How to Make Money Without a Job

Did you inherit your grandpa's valuable old baseball card collection? Is your basement full of mint-condition vintage beer advertisements? Did your daughter go through a serious American Girl doll phase? One of the easiest ways to make money without a job is to sell the things you already own. With Web sites like Craigslist, eBay and Amazon Marketplace, the world is your garage sale.

Of course, to make money in the resale market, you need to offer items that people actually want. Craigslist is already crowded with folks hawking outdated electronics and rusted yard tools for five bucks "or best offer." If you are selling used goods, it's better to concentrate on rare finds and collectibles, which are a nice match for an auction site like eBay, where avid collectors can outbid each other [source: Spors].

Or maybe you're crafty. Do you have a knack for ironic embroidery, homemade soap making or faux-vintage jewelry design? Welcome to Etsy, the online marketplace for make-it-yourselfers of all stripes. Note that Etsy charges 20 cents to list each item and keeps 3.5 percent of each sale.

If you don't have the skills to craft your own products, why not grow them? There are more than 7,800 farmer's markets in America, and consumer interest in local food is red hot [source: USDA]. Farming is a full-time job, but growing a small patch of tasty and attractive vegetables is more like a part-time hobby (and it doubles as dinner!).

If these ideas sound suspiciously like jobs, there is one other option: selling bits and pieces of yourself. For example, you can sell blood plasma — the liquid portion of your blood — to a plasma collection center for around $35 a poke. Women and men with long hair can sell 10-inch (25-centimeter) tresses for $10 an ounce or try to auction them on eBay. Some long healthy hanks of hair can fetch $400 or more [source: Bonander].

And then there are sperm and egg donations. Men can make around $60 per specimen, but can donate up to three times per week [source: Seattle Sperm Bank]. Women can make considerably more — between $5,000 and $10,000 — but egg removal is a surgical procedure with some risk of complications [source: Center for Human Reproduction].

In the age of Facebook and LinkedIn, every individual is also a brand. If you want to make money without working a traditional job, then you need to develop and market your unique skill set. You might be the best "human beat box" in three counties, but no one is going to pay you to record a beat box birthday card unless they can find you. That's where Fiverr.com come in.

At Fiverr — and copycat sites like GigBucks and TenBux — you can offer any service to the world for the low price of five dollars. Advertising your service is free, but Fiverr takes one dollar of every sale. Popular offerings are voiceovers in various comical accents, short writing projects, customized cartoons, logo design, Photoshop editing and Web site promotion.

Do you like taking surveys? (Check box A for "Yes" and box B for "No"). Companies like Harris Polls will pay you in points for taking 15 to 20-minute online surveys. The points can then be redeemed for gift cards to sites like Amazon and iTunes. There are other polling companies that pay in cash, but beware of scams.

You could also sign up to be part of a clinical medical trial – and get paid far better than for taking online surveys (sometimes thousands of dollars). Trials for weight loss, depression, diabetes and other issues are offered all over the country. The U.S. government has a Web site that lists them but hospitals and private sites also advertise for volunteers. Of course you need to weigh the risks of the trials against how much you stand to earn.

Then there's the fine art of blogging for dollars. Do you have fascinating things to say about technology, movies, politics, food, sports and/or celebrity news? Can you churn out 300-word chunks of scannable copy every hour? Do you basically live on Twitter and Facebook? Then you might be ready to become a professional blogger. The best way to blog your way to "riches" is by using Google AdSense. Google automatically posts ads on your site that it believes will be good matches for your readers. Every time a site visitor clicks on an ad, you get a cut of the fee paid to Google. Warning: You do need a lot of traffic to your site to generate some decent cash.

If you have financial savvy and a gambler's gut instinct, "day trading" offers the possibility of making Wall Street money from the comfort of Main Street. In the late 1990s, when the stock market was riding the Internet bubble, there was an explosion in home-based stock speculation. Now day traders are back [source: Segal]. Day traders aren't your average investor. They are looking for short-term gains, to flip shares quickly for a profit and get out before the momentum shifts. Just recognize that a very small percentage of day traders make enough money to quit their actual day job and a much larger percentage lose money [source: Segal].

For more tips about making money from home, check out the related HowStuffWorks links on the next page.