College is fun, but what if I told you there are ways to make $500 a month in college both passively and actively?
Think about it. What would an extra $500 dollars a month do for you in college?
Maybe not a lot but it’ll fill some financial void.
Right?
In this article, you’ll learn how to make $500 a month in college.
Don’t worry, there’s no bluff here and all the strategies work.
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They’re probably what you already know; they might be the newest stuff you get to learn about today too; who knows?
Making $500 a month in college is possible with these methods:
How to Make $500 a Month in College: 19 Realistic Strategies.
1. Launch a blog.
Blogging is definitely one of the surest ways on how to make $500 a month in college.
As a college student, you have a lot of time to grow a side hustle and there’s no better time to do that than now.
So, you can start a blog around something you like doing and keep creating great content to gain traffic.
Much more than blogging about something you like doing, you need to start a blog from a profitable niche that you like if you want to make $500 a month in college and more money blogging over the long haul.
So, once you’re done with choosing a niche, you can focus on creating great content consistently and promote your blog to grow authority and gain traffic.
It’s all not going to happen overnight.
And you can’t speed things up.
But the more you blog, the more you’ll get to understand how blogging works and how to make your blogging career a success.
Like I said, now is the best time for you to start a blog if you’ve not started already.
If you’re ready, click here to get started.
2. Tutoring online.
Online tutoring is another way to make $500 a month in college as a student.
You can work with websites that pay you to teach online and teach other students from different parts of the world.
Expect to earn around $14/hour, and you can do this whenever you have the time to.
The challenge is that a lot of these websites are on session around the same time your school would be on session.
So, it’s really a fatal clash.
But you can still work with websites that don’t clash with your school timetable or working hours.
With this out of the way, you can make over $500 a month as a student just tutoring other kids/students online.
Some of the websites you can tutor on include Tutor.com, Tutorabc, and Cambly.
There are others, but these are some of the top 10.
3. Start a YouTube channel.
College makes everything fun if you’re not a sadist.
It’s also going to make it easy for you to make money off a YouTube channel.
This is because there is lots of crazy stuff that you can do in college, especially around kids like you too.
Just like Mr Beast, you can do prank videos, create tasks and have people complete the tasks.
It’s an endless list of what you can do with a YouTube channel to make money.
It boils down to what you’d like to do.
Whatever it is, you start by opening a YouTube channel and by getting creative around video content creation for your channel.
Put yourself out there and let your audience get to know the face behind the channel.
Understanding YouTube SEO is a very pertinent aspect of your success on YouTube too.
4. Social media influencer.
If you’re famous on social media, then it’s another medium to make money in college up to $500 dollars (and much more) every single month.
As a social media influencer, you make money from brands, from selling your own products, promoting affiliate products and creating contents on special order.
So, here’s one thing; it’s easy to become a social media influencer in college.
You just gotta go wild with your content and be consistent.
Thanks to Tiktok, you can post short videos every single day hanging around college, asking students questions, trying out stunts, dancing, or doing other entertainment oriented stuff.
All you need is a smidgen of video editing pro skills to make your videos captivating enough.
5. Flipping items online.
The concept around flipping items online is easy – you buy stuff from thrift stores and resell them online.
While there are other places for you to get items cheap or at a cheap rate, I prefer getting them from the thrift store or stores (if you can’t find good items at one store).
Once you get a list of items that are well in shape, you can resell them online by listing them on Amazon, Facebook marketplace, ThredUp, Poshmark, Depop, or Craigslist for sale.
The reality of this is you’ll hardly get a sale.
So, to make this work, you can find winning products that thousands of people are searching to buy, buy them cheap at thrift stores and promote them on Tiktok or Facebook to get sales.
6. Proofreading.
Proofreading brings life and a tinge of perfection to a document.
If you’re good at picking errors off documents and invigorating the texts as a college student, then you can make $500 dollars in college as a freelance proofreader.
You just need to get the skill and source for jobs online on websites like Craigslist, Indeed, Fiverr, Upwork, and Google Jobs.
You can also make use of some of the best job boards in your city to get proofreading gigs.
The thing is, proofreading doesn’t take a lot of time to do.
You can finish up proofreading gigs within a day and get paid.
Even if you’re not putting all your efforts into getting gigs, you’d still be able to pull out $500/month in college if you’re good at it.
7. Run errands around town.
This is going to be a way out for you to make $500 a month in college if you have a car as a student.
Basically, you run errands for people and get paid.
If you’re interested in doing this, you can do it on the low or undercover in your spare time and still make up to $1k a month (or in the next 30 days).
You simply get started by searching for random tasks gigs on Flexjobs, Taskrabbit, Indeed, Craigslist, or Mechanical Turk.
If you’re gunning for $500/month, then you can work with all of these platforms to get gigs on a stead instead of beckoning on just one of them before you’re on the move.
8. Résumé writing.
A lot of students and graduates can’t write résumés.
If you can’t too, you’re just like me before I learnt how to.
You can too.
You learn to write résumés using the free resources on the internet.
So, when you’re done learning to write résumés, you can source for résumé writing gigs online and also tell your friends about what you can do; this is word of mouth marketing.
A lot of gigs will come from the internet, but more might come from the people you know, or the people you know will bring in more clients your way once they know about your new skill.
Plus, you can also print flyers and share it among your colleagues.
Maybe share it around the entire college to get more calls.
9. Sell printables online.
You have all the time in the world to learn this skill; selling printables on the web.
And it’s one of the best and most passive ways on how to make $500 a month in college.
There are people making $1k+ every month right now off the sales of printables.
You can make more actually.
You just need to learn how to make printables, know the printables people buy the most, and how/where to sell them off quickly.
You’ll also need to learn how to price your printables so that you’re not overpricing them and chasing off potential buyers.
10. Freelance writing.
Are you good at writing?
Then you can make $500 a month in college writing online as a freelance writer for multiple clients.
You start by signing up on freelance marketplaces like Truelancer, Upwork, and Fiverr.
Then you apply for writing gigs within your scope of expertise.
Charge moderately, and try to need up your freelance profile so that it’s not empty.
Freelance clients give their projects to the best on these platforms.
So, you’ll need to patiently keep applying for gigs until you get your first one.
While you’re waiting for your first gig, you can search through Google Jobs, Indeed, and Craigslist for freelance writing jobs that pay well too.
11. Programming.
Programmers are brilliant people.
And if you have anything to do with coding in college, you’ll make a lot of money before bagging your degree.
Programming as a freelancer is one of the ways on how to make $500 dollars a month in college, and it’s also one of the ways to build passive income if you’re good enough to create apps for yourself.
First of all, you’ll need to be good at coding.
This is because freelance clients show up with almost impossible projects and they’d like you to be the solution to their colossal (and almost bugging on steroids) projects.
As a freelance programmer, you can make $500 dollars with one project.
You could make more and the waiting time to get your first gig might be half the waiting time for freelance writers.
It’s simply a high income skill especially with everyone going online and prioritizing the use of tech and AI.
12. OF content monetisation.
People are addicted to different stuff online and one of them is adult entertainment.
This industry makes billions of dollars every year.
By the end of 2022 alone, this industry grossed $51.8 billion in revenue. It’s really crazy money.
Don’t worry you’re not going to be a p**nstar.
Not on my watch.
But the idea here is to get to know how to monetize your contents on OF (onlyfans), and how to build a fan base.
Every month, OF models boast of making over $10 grand.
You can do it, you just need to know how (and I’m not going any further on this here).
13. Ghostwriting.
Ghostwriters are writing mimics.
They mimic your writing skill and they’re able to write in your voice so that you have enough time for other things.
Their services apply to online webmasters and content creators on the digital marketing sphere who provide content on a more personal level to a massive online audience.
And the audience cherishes their voice.
If you’re this good of a writer, you can work as a ghostwriter for organizations and authors online to make over $500 dollars a month in college.
And you can do this from your dorm.
Find ghostwriting gigs online and apply to everyone you can find for a start.
14. Ride-sharing.
Ride-sharing holds the capacity to generate as much as $500 a day for you.
But rarely.
So, if you’re in college and you own a car, you can make use of this car to work from time to time for Uber.
You don’t have to do this every day.
You can work for both Uber and Lyft, and you’d still make $500+ dollars a month if you worked only 5 days in a month.
The more you work as a ride-hailing/ride-sharing driver for both Uber and Lyft, the more money you stand to make potentially.
So, the first step is to understand how ride-sharing works and how to make more from every trip you get.
15. Take delivery gigs
Delivery gigs are made available to you as a student with a car, a scooter or a bike – companies like Doordash, GrubHub, Postmates, and Instacart (and more) will pay you money to deliver items to their customers around town.
And they pay you per hour.
So, if you don’t feel like working on some days, you can go off.
But if you want to make money while in college, then you’ll be working with any spare time you have.
Per hour and on the average, these companies can pay around $18 dollars.
If you do this in 30 days, that’s $540 dollars (assuming you work for 1 hour a day).
But working multiple hours, you could earn around $3,000 dollars a month off these services.
You’re a student, so you won’t have all the 30 days to work.
You could work 4 hours in 10 days in a month.
Still leaves you with $720.
16. Gutter cleaning.
As long as you’re not stuck in college, gutter cleaning is one of the easiest and highest paying side hustles you can do as a college student to make $500 a month.
It’s not one of the side jobs that can make you a millionaire, but you can definitely make $500+ a month while still in college.
You start by going through the steep learning curve of gutter cleaning, getting your equipment, and sourcing for jobs online and offline.
For a single gig, you can earn around $200 bucks.
So you really need to do this like 4 times a month to make much more money than $500 dollars.
Gigs like this don’t come every time, but you can take it upon yourself to promote your services and really become a name in the gutter cleaning sphere in your city.
Won’t be easy, but it’s realistically doable.
17. Offline tutorials.
You’re in college and if you’re probably doing well in courses that others aren’t doing very well in; courses that have to do with calculations and whatnot.
You can know them by asking the students or sharing a questionnaire in your class.
Once you’re able to know these subjects, you can organize a tutorial center to teach them for a fee.
Make flyers and share it in college; get students to know about the tutorial you’ll be hosting.
You’ll find them trooping in to learn, and if you’re able to reach hundreds of students, you’ll have more students in your tutorial center.
18. Designing t-shirts online.
On the internet, there are platforms that allow you to design t-shirts and hoodies and other clothing patterns.
You make money off the sales of these platforms from the sales you get when people visit your store and buy your designs.
Basically, you don’t have any business with printing or shipping the products.
You just make the designs and fix the prices.
If you want to make more sales up to $500 a month in college from selling t-shirts online that you design, you can promote your store on social media platforms.
Some of these websites that allow you to design shirts for print-on-demand purposes include Zazzle, Printful, CafePress, Teespring and whatnot.
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19. Twitch streaming.
Going live on twitch is another way to make $500 a month.
It doesn’t matter what you’re doing on twitch, just be productive.
Learn to go viral on the video streaming platform doing what you love and how to monetize your content you’ll be getting on your twitch streams.
However, don’t expect to start making a lot of money the very moment you launch into twitch.
It takes time to make money on any platform.
This is because there are other creators there and you’ll be putting up against a whole lot of people doing the same thing you’re doing.
How to Make $500 a Month in College: 19 Realistic Strategies – Final Words.
You’re a college student and the future is really bright, I can tell.
In summary, some of the ways to make $500 a month in college (to cover up for extra costs) include gutter cleaning, organizing offline tutorials, roof cleaning, ride-sharing, ghostwriting, starting your OF page, blogging, tutoring online, social media influencer, YouTube content creation, items delivery, proofreading, flipping items on the internet, résumé writing, freelance writing, running errands, selling printables online, programming, print-on-demand t-shirts designing, and twitch streaming.
If you go big in more than 90% of these methods, you’ll be cashing out over $3,000 dollars a month even while you’re still in college.
Start from where you are right now and start with the method you prefer.
