.

Is It Possible To Earn Enough?

The good thing about making money off photos online is you usually do not need more than your smartphone. Moreover, most smartphones nowadays have the same capabilities as digital cameras of a decade ago, so picture quality is standard.

  • Making 100k a year selling photos online is possible but only if you know what to do. Mostly, you can make that much if you sell your photos as art or if you sell stock photos.
  • The most popular site to earn money selling stock photos is Shutterstock because of its negligible entry barrier. Shutterstock contributors have been paid over $500 million since 2003!
  • On Shutterstock, your experience level does not matter. All you have to do is set up your account, upload your pictures and earn money whenever a company or individual downloads your photos.
  • You can also sell stock photos on other websites such as Getty Images, Adobe Stock or Snapped4U. Likewise, you can sell your photos as art on sites such as Etsy and Fotomoto.

A Great Example

Take the story of famous headshot photographer Mike Sansone for example. He quit his day job in Chicago to focus primarily on his favorite past time and now he works fewer hours and makes more money than when he worked full-time. In 2017, Sansone made about $75,000 selling his headshot photos online. By the end of 2018, he had already broken the 100k mark.

Like Sansone, you could make real cash out of your photography hobby.

7. Consider Dropshipping

There are many online jobs out there, and dropshipping is not one to ignore especially if making 100k a year is your target. Even as dropshipping doesn’t rake in as much money as when a regular trader stocks and ships his physical products, it still provides a steady income, moreover, nothing can beat the completely hands-off method dropshipping affords.

How Can You Make Money?

  • To make money with dropshipping, you have to first decide on a list of products you want to sell. These products have to be something in fashion and in crazy demand.
  • Then, you set up your virtual storefront on a platform like Shopify, list your products, and then have the original supplier/manufacturer of the product ship orders directly to a customer. The dropshipper never has physical contact with his products during any transaction.
  • All that is left for you to do is try to drive traffic to your virtual storefront perhaps through ads. Consistently ‘selling’ products that bang is the key to making a steady living off drop shipping.
  • You can also be a dropshipper on Amazon. A lot of people do their shopping on the website anyways, and Amazon has now made it possible for you to sell your products on their platform.

Good to Know: Per usual, you have to research best-selling ideas, contact a manufacturer from wherever in the world and have your product designed. Then your product gets shipped to Amazon’s fulfillment center here in the States. You are allowed to sell your super rare original product on the website for a small price, making thousands of dollars of profit per month in the process.

Dropshippers who do it right on the internet these days are making 100k a year selling t-shirts, masks and so on, right from their mobile phones.

8. Write a Book

A lot of people have the innate talent to write, but they do not. Either they are too bogged down in their current jobs, or they feel it is too hard a task. Many people have unconsciously killed their writing dreams this way because they never embarked on it. Well, writing books is another sure-fire way to make 100k a year from home.

How Should You Do It?

There are different kind of books that sell on the internet these days:

  • You could write a series of short stories that are specific to a topic and publish them on Kindle. Or you could post your books through your website and sell to your already existing customer base.
  • You could also team up with a larger platform and sell to its audience. Or you could go the conventional route and work to get your book published through a big-time publishing company (hardly the most straightforward path).
  • Another thing you could do is record an audiobook and publish it on Audible.

A Great Example

An example of a writer who made a living off publishing on Kindle is famous fiction writer Joe Konrath. When he first started, Konrath made $100,000 within three weeks with his Kindle books. His story is even made better when you consider the fact that Konrath achieved this feat with books that had been rejected by traditional publishers.

These days, writing a book is not as difficult as it was in the past as there are so many platforms to publish your works and get paid. Gone are the days when the elite publishing companies of New York had the exclusive rights to making money off books.

9. Consider YouTubing

The world’s top-earning YouTuber, Felix Kjellberg earns over 12 million USD a year. He runs a gaming channel called PewDiePie. He is 29-years old, has never worked in the corporate world, and is even a college dropout.

Felix was a regular guy like most of you before he hit it big online. And he is not the only one making millions of dollars from Internet videos. Rhett McLaughlin and Charles Lincoln Neal III made more than $4 million in 2015, and there are scores of other creators making six to eight figures annually from their YouTube channels.

Good to Know: You can also make YouTube work for you. All you have to do when you’re starting is select a niche that you’re passionate about (you have to be able to produce video content reasonably quickly), promote yourself and market your channel correctly.

Once your channel passes the YouTube minimum requirements of views and subscribers, you begin to make money off embedded ads and sponsorships. The more engagements your channel gets, the higher your pay will be.

10. Consider Web Development

There are numerous options and avenues to make money online for a web developer. The selling point of this skill is that you can learn and start practicing it without an expensive and time draining college education. While others are racking up university debts, you could already start making cool money online as a web developer.

What Can You Do?

  • As a web developer, your job description is to create websites for clients and get rewarded handsomely for it. Background knowledge of coding and programming is a significant requirement for a web developer but nevermind if you do not possess these skills.
  • Most of the successful web developers around are self-taught. There are uncountable online resources that can give you prerequisite knowledge to get started so long as you’re committed.
  • With the right client base and experience, making 100k a year as a web developer is very attainable.
  • Being able to self-motivate is useful to succeed in web development as you will be earning your living no matter where you are in the world.

There you have them: a few gig suggestions for you, if you are considering giving up your 9-to-5 and taking up work that can be very lucrative.

Epilogue: Should You Quit Your 9-to-5?

The comfort of being able to work from anywhere in the world while picking your schedule is more and more appealing. If you feel your nine to five is not giving you equal compensation for the amount of work you put in, perhaps you should consider quitting and going virtual.

The question most people ask, however, is how much one could make while working online? You can make as much as a hundred thousand dollars annually!

  • So that you know, these are not get-rich-quick schemes. Making 100k a year working online will take a significant amount of time, commitment and hard work like any other job will.
  • Not a lot of those jobs, however, will afford you such opportunity while you’re working from home.
  • If you are not interested in working as an employee under anyone, this article is a guide on how to make 100k a year online.
  • If you are not inclined to spend the difficult time getting a college degree, you will also find out how to make 100k a year without a degree in this write-up.
  • There is a common denominator, however, with all of the below methods for making 100k a year. They all take work.
  • You are never going to achieve the kind of lifestyle you desire if you refuse to work for it.

So hit the internet streets today and start hustling. You will be able to quit that job faster than you ever imagined.

Author:

Logan Allec, CPA

Logan is a practicing CPA and founder of Choice Tax Relief and Money Done Right. After spending nearly a decade in the corporate world helping big businesses save money, he launched his blog with the goal of helping everyday Americans earn, save, and invest more money. Learn more about Logan.

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Me
Me
11 months ago

Dumb Af
stfu dumb ass