20 Easy Online Jobs for Students to Earn Money (Updated 2023) (2024)

Written by Jason Michaels Last Updated: Mar 3, 2024

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Your college years are such a memorable time.

Meeting lifelong friends, studying your future profession and enjoying college parties are among some of the memories you’ll have when you look back on this time.

At such a busy time in your life, it’s also likely the time you’ll be the poorest.

Why?

Balancing a full time school schedule and work is tough. A lot of college students work part time or don’t work at all while attending school, which is how the phrase “living like a college student” was born.

There’s no need to be held hostage by your finances. Check out these 20 flexible online jobs for students to earn money.

Table of Contents

1. Online Paid Surveys

As a survey taker, you’ll be paid to share your opinion. You will unlikely be able to earn a full-time income from this, but you can easily earn a part-time income.

Survey taking can be fun and has a lot of benefits:

Flexible
Fast pay
Work from home

You can usually take surveys 24/7, from the comfort of your couch, home computer, or your cell phone!

A lot of people make money taking surveys during their down time, like when they first wake up in the morning laying in bed, waiting at the doctor’s office, or sitting in a long drive-thru restaurant line. If you create a schedule for yourself and treat online surveys like a job, you can earn a nice part-time income.

Ready to dive in? Here’s a quick list of some of our favorites:

Survey Junkie
Vindale Research
Pinecone Research

You’ll love this roundup of 25+ survey sites of 2021 to earn $600+ per month!

2. Become a Blogger

Blogging is a fun hobby that can be monetized easily. Blogging has a low barrier to entry and you can start with less than $50 per year.

When you sign-up using our link to Bluehost, you can get a year’s worth of hosting for just $3.95 anda free domain name your first year.

Here is a free detailed step-by-step guide for starting a personal finance blog. You can use the guide to start a blog in any niche: fashion, food, career, lifestyle, etc.

3. Starting an Online Business

You can start an online business to earn money as a student. Here are some examples:

Social Media Management

Social media managers are paid to manage social media for companies. You will likely be in charge of sourcing and posting content to social channels, growing the social following, interacting with followers, and related tasks. Beginners can start earning $15/hour.

Photography

If you’re into snapping photos, you can start an online photography studio. There are even websites that will buy your work, like Fotolia or iStock.

Other sites to sell your photos:

Dreamstime
Alamy
Shutterstock

Consider bundling your photos together and selling them on Etsy. As a beginner, you can start earning a few hundred to a few thousand dollars monthly.

Rent out your place

This passive form of income requires virtually no work at all. It’s called Airbnb arbitrage. If you’re renting out your place while in college, rental arbitrage might be a neat way for you to pay your rent or more!

You rent out a room, or your entire place on AirBNB.

This can be while you are staying at your residence, or not. College breaks, Summer, Christmas, and other breaks in your college schedule are an opportunity for you to monetize your place while you may be away visiting your parents.

4. Teach Online

The student becomes the teacher, with online teaching opportunities. You can make up to $25/hour teaching English to Chinese students online. ESL companies will have a few requirements you must meet in order to be eligible:

Be a native English speaker
Bachelor’s degree or teaching certificate
Teaching experience
Fast internet connection

Now, note that some ESL companies do require applicants to have a degree or teaching certificate, so keep this mind while you are browsing these jobs.

Here are 14 online teaching companies to take a look at, to get you started. We highly recommend the following:

VIPKID
QKids

5. Starting an Online Dropshipping Store

Starting an online store can be a rewarding and fruitful venture. It’s easier than you might think and college students can make a part time or full time income starting from month one!

Interested?

6. Search Engine Evaluator

You can get paid to play around on search engines like Google. As a search engine evaluator, you’ll be able to work from home, getting paid for your feedback on terms you search online, ads showing in your newsfeed, and more.

You will earn $9 to $14 per hour with Appen and enjoy benefits such as independent work, flexible schedule, as well as training and support.

Check out openings at Appen here.

7. At Home Call Center Representative

With Convergys, you’ll do call center work from home. Positions here usually fall into one of these categories:

Customer Service
Sales
Tech support

They offer some awesome perks including tuition reimbursem*nt, 401(k), medical benefits and advancement opportunities.

8. Become an Affiliate Marketer

Affiliate marketers sell products and services to an audience. When a sale happens, as an affiliate marketer, you’ll earn a small commission.

For example, if you refer a friend to Dosh, an app that automatically saves money, and they sign up. You’d earn a small commission.

You can make commission on the sale or sign up, based on the company.

Affiliate marketers can earn a part-time or full-time income. You can work flexibly from your home computer, setting your own schedule, with or without a website.

9. Freelance Writing

If you have a passion for writing, you can make money online as a freelance writer. You can start by joining free sites for work like:

After you sign up, you can apply to jobs (or projects) posted by clients. If the client decides to work with you, then your project will begin and you’ll be on your way to making money freelance writing.

10. Test Websites

Websites are in need of testing. Real feedback is needed so website owners can understand the user experience, in order to improve the website. Website testers will test the look, feel, and use of the site. With User Testing, you can earn $10 for every user test you complete. Other sites you can work for as a tester include:

You’ll be in the unique position to give your honest feedback about your use and experience of the website.

11. Freelance Graphic Design

If you are a creative and have a good eye for design, freelancing in the graphic design field might be the right move. A freelance graphic designer works with companies to create eye-catching graphics like:

Logos
Social media graphics
T-shirt designs

You don’t need experience with Photoshop or other pricey graphics software. There are free tools available online like Canva or Photopea, that you can use to make graphics.

Entry-level graphic designers on Fiverr can make up to $400/week.

12. Retail Arbitrage

You can take advantage of price differences in the market to make money with arbitrage. Here’s how it works:

You dropship one product from platform A to platform B and keep the difference as profit.

For example, you can sell bath bombs online. Buying bath bombs on Ebay for $10 and selling for $10 on Amazon would give you a profit of $10, before fees.

Now, rinse and repeat to create a nice side income for yourself.

Learn more about arbitrage in this free guide.

13. Flipping

You can flip your own goods online for a profit.People actually make this a full time income, buying clearance items from popular drugstores and general stores, then selling online for a marked up price.

You can do this with your own stuff. Here are some examples of goods you can flip:

Comic books or magazines
Books
Shoes
Kitchen goods
Flatware
Home decor
Apparel

Some marketplaces to sell online include Amazon, Ebay, and Mercari.

14. Start a Money-Making Hobby

You get the both of best worlds here: explore your passion while monetizing it. There are a bunch of money-making hobbies for students to earn money, including:

Knitting
Printables, or other digital goods
Candle making
Baked goods

Check out handmade marketplaces to sell like Etsy or Cargoh.

15. Sell gigs

Today, we live in a gig economy. If you have a skill, you can most likely monetize it on platforms like Fiverr. Services start at $5 per gig so quite a crowd is drawn in. There are a number of gigs available to offer in various categories like video editing, copywriting, voiceover, and more.

16. Teach Courses Online

Course creation is a form of passive income that can pay in dividends! You create a course about a topic you are knowledgeable about, price it and sell.

If you are teaching an in-demand topic, you might see success like Mariah Coz of Femtrepreneur with her $400K+ course launches!

You can create and sell courses on platforms like Teachable or Kajabi. You can also upload your course to learning marketplaces like Skillshare or Udemy, where you can get a lot more exposure rather than trying to promote it yourself.

17. Become an Author

You can write books, physical copy or digital and make money as a college student. Today, it’s easier than ever to self-publish your work on places like Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.

You can also get into the digital space selling digital-only books using tools like Sendowl, to digitally deliver ebooks to customers who purchase online.

In fact, selling books is one of the fastest ways to become a millionaire. You don’t have to be a New York Times Bestselling author. A lot of book author millionaires make their millions by authoring many books with mediocre or average sales, rather than one book with a lot of sales.

Not the author type? You can still earn money online selling books.

18. Selling Books

Two ways you can sell books are flipping and buyback. Flipping books is a simple concept. Buy books at a low price and sell at a higher price, keeping the difference as profit.

You can use the free app Bookscouter to scan the barcode of books to determine the value on multiple online sites like Amazon or Ebay.

Book resellers actually walk around used book stores scanning books and purchasing only the profitable ones, for the sole purpose of reselling.

Book buyback means you sell back your college text books that you bought for classes that you’ve completed. Simple.Cash4Books is a site that can help you with this.

19. Virtual assistance

Become a personal assistant virtually! As a virtual assistant (VA), you’ll be helping companies with a variety of tasks, which might include:

Appointment setting
Bookkeeping
Answering phones or answering emails
Managing meetings
Taking notes
Data entry

VA’s can work full-time or part-time. The most successful VA’s can earn up to $10,000 per month. Here are some helpful resources to get started:

Zirtual is a top company in the VA space, connecting qualified VA’s to clients who are looking for help. Consistent work and competitive pay are among some of the benefits you’ll enjoy at Zirtual.

VA Networking connects VA’s with companies worldwide. This is great for full-time and part-time VA opportunities. They offer VA training right on the website and you will be able to browse companies that are hiring, once you join.

20. Become a Transcriptionist

How would you like to make money to type? You can earn up to $25/hour listening to audio files and typing what you hear with transcription work.

If you have access to headphones, a computer and a quiet space, and you’re a fast typist, this might be the perfect fit for your busy college schedule.

Once you’ve passed the quick on-boarding process, you have the freedom to pick and choose which transcription jobs you want to work. You can earn money as often as weekly, all from the comfort of working from home.

Where can you start?

Final Thoughts

Hopefully you enjoyed these 20 ways students can earn money online. Have an online money-making idea to contribute to the list? Comment below so we can hear from you!