Money Making Ideas That You Can Get Started with Right Now

Starting a business feels like big step, and it is without a doubt one of the biggest decisions you’ll make in your life. But it doesn’t have to begin that way, there are so many money making ideas that can be implemented alongside your current situation – whether that’s a current full-time job or battling the concern that striking out on your own might not actually be for you.

One of the most common fears for early stage entrepreneurs and people looking to begin that shift into a more independent lifestyle is that by giving up the security of their current job, despite knowing that they don’t want to be in that job forever, is that it could very realistically place their current lifestyle in jeopardy.

Let’s be honest here, too: that isn’t a small concern, especially if you have a family or dependents who rely on your “stability”.

Heck, some people are still asking themselves “What do I want to do with my life?”.

Too often we’re told to jump; we’re told to leave the security of our current situation to pursue this dream entrepreneurial lifestyle.

Usually, we’re being told that by entrepreneurs who have done that with great success, who have complete belief in that scenario and who can give you so many examples of people alongside themselves who have done it, that it’s easy to believe that the jump is easy.

But, what no-one knows is your situation. The specifics, reliances and dependencies that form the structure of your current life.

Nor do these people know what makes you tick.

By generating money making ideas that can run alongside your current situation and by using these to transition carefully into entrepreneurship, you can transform your lifestyle incrementally and without the stresses that could very well come with a “hard jump”.

“But, we’re told to make the jump!”

It’s true, many people make the jump to entrepreneurship quite literally without any specific money making ideas in place to implement.

They simply stop what they’re doing in their career, do an abrupt about-turn and begin a new path of entrepreneurship by usually following a passion.

But, many of those people do so either through necessity or thanks to the execution of a carefully thought out plan.

How many times do you hear the story of the entrepreneur that set up their first business because they were surprisingly made redundant from the ‘career’; how typical is the scenario in which a service based business worker builds up a portfolio of clients “on the side”?

Of course, there are the entrepreneurs who make that hard jump into their now business – but I’d be willing to bet that was never as clear cut as that – remember, we all have a life to live and it’s up to each of us, you included, to decide what that jump looks like.

The only thing that you need to be confident of is that you want to make it.

Money making ideas: #1 – Coaching.

As frequently stated by my friend Chris Ducker, coaching is the lowest of the easiest and quickest to implement of any of the money making ideas entrepreneurs have.

And to be clear, anyone can be a coach, in my opinion.

The first challenge that faces any of us, even the most seasoned business people, is that when it comes to coaching we completely underestimate our own self-worth.

So let me tell you this: you know more than you think, and the knowledge that you have inside your brain can be packaged up to help people who would like to know what you know.

Simply put, this is one of the most effective money making ideas that you can get started with right away.

In fact, there are a couple of ways that you could set a coaching business up alongside your current job.

First, it’s about deciding how much time you can dedicate to the coaching project and then deciding how much money you’d like to earn, across what period of time.

For example, do you want to run ongoing, continuous coaching or do you want to set defined periods within which you coach people?

The latter is the approach that I take with the Podcast Accelerator programme that I run and it works well as I can create some scarcity within the sign-up process along with giving people a very specific output timeframe for results.

The beauty with a coaching sideline is that you can run it at times that suit you, in your “gaps in time” and you can really focus on delivering value in areas that you know that you have a deep level of knowledge in.

Money making ideas: #2 – Starting a drop shipping business.

Drop shipping businesses are becoming more and more popular within the sidepreneur culture and the reasons are super simple: they allow you to generate income without holding any stock, and as a beautiful by-product, they also allow you to learn a pile of other skills that you’ll need moving forward as an entrepreneur.

To anyone looking to start a side-business, it’s super attractive to need little investment to start a business like this.

You need to hold no stock, you need only a simple website and a quality partner (or partners) for product fulfilment and shipping.

Two of the long-term benefits that I believe this kind of starter business model comes with are:

• Passive income: Once you have a site set, ranking well and mostly automated, you can continue to earn revenue and decent margins from this kind of business well into the future, with a lower than expected time investment once it has grown into a successful process.
• Learning vital marketing strategies and tactics: In the early days of setting up a drop shipping business, it’s about traffic generation and conversion optimisation through your website. Learning SEO, PPC, social media advertising / marketing, content creation and marketing alongside conversion optimisation techniques stand you in such good stead for anything else that you ever do in business – these are core principles of modern marketing and every entrepreneur should know at least the basics.

Honestly, I’m no expert in drop shipping but I included it here because frankly, people are doing amazing things with businesses like this.

Here’re some amazing resources that I found on the subject that might help you:

• The Ultimate Guide to Drop Shipping
• Drop Shipping: The Easiest Way to Sell Online
• How to Start a Profitable Drop Shipping Business

Money making ideas: idea #3 – Do exactly what you’re doing now, freelance.

I started my career in admin. Then I moved to data / systems analysis, through to delivering training and then I learned about the web alongside that.

Whilst I was learning about the web and how to build things for it I made the “entrepreneurial jump” steadily via freelance training.

The situation was that although I didn’t overly love training, I was good at it, I got to meet people and it paid pretty well.

But the biggest reason for following this path was that it was the path of least resistance.

It enabled me to begin that transition slowly into entrepreneurship and it allowed me to create an income stream that I controlled more than I did in my previous employment.

Most people, wrongly I believe, view entrepreneurship or creating their first business as something that is so far from what they do now that they simply don’t know how to get there.

So instead they don’t do anything.

Freelancing at whatever you’re doing right now can give you a really comfortable transition into your own business.

Much like coaching, you’re using the knowledge that you already have and you’re completely comfortable delivering that work because you do it already.

But rather than delivering this kind of work for people who pay you for your time, and usually not enough, you can choose who you work with and you can choose how to charge that work out based on the value you provide.

It sounds simple, but I’ve included this in the list of money making ideas for one simple reason: so many people, me included for a long time, don’t think this is a viable option because they can’t see past the lack of perceived value in their skills that comes from using those skills in a job that typically doesn’t value them.

By packaging yourself, your skills and your personality, you can earn significantly more money, on your own terms, in less time by delivering exactly what you do now.

And, you can use that extra time and extra finance to take the next step in your business journey.

Money making ideas aren’t hard to come by, they’re just hard to start, because of your own limits.

Another good friend of mine, Brad Burton, always tells people at his motivational talks:

“There is NO job security in this world anymore.”

And I agree. The days of a lifetime job are gone.

But the jump to entrepreneurship isn’t easy, let’s not pretend that it is. But money making ideas are abundant, all you have to do is open your mind to thinking a little differently and then begin to implement things at a measured pace that suits you.

But whatever you do, don’t make excuses or wait for “the perfect time”.

Just get started, and don’t forget: the more you expect from yourself the more you WILL excel.