Do you want to know how to make money with 5000 dollars? I’m talking cold, hard cash in your pocket — using proven methods that work like gangbusters.
Sounds like a pipe dream, right?
I promise you; it’s not.
The 12 methods you’re about to discover in this post are achievable for almost anyone.
Even you.
Let’s take a look at them.
12 Ways How To Make Money With 5000 dollars
The methods below are proven to work; people from all walks of life implement them successfully. However, there’s no magic button or guarantees; you will need effort, research, and the determination to push through with a positive attitude.
That said, let’s start with one of my favorite methods to make some passive income and extra cash.
1. Build A Niche Website
Building a niche website is arguably the most common method and one that you can get started doing almost immediately.
If you do this correctly, you could be making extra money within 12 months.
You’ll need a domain name and hosting, which costs around $100 for 12 months.
In addition, you will also need:
Costs vary, but typically, a niche topic won’t cost you anything but research. Plugins and themes will cost around $150, and you can get started with a free plan for an autoresponder.
Here’s what I would do with the rest of your money.
- Buy a subscription for Brandon Gaille’s RankIQ and get a list of keywords with low competition (this will save you a ton of time researching keywords and ranking in Google)
- Compile a list of at least 30 articles to write from the keywords.
- Take $3000 out of the money left over to hire writers paying 5 cents per word — each article around 2000 words long.
- Create an ad on the ProBlogger job board for writers specializing in your niche topic.
- Add the content to your website
- Build an email list
- Keep adding content
- Monetize with affiliate links and ads using Google AdSense, Ezoic, etc.
2. Buy And Sell On eBay
You have 5000 dollars, so you will use a chunk of this investment to purchase products to resell on eBay at a profit.
The first step is to decide on the type of product you want to sell by doing market research. It’s a good idea to choose a niche market and then research the demand for products the audience is buying.
Once you’ve decided on the product, look for a manufacturer that will sell you the products at cost. Then add what you want to make your profit.
Depending on the product, you can get some fantastic deals on Alibaba and AliExpress — but be sure to vet the sellers before buying and investing any of your money.
Once you have the products ready to ship, take some great photos and list the items on eBay.
You’ll have access to eBay business tools, and you can open a shop for lower fees, free listings, and even more benefits.
The critical takeaway with buying and selling on eBay is to start small to test the waters, and if the product is selling, increase your inventory.
3. Create An eCommerce Store
This small business method is similar to building a niche website, but you focus more on selling a particular type of product(s) in a specific niche market.
Typically, you can build your website the same way you would create a niche blog, but you can take advantage of the WooCommerce plugin, enabling you to add a shopping cart and products to your website.
Alternatively, you can use subscription-based eCommerce software options like Shopify or BigCommerce.
These options offer excellent features, and you can build an online store ready to sell your products quickly and easily.
You would use your 5000 dollars to purchase your products to sell at a profit and pay for the website or eCommerce software service costs.
4. Build An Online Course
Building an online course can be highly profitable if you do your research before creating it. The trick is to make a course your audience wants, and a great way to do this is by asking them about it.
Email your list and ask them the main problem that keeps them awake at night and what would make that problem disappear.
You then go and create a course based on the most popular answers.
If you don’t have an email list or want to clarify your pre-launch research, you will need to see what’s already selling and put your spin on things — and add what’s missing from other courses.
Search for courses in your chosen niche for ideas.
You have 5000 dollars, so my advice is to invest in Teachable. It costs around $29 per month, and you get great features such as drip-feeding content, custom domain, hosting of content and videos, a payment processor, and more.
If the course starts seeing sales, ramp up your efforts. For example, you can use a few hundred dollars to test paid traffic using Facebook and Google AdWords.
5. Flip Websites
Flipping websites can be profitable if you know how to spot a good deal and use intelligent tactics to grow the website.
For example, you can purchase a website earning around $100 in revenue for less than $2000 on MotionInvest or similar websites.
You can then use the same tactics for building a niche website to grow your monthly income.
MotionInvest will vet the seller and provide proof of earnings, so the website you buy will be genuine.
Here’s a breakdown of the strategy:
- Learn about flipping websites and content marketing — the Niche Pursuits podcast is a great place to start and features interviews with many site builders and website sellers.
- Purchase a website on MotionInvest for less than $2000
- Compile a list of low-competition keywords to target for the new site
- Spend $2000 paying freelance writers to create twenty 2000-word articles based on your keywords.
- Purchase an internal linking plugin like Link Whisper to quickly create an internal linking structure (great for SEO)
- Continue to add content by yourself or reinvest any income from the website.
- Build backlinks
- Create social media platforms for the site
- Build an email list
- Then sell 12 months later at a profit.
If you do the above correctly, you can make a big profit when you sell the site, and of course, you will already be making monthly income from monetizing with affiliate links or ads.
6. Start A Podcast
Podcasts can make you money with ads and sponsors. You can also make money by recommending affiliate links in the show notes.
The process involves choosing a niche topic to chat about and creating regular episodes for your audience.
You will need to purchase:
- A decent microphone
- Good headphones
- Editing software
- Podcast hosting service
In addition, you will also need to know what you’re talking about, or your audience won’t listen.
Once the podcast is up and running, you can create a niche blog (see the first method) and highlight the podcast on the blog.
7. Create And Sell An Ebook
Another great way to make money with 5000 dollars is by creating and selling an eBook. You can sell it on your blog or sell it on Amazon.
You have two choices.
First, with your $5000 cash flow, you can use some money to pay a freelance writer to write a series of articles related to the book topic.
Second, you can create the book yourself using the same process as the first option.
You create or purchase content for each chapter, add them together, write an introduction and closing, and the book is almost complete.
Of course, you’ll need to have an eBook cover design, which will probably cost around $100, and you will have to upload it to cloud storage like Amazon s3 to allow downloads once sold, if not selling on Amazon.
You will also have to spend money on a good editor.
Besides this, you can use the money you have for paid traffic or to pay writers to add content to your blog targeting low-competition keywords to get more exposure for your eBook.
You could also give the book away as an incentive to grow an email list and make money from affiliate marketing.
8. Start A Content Agency
Content is still king, but finding good content marketers seems to be more difficult than ever!
Business owners and niche website builders are desperate for freelance writers, and they will pay extra for content strategy.
You will need a domain name, autoresponder, booking system, hosting, and a website. These will cost around $700 per year, give or take.
In addition, it’s a good idea to have a subscription to a keyword service like Ahrefs or RankIQ (probably both). The extra cost for these services is around $1600 per year.
You can quickly become profitable by building an agency of 5-10 good writers and specializing in a niche market.
You charge the client a price for content and then use one of your writers to create it — at a lesser price than you set for the client.
For example, a client pays $100 for a 1000-word article (10 cents per word), you get one of your writers to write the content for $50 (5 cents per word), and the profit for you is $50 for one article.
The trick is to get retainer clients and offer extra services like keyword research. You will have Ahrefs or a similar tool if you follow the advice, so finding keywords for your client is easy.
You can charge them an additional price for the service.
Of course, you need good writers, so you will have to spend some money on hiring them and more money on finding clients.
A few ways to find clients are:
- Apply to ads on job boards, and offer your services with a guarantee
- Run Facebook ads
- Build a blog and target keywords related to your niche
- Build a social media following
- Offer free articles to a few clients in exchange for a review
- Create case studies
And to find writers:
- Search for freelance writer directories on Google
- Create a job ad looking for freelance writers
- Advertise on Upwork
- Search Twitter
It would be best to keep both the writers and clients happy, so make sure you test your writers for quality, perform plagiarism checks, and set deadlines.
9. Blogancing
Blogancing is a new term, which means freelance writing and blogging simultaneously. You start a blog and use the articles on your blog as proof that you can write good copy when pitching for jobs as a freelance writer.
You make money from freelance writing and also from your blog. The money made from freelance writing is immediate, while the blog income will take a little longer because you will have to build it up from scratch.
The first step is to decide on a niche topic for your blog.
You want the niche to be related to the type of content you want to write for clients.
So, if you’re going to specialize in fitness writing for clients, build a blog on fitness for men, women, or over 40s, etc.
You can then use the steps and advice for building a blog from the first method in this post.
Have some articles up on the blog before pitching for freelance work because these will be your samples.
As for finding freelance work, you can visit job boards like:
10. Affiliate Marketing (ClickBank)
If you’re wondering if affiliate marketing is worth it, don’t because it is worth it for most people.
Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money selling products or services that you don’t own. You don’t have to worry about customer service, product creation, or taking payments.
All you need to do is send traffic to the sales page, and when they purchase, you get a commission.
Here’s an excellent step-by-step plan to build an affiliate campaign.
- Choose a product to promote on ClickBank.
- Create or pay someone to create a free report (around 5000 words) focusing on one of the main benefit bullet points on the sales page.
- Purchase a domain name, hosting, and autoresponder.
- Set up a landing page to highlight your free report (you can use click funnels or check if your autoresponder offers free landing pages (most do)
- Create (or pay someone) to write 5 emails, a primary download page, and a thank you page.
- Create Facebook ads and use free traffic methods to send people to your landing page
- Consider creating a blog to send traffic to your landing page.
The above is an affiliate funnel where the website visitor signs up for your free report and is taken to the thank you page.
The thank you page tells them to check their email for the free report but then advertises the affiliate product on the same page — this is the visitor’s first exposure to your affiliate link.
You then show them the affiliate link in the free report and the 5 emails you have created.
It’s all about targeting a specific niche and using the autoresponder to use email marketing to pre-sell them the affiliate product.
11. Become A Coach For Less Than 5000 Dollars
Have you ever liked the idea of becoming a life coach and helping people to overcome a problem?
It’s possible; take a course and then build a blog offering life advice to specific people — you make money with online ads and by providing one-on-one or group coaching sessions.
There are well-known coaches like Tony Robbins, Michael Neill, and David Key that offer certification courses that teach you the tactics and specifics of becoming a coach. The classes usually cost around $2000, but you can get good deals for less if you shop around.
Becoming a life coach can be rewarding both mentally and financially.
12. Invest in Your 401k
The final method for making money with 5000 dollars is to invest in your 401k. I won’t talk too much about mutual funds, index funds, penny stocks, bonds, or stock market trading because I’m not a financial advisor. However, I believe that a 401k has a relatively low-risk tolerance.
Of course, you will have to do your due diligence on this, but with a 401k, the company you work for often matches your contributions, so the more you put in, the higher the contribution you get.
I think the contribution from a company is around the 3-6% mark (ask them), so it’s a decent return on investment.
You can’t invest your 5000 dollars into your 401k, but you can use the money to replace the extra money you pay into your 401k.
For example, if you pay an extra $50 per week into your pension plan, the company will reward you with extra money per their contribution percentage — what you do is replace this $50 from the $5000, so it won’t be out of your pocket.
Once the 5000 dollars are gone, you can revert to your old payments. However, check the details of this with your company first.
Is Making Money Guaranteed With Any Of These Methods?
No, as already stated, you need to put in the effort, and even then, nobody can give you guarantees on making money. Everyone is different, and results will vary.
I’m not saying this to put you off; that’s not my intention. However, it’s important to realize that any money-making advice online isn’t guaranteed.
What is the fastest Method To Make Money With $5000?
The fastest method for making money with $5000 is either the ‘buy and sell on eBay’ or the ‘Blogancing’ method.
I’m not saying these are the best money-making methods, but you could quickly see a return on your investment if you do things correctly.
How Long Will It Take To Make Money With 5000 Dollars?
Some of the methods mentioned in this guide can take a few weeks, while others can take a few months or even a few years. So, making money online, in general, isn’t an overnight success.
For example, niche blogging typically takes around 6-12 months before Google starts to give you some traction in the search engine. It will take this time to build backlinks, gain trust, and build your domain score ranking.
Which Is The Best Money-Making Method?
The best method is the one that appeals to you the most. You will be spending time getting these methods off the ground, so choosing one that you’ll enjoy doing is the best method for you.
Final Thoughts On How To Make Money With 5000 Dollars
You now know how to make money with 5000 dollars.
The 12 methods in this article are genuine and have provided people with income for many years.
Take a look at each method and see which one jumps out to you. Then do some further research and get to work investing your 5000 dollars.
There’s a famous saying in the internet marketing world: ‘you won’t have any success if you don’t take action’ — it’s pretty corny, but it’s true!
Take action, work hard, and see where it takes you.
Good luck.
