Make Money In College: 14 Ideas and More

How do you make money in college? I have a quick list of plenty ideas on great ways to earn some green to pay tuition or whatever. And this money you can spend how you want, since it won‘t be from a grant or scholarship :o) But on the other hand, you will definitely have to pay some taxes on it :o(

The Make Money In College List

Online Ideas

Basically, you have something you make, or don’t need, such as books. You can sell a book on BN.com, the Barnes and Noble site, or on Amazon (I have done this numerous times), Half.com which is an eBay owned site, or tons of others.

If you have a crafty side, you can sell a craft on eBay or Craigslist, along with anything clogging up your garage or attic to make money in college.

Cafepress offers a chance to be creative and create a poster, t-shirt, hat, cup or tons of other things and then sell them.

2. Earnings Sharing You create cool stuff like a great video, music, pictures, an article or other widget, then you put in on these sites and get paid when people look at what you have uploaded.

Sort of like having a site without the technical stuff involved. You can spend your time creating and studying, not learning HTML.

A few popular earnings share sites: Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com, Lulu.tv, Revver.com, Triond.com

I have dabbled in this. It works, but I haven’t made anything yet. Still, if you do it well, you can earn some money.

3. Create a Website You’ve probably heard of this one. The best way I know of, and what I use for my site, is SBI! Or Site Build It. Whether you use them as a host or not, to make money this way, you will typically do 3 things: build content (articles, videos, pictures, mp3's), sell advertising or sell your own product (or both). I have written up 5 keys to building a website to help you get started.

You make money by people looking at ads or by people buying through your site, also called affiliate links. From experience, I can tell you this takes some time and patience while you build traffic to your site, get in search engines and so on.

If you are patient and don’t need money immediately, you can expect to build a real income this way that will last for years. Plan on using a top level domain, not a free site.

By the way, weblogging or blogging falls in this category, though it works slightly differently. You would still build content, and sell advertising or your own product.

4. Trading Online Think oil has topped out, or will go higher? Will the dollar fair well against the Euro? Know a hot company on the rise? You can trade any of these and make money in college, but this can be pretty advcanced, so get some training first.

Forex means trading dollars for Euros or Yen or any other currency combination. I have a couple of friends who have used Forex trading to earn substantial money. You can think of it as similar to stock or commodity trading, but with different strategies and movers.

I have traded some stocks and done okay, but I don’t like the research. You might – and you can earn a ton doing any of these, but be careful.

5. Teach online, or Tutor You can do this at UniversalClass.com, or at tutoronline.com, or mytutoronline.com – and dozens of other sites that offer online classes and tutoring.

6. Freelance In freelancing, you do work for someone directly instead of having a job. Projects such as typing, writing, translating, researching, programming, designing, website work, and graphic design can all work well at a distance, and many more. Some popular sites for this are elance.com, odesk.com, guru.com, scriptlance.com, and tons more. The larger ones get more traffic.

Go check them out and register if you like what you see. You can work according to your own schedule and work from home or wherever.

7. More cool ways to earn online that don’t fit above: - Studentoffortune.com is a paid research site, where a student can post a question with a bounty, then you can answer and win the bounty. Tutoring also available here.

- Chacha.com also offers the chance to answer questions online, often to help others in their searches.

- Treasuretrooper.com and cashcrate.com let you fill out surveys that pay or offer free goodies.

8. Sell What You Do Online: At barefootstudent.com, you sign up to seel what you do, whatever it is. The site bills itself as the number one college student work portal. I found plenty of babysitters and student movers on this site.

But many other students offer their services as a personal assistant, chef, or wedding planner. You can make money in college also by applying for a regular job.

Work portal sites like Barefootstudent.com have a lot to offer. I think you'll like this site, since you can just do what you do best.

Let's take a look at offline ideas to make money in college.

Offline Ideas

You may have heard of stores like Coomers, or Quilted Bear for crafts, while others sell furniture, artwork, books, and cars. Of course, Plato’s closet is also a consignment chain that sells clothes.

10. Performing My wife just went to a 1 year old’s birthday party. The parents hired a magician and a Minnie Mouse performer at their little girl's party. Believe it or not, you can make money in college doing this, great money if you are good at it.

My friend’s daughter worked for a performance company that sent her to parties with – get this – live reptiles. She would bring out sweet little boa constrictors and spotted geckos to show little tykes, and get paid for doing it.

And Minnie Mouse above? After she left that party, she was going to change into a princess costume. You can be the hit of the party – as a princess, or as Batman, Superman, 007, or whomever.

By the way, learning to make balloon animals never hurts. Kids love those things, and what kids love will help you make money in college.

11. Obamaniacs, Unite! for Campaign Clean Up Did you know that candidates have to clean up after their campaign? Whether you get elected or not, you have to make sure your signs are taken down. Not just the big dogs. Even if you run for city clerk you have to clean up after yourself.

As a student, you can approach the campaign and ask about clean up. I have a friend who did it. He did it for a scout troop, making the money a donation, but you can do the same thing to make money in college and pay those fees.

Don’t get greedy – but charge enough for the job. Since you’ll be all around town, you should talk to multiple campaigns and make the most of your time cleaning up.

12. Cool Ideas for Holidays, Parades, and Festivals As a kid, my parents tried an interesting one. They bought a tank of helium and some balloons, and then participated as a vendor at a parade or craft show or something.

You come with a bunch of different balloons, and string or ribbon, and you sell them. You may have to pay the organizer to participate, but you may also get to be the only balloon seller. Pretty cool idea.

Another, similar one: sell hot dogs. People at craft shows and parades eat them up - I mean they love it. You can go all over, and only on weekends if you prefer.

A friend of a friend makes more on his hot dog cart that he did as an aerospace engineer, and it’s more fun, too. Not a bad way to make money in college!

13. Easy Landscaping Services - Aerating: Ever heard of aerating, power raking/thatch removal, or tractor/grading work? Believe it or not, you can earn quite a bit doing this in your own neighborhood.

Locally, I know a couple of guys who rented an aerator for about $100 for 24 hours, then aerated lawns all of one day. They can do a house in 30-60 minutes, and charge $35 each for a regular lot, up to 1/3 acre, more for really big lots.

Note: Aerating lawns means you pull out short plugs of grass and dirt from the lawn, to allow more air into the soil. It helps the grass grow.

They made over $500 in a day. And they only did it for one day. But they didn’t make it to my house, even though I asked them to do my yard. Why? Because they had to take the aerator back, and they were tired. They were just in it for a local youth group as a fundraiser, not make money in college, but it works the same.

You could do this for a few weekends in a row and cover a bunch of costs. Try to keep the houses close together, and make sure you can control the machine - you need some upper body strength. They broke a fence at one house because they were still getting used to the machine.

- Thatching: Similar to aerating, but it pulls up all the dead grass. Same as above, rent a machine and run it across a yard. It will pull up a bunch of grass, so you may want to tell the owner before you start that they will have to rake it up.

- Tractor work: smoothes out the yard before you put down sod, or install sprinklers, or build a building. This one takes some know how, so don’t attempt it if you don’t have any experience with it.

On the plus side, if you can do this, you can really make some money. I paid a few hundred for 2-4 hours of work, and that is very common to prep for planting grass.

14. Cool Campus Jobs I was going to leave this out, but I remembered a cool one. A friend of mine was the manager for the girl’s gymnastics team. He liked that job. He went to the meets, kept track of equipment, that kind of thing. And he got paid to watch the competition.

I have had friends who took tickets at the football and basketball games, or who worked the concessions stands. Some of those positions work all day prepping, then much of the night cleaning up. But you might only work one day a week. Nice.

My Weirdest Jobs

The company had contracts to hang ads and change bulbs in outdoor signs at truck stops. I went to 7 truck stops a month and put up posters for the latest ad campaign, I washed the poster holder, and changed those bulbs. I made a couple of hundred for the work and it only took a day.

I also was an independent rep for a credit card company. In this one, I put up credit card apps around campus. If someone applied, I earned a buck or two. While I didn’t spend much time on this one, it was nice to get a small check every so often.

Keep an eye out, talk to people, and look at job ads. You can find a weird job sometimes, and the money helps ;o)

Come Back For More!

Share This Page

From Make Money In College up to home