Along with a high workload and a lot of stress, one of the most common challenges that students face is money. Specifically, they don’t have enough of it. For most students, financial survival is a major issue, especially as you often don’t have the time (or the energy) to try for more hours or an extra job. In fact, you may feel you barely have the time to do what you need to for college.
So, what’s the solution?
Actually, there is a range of different ways to make more money as a student. Some of these may directly apply to your situations while other ones may not. Likewise, some of these are relatively short-term approaches for earning money but others may be relevant even after you stop being a student and start trying to make a full-time living.
Providing Services for Students
One way to make money as a student is to target people like you. After all, you probably know a lot of students just through your day-to-day interactions and you may have access to tools or places that would make advertising to students easy.
Providing services to students might seem like a bit of an odd choice because students are pretty strapped for cash. However, they are also short on time. Because of that, many students are willing to pay for services that are going to save them time.
For example, I know one college student who earned extra money by editing papers for other students and providing advice on how to approach a given topic. I also heard of a student who wrote detailed notes to help her learn each subject and then turned around and sold those notes to people in her class – and people who would take that class the following year.
Tutoring is another key area. This one is especially effective if you have a topic that you are good at and it’s even better if people often struggle with that same topic. For example, just about every math class is going to have some people that really don’t understand the topics and the same is going to be true for many science courses, along with topics like philosophy.
Tutoring others is also a win-win because it can help you learn and understand the topic better as well. Just make sure you actually know what you’re talking about before you start charging others to learn from you.
There are lots of other examples of ways to make money with services that are targeted at students.
The trick is to think about things that students need to do often and find a shortcut. Now, I’m not suggesting that you help others cheat (although some people do that too) but there are plenty of services that you can offer that won’t get you or other students in trouble,
You don’t just have to focus on academic services either. On some campuses, there are examples of other services, such as room cleaning, snack delivery, laundry and even grocery shopping.
In theory, the potential to earn money is even greater around exam time, when students really do have very little time to spare. However, that mightn’t be useful for you if you have your own exams to study for.
Sell Things
As a way of making money, selling things sounds a bit obvious and fairly simplistic. However, there are a few effective ways that you can make money selling things as a student.
The first of these is probably the most obvious, which is to sell old textbooks. Most students already do this, especially as student bookstores will typically buy those books back. But, you can also use this as an extension of the services approach by offering to deal with the running around for other people, for a fee.
Additionally, it’s always worth doing some research before you sell any textbook. Many college students simply sell it back to the bookstore. That might be guaranteed money but you’ll often get less than the book is actually worth. Instead, take the time to check out eBay and similar places to figure out what the book actually sells for. In many cases, it’s worth selling it online because you will get a higher profit.
Another approach for selling things is to take advantage of passions.
For example, at a sports game, you could sell almost anything in the team’s colors and make a profit. Likewise, it’s fairly easy to sell memorabilia, especially if you’ve designed it yourself. That approach does take more work but if you see a market it may be worth going for it. If the audience is right, there may also be other products you can sell, such as baking in dorms or chips and drink at parties.
As with services, there is basically an unlimited amount of options. Taking advantage of these is really a matter of being a little creative and figuring out what your audience is likely to be interested in.
Approaches to Avoid
There are a lot of other ways to make money as a student and it wouldn’t be realistic to cover all of them in a single post. However, I have found that some of the advice out there isn’t realistic for most people. In fact, some of the approaches promoted would be a bad choice for just about anyone.
So, here are some key ways to make money that you should avoid – or at least think carefully about.
Data Entry and Surveys
One fairly common recommendation is to do data entry work or online surveys as a way to make money. Technically, this would work because these approaches do earn you money. However, I wouldn’t recommend them.
The problem is that you earn a pretty low amount for the amount of time you spend. Survey sites are a perfect example of this. Often you might end up at an average of $1 to $2 per hour and you spend a lot of time doing prescreening for surveys that you never actually get into.
This approach for making money is only ever good for a little bit of money and it certainly won’t help relieve any financial strain. It’s also an especially bad choice for students because they tend to be short on time anyway. If that’s the case, it seems like an inefficient way of earning money is one of the worst things that you can do.
Ghostwriting for Students
With so many struggling students out there, some people have found a unique way to ‘help’, which essentially involves writing assignments for other students. In theory, this approach can pay quite well, especially if you are good and fast at writing.
However, it’s also extremely risky.
If you take this approach, you are helping a student to cheat and the consequences could be quite substantial if you ever get caught. I suspect that in many cases you’re likely to get kicked out of college entirely, if not prosecuted, even though it was the person paying you who was technically cheating.
Regardless of how much you may need money, this approach simply isn’t worth the risk.
The Best Method: Building Your Own Website
In the long-term, this approach for making more money as a student is probably the most reliable, especially as it is something that you could theoretically keep going for the rest of your life. There is even a significant number of people out there that have turned a website into a full-time source of income.
However, the catch is that this is an approach that takes time to develop and grow. In particular, you have to spend time building a site and regularly develop content for it. It's not like selling old stuff, where you get paid instantly. It may take several months or even more than a year to start making sales, because you need to work on getting traffic to your site in the beginning.
That being said, essentially creating an online business in less than a year is not really very long. IRL businesses can take several years just to break even, and may have very thin profit margins, staff to pay, etc other complications. With a money-generating website, you run the show from your laptop, and mistakes are free (except for time wasted) since you don't have to invest in any equipment or staff.
One of the things that I like the most about making money with your own website is that you have the ability to go at your own pace. This means that you could put a lot of time into the site on weeks where you don’t have many assignments or when you are on holiday.
Websites are becoming increasingly relevant as a tool for making money, simply because there are so many people online at any given time, and many of them are spending money, especially in the USA.
At the same time, you have the ability to develop a website on pretty much any topic that you can imagine. So, you could develop one targeted at students, which might contain study tips and references to products that make student life much easier. Alternatively, you could make a site about a hobby, like surfing, vaping, building computers, traveling, or something else that catches your interest.
The general idea is that you can use your website as a platform for selling products. You don’t have to own the products or buy anything physically. Instead, you’re working on getting people to click on a link and making a purchase. If you’re promoting products that are appealing, getting people to do this isn’t terribly difficult.
People often get put off by this concept because building a website sounds like it is going to be difficult. But, that’s not the case. Nowadays, you can build a website without knowing a single thing about coding. In fact, you can find training for everything that you need to do online, so there’s no guesswork needed at all.
My recommendation for training is a site called Wealthy Affiliate. The site acts as a community for people from all walks of life, who are looking at making money from their own website. Even though everyone works on their own projects, the amount of support is overwhelming. At the same time, there is also an extensive amount of training on the site to teach you everything you want to know from the ground up.
Nathaniell
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Interesting article and very good idea to help students earn some money while studying. This post is different as you also provide the approaches to avoid. Data entry and surveys companies make a lot of online publicity to attract people and I always wondered if it was worth it. I will follow you advice and stay away from it. Building a website and becoming a content writer sounds promising
Very nice page. You are a very good writer. Great use of words. I agree that online surveys a waste of time. Tried them myself. It take hours even to qualify for 1 survey. The time you spend and the amount of money earned, definitely not worth it. Wealthy Affiliate is definitely the way to go.
Hi Nathaniel,
I have to say your article is pretty good. I remember I used to try and do online surveys and I completely agree with you about making sometimes $1 an hour. I also remember selling my own plasma in college to get a little extra money. All ways that I do not particularly recommend.
The selling of text books is one way to make money. Most college students only sell their text books back. I wonder if there is anyone who has tried to buy other people text books then sell them on ebay or amazon for a mark up. I agree this would take a little research, but selling used products always does. You could probably do this while building your website for the few month to a year if you don’t make any money with the site.
Hi Nathaniell
I am a graduate of University and relied on funding to pay for the education and living expenses. My 3 years where followed by another year at the polytech to get some hands-on training before heading out into the world.
I wish I had known about starting a website earlier, however I am trying to make up for that lost time now.
While time is tight for a student, it is for us outside of college or university, we have jobs and family to juggle with hobbies.
It all comes down to time management and desire to succeed in this area.
Even with limited time content can be built up, and while getting traffic may take longer, this is only the starting point.
Great work.
Wade
Actually, I tend to disagree about making money as a student by building a site. The reason is simple, it is so terribly time consuming. Building a site nowadays is in fact a simple process, as you rightly say, but this is the easier part of the job, you have to add content.
I have two daughters who graduated recently, and can tell you I would not dare to suggest them to build sites.They are too busy with their PhD studies now. I agree with your recommendation of Wealthy Affiliate. Being a member myself I know this is a great place, I have 4 sites built and hosted there. But for students? I am not so sure really. It takes time for a site to develop and to start bringing some income.
But I may be wrong, I see the things from my own unfavorable angle; things with my sites are everything but smooth.
Hi Nathaniell, It’s me again lol
I wanted to share with you my story when I was a student, I left school last year after my son’s birth.
I arrived in France 3 years ago as a foreign language student. I was studying Literature and Foreign Civilizations in Lyon 2 France.
I desperately Needed Money as I don’t have any scholarship to cover my expenses. My only regret is to not have encountered such a great article about how to make money as a student, it would have solved my money problem.
Thank you for the help you are providing.
Youba.
That’s some great information Nathaniell. I still remember my struggles as a student and how I wished that I would have an extra source of income for my daily expenses. I really wished I had read your article back then.
But it’s all water under the bridge now. Thanks to WEALTHY AFFILIATES I now owned two successful websites and I think it’s the fastest and authentic way to make some extra money online.
I loved your article and going to share it with my students who are looking for some extra cash. Thanks for sharing 🙂
Regards,
Aman
Hi Nathaniell,
when I was a student I did all kinds of jobs. I worked in the student library, in the club, as a waiter for event catering such as Formula One, in underground carbon and salt mines and on oil rigs even this was related to my studies.
When I see how much effort I have put into it I wish someone would have told me before to make my own website. The problem with student jobs or any “normal” job for that matter is that it is not lasting after you quit. When you finish working nothing is left. Either you work and spend your time and get money or you don’t and that is it.
With a website it is the opposite. The more you work on it, the more it is accumulating. You only need to write a post once, and it will be there still next year and in the year after that and people can still benefit from it. So over time you can build something really big that is all your own until one day you could actually get money back from it without you even working on it.
It is certainly not a way to get paid immediately when you start out but over time you cetainly will reap the benefits. And the best time to start your own website is when you have more time for it. I wish I would have used my time more wisely back then
Best Regards
Rene
You have great tips about how to make money as a student. As a student, I now how hard it is being without the money. I will definitely use your tip about selling things. I have a lot of old books in my basement so why not sell them and make some money. I believe a lot of students have something to sell at home and this tip will definitely bennefit them.
Hey Nathaniel,
This is indeed insightful. I will share this post with my daughter who has just completed at the university and is still looking for something to do.
I enjoyed reading that and got nice ideas.
Great stuff indeed.
Cheers.
Hi Nathaniell
Thanks for this information. I’m actually a student and there are a lot of mates nowadays talking about making money on the internet. I have been a little bit sceptical, specially because I bought a course to make money with surveys. What a scam! Like you said, you get a training, yes, but you have to spend one hour in front of your pc in order to make 3 dollars. They tell you that along the way you will get better paid surveys. I don’t know if this is true. But I don’t want to know of a paid survey again in my life. I’ve thinking about creating something personal, I don’t know yet, but a website sounds good. How can I know that Wealthy affiliate is not a scam? Thanks a lot.
Kind Regards.
Cool set of ways to make money as a student Nathaniel. Running a website blog on the side of schooling would be too overwhelming for me to do.
To pull this off you would have to be a very organised person who can prioritize daily tasks and never get distracted.
Scaling a website is a great investment of your time and may become a pricey asset in the long run. So I will try out your recommendation because I have faith in your words.
Hello Nathaniell, fascinating post once more. I am a university student myself so i can relate to this article more than anything. With high demands from my university program i struggle to make ends meet. So, i decided to start my own website using wealthy affiliate. The best platform certainly for anyone starting out. Recommend it fully. Cheers!
Hey Nathaniel,
As a college student myself this one really hit home for me. I think you made some great suggestions here and I especially agree with the one about sports memorabilia. I have seen for myself how people can make a killing creating something from scratch like corn hole tables and other things of that nature and embellish them with team logos. It really works!
Thanks for the post!
The cool thing is that once your ‘business mind’ gets going, you can really start looking at the world in a way that will allow you to see lots of opportunities to make money. Instead of just looking to buy things, you can start looking at, “where is there a need I can fulfill?”. Going off your corn hold table ideas, that could totally work if you’re going to parties and people are bored or don’t have games – so what about producing and making a portable corn hole game? That way people can take them around between houses easily.
Even with no business experience, you can learn the ropes by failing a few times.
At the time time, going exclusively online means that you can also fail in secret. That’s what I found to be the advantage for me. Not all my sites have been successful! But the ones that faded away have done so silently, and I don’t have to advertise my bad ideas to friends and family 🙂
While I do agree that Wealthy Affiliate is a good platform to build a business, I could not see how it would work with students from our country. Normaly student who NEED to work for money have barely enough to spare. At the very least, they would need to purchase a domain, and host with Wealthy Affiliate. Can they host with Wealthy Affiliate without upgrading to premium membership?
Wealthy Affiliate works in all countries, so it doesn’t really matter where you are from. As far as not having enough money, there are always way to make money. For someone in the US, $50 can easily be spent on beer in one night. For other countries, I realize it’s not as easy to save $50 for your membership and domain name.
But that’s the cool thing about the free membership at Wealthy Affiliate. You can be a free member for as long as you want, and build your business on a free website. There are, of course, some limitations to what you can do with the site (like how much you can customize it), but as far as making money goes, you can totally do that with just a freebie membership.
You won’t have all the personal support that comes when you pay for Premium, but for someone that’s really motivated and has a few hours per day to research and write for their site, this is absolutely something any student could do.
Selling notes- what a great idea. I mean there are so many starving students. Not all like to eat macaroni and cheese or noodles. The tips you provide here are great, will probably help many a student get a great meal. During my schooling, but sadly it was done before technology age really took off. I could have used these tips back then. Keep up the great work.
That’s the crazy thing. Students complain now about debt and the cost of living, but there are so many new opportunities out there that they aren’t taking advantage of! I don’t mean to trivialize student struggles – I never actually went to college, but I know that for a motivated person there’s so much opportunity to earn money online now. Anyone with a bit of spare time can at least write articles for blogs and get paid $5 – $10 per article. That could be an extra $20 per day!
I know someone who was a college student, joined Wealthy Affiliate, and now he earns more than $10,000 per month from his website! This is definitely worth checking into. I think the other ideas you give here in this article and that are all over the internet (doing surveys, etc) are all good ideas. But I think the website idea is better because it’s more long-lasting. I mean, if you create a website about something that you’re actually interested in and like, you can have that website for years and years – always having either a full time income from it if you choose, or just keeping it as a side income literally for the rest of your life.
The cool thing about building a website is that it can provide residual income. With surveys, you just make money for the work you do (if you make any at all). Do some work, make some money. When you stop working, you stop making money. The same goes for many types of work, including the typical 9-5 job.
With owning a website, you can earn money even when you’re not working!
of course, the same is true that sometimes you work and don’t see immediate income come in. This can be frustrating, but if you can stick with building out content for your readers, you can expect results to come in at some point.
Then, that website can be used forever for income. You’ll need to add content and maintain certain things, of course, but you can earn income from your website for decades to come.
I think it’s great that students today have so many opportunities to make money online while they go to school. With social media and Internet use at an all time high, the amount of information that students have access to that college students like me, who have been out of school for less than 10 years, had access to during school.
With tuition and student loans getting so outrageous students almost have to make more money while they are in school if they want to even have a chance of getting out of debt quickly once they graduate.
Can students really earn money building a website even if they only have a couple of hours a week in order to dedicate to it?
Student loans are crazy these days. If you could get your website making just a few hundred a month, that could seriously reduce the amount of loans that you need to take on in order to finish school, or at least take care of the loan payments while you get established in life after you leave school.
YES. Students can absolutely make money with just a website. How many hours you dedicate to it will reflect how long it takes to be profitable though.
I started out with just 1-2 hours per day…if even that. Maybe less 10 hours per week. But i didn’t really see any big progress until I started doing daily work on my site. It was a progress. As I learned more, I was able to spend less time in the training area of Wealthy Affiliate, and more time on my website.
But yeah, start off with just a few hours per week, and as you gain more knowledge (and tolerance for online work), you can do more hours. Of course you have to stick in studying in there somewhere as well, but I think of most students cut out partying, and reduced the amount of “hangout” time with friends, it’s totally possible to make big leaps in traffic and sales conversions with just a few hours a week consistently over a longer period of time.
Hi Nathaniel, great article! I remember on my uni days, a friend of mine would come with truffles he made at home and sell during the break time. He made good money and helped with the bills, believe it or not.
Now, I wish I had discovered this opportunity to make money with a website when I was at Uni. Even though I had to study a lot, I didn’t work at that time and had so much free time. I could have built highly profitable business during my 5 years study.
So, I highly recommend students to go for this alternative. It’s very easy to create websites these days and you can work at any time you want. You just have to be patient.
Wealthy Affiliate is also my favourite platform.
All the best
Stefan
Selling truffles…what a crazy idea. But I guess it worked! When you’re a poor student, any amount of money will help.
I knew a guy that was a WA member while he was in university, and by the time he was done with school, he was making several thousand dollars a month. If you look at it as a time investment, and spend a couple years dedicated a few hours per day to your business, you can really make some headway. You were in school for five years. It took me two years to quit my job and go full time online. Yeesh! Imagine if you had an online business running while in university.
You could rent your own house (no dorms), be able to take girls on dates, and probably even afford your own car. True independence at an early age. Even if it took you longer than the two years it took me, let’s say the full five, you’d have a job to support yourself while you started looking for career opportunities. then you could hold out for just the BEST one that suits you instead of taking anything that came your way.
All with simple website!
Even though I’m no longer a student, and my sons are also now grown up, I like to check into things to stay up to date with helping my family where I can.
The next step for me are my grandchildren that will be coming of age to start earning money and your site, and especially this article will help immensely for ideas and inspiration for them to start figuring things out.
Yup. so if you learn how to do affiliate marketing and start your own business online, you can teach your grandkids how to do the same. Not only will they be impressed by Grandpa and his internet-savvy business skills, but they’ll learn a whole lot about business and making money at an early age, which will pay off very soon as they get into the ‘real world’ and need to make money to support themselves!
Excellent post! I really like the ideas you shared here for college students to make extra money while enrolled. I wish I would have had these tips when I was in college.
One more to add that I can think of is cutting hair. Guys, if you’re pretty handy with hair clippers, you can easily charge anyone feom 5-10 bucks each. And ladies, cutting or dying women hair can be quite lucrative.
Also, an online business has got to be the very best idea I’ve heard. I have an online business that currently makes money. If I would have gotten this tip when i was in college 10 years ago; my business would be in a whole other tax bracket, lol.
Thanks for the tips!
– Jonathan
Haha. Cutting hair to make some extra money is a really cool idea actually. I hadn’t thought of that. I guess you’d have to start with a buddy of yours to practice, but most guys are simple anyway. I bet that you could learn quite a few things from YouTube as well – simple techniques like texturing.
You are right that one HUGE advantage of starting an online business while in college, even if it’s not profitable, is that you get an early start. If you have 3 years of failure and one year of success, you now end college with a profitable business that you can use to pay off student debt, buy a home, or at least be marketable on the dating scene LOL.
Who knows, maybe you won’t even need to enter the job search if you’re making enough money online. At the very least, you’ll know a few skills like SEO, WordPress, and website management in just a few months of training.