If you don’t have a degree, but you want to get a job that pays as high as $35k a year without a degree, then you’re on the right page. This article explores a list of self-employed jobs that pay $35k a year without a degree. It’s really possible to make a lot of money without going to college or bagging a degree.
And while I’m not a big fan of going to college or having a degree to become successful in life, my school of thought is empowered by now businessmen and entrepreneurs flood Forbes’ billionaires list.
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And if you check again, the 30 under 30 for Forbes is covered not by employees, but young people doing great things other than working as employees who depend on their degree to earn a living. You can end up there on the list too (if you’re not way over 30).
Without further ado, here are 12 of the best jobs that pay $35k a year without a degree.
That’s like $2,900+ every month.
Very realistic.
12 Best Jobs that Pay $35k a Year without a Degree
Affiliate Marketing
With affiliate marketing, it’s a realistic goal to aim for $2,900 dollars every month. For the record, you don’t need to have a college degree to make money with affiliate marketing. It’s probably one of the easiest and cheapest options on this list to earn $35k a year without a degree.
Firstly, focus on a niche and recommend the highest paying products in that niche to the people that visit your web traffic magnet (like a blog, a social media page that’s popular, or a YouTube channel).
When people buy the products you recommend to them, you get paid. One of the best ways to make a pile of money off affiliate marketing is to have a web traffic magnet.
This could be a popular blog with over 10k to 100k+ visits a month, a YouTube channel with thousands of subscribers, and/or a social media page like an influencer Tiktok, Facebook, or Instagram page. While it’s possible to make money with affiliate marketing even with a few visits, subscribers or followers, it’s not going to be life-changing money.
Stock Trading
Trading stocks can get you to $35k dollars in a year. Apparently, you don’t need a degree to start trading the stock market. You just need the appropriate knowledge and the experience.
And you can get this by consistently trading the markets on a demo account before investing for real. Plus, you need money to begin trading a real account here. Stock trading is an online market, and you’re prone to losing some funds.
It’s really a matter of how much money you’re willing to lose versus how much you’re capable of making. The bottom line is; trading stocks is a profitable way to make $35,000 dollars a year without a college degree.
Ride-sharing
If you own a car, then this is a great place to start making money. Ride-sharing is cool if you love driving too. Now, there are ride-sharing services like Uber, Lyft and Gett.
These services will pay you for every trip you make. It’s simple to register with them, and your vehicle must provide enough comfort for their clients. At the time of this writing, the biggest player in the ride-sharing industry is Uber.
On average, Uber drivers can earn up to $95/day. But the thing is, I’ve come across a lot of Uber drivers. And they all earn over $200/day working more than 6 hours.
With $200/day in revenue, you’re set to make over $4,000 a month (working 20 days), and up to $40,000 in a year (after taking out maintenance & gas fees). The verdict is that you must own a vehicle of your own. Plus, it’s one of the ways to make money in your spare time too.
Blogging
While there are other ways to make money up to $35k a year without a degree, blogging is one of my favorite ways. And this is practically because it can guarantee a passive income stream for you with time.
With a good blog getting a decent traffic of over 10,000 visits a month, you can make a lot of money for yourself especially if you have a product to sell or some affiliate product there’s a craze for. But then, it takes time to build a blog like this one. On average, it takes about 12 – 18 months for bloggers to make money blogging.
To make a full-time income, it takes an average of 24 months (or two years). But you can skip all the months and generate a full-time income blogging using this free serial blogging guide. On the bright side, the income is purely passive with a ton of upfront work.
YouTube
Starting a YouTube channel doesn’t cost a dime. Yes, it’s free, and it’s one of the best ways to make up to $35k a year passively without having a degree from Harvard or any other topnotch or low grade academic institution.
No bluff.
Today, there are YouTubers earning over $200k in a single month. That’s about $2.4 million dollars a year. Just starting out with all the seriousness and with everything in place, $5,000 a month is attainable.
On YouTube, you can choose to monetize your channel by selling your products, affiliate products, or using ads. Heck, some YouTubers get paid to make videos for brands and campaigns.
It’s thrilling.
You just need to be good at creating videos in the right niche that’s perfect for your money-making objective (which you should never prioritize over the essence of value).
T-shirt Designing
Designing t-shirts for money on the internet is one way to earn up to $2,900 or $3k a month.
How?
Platforms like Teespring, Printful, Zazzle, Gooten, and CafePress, you can design t-shirts and upload them for people to order them. You can have a collection of t-shirt designs on one or two of these platforms, and go as far as promoting them for people to buy them. The more sales you get, the more money you make.
When people place an order for the designs in your collection, the platform/company prints the designs and sends it to them. You just design and let the print-on-demand platform do the rest of the work.
Online Tutoring
Teaching online, you can make as much as $50/hour. This is true as there are remote teaching jobs on Indeed, Craigslist, Ziprecruiter, and other job boards. Working for 3 days, that’s $150/day. And in a month, you get to keep $4,500 dollars. In one year, that’s about $54,000 dollars. Much more than the target $35k/year.
Although having a degree will increase your chances of getting remote teaching jobs, you don’t really need any to make a living as an online tutor as there are websites paying you to teach without having a degree. Websites like Cambly, OpenEnglish, Preply, and Palfish will let you teach English online even if you don’t have a degree.
E-commerce
If you decide to open an e-commerce store today, there’s every possibility you’ll become a millionaire in 5 years depending on the products you’ll be dealing in and the effort you put in to make sure more eyeballs come across your store.
You don’t need to have a degree to start an ecommerce business, you need to have the idea and funds to Kickstart the business. Truth is, the ecommerce space is getting more and more saturated. But the right time to start off is now.
You don’t need to be a programmer too to get started. With platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce, it’s easy to create an ecommerce store in minutes.
Freelancing
If, let’s say, you’re good at writing, you can help people write online to make money. This is called freelancing. You’re basically selling your skills for money and there’s no degree requirement to do this. For instance, if you’re great at designing graphics or programming, then you can sign up for free on platforms like Fiverr, Upwork or Freelancer to find gigs on the stuff you’re good at.
Maybe you won’t make money in the first or second month, but it’s commonplace for freelancers to make upwards of $5,000 a month. Even if you start making $5k a month starting from your 4th month into freelancing, it’ll still be over $35k at the end of the year.
Lawn Mowing
In the United States, professional lawn mowers earn up to $40/hour. Sometimes, up to $60 dollars in an hour. If you’re good at mowing lawns, you can get lawn mowing gigs on platforms like Craigslist and Indeed.
If you’re in a city right now in the US, and there’s a more active job board for local job submissions in your city that’s not very popular on the global scale, you can as well search for lawn mowing gigs there.
But then, if you’re not good at mowing lawns or you’re a beginner, you can charge around $20/hour. Let’s peg it at $30/hour for the average lawn mower. If you’re doing this for 5 hours, that’s $150/day. And in 20 days in a month, you get $3k dollars. That’s $36k gross income in one year.
Housecleaning
There’s no course to study when you want to make money cleaning houses as a housecleaner. Hence, you can simply get the equipment to clean while you search for house cleaning gigs on Craigslist. Or some other job board operative in your city.
Again, you can start a housecleaning agency online and hire more hands to do more jobs for you; which would mean more money for you. House Cleaning can serve as a great side hustle for you, and if you’re asking the possibility of making $35k a year with this, the odds are pretty high.
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Barbering
If you’re great at grooming hair, then this is one of the skills that can really make you a lot of money in the US. It’s a vocation, and you don’t work around to get clients.
The clients come to you. If you’re really good, you can charge anywhere from $50 to $500 dollars for a single haircut. Some professional barbers in the US groom for $1,000 dollars per client. These are celebrity barbers however. Let’s say you groom for $100/client, that’s $400 a day if you get 4 clients.
In one month, you get $12,000 dollars in gross income. Taking out all the expenses to run the business, you might be left with $8k a month. In one year, that’s $96,000 dollars; $4k shy of $100 grand.
12 Best Jobs that Pay $35k a Year without a Degree – Summary
Without a degree from any college at all, you can earn $35k a year or $2,916 dollars every month (and much more) by starting a blog of your own, affiliate marketing, barbering, rendering house cleaning services, lawn mowing, ride-sharing, stock trading, freelancing, t-shirt designing online, online tutoring, ecommerce, and starting a YouTube channel.
Ways more than $35k a year, some of the self-employed jobs right here can get you to $35k in a month! But then, it takes a lot more time to scale right up to this feat.