Would an extra £1000 a month change your life?
I think it would for most of us.
Two years ago, I got fed up with my low salary at my job and started looking into ways to make extra money online.
At the time, my goal was to make an extra £200 each month.
I thought £200 would be life changing for me. We were living on such a tight budget. We never went out for meals or bought new clothes. We were getting by, but there just wasn’t much cash left after the bills were paid each month.
I just wanted a little bit more breathing room and spare money to have some fun.
Two years later, I’ve managed to double my income by learning how to make money online.
I’ve experimented with dozens of different ways to make extra money, and I’m here to tell you it is very possible to make at least £1000 online each month.
All you need is an internet connection and a few hours spare time each week.
(And if you don’t think you have the time, then get up earlier, go to bed later, cut out TV, nights out or social media – if you want it enough, you have to find the time!)
How to make £1000 a month in extra income
Want to know how to make £1000 a month on top of your day job? Here are six potential ways to make £1000 a month with no special skills or qualifications.
You might need to combine a couple of these activities to make your £1000 (or whatever your personal target is) but I promise you it’s possible.
Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links. That means that if you buy something from a site I’ve recommended, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
Matched betting
Matched betting is how I started my money making journey. I went from making £0 to £500+ per month very quickly.
I can honestly say matched betting changed my life because it gave me the confidence and knowledge that I could make money for myself!
If you haven’t heard of matched betting before, it’s a safe, reliable and legal way of making profits from bookies’ free bet offers.
Although you use betting sites to make the money, it’s not gambling because it’s all based on ‘matching’ your bets, so the winning and losing bets cancel each other out. The profit comes from the free bet offers.
There are websites like Outplayed.com (previously known as Profit Accumulator; the one I personally use) which have special calculators which tell you exactly what to bet. It sounds confusing to start with, but anyone can learn it as long as you follow the instructions.
You can read more about my experience with matched betting here:
- My First Month of Matched Betting
- Side Hustle Milestone: My First £1,000 From Matched Betting
- Matched Betting for Dummies: Your Questions Answered!
- How to Make Money Betting Online – WITHOUT Gambling
- Thinking of Starting Matched Betting? Here’s What You Need to Know
- Matched Betting Glossary
If you’re ready to dive in, you can make up to £40 with a free trial at the matched betting training service Outplayed.
How much can you make matched betting?
If you can put in the hours, it could be possible to hit your £1000 a month goal from matched betting alone. There are several people in the Outplayed forums who claim to make more than this every month.
In your first month, a more realistic target based on my own experience might be £200 or £300, but you can go faster as you get more experienced!
Search engine evaluation
Search engine evaluation is an interesting and flexible work-from-home job opportunity for internet savvy people.
The work involves testing search engines to check if the results are relevant. Sometimes you’ll also monitor social media or similar tasks. You’ll be helping search engines develop their algorithms and deliver the best results to their users.
To get the job, you have to pass a test and complete some online training.
One advantage of this online job is you can pick your own hours. Once you’re approved, simply log on at a time that suits you, select a task and get to work.
The two main search engine evaluation companies are:
Leapforce used to be another big one, but it was taken over by Appen last year.
How much can you make as a search engine evaluator?
It depends on the company and task, but the average wage for search engine evaluators in the UK is around £10 per hour. This means you could earn upwards of £600 per month doing this part time.
Blogging
Blogging is the main way I make money online these days.
I love blogging because it’s so flexible and varied. Also, unlike other work-from-home jobs such as search engine evaluation, you are not exchanging money for time.
You’re building a business which can eventually become a source of passive income – bringing you money every month, regardless of the hours you work.
There are several ways bloggers make money, including advertising, sponsored posts, affiliate marketing, offering services, and selling their own books, courses or other products.
Want to know how to get started? I have this step-by-step guide to setting up your first blog on Siteground (with pictures!)
If you need a bit more hand holding, I rate this site for complete beginners. It has complete and affordable training to help you start a profitable blog, based on the affiliate marketing model. You can test it out for free and you even get a free first website!
How much can you make as a blogger?
This one is hard to answer because the sky’s the limit with blogging!
I’m less than two years into my blogging journey, and I currently make around £2000 per month from blogging – and I know several pro bloggers who make many times that.
However, I barely made any money at all in my first year.
Blogging is not a get-rich-quick scheme. It does take time to learn the ropes and build an audience. But if you work hard and follow some training, it’s possible to hit that magic £1000 a month within a year.
Pinterest VA
A Virtual Assistant (or VA for short) is a flexible work from home job that you can do from anywhere in the world.
Virtual Assistants help bloggers and small business owners with online tasks.
Typical services include social media management, replying to emails, editing/formatting blog posts, and email outreach, but there’s really no end to the services you can perform!
Being a bit of a Pinterest addict, I’m extremely interested in the idea of being a Pinterest VA – that’s a virtual assistant who focuses on improving the Pinterest presence of their client.
If you are familiar with Pinterest, design great pins and love the idea of pinning for a living, this could be something to look into!
There are courses you can take to learn how to be a Pinterest VA if you’re serious about making good money from this. The most respected course is Become a Pinterest VA TODAY!
The main course only opens a few times a year, but you can sign up for a free workshop here to learn more about the work.
A lot of services offered by VAs have some crossover with blogging, so working as a VA is a common side gig for beginner bloggers who want to earn some more consistent cash while they’re still growing their blogging income.
But a blog isn’t necessary at all.
If you’re generally social media-savvy and highly organized, you can do this job 🙂
How much can you make as a Pinterest VA?
Going by information shared by Kristin and Gina, the creators of the course Become a Pinterest VA TODAY!, the average fee for Pinterest VAs is $25-$50 per hour (about £20-£40!).
It’s also common to offer ongoing monthly Pinterest management packages of $250 or more per client per month, which would usually be just a few hours work per week.
So you could hit your £1000 as a VA with just a handful of clients!
The course has more info on setting your prices, pitching clients and more.
Amazon seller
Amazon is the first stop for most of us when we want to buy something online. Imagine the money-making potential if you could tap into Amazon’s customer base?
Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA for short) is an awesome business model that makes it so easy to sell on Amazon for a profit.
With FBA, you send your products into the Amazon warehouse and let them handle packing, shipping and deliveries. All you have to do is source the products.
Most people who do FBA use something called retail arbitrage. This simply means finding something for sale cheaply and reselling it for a higher price.
To start with, look for products on sale in supermarkets, toy shops etc near you. Once you get a better understanding of what sells, you might want to start buying products in bulk online.
Jessica and Cliff from The Selling Family make a full time income so they can both stay at home with their son thanks to FBA. They have a free 7 day email course which will teach you:
- Why leveraging FBA is essential for Amazon sellers
- Which niche you should sell in
- Picking items to buy
- How to price your items
- How many items should you buy
- And more!
Sign up for their free course here!
How much can you make selling on Amazon?
FBA is a scalable business. The amount you earn is only limited by the amount of products you can buy to resell! Of course, this means you need some cash upfront to invest.
Most people reinvest all their profits back into their business for the first few months but once you have a good cash flow it may be possible to take home a profit of £1000 or more within a few months.
Apps and surveys
Apps and survey sites are the easiest way to get started making money online. You don’t need any qualifications or experience, and they usually pay out pretty quickly.
I have a list of all my favourite money making apps to check out here.
The best payers tend to be task apps like Roamler or Field Agent. These are basically like mystery shopping through an app where you visit a shop, check if a certain product is in stock and snap a few pictures to prove it.
If you live in a big city with plenty of tasks available (or if you drive a lot for work) it’s possible to make several hundred pounds from task apps alone.
Living in the country, I haven’t had so much luck with these myself but every now and then a task comes up in the town where I work and I bag an easy £10 or £20 on my lunch break!
If you’re having a clear out, there are lots of apps where you can sell old books, games, DVDs and CDs for cash. This might not be a long term money-making solution but it’s a great way to make cash fast.
Survey sites are another easy way to start making money online. They don’t always pay that well but they can be a fun and easy thing to do while you’re watching TV or waiting around.
Start with the best paying sites. Prolific is my favourite by far because you never get screened out!
I also recommend PineCone Research (pays £3 per survey), Swagbucks, GlobalTestMarket and YouGov.
How much can you make with apps and surveys?
You’re unlikely to make the full £1000 through apps and surveys alone, but it’s a good way to top up other money-making activities, especially if you can do surveys on your phone to make use of dead time.
Some people make a couple of hundred per month with survey sites and some people make a couple of hundred just with task apps, although it does depend on your location and availability.
Related Post: How to Earn Amazon Gift Cards
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Great post. i am a new blogger and I am not making any money on it yet so thank you for your honesty about not making much in the first year. You have motivated me to keep going.
Thank you Vanessa! Yes, just keep going!! It can be slow to start with because it takes several months for Google to start sending traffic to your site, plus it takes time to build your own audience and social media profiles, and it just takes time to find your feet sometimes. But once you start getting traffic, it’s SO worth it! Once I started making money it just started increasing month after month. Eventually you’ll reach a point where it becomes a lot more passive too 🙂 good luck with your blog!
Thanks a lot for the post, really informative! I am looking into matched betting but I don’t understand one thing. I was looking at your income reports and you made money consistently through matches betting month after month. Once you have signed up for a betting site how do you get more free bets? Or do you keep cycling through new betting sites? There’s only so many betting sites right? Thanks for your help!
Hi Elliott, thanks for your comment!
Firstly, there are a LOT of betting sites. There are literally dozens that I’d never heard of listed on Profit Accumulator. So that kept me going for a while.
Secondly, you can do offers called ‘reload offers’ which the bookies offer to established customers. A lot of them have regular weekly reload offers and there are lots of random promotions too. These are usually a little bit more involved than the sign-up offers, but once you’ve done all the sign-ups you’ll be much faster so it’s no problem. You never run out of offers 🙂
Hope this helps and feel free to ask any more questions.
I love your ideas. Well, almost all of them. I used to make extra monet by online surveys and I wasn’t expecting it is so time consuming. That’s not for me. 😉
Thanks for your comment! Me too – surveys are not my favourite way to make money, although I know some people do well with them.
Interested to know if you are still managing to make good monthly income from matched better this long after your initial post? I’ve just signed up with odds monkey and hope to start this weekend so interested to know if you are still profiting!
Hi Sarah! To be honest, I rarely do matched betting these days, just because I’m shorter on time (had a baby!) and I now run a few online businesses that are a better return on time investment for me. I do still dabble occasionally, if I want to make some quick cash 🙂
Generally speaking, the sign up offers are the most profitable. There is still plenty of money to be made with reloads in the long term, but you have to learn some new techniques to profit from different kinds of offers, and it helps if you can get fast too. I know a lot of people who lose interest after the initial sign ups but equally I know many who are still make several £100s a month long term. If you join the Profit Accumulator group on Facebook, there are often threads discussing this topic and lots of people posting their monthly earnings so you can get a good idea of what’s possible.
Good luck!