This week is part 2 of our discussion on 15 ways for you to make money this summer. If you missed part 1, you might want to go back and check it out before getting started. We’ll cover what you could do to make money as well as some tips to go about making sure your business model is a success at remaining profitable. From snacks to internships, we cover a broad number of ideas to get you started. Reach out to us on Facebook and let us know your money-making endeavors for this year!
Bekkah: So far we’ve covered quite a few and we’re going to keep jumping into the rest of them. If you missed the first episode go back and listen to it for some really good ideas. If you have already heard of some of these or you think that it wouldn’t really fit your circumstance, that’s okay! Because that’s how entrepreneurs start figuring out what they want to do. I think I probably went through 15 to 20 different business ideas before I finally was like this is the business that I’m doing with my life or this summer. Definitely use those to peak your imagination.
7. How To Become a Personal Care Aide
The next thing is being a PCA for special needs. When some people think about special needs I think of like a group home or whatever and yes there is a huge need there! There’s just not enough people doing that in general and most companies will totally pay you to get all of your training and certification now because they’re so desperate. The pay is pretty good. I’ve seen people have some really good relationships and learn so much about caring for someone who may not cognitively be at the same level as other people and some of my family has done this before. One of my cousins did this and I have seen such growth and compassion that he’s had for other people in experiencing what some people’s lives are like.
I think a lot of us don’t even realize what a blessing that is to recognize that this is a beautiful thing. Another one of my friends just told me that a couple of her sisters need some care that may not necessarily everyone has access to. If you have a family member that really needs something or an elderly person like a grandparent there are actually a ton of programs through the state as well that can subsidize you caring for that loved one in your own family. You might be doing something already that you’re thinking, “I can’t get a job because I’m caring for someone in my family.” There might actually be a program that can pay you to do that. Definitely check those things out.
8. How to Make Money Shooting Videos
The next thing we have for you is video creation. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen people ask, “Could you make this video for my son’s graduation” or something like that. Most videographers are not going do that because the price point is way too low for a mom to pay for their kid’s graduation. But it is a prime opportunity for you! Whether it’s taking video footage of someone doing baseball or whatever, putting a really nice montage together for their grad party is a huge thing you could be doing right now.
Right before the summer or into the summer people love when you document a family member’s history. You could say, “If you want, I’ll interview your grandpa and get his life story for you and then you guys can keep that adds like memory documentation of his biography.” Tons of ways you can do that. Check out the price point on what would be viable. Do some market research.
Ruthie: And find out how much time it takes you to do that. Especially when you’re starting out it’s going to take you a lot longer to do things. With time and experience you’ll get faster as you keep going. Keep tabs on if this project is going to take four hours or if it’s going to take 20 minutes.
9. Make Money Making Snacks For Busy Summers
The next thing we have is making healthy snacks. I know this is something especially for busy moms who have a lot of kids or for busy moms in general, they love being able to have healthy snacks for their kids on hand. If this is something that you can just mass produce a bunch and be available to sell those to people throughout the summertime that is huge. If you go to t-ball and there’s a ton of kids there and you know that the concession stands what they have is chips, nachos, and hotdogs, or whatever; you have to be attentive to the ballpark that you’re at and what rules they have. But if you are the supplier of the healthy snacks not only can you get exposure from that but also you can be a service to the moms, families, and the dads that are bringing their kids to T-ball.
Bekkah: I’m just gonna say right now from personal experience, I will tell you that there is a very low-cost way to make healthy snacks over the summer. When I go on bike rides through the trails in rural America I find apple trees. I find a variety of wild plums. If you have a food dehydrator – oh my goodness. You can pick tons of wild berries and fruits, process them yourself, dehydrate, and you have tons of products that are absolutely free to you. Because you went out and harvested it. I’m amazed at how many people don’t do that I do that for myself every summer. There are tons of wild apple trees everywhere where I live. Figuring out what’s within your region, what’s growing, and what’s available for free is totally going to decrease your cost for production as well.
10. Making Money At Your Local Farmer’s Market With Snacks
Ruthie: Talking about creating your own snacks, you can, not only, take those things to t-ball and sell them to parents, but you can also be looking into starting your own stand at the farmers market. It doesn’t take a whole lot of work. You can just go there. Obviously, it depends on where you live. Sometimes you have to get a permit, but for the most part you can just go and set up a stand. That stand can literally look like you taking a pickup or a minivan, opening your trunk, and selling things from the back of your car. If you’re making those healthy snacks anyway or I know a ton of people who make bread. They just make bread. They’ll make tons of plain ole, homemade bread. People love that. Then they’ll sell that from their van or they bring a wagon or just a table. They make jellies or things like that. The farmers market is a really good way to make some money this summer.
What Does It Mean to Be A Cottage Industry Business?
Bekkah: I would just say, this is where people get a little freaked out. Cottage industry. Okay because a lot of people say, “Oh, well, this is not an FDA-approved product, blah blah blah.” You’re right! It’s probably not, but you need to just say “Not approved by the FDA.” You need to say, “Cottage industry license.” Basically what that means is, “I made this myself.” If you want to make sure it’s approved through an industrial kitchen, you could use a church or a community center that has an industrial kitchen. Ask them if you can make your stuff there to bring to this or that place. Check out what requirements there are for your local farmers market. Sometimes people have to pay a fee to be there. Cottage industry has so much more availability for you to make stuff from your house. Especially things like jewelry. Think about how you can utilize social media to let people know when you’re gonna be at the farmers market. Or tell people, “We also traveled to this and this place.” With cottage industry you cannot sell online for food products. You need to hand-deliver to people. Check out different payment processing systems.
If your farmers market is a pretty big one or has some connections with the county a lot of times there’s also an EBT connection program. What that means is people have food stamps that they pay for their groceries with. I know in the state of Texas, if you go to a farmers market, pay with EBT, you get two for one. The government subsidizes and doubles your money. If you’re going to say accept EBT payments, look at how you can process those things, because that’s totally going to help you. And your local County will probably help you through that process of being able to accept those payments. Whether through like a credit card processing system or something similar. Keep that in mind if you’re thinking, “I’m all in, and I want to make money from this long term. I want to do this every year,” look at those avenues. They’re totally going to be helpful for you.
11. How To Make Money Using “Medium”
Ruthie: The next thing that we have is a writing platform called Medium and Bekkah is going to tell us about that.
Bekkah: Medium is a little more trendy. It was made in the last couple years. It’s a website that people basically write their own blog on, but if you read a ton of articles on there they’re like, “Hey, you’ve read more than this many articles you need to pay five dollars for our subscription to read more stuff.” A lot of professionals within different communities of thought are writing and making it their own blog. There’s a way you can share an article to just your friend network for absolutely free so they can read your stuff when you share with your friends. If other people are finding your content, reading it, and they have a subscription, you get paid out a little bit of money for the number of people that read it.
It’s based on how many articles they’ve read that month. Then that five-dollar fee gets split up between all of the articles that they’ve read. You connect it to your paid account. You have to go in and figure out how you can be paid through this and you have to set up either through your business or through your personal, as a sole proprietor to get paid. It auto-deposits through Stripe to your bank account. I did some testing with this to try it out. If you know anything about search engine optimization and writing for your target market it can help you with this. Obviously, if you’re writing really good, quality content and you’ve done some surveys or you collected some data yourself, you’re going to probably get a lot more stuff.
I wanted to try this to see how it works so I wrote an article called “Why Formal Education Is Losing Value” and I did that through doing some research on different networks of people and what they were talking about. Then utilizing this is the platform of people that read this so I’m going to make content just for them. I tried that and I did a little bit of marketing for it by like sharing it with some subgroups of consultants on LinkedIn. I’ve made like $10 off of that article. That’s not a lot of money but for the amount of time that I put into it, it’s residual income. I’ve had over a thousand reads on that one article and I still get email updates every month about how many people have read it. It is still continuing to give me like a penny here and there. If you continue to use that platform and you create good content and keep doing it, a lot of people make like a part-time job off of that platform.
12. How to Make Money Washing & Picking Up After Dogs
Ruthie: That’s good stuff! Number 12 is washing animals for people and picking up dog poop. This is huge. I know so many people who hate picking up dog poop. If you are one of them, then maybe this is not for you, but if you know people who hate that then you can capitalize on that! That’s basically the heart of entrepreneurship is finding a need and meeting that need. During this time level of quarantine and in preparation for summer, people are all about picking up their yards right now.
What my siblings have done is they’ve called a whole bunch of people. We’ll have Miriam on another episode so she can talk about what she’s been doing with this, but she just goes through the phone book and calls different people and asks them if they have a dog and if they would be willing to let her come and pick up dog poop for them. She’s figuring out her pricing right now but what we’ve talked about is she’s going to do five dollars per bag of dog poop. If it fills up a Walmart size bag.
Bekkah: Which is incredibly low cost. I think. I would be willing to pay five bucks for that.
Ruthie: But what my brother Micah when he went and did someone’s yard is just told them a flat rate because it was the first time he did it. He said either fifteen or twenty dollars and because he worked so hard and he worked in the rain. It started raining on him. They gave him twenty dollars. He was super stoked about that. And washing animals, I would just save yourself from washing someone’s cat. I would recommend not doing that.
Bekkah: I think dogs specifically. I don’t know if you guys have a Tractor Supply where you live but you can spend ten dollars and they have an entire pet washing station ready to go. It has all the soap, all the towels, all the tools. I love it. I go there for my dog all the time. If I had a kid in my neighborhood that was like, “For an extra ten dollars, I’ll take your dog and wash him for you.” I would say, “Oh my goodness. Deal.” You’re making ten dollars, you’re paying $10 so you charge twenty bucks. Look for those different things that you can wash people’s animals in a way that I was not going to be super intensive of your cleaning. If you do it in your mom’s bathtub she’s probably going to freak out after a while. Either figure out an outdoor station or find a station that’s already within your community that you can do that. There are tons of pet washing places all around. If you were like, “I’ll come pick up your dog, wash them, and bring them back for you.” People love that.
13. Make Money By Selling on eBay
Ruthie: Number thirteen we’ve already done an episode about. It’s episode 11 so definitely check that out on our website, on Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Basically what this is about is selling on eBay. Things that you find around your house. Maybe you’re purging all the stuff in your house. You’re a spring cleaning. You found a whole bunch of stuff that you’re thinking, “We really don’t need this.” Talk to your parents obviously. Be wise about that don’t sell other people’s stuff. Been there, done that, dealt with the repercussions.
Bekkah: Ruthie knows.
Ruthie: Get permission or whatever. Make sure you’re selling your own things and then look into selling on eBay. That’s a good skill to have.
Bekkah: I’m just going tell you right now grandparents, you would be surprised at how much stuff they want to
get rid of. Even my dad. I was, “Dad, I bet you that I could sell these Hot Wheels for you for some money.” And he said, “No, no way.” My husband is a really big Hot Wheel collector and he said, “Oh yeah. You totally could.” I
sold one of his Hot Wheels for like $50. I sold another one for a hundred and fifty bucks. There are certain things that people think are junk which are actually treasured because other people collect them. Find a niche and then look at buying stuff in that niche and selling it or see what you already have on hand. One day I went around and looked at everything in my house up on eBay to see how much I was selling for. Listen to episode 11, because that tells you a lot about profitability and how to go about making sure that you’re not getting burned.
14. Filling Out Paperwork For Others
Ruthie: Number fourteen on our list of ways that you can make money is to help people fill out paperwork or file paperwork. My parents have a lot of paper. They’ve got a lot of kids. They’ve moved many times and done a lot of taxes. I don’t charge them for this but they have a printer setup that I figured out how to get it to scan into their computer. Then I made them a Google Drive account. I take the papers that they have, I scan it into the computer, and then I upload it into Google Drive. Then I file it and label it so they can easily find it. I’ve even set it up on my parents’ phone so that they can look on their phones if they want to find someone’s transcript or something like that. They have easy access to that. Then I get the perk of being able to burn the paper afterward.
Bekkah: Because she hates clutter.
Ruthie: I really do. I love being able to declutter anything. If there’s any way that you could look into monetizing that, there are a lot of elderly people who are not able to run technology like you can. Use that to your advantage. Buy a printer or use one that you already have. That might cost a little bit more overhead, but looking into that in the future for how you can utilize that moving forward. Then filling out paperwork for people, is pretty self-explanatory. You can also just do this as a favor to someone. With my taxes, for instance. Getting started with my taxes is always really intimidating for me so usually what I do is set up a meeting with Bekkah. Then what we do is we just start talking about it. Once I get going with like turbo tax then I’m fine. I just need that initial nudge from somebody to help me get started and then I’m fine with it. Maybe that’s what you need to do in helping someone fill out paperwork.
Bekkah: Apparently my one of my giftings is understanding the paperwork. Probably because I do a lot of research or read a lot. I don’t know if your mom has ever been, “Hey here’s a sweepstake on the back of this ketchup bottle. Can you fill it out?” That is how I started trying to figure out directions to things. Do you know how it says “I accept these terms and conditions”? I used to read every single one of those. Do I really want to sign this? That’s how I started looking into that stuff.
When my parents had a flood in their basement, I handled their entire insurance claim. Let’s just say I would never recommend doing it for my parents. Don’t do it for your parents. It’s so emotional. Anything with a fire or flooding is a very emotional grieving process, actually. This really is a blessing if you could try to do this for people who are in that stage of grief. They just can’t even mentally focus on any of that. When that happens a lot of times, they can’t do this paperwork, because it’s just too emotionally taxing. If you’re saying, “I am going to document your receipts. I’m going to document what you’ve lost. We’re going to go out and get the stuff. We’re gonna send it to the insurance company and make sure you get reimbursed for all of the stuff that you lost.” I saved them like twenty thousand dollars on their basement. That is a way that you can be a resource to people, but also if it’s totally valuable to them you can even charge. Say, “This is how much I could charge you to help you with this.” If it’s something you want to do as an actual business.
15. Getting Internships Through the Government
Ruthie: Number fifteen is our last one and Bekkah’s going to talk about that one.
Bekkah: Within your community, there are a lot of government and nonprofit programs specifically for young adults and youth that you potentially could qualify for. In my community, there’s one where if you have ever been in a place of financial hardship. Or you’ve ever gone through depression or anxiety or all these different things in your life, you actually can qualify for an internship program that allows you to work for a business. The state pays your wage. In my community, it’s like ten dollars an hour.
You can go work for a business and the state pays, covers your workman’s comp. Then the business gets to have you in their business and they mentor you and teach you about their business. You get to work on projects so it’s basically a full-out internship, but the business doesn’t have to pay any money. That’s an excellent opportunity. If you are an entrepreneurial person and you’re thinking, “Whatever that person is doing, I want to be a part of it. I want to learn how to do that because that’s the future.” You go and figure out if you can qualify for this program. You connect with the person there and say, “I want to be a part of this program. What paperwork do I need?” Then you go find that business and you say, “I want to come work for you, but you don’t need to pay me because here’s this.” Or maybe it’s a program that will pay 50 percent of the wage. If your major right now in college for a SciTech program, science, technology, math, any of those things in the stem field – there are so many programs across the United States right now that will fund 50% of your internship.
Now it’s some paperwork! The business might say, “I don’t really want to fill out this paper.” But if you help them through that process and say “I want to work for you so bad, I will help your business fill this out so that we can get this done.” That’s an excellent way to be proactive, to get what you want in terms of learning a new skill, and you’re getting paid for it. The business is super impressed that you went out, found it, and did it for them. Definitely check those things out within your community. I hope these are new things you’ve never heard of before.
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