Realistically, it’s possible to make money working from home or working self-employed. And when I talk about making money in this sense, I’m not talking about some pitiable $100/month income.
I’m talking about real money, like $100k/month or a million dollars a year without having to work a salary job. While there are a few great salary jobs that pay $1 million dollars a year, they’ll consume your time, your strength, and require some academic degree to begin with.
Recommended: How to Make $170 Dollars Fast: 10 Realistic Ways
Before I type any more text, what does it mean to make $1 million dollars a year working as a self-employed or working from home?
This means, you’ll be making approximately $84k a month, $21k a week or every 7 days, and $2,800 a day. So to become a millionaire in a year, you need to find a job, start a side hustle or a self-employed job that pays an estimated $2,800 a day consistently.
Sounds easy now right? $1 million dollars isn’t a lot of money after all.
Unless it is.
The good news is that this is possible and you can make it work out starting from today, or this moment. Right on this page, I’ll share 12 of the best self-employed jobs online and offline that can generate up to $1 million dollars a year, and even more money.
Your success is dependent on whatever it is you do, and how you do it. These self-employed jobs can turn your life around for the better, and they’re the most realistic self-employed jobs that pay a lot of money (if you put in the work).
If you’re looking to make $1 million dollars a year, then self-employed jobs are the kind of jobs you should delve into right now.
There’s no better time than now.
12 Best Jobs that Pay $1 Million Dollars a Year
Blogging
In the 2020s, one of the most stable online businesses you can start up is a blog. It costs very little and can give back very much in the long run. Imagine how a lot of people, blog owners, earn upwards of $100k/month blogging.
That’s already more than $1 million dollars a year. If you want a job that pays $1 million, then blogging is a great option on the grand list. By starting a blog, you’re creating a platform to air your intelligence, build a community, and generate passive income.
And one of the ways to not make a cent from blogging is starting a blog without knowing what to do with it. Well, that was me exactly a year ago at the time of this writing.
I started this blog and for the first year, I attempted to build links, wrote some guest posts, worked my 9 to 5, but didn’t really ask what the blog was all about. I was consumed by pressure and it led me to nothingness in 365 days. Blogging a month and earning $3.07 in my first real month of blogging, that Cookie money rekindled my passion.
Truth is, you can generate up to $200k a month blogging, or $2 a month blogging. It depends on how much effort you’re willing to put into your blog.
How to make $1 million dollars a year blogging?
$1 million dollars blogging won’t likely happen in a year or even two, it depends on how much work you put into it. A ridiculous amount of work is required to build any business from scratch to generate five, six, and even seven figure income.
Here are the steps to take to build a blog to $1 million dollars a year.
Choose a niche
So, to not get confused with a lot of topics to create content around later, take some time to think about a niche. The niche is basically the focus of your blog, or what your blog will be about.
I strongly recommend you choose a niche not because it’s your hobby, but because it has enough interested and engaging audience in the market. You want to choose a niche that can make you affiliate revenue by selling products and ad revenue by attracting a lot of visitors.
If you can’t find a good niche, choose from this list of profitable blog niches and with time, you’ll fall in love with them (after earning your first $100 bucks).
Here’s the list:
- Tech
- Software
- Food
- Lifestyle
- Health & Wellness
- Finance
- Insurance
- Law
- Pets
- Parenting
- Business & Entrepreneurship
- Make Money Online
- Education & College
These are some of the highest earning niches in the 2020s, and if you join an ad network, you could earn up to $10 per click in some of these niches.
RPM (or cost per 1k views) can soar to $20 in some subcategory niches still under these parent niches. Once you’ve settled for a niche, move on to getting your blog online.
Get your blog online
It takes just about 5 minutes to get your blog online and live. To get started, go to Namecheap.com, and select a plan as it meets your budget. It costs just $29/year to get online with Namecheap.
Identify high traffic product keywords in your niche
In your niche, there are new and emerging products or old products that really haven’t been reviewed. You want to identify these products, review them thoroughly and add a call-to-action button for visitors to buy them. It’s that easy.
There are products getting into the market daily, and if you’re the first to review them, you can make money off affiliate sales.
Find low competition keywords
If you’re like me, I hate competition. This way, you want to rank for keywords in your niche that people aren’t writing about, or writing about a lot. These keywords are low competition keywords and they get some search volume every month.
Writing great content on a lot of them can quickly turn the traffic switch on for your blog. And one best way to get juicy keywords like these is to use a keyword research tool like Ahrefs. It’s a premium research tool and it’s super cool.
You can just type a word or two in your niche, and it pulls up a long list of keywords people actually search for along with the competition level (indicated in the tool as KD), and the search volume.
So, if you get up to 500 of these keywords and you’re able to rank for all of them, it won’t be easy, but that’s over 400 visitors in a day. Do that over and over and by the time you’ve written 2,000 articles, your blog traffic and authority must have soared.
Keep in mind that the more traffic you get, the more people will link to your blog. And the more links you get, the more high volume keywords you’re able to rank for, which means more traffic.
So, allow me to cruise on this strategy for a while until I’m confident enough to think about a world where my blog outranks these three giant blogs.
Create ultra-high quality contents
Quality content is king. So after identifying product keywords or low competition keywords, you want to create content around these keywords so you can rank, make money from ads and affiliate sales.
It’s the hardest process when it comes to blogging, but if you can outsource this task, it’s better for you. If you can fork out the money to pay writers every time, it’s a great idea.
How many words should I write per article for SEO?
Word Count isn’t a ranking factor, but from experience it matters a lot. To be on a safer side, create contents above 1,000 words every time. If you’re not able to write something sensible in this word count, keep it at 1,000 words.
Take my word and the words of a bunch of SEO experts like Neil Patel and Brian Dean who believe longer articles perform better in search.
Unless you want to create content for ranking alone, you can create longer articles with the intention to truly help your viewers or teach them. I’m not a great writer, you can tell from how I fling my punctuation all over the place and use improper words where I’m not supposed to (like I just did).
But then, I’m able to naturally write longer pieces of content like this one (over 5,500 words) just by writing and filling the blank spaces in my content skeleton or format.
Write guest posts
From time to time, write guest posts. Or entirely skip this part if you’re targeting 5,000 low competition keywords.
But still, writing guest posts and getting links back to your blog is a great (and the most genuine) way to build links to your blog, and gain exposure as an authority in the niche (even if you’re not).
Insert affiliate links
After writing reviews and list articles, you want to make sure you’re getting paid affiliate revenue when people click on a link to buy something.
So, you want to replace normal call-to-action links with affiliate links by signing up for affiliate programs with the manufacturers or sellers of the products you recommend, or review.
Join an ad network
The only ad network I can truly recommend right now is Mediavine. I’m running on Adsense at the time of this writing, that’s because I’m nowhere close to 50k sessions per month (which is the current traffic requirement for new Mediavine publishers).
By joining an ad network like Mediavine, you can make money from direct traffic in addition to affiliate commissions.
Repeat the process from step 3 to 6
Yes, the process from where you start researching keywords, creating content to inserting affiliate links. Repeat the process over and over again, sit back patiently and watch it grow.
You’re most likely not going to make $1 million dollars blogging in your first year, but you’ll hit the mark eventually as your blog grows.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is an easy concept to understand. You recommend products to people and get a commission from qualifying sales.
The good thing about affiliate marketing is that you can start without having a dime. It’s simple to get started, and it’s one of the best self-employed jobs that pay $1 million dollars a year in the 2020s.
How to make $1 million dollars a year from affiliate marketing?
Pick a niche
First of all, you want to pick a niche and just stay there.
Decide what category of products you’ll promote and these products better be the kind that has a lot of people running online to buy them.
Choose a stable platform
When it comes to affiliate marketing, you can choose to start a blog, a YouTube channel or a social media page. You just need a place to pull traffic and send people off to buy products.
A stable platform like a niche blog, social media page or a YouTube channel is the best place to pull in visitors. That’s where you’ll basically be reviewing affiliate products. I recommend starting a niche blog and later create a YouTube channel to review products.
With a niche blog, it’s easier to pull relevant traffic and make money with a few visitors. This is because the people who land on your blog from search engines actually want to buy something.
You write about new products in a niche, people search for them, they see your blog, read through your reviews and decide to make a purchase.
Create reviews and list contents
After choosing a niche and settling for a platform, you want to write about products in the form of reviews and lists. So let’s say you’re in the food niche, you can review the best dishwashers or write a list of the best dishwashers and drop call-to-action buttons for people to buy them.
After having a couple of blog posts, you can go on to sign up as an affiliate marketer with Amazon or any other company selling the products you reviewed.
Promote your platform (if you have to)
Whether it’s a blog or a YouTube channel, you need more traffic and more commissions to make money with affiliate marketing. But you don’t really have to promote these platforms.
For an affiliate social media page, the best way to get massive traffic in a short span of time is usually to promote your page. A niche blog or a YouTube channel will grow naturally unless you want to fuel their growth by promoting them on social media.
But a social media page takes longer to get natural likes and followers.
Stay consistent
To see massive results, stay consistent. It takes consistency to build any form of business. Consistently create reviews, videos, and upload content on your affiliate social media page.
Ecommerce
Ecommerce is one of the many things you can do online to make $1 million dollars a year. It’s all about building an online store, purchasing inventory, and selling your products online. Now when it comes to ecommerce, you can sell physical and digital products.
It’s really up to you. If you have a course or a piece of software that helps or you’re a musician, you can sell your stuff online in your store (or ecommerce store).
How to make $1 million dollars a year in ecommerce?
Select your desired product category
To become really successful in the ecommerce business, you need to focus on one product or a series of related products.
You can focus on shoes, wristwatches, necklaces, or knives. Just have a product in mind that you’d like to sell on your ecommerce store.
Get the inventory
Next up, get the items.
You handle the shipping, customer service and many more things just like Amazon runs it. You’re the Amazon here, and everything about orders and deliveries, you manage them.
So, after clearly defining the product category you want to trade on your ecommerce store, acquire lots of them (or a small quantity) to test-run your store.
Build your ecommerce store
Now that you’ve got the inventory, it’s time to go online. Simple thing, you don’t need to write a boatload of codes to build an ecommerce store. You can simply do this on Bigcommerce.com, and have a full-fledged ecommerce store set up in a matter of minutes.
On Bigcommerce, you can build an online store just like Amazon from start to finish with Bigcommerce’s advance features just by clicking in what you want and don’t want. So, head straight to Bigcommerce now to get an account.
Promote your store
Once your store is all set, you want to start processing orders almost instantly with everything intact. To get quick traffic, promote your store on social media and search engines like Google.
Alternatively, if you don’t have enough money to spend on ads, you can simply create a blog alongside your blog and drive natural traffic to your ecommerce store by fueling the ecommerce blog with relevant high quality contents (usually about the products you sell).
Dropshipping
This isn’t a new business model on the web today, and it has been around for some time.
If you’re willing to make $1 million dollars a year on the internet in the 2020s, dropshipping is one of the few businesses you can start on the side (while you work your full-time job). It’s a business with procedures you can automate.
What’s dropshipping?
It’s simple.
Dropshipping is playing the role of a middle man with the help of an online store we’d be calling the dropshipping store. So you’re basically in the middle here between a buyer and an actual ecommerce store online, but the buyer doesn’t know this.
And may never will. Dropshipping gives you the privilege of hosting a store online without having to deal with packaging, shipping, and inventory.
To start a dropshipping store today, all you need to do is go to Shopify, select a plan according to your budget, and get on with designing your dropshipping store.
No codes. No scripts.
How to make $1 million dollars a year dropshipping?
Dropshipping stores are all over the place today on the web, and to stand out you need to learn all you can. Before launching a dropshipping store, you want to know how dropshipping truly works. You can’t get into any line of business without acquiring the relevant knowledge you need to excel.
Next up, you want to choose a niche and focus on that niche. This is to ensure that your store isn’t all over the place with confusing product categories and all of that. You want your customers to know your store for one product, or a set of related products.
To make $1 million dollars a year as a dropshipper, you’ll need to promote your dropshipping store endlessly through social media paid ads, and frequently update your store with new products.
You also want to partner with social media influencers, have them promote your store to reach more people which translates to more orders and more money.
Trading Financial Markets
By trading the financial markets, you can make up to $1 million dollars a year. But it’s not all so easy. You’ll need to master the art of trading, and also execute trades using strategies with a higher win rate.
One more thing, if you’re looking at $1 million a year, then your trading asset must be robust from the start. This means you need to trade with a lot of money, and not just $10k. It’ll cost you money to make more money in the financial markets.
How to make $1 million dollars a year trading the financial markets?
Learn to trade
Learning to trade is the first thing you need to do. I mean, how can you make money without ever knowing what you’re unto?
It’s a fool’s errand.
Stick to a winning strategy
By mixing a lot of strategies in your trades, you end up losing most, if not all, of what you’ve gained in the past.
You want to win every time, and it’s possible. Stick with whatever trading strategy works for you.
Prioritize risk management
Risk is a norm in every business, and the financial markets aren’t an exemption to this business norm. Risk management is primal to trading successfully.
Incorporating risk management into your trading strategy ensures you don’t blow up your entire account when the market runs against you.
Trade with more liquidity
You want to make $1 million dollars a year, and if that’s true, you’ll need to trade with more money.
Don’t expect to make a million in a year trading with $1k, well unless you enter into a trade that booms 10,000%.
Understand the market and know yours
Every market isn’t the same. I know this personally from trading multiple options on Pocket Option one time. But it didn’t end well.
While my strategy made me gain in one market consistently, I made losses with the same strategy on other markets. So, stick to a market you understand.
Website Flipping
Website flipping is what you do when you sell a website for more money than you got it or built it.
So, if you bought a website for around $50,400 and sold it at $68,200, you keep a profit of $17,800. That’s website flipping in the most simple sense (if that makes sense). Interestingly, people have sold websites for more than twice the buying price, and are still on to it.
How to make $1 million dollars a year from flipping websites?
To make a million dollars flipping websites, you have three options to explore:
First option:
You can buy a growing blog with some authority and contents, build it to become more credible with more quality contents and a higher authority, and then resell it for profit.
This way, if you bought a website for $10k, you should be able to resell it for $50k after three months of intense work on it.
Second option:
Start a brand new blog, build it by ranking for several key terms and getting traffic to it. A lot of traffic. Afterwards, you can sell it for 50 times your initial investment on the blog. So, it’ll cost you around $29 a year to start a new blog on Namecheap.
After 6 months of working (and not ignoring the blog like I did to this one for a whole year), selling it on Flippa for around $50k shouldn’t be a problem.
You could sell it for $10k, $20k or even less. The goal is to make profit and amass $1 million by the end of the year.
To reach this goal fast, you want to focus entirely on building just one blog and getting a ton of traffic, like 20k daily views, to it. A blog with this much traffic will definitely sell for over a million especially if there’s affiliate links in the right places and an ad network account.
Third option:
You’re definitely going to make a million dollars within a year with this option. It’s all about buying an already established blog from a seller and reselling it for a higher bid. You can do this 20 times in a year and make over $1 million in the space of time. So let’s say you get a blog or a website for around $300k, you can resell it for $350k.
The code is to look for authority websites on Flippa, buy them, build them some more and resell them for a much higher price. It’s easy to drive more traffic to a blog with a high ranking strength already.
YouTube
One of many self-employed jobs that pay $1 million dollars a year is YouTube, and it’s free to start. Yes it pays $1 million and even more in a year if you’re consistent, but it almost never happens in the first year.
Google owns YouTube, and almost the same algorithm runs on both platforms for new accounts (a blog and a YouTube channel) respectively. So if you’re starting a new blog or a new YouTube channel, things may not go so well in the first year.
That’s pretty normal. After that, you can expect to see spikes in the second or third year if you’re consistent.
How to make $1 million dollars a year as a YouTuber?
To make a million dollars with a YouTube channel, you can either personalize your YouTube channel or make it a cash cow. Here’s where I talk more about these ideas.
Personalized channel:
This means making your YouTube channel all about you.
If you’re going to be talking about products, it’s you in front of the camera and the world gets to see your face, and know you for who you are. A popular personalized channel is the one by Prince E A.
YouTube Cash cow:
A YouTube cash cow exists to make money, but they offer some value along the way consistently. Most of the videos are produced in an automated procedure that leaves the owner with more time and profit.
A great example of a YouTube cash cow channel is Young Entrepreneurs Forum. So, you can create any kind of YouTube channel and raise it to generate a lot of money. First of all, you want to pick a niche or something to make videos around.
It could be a product, a service or just giving random tips and information to people searching for them on YouTube. Then decide if you want to get in front of the camera or make it a cash cow.
I recommend getting in front of the camera as your viewers get to know you, and you’re more likely to spike more engagement just by being real. Lastly, create videos consistently and make sure you’re really adding value and not just upping your video count. Do this for the next 6 months, and keep at it.
Airbnb Host
On Airbnb, you make money by leasing out vacant apartments to strangers around town. So, if you’ve got an apartment and it’s vacant, you can easily lease it out on Airbnb and get paid per night up to $100 bucks.
How to make $1 million dollars a year as an Airbnb host?
To make $1 million dollars a year from Airbnb, you need to have a lot of apartments under your umbrella.
If you don’t have any of your own, you can talk with multiple apartment owners and come to an agreed conclusion on how you rent out their apartments and pay them weekly or monthly. With one apartment earning you $200 a day at least, that’s $2,000 with 9 other apartments.
So, let’s say you lease these apartments out to different or the same people everyday, that’s $60k in a month. While I’m using $200 as a base revenue you can get paid per apartment, depending on factors like convenience and location, you can earn significantly higher per apartment.
$60k in a year leaves you with $720k in the first year. Realistically, you may not make half of this figure with Airbnb in the first year.
It’ll take time to find willing apartment owners who want to lease their apartment for a weekly pay, and to also get customers to know you on Airbnb as a reliable apartment host. So, with time, you should be able to get your own apartments and make more money by putting them up for lease.
4 Off-the-web Jobs that Pay $1 Million Dollars a Year
Catering
If you’re great at cooking and you possess culinary skills like no one else, then you can make a million dollars in a year, but not instantly.
You know the strategy – to generate an average of $3k daily lead you to $1 million dollars a year in gross earnings. So, with the competition out there, how can you stand out and become a millionaire caterer? You don’t have to do everything yourself.
How to make $1 million dollars a year catering?
In isolation, no one knows about what you do even if you’re the best cook in the universe. That’s the case. So, you want to reach out, go online and notify event centers of your services.
You can also search for catering gigs near you on Google and seize the best opportunity online. Having a social media page gives you a platform to reach more people on the internet. Post your works online, and make it easy for people to contact you.
Business Owner
As a business owner, maybe you’re not going to make $1 million in the first year, but it’s a realistic goal after the first year.
Whatever business you start up, have it in mind that it’s not a rosy path to trundle. Many small businesses remain small for the first decade, a lot of them crumble. The competition is insane in almost every line of business nowadays, but you can break through.
How to make $1 million dollars a year as a business owner?
To make $1 million dollars a year with your business, you’ll need to find a way to make $3k daily in gross profit. And here are some realistic ways to get there (with time and not overnight).
Start from a favorable location
I run a mini business that has a lot to do with cash and spending right now.
And for this business to take a different shape, I had to relocate to a place that doesn’t look like I’m stuck under a rock (where no one sees me). For a business to succeed, it must be situated in the most favorable location possible.
Study the competition
After getting the right location for my business, I studied my competitors and found how they don’t open their stores before 7:00 am.
New goal! I started opening by 6:33 am, sometimes a little bit late.
But I’m able to seize the earliest deals before they arrive. Look for what your competitors aren’t getting right, and try to be the most unique. Don’t copy them especially when you don’t have to.
Strive for perfection
Whatever line of business you’re into, incorporate perfect into your routine. Everything worth doing is worth doing well.
Prioritize value
Put value over profit. In the long run, the profit will bring back so much profit and you’ll be grateful for it.
Elevate customer satisfaction and safety above your personal goals. This will make it even easy for you to achieve your goals because you’re in business to serve, not to be served.
Go online
Take your business online.
If you’re into buying and selling, build an ecommerce store with Shopify and make it easy for customers around your city or from anywhere in the world to buy from your store. It’s one of the best ways to go global and appreciate the good of the web.
Real Estate
Real estate deals with properties, and you can make a couple hundred bucks by just playing the role of an agent even if you have zero dollars.
As a real estate agent, you can flip houses for profit, make gains from selling a property at a higher price from the listing price, or keep a mega commission from referring a buyer to a seller.
How to make $1 million dollars a year in real estate?
To make a million dollars as a real estate agent is easy if you already have a million dollars. This way, you can quickly get into the business of flipping houses and selling properties for profit. You can also acquire properties and sell them for twice the initial value in the next 440 days. But as a starter, making $1 million dollars a year won’t come in handy. It’ll take some time.
But you can start by becoming a house rental agent, property rental agent, and a real estate agent who connects buyers to sellers or real properties.
Recommended: 8 Best Jobs that Pay $10,000 a Week
Book Authoring
If you’re passionate about something or you’re an expert in a field, then you can write a book about it.
Before writing a book that generates $1 million a year in sales, you want to make sure you have something rare – stuff almost nobody else has in spades. It’ll cost you money, time, and a great deal of work to publish a bestselling work in any field.
How to make $1 million dollars a year as an author?
Earning a million dollars as an author is relative to how famous you are outside of your career as an author.
Are you a skilled engineer, or a professor in medicine?
Your influence in a particular field or area can drive thousands of sales to a book you write or a course you sell online. Here’s what to do to make a million dollars as an author:
Become an expert
Becoming an expert in an area like finance, medicine or business will go a long way to tell your audience you’re credible enough to write a book in the first place.
Again, it’s easy to get more sales with your name already trending as an expert in the field.
Work with successful people
By working with successful people in your field, you broaden your knowledge and put your name in the lips of people capable enough to amplify your career.
You also tap into the influence of these people over time and get a large chunk of their fans to know your name.
Get interviewed
Landing interviews on media outlets and blogs is also a way to get exposure as an expert, and get your views out there. With more frequent interviews, you become a household name – which is good for business.
Create a strong social media presence
To make a million dollars, you need to tap into the online world where most of your fans spend their time.
Create a social media page, and don’t create too many of them. You want to focus on one or two, like Instagram and YouTube where it’s easy to influence your followers and have them do your bidding.
Write the book
The process of writing the book involves rigorous research, editing, proofreading, fact-checking, and illustrating, and designing.
A lot goes into the actual process of writing other than just literally writing. It could take months to write a single book worth a million dollars, and that’s because the compatibility and flow of every line counts.
Publish it online
Have a soft copy or online version of your book so it’s easy for fans abroad to simply download it especially if they can’t wait the shipping delay.
So, build a platform where people visit to buy your books. You’ll definitely record thousands of sales within a short period of time.
Promote your book
Promotion is one thing you want to do for a very long time until there’s no more need to promote your work.
In the real sense, for the rest of your life, you’ll need to promote whatever you produce to get more sales. You revise, edit, republish, and keep promoting.
12 Best Jobs that Pay $1 Million Dollars a Year – Summary
All of the jobs on this list can make you a lot of money, up to $1 million dollars a year, but it’s dependent on you. The key to wealth is in your hands. If you joke with these jobs and make the wrong decision every time (decisions like watching Netflix over outreach for your business and creating content), welcome to the club of business owners and entrepreneurs who’ll fail over and over again.
But if you focus entirely with intimidating goals to break through, then you can easily make a ton of money from any of these self-employed jobs online and offline. You can start up and focus on one or start a couple of them and build them over the years.
For example you can venture into catering and start a catering or food blog to teach people your magic recipe, or start a dropshipping store to sell kitchen utensils and equipment.
Or an ecommerce store to sell your magic recipes for every snack or delicacy. There’s no limit to how creative you can get with a mix of these self-employed jobs. In the end, you’ll be richer.