How to Make an Extra $500 a Week: 23 Realistic Ways -

If you’re searching for how to make an extra $500 a week, this is the right blog post for you.

The truth is, you can make much more money than just an extra $500 dollars every week.

You can make as much as $2,000 a week even if you keep a full-time job.

However, these aren’t some of the ways to get rich quickly. But then, you can make money if you’re willing to put in the work.

$500 dollars is a realistic target, and a really conservative one.

You could make more if you’re willing to. It depends on how much time you’ve got after committing to a full-time job.

Moving forward, here are 23 realistic ways to make $500 a week or an extra $500 dollars per week if you already keep a full-time job.

How to Make an Extra $500 a Week in 23 Realistic Ways.

1. Start your own blog.

Blogging is fun if you love writing.

If you don’t love writing, then you can grow a blog by outsourcing some efforts like content creation to professional or expert writers.

With that said, you can make a lot of money from a blog.

But it takes some time for this to happen.

When starting a blog of your own, you need to pick a niche.

A good and profitable niche that also resonates with you (so that it’ll be less draining to create loads of quality content in the long run).

After picking a niche, think up a simple name you’d like to use for your blog, and then get your blog live with this guide.

Once you’re done, you can start developing your blog by adding relevant content and building background ranking signals.

However, you can make an extra $500 a week by blogging simply through creating tons and tons of quality content over time (without ever reaching out or doing any hard SEO stuff).

But you’d make money, probably 5× quicker, if you do SEO thoroughly and reach out (i.e write for other bigger blogs in your niche).

If you’re a complete beginner, there are tons of articles and resources out there to learn about SEO and how to grow your blog traffic.

In all things, blogging to make $500/week is awesome and attainable under 1 year. Or 365 days.

You could make this happen faster and it totally depends on the blogging approach you adopt.

Once you start getting traffic to your blog, there are different ways to monetize that traffic so that you can start making money blogging for real.

Don’t wait too long to throw some monetization in there.

You can monetize either by throwing ads in there, selling affiliate products, selling your own course or ebooks, selling advert spaces, and posting sponsored content.

If you want to start your blog right now, use my free blogging guide to get started.

2. Start a YouTube channel.

Starting, growing, and eventually monetizing a YouTube channel is another way to make an extra $500 a week.

If you already have a full-time job that you keep, that’s great.

You can always create videos when you’re back home or with your spare time.

And the videos don’t always have to be perfect.

Today, a bunch of YouTube guys generate over $5,000 dollars monthly from their channel.

And that’s a channel they spent almost nothing to register or to create.

The good thing about this is, video creation is interesting especially if you have your face on camera.

So, you can start by picking a niche for your YouTube channel, give it a nice name that’s memorable, and dish out content consistently.

With time, your videos will attract subscribers and a lot of views.

It’ll make more sense if you’re actually making videos about what people want to see and learn.

By the time you’re past 1k subs and 4-hour watchtime, you’d be able to turn ads on for your YouTube channel, and also monetize your YouTube channel in other ways.

3. Do dropshipping.

Dropshipping is a realistic way to make money, and it could take a while before you start making an extra $500 a week from a dropshipping store.

But you can make it happen if you’re consistent.

Firstly, you want to make sure you know exactly what a dropshipping store is.

It’s not the same as an ecommerce store and it’s the kind of online business that can generate passive income for you in the short and long run.

Once you understand the concept and the basics of starting a successful dropshipping business, then it’d be a tad easy to create one yourself.

Realistically, there’s no limit to how much money you can make off a dropshipping business/store.

It depends on how much time and effective efforts you’re willing to invest just to reach more people and process more sales.

4. Start a digital products ecommerce business.

You can make an extra $500 a week by selling digital products on your ecommerce store.

Yes, you can start up an e-commerce store just for virtual products like photos and frequently update your ecommerce store to house more products people would want to buy.

Doing this part-time, it’s possible to generate a gross income of $4,000 dollars per month.

It involves a lot of upfront work and you either have to be good at taking photos or designing printables.

Plus, you’d spend a dime to create your store as it’ll run on plugins and web servers.

5. Trade online markets.

If you want to make $500 dollars a week from home and not have to go outside of your home, then you can trade the financial markets online to make this happen.

Some of the markets you can trade on the internet include:

Crypto
Stocks
Forex

Capital markets
Money markets
Derivatives

Commodity market
Bond market

If you choose to trade any one of them and you’re open to learning all you can about them, then you’d be able to make as much money as you want to make off the markets you settle with.

Trading is risky in itself and you’ve gotta arm yourself with the prerequisite knowledge and experience.

Plus, to speed things up, you can take a course in any of the markets.

Trading the financial markets online can either make you or break you.

It depends on you totally.

And you’d also be trading with real funds to make money.

So, you need to be really careful in this aspect.

6. Design graphics.

While graphics designing is a great skill for anyone to acquire, it’s one of the things you can do online to make an extra $500 dollars a week on the side.

As a graphics designer, you can perform freelance services and work with clients needing your skill for one or more of their projects.

You don’t have to pay a single dime to get gigs and you can start by signing up on some of the marketplaces for freelancers online.

With a single gig, you can take home up to $150 dollars.

It depends on the nature of the gig and what the client is asking for.

And as a beginner freelancer, it could take some time before you start getting gigs regularly.

7. Sell photos.

Selling photos online is another way to make up to $500 dollars a week on the side.

Be good at taking genuine photos with your android phone or get a really good camera.

You can do this all day and have up to 100 beautiful pictures to sell.

The more time you invest into creating photos or taking photos, the more genuine and beautiful photos you’ll have in your portfolio.

So, whether you have a good android phone or a camera for taking photos, you can sell them on:

500px

Alamy
Shutterstock
iStock Photo

Smugmug Pro
Adobe Stock
Etsy

And there are other places to sell your photos for money too.

It’s passive, and you just have to upload your photos on these platforms for sale.

It’s no news to make a couple thousand dollars just selling photos.

And your photos have to be some of the best on the platform.

They’ve got to be niche photos too.

8. Do proofreading.

Proofreading has a lot of definitions already by people who are 50× smarter than I am.

But it’s simple; you read through documents and take out the anomalies.

It’s almost like editing, but they’re two different activities performed on documents.

As a proofreader, you’re taking away spelling errors, and other forms of errors and making the document more reader friendly by incorporating a simpler (and organized) formatting.

If you know exactly how to proofread a document, then you can go ahead and look for proofreading gigs on freelance marketplaces.

You can get paid as high as $27/hour as a freelance proofreader.

But your rate and portfolio could earn you more.

If you have no idea what it means to proofread, then start learning to do just that.

There’s more than enough resources to learn with on the internet.

9. Drive for ride-hailing services.

Making up to $500/week is the norm if you’re just barely working for ride-hailing services like Uber or Lyft part-time.

And working for a few hours.

Now, if you’ve got a car of your own, you have an edge here to make $500 dollars in a couple of days.

On average, Uber drivers in the US make $590 dollars per week working about 40 hours.

Now, if you increase the hours of work, you can impact the revenue positively.

I know some Uber drivers right here in the States generating over $500 in 2 to 3 days.

Some even earn as high as $500/day on really good days.

The point is, you can hardly go out to hustle as an Uber or a Lyft driver without earning some hundred bucks.

And for sure, it’s a way to make up to $500 dollars in a week either on the side or as a full-time thing.

10. Sell printables.

You’ll see stories of people making $10,000 dollars a month selling printables online.

It’s true, and they’re not making up these stories.

Selling printables online is one true way on how to make an extra $500 a week.

You just need to know how to design printables for almost nothing, and sell them online for a few dollars.

To get to $500/week, you’ll need to sell a lot of printables.

It’s upfront work because you’ve got to design some quantity of really appealing printables and resell them on places like Etsy, the Facebook Marketplace, Fiverr, Gumroad, and even Amazon.

Selling printables can be a profitable online business on the side, and it doesn’t take forever to learn how to create sellable printables.

11. Deliver groceries.

With Instacart, you can deliver groceries around town and get paid up to $20/hour with an average of $13 dollars per hour.

So, you can expect earnings with Instacart to be as low as $13, and higher than $20 per hour.

You just need to get batches and deliver them efficiently.

Plus, getting batches isn’t guaranteed with Instacart.

I mean, don’t expect to get loads and loads of them every time.

Sometimes, it’s crickets.

And that’s why it’s a good idea to work with multiple platforms providing similar services.

If one’s not offering you a gig, you can check out the others and that’s how you can be regularly on the run (to make sure every single hour counts).

12. Deliver products for Amazon.

Amazon isn’t just an ecommerce business, it’s an empire.

And it has several firms under its umbrella.

One of such is Amazon Flex.

Basically, with this service, you’re able to make money by helping Amazon deliver products or orders to customers around the city.

You can get paid up to $25 dollars per hour.

It could be lower for some gigs, but the all-time high for per hour payment settles around $25 dollars.

Now, you just need to work 4 hours, 5 days a week to get $500 dollars.

If you’re getting paid as low as $18/hour, then you can work more hours to make more money.

How about working 7 hours for 5 days in a week.

That’s $630 dollars in 5 days (or a week) if you’re getting paid $18/hour.

13. Rent out your space.

On Neighbor, you have the option to rent out your space.

So, if you’ve got a room in your apartment that you’re not making good use of, you can list it on Neighbor for rent.

Although you might not be making a full-time living with this, earning up to $500 bucks per week is attainable.

There are different contracts that generate income for you as per renting out your space.

Some clients will choose to rent for 24 hours and the longer they rent, the higher they pay.

Once you’re on the platform, you’ll definitely know what to do to make more money with the spaces you’ve got looming in emptiness.

14. Lease your apartment.

If you’ve got an apartment of your own, you can make an extra $500 a week by leasing it out on Airbnb.

The better the apartment, the more money you stand to make with every lease.

So, for a night, you could make up to $300 dollars.

You’re certainly not going to get deals like this every single day unless you have a couple of apartments; all well furnished and really nice.

But if you get people to lease your apartment twice a week at $300/client, then that’s already $600 in that week.

Plus, some clients will stay for as long as 3 days.

Sometimes, a week (if they really really like the apartment).

People rent their apartments out and live off the income full-time.

Yes, you could make so much money.

15. Rent out your RV.

Perhaps this is only applicable if you’ve got an RV that’s in shape.

You can put it to good use by leasing it out for more than $500 dollars.

Doing this 4 times a month is a staggering $2k/month.

And $500+/week.

The better your RV, the more orders you’ll get from clients willing to rent it for more money than the listing price.

You may want to invest some money into beautifying the RV so that it generates more money for you.

Where to lease your RV?

You can lease your RV on Outdoorsy, or RVShare.

While there are other places to rent out your RV or list it for people to lease, these two stand out and you’re definitely going to get more RV leasing offers from either of them.

Just leasing RVs in a month, there’s a possibility to generate an average income of $3,000 dollars.

Still depends on the kind of RV too.

16. Write for websites.

Right now, you can run off to Google to search for a list of websites to write for.

Some pay as high as $100/article.

So, if you’re a good writer, you can try your shots with websites that pay writers to write for them.

There are a ton of them and you should only spend your time writing for the most rated websites.

The trustworthy ones.

And not the ones that waste your time after turning down 50 articles you submit.

Moving on, it’s a possibility to generate or get paid up to $11,000 a month just by writing for websites across the internet.

And if you want to make an extra $500 dollars a week on the side, you can make this with just 5 articles (and I bet they wouldn’t take you 37 hours to write)

17. Do freelance writing.

You can either write for websites as a ghostwriter, or write for clients, individual clients, as a freelance writer to make $500/week.

This is very realistic, and freelance writing is one of the cheapest online businesses to start.

You can start right away if you’re good at writing. And there are tons of people out there looking for writers just like you.

Depending on how much you charge per word, it’s possible to earn up to $800/article.

If you charge $0.8/word, that’s $800 dollars per 1,000-word content.

Depending on your rates, you can earn high or earn low.

But it’s commonplace for freelance writers to earn an average of $5,724 per month (as observed and researched by Ziprecruiter).

To get started as a freelance writer, you can sign up for free on Fiverr right now.

18. Try out copywriting.

Copywriting is product writing.

And as a copywriter, you write to convince rather than to inform.

Your writings are more persuasive than informative.

However, this is what brands pay for.

And you can make $500 a week just by trying out your copywriting skills on freelance marketplaces like Upwork, ClearVoice, the Problogger job board, and Fiverr.

There are tons of jobs on these platforms for you, and you don’t have to be a super copywriter to make money off these gigs.

Plus, you can freely hone your copywriting skills with resources on the web.

19. Deliver food items.

Got a car or a scooter, or a bike?

Then you can deliver food items around your city for services like Doordash & UberEats.

There are other services, but these two control the most traffic and they pay pretty decently.

With Doordash or UberEats, you can expect to get paid $18/hour.

Working for 4 hours a day (8am to 12pm), you’d be making $507 every week (or in seven days).

You could make more.

But the average per hour pay rate is $18 dollars.

You can get paid as high as $25 dollars for some batches.

But I’d rather be conservative here.

Alternatively, with an average earning of $18/hour, you can work longer hours of the day to quickly reach $500 dollars.

This means that you’d be doing this full-time to get to $500/week.

And even more.

20. Programming.

Programming is a great skill.

And personally, I look forward to learning it myself before I’m 30 (and my brain cells begin to wither off slowly).

Truth is, if you’re a programmer or you’re good at writing codes (or coding things up), you can get gigs that could earn you up to $6,000 dollars a month.

That’s $1,500 every single week.

But let’s start from the grassroot here.

You can simply look for jobs on Craigslist, Fiverr, Toptal, or Indeed.

Remote jobs or gigs that pay a lot of money.

And depending on the size or the nature of the projects/gigs you’ll get, there’s a possibility to make $500/week.

Not passively, but as you complete every project.

If you want to make $500 a week as a programmer, then you can write up a tool, develop a web based software or a game or something that you can monetize and make money passively.

21. Online tutoring.

Do you know you can teach online on the side to make money?

And yes, it could be as much as $500 or $700 dollars a week.

If you’re good at teaching particularly English, you can register on websites like Qkid, Tutor.com, BookNote, and Vipkid can pay as high as $15/hour to tutors teaching online.

If you’re working up to 7 hours a day as a tutor online for any of these or for two (or more) of these companies, then you can earn a cumulative sum of $500+ every week.

If you know a lot about a particular subject, there are also companies that’ll pay you to teach their students.

22. Lawn mowing.

Mowing lawns doesn’t require you to have any skill, and it’s one way to make money quickly.

It’s not going to be passive income, and it won’t be life-changing money either.

But it can definitely amount to $500/week.

Or more.

So, you start by learning the basics of lawn mowing and how to do it more effectively.

Nothing technical.

And then you can look for lawn mowing gigs on Craigslist or on Google using the Google Job search.

There are a ton of other places to find jobs pertaining to mowing lawns, and then you get paid about $50 dollars per hour.

Earnings can be as high as $70/hour, and you’d just need to do 10 hours a week to be sure you’re above the $500/week income table.

The more gigs you get, the more money you’ll make.

But this isn’t something you can build your life on.

23. Landscaping.

If you have a lot of experience in this aspect, then this is for you. You already have the skill you need to make an extra $500 dollars a week.

Landscaping isn’t a passive income stream (oh! My love for passive income streams), but it can put food on the table big-time.

Plus, you can get paid as high as $100/hour if you’re a professional landscaper.

For starters, payment can be around $35/hour.

If the average is $50 bucks, then you’d need to work about 10 hours in a week designing gardens and transforming landscapes to earn $500 dollars. It’s realistic.

And you could make much more than an extra $500 dollars in a week.

The odds are… high.

How to Make an Extra $500 a Week in 23 Realistic Ways – Final Words.

In summary, some of the best ways on how to make an extra $500 a week include starting a blog of your own, delivering food items with UberEats or Doordash (and other services alike), copywriting, freelance writing, writing for websites, starting a YouTube channel, working as a freelance copywriter, dropshipping, launching your ecommerce business, trading financial markets online, selling photos online, selling printables (as a side hustle or full-time self-employed venture), ride-hailing, and delivering groceries.

You can also make an extra $500 dollars a week (online and offline) by leasing your apartment on Airbnb, renting out an extra space in your house, leasing your RV if you’ve got one, proofreading, designing graphics, coding/programming, and tutoring online.