There is no better time than now to get a side hustle up and running. If you’re looking to make some extra cash but aren’t sure what you want to do, we’ve rounded up 25 legit — we checked! — ideas to help you start generating cash online.

Ebates is one of my favorite money-earning apps because you get cash back for things you’re going to buy anyway, as long as you do it through their app. Money-making apps like Swagbucks are apps that allow you to earn money from your smartphone. They can be money-saving and cash back platforms that help you save and earn while shopping, apps to help you manage your money and grow it by investing, and apps that can help you when you want to make additional money working a side hustle.

One important note: some of these ideas could require you to get a business license from local authorities. Make sure to do your due diligence, so your small business is not on the wrong side of the law.

OK, with legalities out of the way, let’s start making money online!

We’ll Support Your Side Hustle

Whatever your business goals, we’ll be right there with you, making sure your website is fast, secure, and always up. Plans start at $2.59/mo.

Start Your Own Web-Based Business

These ideas require a lot of initiative to get off the ground but can pay big dividends long term.

1. Start a Blog with a Custom Domain

Are you passionate about one particular topic or an expert at something special? If so, start a blog! This is a great way to build a business and make money on advertising, sponsorships, and even your own brand.

How to Get Started:Research is the first step! Check out the following guides:

Then sign up for a great domain and shared web hosting (psst, we can help you with that).

2. Write and Sell an E-book

Sometimes a blog can be a starting point for launching into publishing your own book. In fact, many bloggers make most of their hard-earned cash by selling e-books. The best news? You can too!

How to Get Started: Setting up a blog is your first step. Once you have your blog up and running, you can write an e-book, publish it, and sell it on your own website. As an example, here’s an e-book we put together at DreamHost that still gets lots of clicks.

3. Make an App

Maybe you are the designer of the next MyFitnessPal, Flappy Bird, or Pokemon Go. If you have an app idea, don’t wait to execute it.

How to Get Started: Making an app is easy these days if you rely on the help of an app builder. Ask yourself what you want your app to do and then research which software best suits your needs.

Related: This DreamHost Customer Built an Aviation App

4. Build an Online Store with WooCommerce

You may be savvy at selling things online through Craigslist, eBay, and Amazon, but what about striking out on your own? With a simple website, you can run your own digital storefront.

How to Get Started: Getting started is simple. All you have to do is create a website, download the WooCommerce plugin, and follow the directions.

5. Sell Custom Plans for DIY Projects

Are you a DIY expert like this chicken coop designer, for example? If you have a special talent, you can make and sell detailed plans to others who fancy weekend-warrior projects.

How to Get Started: All you need is a website, a plan, and some patience for getting your custom plan design sales off the ground.

6. Start Your Own Podcast

Podcasting is one of the hippest new ways to get your ideas out into the world. Not only is it fun, but if you get an audience, you can start making money with advertising.

How to Get Started: To create a podcast, you need to make sure you have the right equipment. This includes getting a microphone, laptop, headphones, and even a sound engineer, depending on how professional you want your production to sound.

Related: The 6 Best WordPress Plugins for Podcasts

Partner With an Existing Business or Website

Another great way to make money online is to partner with those who already have a large internet following.

7. Promote Affiliate Links

Another way to create a revenue stream is by incorporating affiliate links on your blog or website. Essentially, this means you’ll promote another brand’s products or services on your website and include links for customers who want to find out more. If one of your readers decides to buy, the merchant will give you a cut of the sale.

How to Get Started: You can either reach out independently to merchants you like and set up a deal or you can join an established affiliate program. And if you really like DreamHost and want to spread the word about us, we’ve got an affiliate program too!

Related: A Beginner’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing

8. Become a Micro-Influencer

If you’ve built a devoted social following, you can turn that niche audience into passive income. More and more, brands are looking for micro-influencers — not big-time celebrities — to promote their products and services online. Most micro-influencers are paid less than $500 per sponsored post, but hey, that’s not bad for one Instagram snap or Facebook missive, right?

How to Get Started: The key is to build an engaged, niche audience with your blog, website, or social channels. Then look for products or brands that are a natural fit for your message. You can reach out to brands and offer to run a giveaway, do a product review, or host a live demonstration for your followers.

9. Write Content for Cash

The internet is fueled by content, and that’s not going away anytime soon. This means if you have a knack for writing, you can make a monthly windfall by starting a freelance writing business.

How to Get Started: You’ll need to create a portfolio website to showcase your writing samples.

10. Create YouTube Tutorials

Podcasting and blogging aren’t the only ways to share your talents with the world — and bring in cash while doing it. Video tutorials are also a great way to instruct others, get an audience, and make money off of advertising.

How to Get Started: The first step for creating video tutorials is to start a YouTube channel. Then plan out your content, start filming, and create a posting schedule.

Related: How to Start a YouTube Channel

11. Do Simple Tasks for Cash

Do you like crossing things off a to-do list? If so, there are a lot of online networks that you can join to hire out your services. You won’t make a ton of cash — on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, for instance, some minute-long tasks pay just one cent — but this is an easy way to supplement your income when you’ve got a few seconds to spare.

How to Get Started: Mechanical Turk offers a ton of quick, low-paying gigs. If you’re handy around the house, however, Task Rabbit offers better rates, and you can do anything from put together flat-pack furniture to lift heavy stuff for paying customers.

12. Tutor Students Online

Are you an expert in math, science, or a foreign language? If so, you can money by offering tutoring services. And the internet makes it easier than ever to find the right students for your particular skill set.

How to Get Started: Start by reading about the basics of online tutoring. Then you can start your own tutoring website or join a tutoring network, like Tutor.com, Homework Tutoring, or Aim-for-A Tutoring, to find pupils.

13. Rent Your Home Online

Do you have a beautiful home or cozy apartment that you’re not planning on staying this season? If so, make some extra money by renting it out.

How to Get Started: First, research the housing and rental restrictions in your neighborhood. Then create an Airbnb account, post your listing, and you’re ready to roll.

14. Have an Online Yard Sale

Spend some time sorting through your storage closet and post any unused or unneeded treasures on eBay. You’ll be shocked at how much you can make on things that were literally just lying around your house.

How to Get Started: Today you’re almost guaranteed to make more money selling your stuff online than you would at a traditional yard sale, and all you have to do is set up an eBay account and get posting. But if snapping photos and managing auctions is still too much for your to-do list, eBay’s valet program will handle all the logistics you.

15. Sell Your Photos to Stock Agencies

Every aspiring photographer dreams of becoming the next Annie Leibovitz, but that’s not going to happen overnight. What can happen, however, is you making some extra bucks by selling your images to stock agencies.

How to Get Started: Sign up for a popular stock photo agency, create an account, upload your images, and wait for the licensing money to roll in.

Related: Edit Your Website Photos Like a Pro with These 8 Tips

16. Make Something and Sell It on Etsy

Are you crafty? Great! Don’t let that talent go to unused. Instead, create an Etsy store, establish a strong social media following, and sell your products to those who are dying to get your latest creation.

Cash Making Apps

How to Get Started: All you need is an idea, a plan for execution, and an Etsy account.

17. Drive For Uber or Lyft

Do you have a few extra hours each day? Instead of spending them watching the latest episode of garbage reality TV — we all agree it’s garbage, right? — sign up for Uber or Lyft and get paid to help people zip around your city.

How to Get Started: Make sure you have a valid driver’s license and a smart phone. Review the rules and start the signup process for either Uber or Lyft.

18. Develop Educational Courses On Udemy

Developing courses on Udemy is a more time-intensive hustle than some of the other ideas on this list, but once you have a course up and running, you can make money in your sleep. Hello, passive income!

How to Get Started: Getting started is as easy as setting up a free account. And Udemy has tons of resources to help guide you through the course creation process.

Related: Easily Set Up Online Courses on Your WordPress Website in 3 Steps

19. Sell Lesson Plans with TeachersPayTeachers

Teachers have one of the most important jobs on the planet — and, fun fact, they’re always overworked. If you are a teacher, consider helping out your overloaded peers by selling A+ lesson plans online.

How to Get Started: Flesh out your lesson plans and sign up for a TeachersPayTeachers account. Then sell your best original ideas, resources, and even music to other teachers of all grade levels.

20. Answer Online Surveys

Remember telemarketers — those people who used to call you at dinnertime to ask if you’d take a random survey? Online surveys allow you to run with that concept, but now you’re the one making the dollars and cents. There are several sites where you can answer surveys for cash or gift cards.

How to Get Started: There are a ton of online survey purveyors — think Swagbucks, Survey Junkie, and OneOpinion, just to name a few. Check out this list of paid survey providers to find the best options for you.

21. Rent Your Stuff Online

It’s not just houses and apartments that get booked online these days. Do you a have an extra car, boat, jetski, bike, or anything else that others might be interested in borrowing for a few bucks? If so, you could make money loaning it out on the web.

How to Get Started: There are several places to list your rentals online. Here are a few to consider, depending on what type of stuff you’re willing to loan out for cash.

• Rent your car: Turo and GetAround
• Rent your bike: Spinlister
• Rent your stuff: RentNotBuy and Loanables
• Rent musical equipment and gear: Sparkplug

Create Your Own Small Business with a Website

Build a stellar website for your small business. Yep, even brick-and-mortar enterprises can — and should! — make money online.

22. Open a Pet Hotel

Here’s the deal. Pet owners can’t always take Bruno and Fluffy along when they travel. If you are an animal lover, what better business could there be than starting a pet boarding service?

How to Get Started: You’ll want to do your homework on this one. Try working at an established operation to learn the trade and gain experience. Once you’re ready, build a website to advertise your kennel and to help owners schedule pick-ups and drop-offs.

23. Start Mowing Lawns

Any homeowner will tell how quickly the simplest yard tasks, like mowing and edging, can pile up. If you have a lawn mower and enjoy spending time outside, you can make extra money by starting yard care company in your neighborhood.

How to Get Started: Word of mouth will be a huge part of your expansion strategy, but you’ll still need a place for prospective clients to go to learn more about your services when they get that sterling recommendation. So create a simple website to provide your contact info and rates.

24. Take Car Detailing on the Road

While it costs less for car owners to clean their own vehicles, most people love the convenience of having someone else take care of the mess. With a mobile car detailing business, you have the luxury of selling this convenience as a service since you’ll be able to clean cars wherever their owners leave them.

How to Get Started: Starting a mobile detailing company requires quite a bit of gear: a smartphone, reliable set of wheels for getting around, business cards, cleaning supplies and tools, and, of course, a website.

25. Music Lessons

If you are a virtuoso on the piano, violin, or even air guitar, then you have a solid foundation for an awesome business. Music lessons are in high demand =and a great way to spend your free time making extra money.

How to Get Started: When looking for a music teacher, most people will either find someone by word of mouth or on the internet. In addition to starting your own site to nab clients, you can also join one of the many music lesson networks that are popping up, like Lessonface or TakeLessons.

Ready to Make Money Online?

Whether you need help finding a target audience, crafting the ideal social media strategy, or setting up a newsletter, we can help! Subscribe to our monthly digest so you never miss an article.

Whatever You Do, You’ll Want a Website

If there’s one takeaway from this article — other than that there are a million ways to make dollars online — it’s this: a website is critical for the success of your small business. The good news? It’s quick and easy to get online with DreamHost. Let’s get hustling.

Register for just $0.89

Normally $12.99

There is no shortage of legitimate ways to make money online.

With so many legitimate online money making opportunities, almost anyone can earn extra cash on the internet these days.

But, many of these sites have one shortcoming…

they aren’t that quick when it comes to paying you!

It takes weeks to get paid and in some rare cases, even months. Of course, that doesn’t mean they are scams. They are perfectly genuine sites, it’s just the way their payment system works.

But what if you don’t want to wait weeks or months to get paid?

What if you want to be paid instantly, or at least fast within a day or so?

Well, you are in luck!

I’ve found you a few trusted websites that do actually pay quickly, some instantly and some within 24 hours or so.

Some pay via PayPal, others will write you a check.

Here they are…

1. LifePoints (formerly known as MySurvey)

• Official Site: LifePoints.com
• Payout Minimum: $10
• Payout Speed: Instant (if you choose gift certificates)

If you like talking about products and services that you use in your everyday life, you’ll like LifePoints. It’s one of the best legitimate online survey sites that pay you to take online surveys.

Each survey can take anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes. Longer surveys usually pay more.

The best part is that you don’t need any experience or special knowledge and since it’s free, it’s a great way to make money without investing a dime.

2. Transcribe Me

• Official Site: TranscribeMe.com
• Payout Minimum: $1
• Payout Speed: Instant

Transcribe Me is a website where you can transcribe audio files for money.

If you don’t know what transcription is, it’s the practice of taking audio and writing it down.

It’s simple stuff, and all it requires is that you be able to type quickly!

Transcribe Me has just a short little test to see if you qualify, and then you can get right into it.

This website offers $20 per audio hour.

Each audio file takes an average of 3 hours to be transcribed.

3. Qmee

• Official Site: Qmee.com
• Payout Minimum: None
• Payout Speed: Instant

Qmee started as a “Get paid to search” kind of site but has rapidly evolved into something more.

It is now a much more full-fledged online rewards program where you earn money for searching as well as shopping online and taking surveys.

Yes, a sort of cashback site.

They pay via PayPal.

4. Slice the Pie

• Official Site: SlicethePie.com
• Payout Minimum: $10
• Payout Speed: Every Tuesday and Friday (fixed payouts)

Slice the Pie is unique among the many mini-task sites that have been very popular under the mTurk model because it’s a music review site that pays you to listen to music.

An artist’s song will play in a 90-second clip. You listen and afterward answer a few questions about what you liked and disliked.

The payment will be anywhere from 6¢ to 15¢, depending on whether or not they’re running any specials.

Payment also increases with your rank, which you’ll gain as you review more songs.

It’s not amazingly lucrative, but definitely, a more fun way to earn, than many other options.

5. Ibotta

• Official Site: Ibotta.com
• Payout Minimum: $5
• Payout Speed: Instant

Ibotta is an awesome money saving app that everyone should be using.

Ibotta pays you back for items that you buy from the store. They’ll tell you what products are sponsored, and then you’ll be compensated for buying them and checking in with the app (verified via a snapshot of your receipt.)

You can cash out when you reach the minimum requirement.

It’s worth noting that it has a referral system too, just in case the others in your life might be interested in a service like this.

6. Toluna

• Official Site: Toluna.com
• Payout Minimum: 500 points for prizes, 80,000 for vouchers.
• Payout Speed: Depends on the reward

Like getting paid to test products?

Then you’ll love Toluna.

It’s parent company, Toluna Group, is one of the most trusted market research companies.

Toluna Influencers is their online panel where not only they pay you to test products, but also to take surveys, polls and more.

Apps To Earn Money Online

Now, you won’t be getting products to test every day or every week, but you get enough free stuff to test that it is worth joining. Plus, you can make money almost every day by taking surveys, poll and more.

7. Amazon mTurk

• Official Site: Mturk.com
• Payout Minimum: $1
• Payout Speed: 1-2 days

If you’ve heard of anything on this list, it is probably Amazon mTurk.

mTurk is the king of task websites, hosting hundreds of thousands of tasks every day and seeing very large amounts of money flow through from task providers to task-takers.

You’ll need an Amazon Payments account because this is a very official way of making money (probably the most official behind finding work on a freelancing website.)

The Amazon Payments account will want to be linked to your bank account, that way you can transfer the funds between the two (you can also spend the money on Amazon.)

The tasks are called HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) and they can vary greatly in difficulty, from assigning labels to pictures to writing full-on articles, or transcription work like we discussed before.

You can easily make $10 in a day, or even more if you sink a lot of time in.

mTurk is a pretty serious part of some people’s income (those who do complicated tasks with big payouts, not easy tasks that pay few cents), so it’s definitely something to look into if you find yourself in need of this type of service.

8. Newslines

• Official Site: Newslines.org
• Payout Minimum: $20
• Payout Speed: Varies, but less than a day

Newslines is a crowdsourced news website. It’s organized by topics, which are updated as a timeline through 50-100 word posts about the topic and its details or goings-on.

You can get paid to add these little blurbs, $1 per accepted post.

It’s a great way to write and get paid. If you can find a way to get a groove going with posting things, you can easily make the money by the day. Even if not, you could probably manage to get a payment in a week or a few days.

The website is always accepting contributors, though the posts will have to pass through a minor editorial check (just to see if it fits the site’s standards.)

You can find more about what they require on their website.

9. YouGov

• Official Site: YouGov.com
• Payout Minimum: 5000 YouGov point.
• Payout Speed: Varies, but less than a day

YouGov is another survey panel but their surveys are very different than other survey sites. They tend to focus on big picture issues rather than consumer related stuff like products and services.

Their surveys are about social issues, politics, public affairs and topics of that nature.

Here’s something interesting…

your feedback may actually get featured on major news sites!

You see, YouGov’s data and findings are constantly used in news articles on major media and news and sometimes that could be your feedback that gets shared. If that happens, YouGov will email you to let you know you’ve been featured.

Update

Unfortunately, a few of the sites mentioned in the original post are no longer in business. They either merged with another company or have changed direction.

For the sake of archives, I kept them here.

Postloop

• Official Site: Postloop.com
• Payout Minimum: $5
• Payout Speed: A few hours

Postloop is a website that pays you to post to forums.

It’s mostly used by new websites who are trying to drive traffic to the site, so all you have to do is follow the links on the site and make some quality posts.

This is one of the more favorable options on the list, if for no other reason than the fact that it is so open-ended.

Reaching their minimum payout is no trouble at all, so it’s a good site to keep around if you ever need a few bucks in a pinch.

Jingit

• Official Site: Jingit.com
• Payout Minimum: N/A
• Payout Speed: Instant

We couldn’t provide the payout minimum because Jingit is pretty unique in the way that it operates the money side of things.

Jingit won’t pay out to a PayPal or a bank account – they instead payout to a Jingit Visa debit card, which you sign up for when you sign up for the site itself.

Supposedly, any money you earn goes straight to the card, which cuts out the need for a payout system.

Earnings for this site are low, $5 to $10 in a week for those who are only putting in minimal effort. This one is probably best done as a rainy day fund.

Use your Jingit account to earn funds a little bit throughout the week and just let the money save up on your card, that way you know you’ll have a little bit built up by the time you need it.

But how does Jingit work?

Well, it has sponsorship from lots of major retailers- Kraft and Walmart to name a few- and you earn money by watching ads, giving feedback on products, doing a check in at a store, or shopping for certain items.

Whatever you earn goes directly to your Jingit debit card. You can then use that card like any other gift/debit card to shop.

Final Thoughts

I am sure there are many other legitimate money making websites out there that do pay fast, but these are some of the most trusted sites to earn money with.

Have you made money with any of these or any other legitimate money earning site?

If you have used any personally and have gotten paid quick, I’d love to hear from you.

Let us know in the comments below.