7 Best Jobs that Pay $100k a Year without a Degree

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For $100k a year without a degree?? I’d quit my day job even if I didn’t hate it, stay indoors drinking soda and focusing on whatever I’m doing online to earn so much money. If I don’t do that, I’d be traveling from one city to another, one country to the other, working in space and watching Netflix for relaxation. 

Well, if I don’t do that… I’d be looking for more ways to make more money, double my online portfolio of passive income, and get in touch with some of the biggest dogs in the game online just to be famous and have a bunch of followers whose emotions I can leverage on whenever I have something new to sell or have them look at. Well, that’s me. 

What about you? What would you do if you were earning $100k a year working online? It’s really something to think about because $100k a year isn’t a big deal and you can get there in just about one year working consistently online. 

Recommended: 10 Best Jobs that Pay £1,000 a Week in the UK

How? That’s the question I’ll demystify right in this post as I share realistic online jobs that pay well up to $100k a year. 

Just before I spill another word, making $100k a year without a degree is attainable, but it doesn’t make it easy anyway. Everything takes time. In fact, time is one of the biggest factors when it comes to building wealth systems from scratch. 

Like you read on this blog’s headline, $10k a month is $120k a year. So I’m not even shooting for $100k. And I’m not hoping to hit $120k in 12 months. I wish. Truth is, you can make money online for real. And $100k gives you a lot of freedom (unless you just love the pressure and redundancy that comes with a 9 to 5). 

If you scrutinize my opinions on this blog, you’ll discover I’m anti-9-to-5. That’s basically because after 4 years of schooling and 1 years of mandatory service to the country, no 9 to 5 I got would pay a month’s expenditure in college for me. 

Plus, working as an employee means you want to work for a very long time before getting rich. 

But a lot of people don’t work that long and a bunch of employees are young and rich. 

True. You don’t want to talk down that ladder to see if your story would flow in the same spirit. 

Point is: you can make money online, and you just have to participate in building passive income online the right way – not by taking surveys or joining Swagbucks and Inbox Dollar. They’re great companies that won’t repay you a great cash reward for your time and effort. 

Realistically, here are 7 self-employed online jobs that pay $100k a year without a degree from college. 

7 Best Jobs that Pay $100k a Year without a Degree. 

1. Blogging profitably. 

Blogging is one of the best online jobs that pay $100k a year without a degree. You certainly don’t have to go to college to build a blog, and with time, you can grow your blog from whatever stage to $100k per year. 

In five minutes, you can set up a blog and start grinding. It’s all about adding value and putting in your best to whatever you’re doing with the blog. 

In this simple guide, I cover everything you need to know about starting a blog and building it to make money. 

Read the simple blogging guide here. 

How to make $100k a year blogging?

To make $100k blogging, you need to stick with a strategy that really works and be consistent with it. There are three ways to make life-changing money with a blog. 

The first way is to target a lot of low competition high search volume keywords that you can rank for and get a lot of traffic. The second way is to target a few high competitive high search volume affiliate product keywords, create ultra quality content around them and build authority by guest posting to rank for them. The third is to target low competition affiliate keywords with low search volume or high search volume, and create ultra-high quality contents around them. 

Whichever approach you choose, you can definitely hit $100k a month with them if you’re consistent enough. It won’t take years to reach $100k a month especially if you’re outsourcing content production and guest blogging while you focus on outreach for guest posts, keyword research and creating killer courses to sell. 

But if you’re a standalone blogger like me with no cash to spend on content creation, then it could take a while. 

2. Airbnb host. 

On Airbnb, you make money by simply leasing your apartment out to strangers. So if you’re an apartment owner, you have an edge here already. You can register for a free account on Airbnb, and start uploading photos of your apartments for people to lease. 

Doing this in a year can get you to $100k even without having a bachelor’s degree or going to the university. 

How to make $100k a year on Airbnb?

To make $100k a year as an Airbnb host means you’ll be earning approximately $300 a day, or $2,000 a week. You can get to this feat with one or two good apartments and that’s if you get visitors to lease them every single day. It’s easy if your apartment is topnotch. 

People will pay more, up to $500 per night, and you’ll definitely surpass $100k a year if you’re consistently leasing apartments out like this. The best investment would be to get and renovate one cool apartment so it’s worth a lot of money per night. 

You can stuff it with immovable electronics, and basic things people need to have fun in a home. If it’s got a swimming pool, a dinning, kitchen, TV, musical & gym equipments, chandeliers, and a good smell, it’ll definitely be worth $500 per night, earning you about $156k in 312 working days. 

3. Affiliate marketing. 

Affiliate marketing is one of the many things you can do online to make money without having to spend a dime. And you don’t have to go to college to get started. 

With affiliate marketing, you refer products to people and get paid doing just that. One of the best ways to start affiliate marketing right away is to set up a blog and write about different products people are searching for. 

Get your articles to rank on Google, slap in affiliate links and wait out the result while you keep adding great content. 

How to make $100k a year with affiliate marketing?

If you want to make $100k a year as an affiliate marketer, then you need to do it the right way. You need to forget about spamming forums and stashing affiliate links everywhere you see vacant on the web. 

As an affiliate marketer, you make tons of money by appearing in the right places where your customers go to. 

Places like Google when they want to buy a product, YouTube when they want to watch a review or see the specs of a product, and social media pages when they’re so in love with a product that they learn about the product updates and news releases. I’ll decipher all three strategies even further. 

Google. 

The way to appear on Google traditionally is with a blog. Since you’re coming in as an affiliate marketer or a middle man, then it’s best to use a niche blog. People want to know about products and make informed decisions by reading about them. 

You can create a niche blog, write about the products you promote and add affiliate links to them for users to click-through to the sales page. It’s easy to rank for affiliate keywords if you’re in a niche with new products every time. 

If you’re the first to write about products nobody has written about, you can get traffic to your site and make money, even with 100 visitors. Add more product-oriented content in the form of reviews, lists, and case studies. 

YouTube. 

YouTube is a free go. So, to make money as an affiliate marketer utilizing YouTube, you can create a niche YouTube channel just about your products or the products you’re promoting. 

If it’s tech, you can create review videos about different phone or PC models, brands, and their specs like the famous MKBHD. The key to steady growth on YouTube is to create engaging content that people watch till the end. 

It scores your videos a good engagement rate, and suggests to YouTube that your videos are great, satisfying user intent. Stay consistent with creating better reviews content on YouTube, and wait it out for a spike. 

Social media. 

On social media platforms like Facebook, you want to create pages for a product you’re promoting. This means sticking to one product as you can’t promote a lot of products on one page. It’ll be weird and confusing. 

So, create a social media fan page for a product you’re promoting, promote your social media page to reach more people and regularly post engaging stuff about the product on your page. 

You can do this consistently, but you’ll need to spend a ton of money to reach more people faster. If you don’t have the cash to spend on running ads, then you’ll need to beckon on social media optimization as a leverage to reach more people organically, which would mean more exposure and more sales. 

To avoid any wasted effort, always attach your affiliate link somewhere around your social media posts for easy click-throughs to the sales page. 

4. YouTube. 

It’s a free world. And so is YouTube – a free to start video streaming and sharing platform that allows you to upload great video content, make money, build a community, and live life doing just that. 

Creating a YouTube channel is totally free. And you can make up to $100k a year from this. It’s not going to happen overnight, or in the next 5 months or even the next 1 year. But with time, you’ll definitely see little spikes and momentum buildups. 

How to make $100k a year from a YouTube channel?

Whatever niche you’re into with your YouTube channel, create better content. Have you seen suggested videos and shorts on YouTube? They don’t pay YouTube to show videos in that space most of the time. 

YouTube just suggests videos it thinks you’d like simply because they’re engaging and are usually watched till the end. So if you want to make $100k a year with a YouTube channel, you need to focus on a niche, create great contents for a long time and don’t rush the process. 

5. Dropshipping. 

By dropshipping, it’s easy to make money. It’s like running a business on top of another established business. 

What’s dropshipping? 

It’s simply building an ecommerce store that shadows another ecommerce store. So, you start an ecommerce website, connect it to another ecommerce store, promote your store to get customers. 

When a customer places an order in your store, the order flows directly to the other ecommerce store and they handle the shipping. While the other ecommerce store handles shipping, you handle customer support, refunds, and every other risk because the customers shop in your store. 

That said, you don’t need a degree to start dropshipping today. And you don’t need to write a line of code to get started. With Shopify.com, it takes just about 20 minutes to set up your store. 

How to make $100k a year dropshipping?

$100k a year dropshipping is attainable. This means you’ll need to make about $274 daily from your dropshipping store. While earning a stable $10 to $50 daily from a dropshipping store is no big deal, $274 daily is a dream come true. 

To reach this feat, you’ll need to constantly promote your dropshipping store or utilize content marketing to drive traffic, and sales. 

If you’re settling for just one niche like furniture or toys, then you want to consistently publish content around your niche products to drive traffic and increase sales. 

To do this, you’ll need to add a blog to your dropshipping store. You can also monetize your store with ad networks like Google Adsense, AdThrive, Ezoic or Mediavine in the long run to quickly hit $274/day. 

6. Course sales. 

If you’re passionate about something and you can teach the world about it, then creating a course is one of the many things you can do to make money without going to college or bagging a professional degree. 

By selling courses online, you can build your authority in that field, and still generate passive income. But your courses must have cutting-edge value, and be worth paying for. 

How to make $100k a year selling your own courses?

To make $100k a year selling courses, your course need to be worth selling. If you’re creating a course to sell, it’s going to be out there and you can change whatever’s in it when people start buying it. 

You want to make sure it’s fully packed and has the best quality. Give it your best shot, and refrain from creating a crash course for a real sellable course. 

If your course is great, influencers will write a case study about it and recommend it to their audience = more sales = more money. 

But if it’s quack, you’ll see the feedback from readers on review websites. Don’t aim for $100k a year, aim for the best value you can give out. It takes time to write a great course. And by time I mean, months. 

Recommended: 7 Best Jobs that Pay $100k a Year without a Bachelor’s Degree

7. Freelance writing. 

It’s free to start freelance writing, and it’s one of the many self-employed jobs that pay $100k a year without a degree. I mean, all you need to do as a writer is to sign up on Upwork, and start hunting for freelance jobs. 

On Upwork, you don’t even need to search. They serve up work for you if you configure your profile and opt in for Upwork to serve jobs to you. If you’re a good writer, you’ll make a lot of money freelancing. 

I’m not saying $100k a year comes to every freelancer in the first year or second year. I’m saying, you could make $100k a year freelancing in the long run. The more you do it, the better you get at it. And the more high-profile clients you get to work with. 

How to make $100k a year freelance writing?

If you can get gigs frequently as a freelance writer, then $100k a year is certain. By frequently, I mean daily. Or several high paying gigs in a month. 

Like a $5k gig from a topnotch client in a week. The odds of reaching $100k a year doing petty $40 gigs on Upwork are high. That said, you want to work for the best clients or start up a freelance writing agency to shoulder multiple $40 products in a week. 

With a freelance writing agency, you can get much more than 50 jobs in a week. You certainly won’t be the only one writing or creating content unless you have flash fingers. 

You’ll need to promote your agency to reach more people, eyeballs, which means more projects on the way. With a writing agency, your plans won’t be $40 of course. 

You want to get paid more for your work as you deliver the best quality, have names on your payroll, and want clients to see your brand as a quality name. The higher your plans, the more professional you seem in the eyes of clients. 

They’re expecting the best job, you give it to them. You work with the best writers even if you’re not a writer yourself to deliver the best content for clients. With a least plan of $100/project, that’s $3,000 a week. And $12k a month. 

Going the cold pitching way: 

With cold pitching, you can definitely make $100k a year. It takes time to hit the right client via cold pitching, but when it happens, some clients can pay as high as $2,000 for a single well-researched content you deliver. 

If they love your work, they can hire you to keep writing their contents. Best part is, you can get multiple high-paying clients from cold pitching. 

7 Best Jobs that Pay $100k a Year without a Degree – Final Words. 

Without going to college or becoming a sales rep for a moderately organized firm, you can make $100k working online. With time and patience on your path, you’ll hit it. Time is a factor, but if time wallows without you getting to work at all, nothing changes. 

I’m preaching against the evil ways to make cents online and also campaigning for the best ways to make money online up to $100k a year without a degree. 

By starting a niche blog, a YouTube channel, or rendering freelance services, you can truly build passive income online. Certainly not overnight. 

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