How to Make Money Post Coronavirus 2024 & Beyond

Reading Time: 17 minutes

In the years following the outbreak, the world underwent a noticeable transformation. Many of us embraced the home office, and the era of remote work truly took flight.

With the uptick in the number of people working from their own spaces, there’s been a surge in those seeking online opportunities to generate income.

The digital realm, it turns out, is a vast expanse of potential. Whether you’re aiming to tap into the gig economy, launch an e-commerce venture, or perhaps channel your expertise into online courses, there’s no shortage of avenues to explore.

In this article, I’ll shed light on some of the most promising ways to make money post-coronavirus. These aren’t mere quick fixes; they’re sustainable strategies that could pave the way for long-term financial success.

Ready to dive in? Here are my 10 stellar business ideas to help you make money in our increasingly digital landscape.

1. Freelancing

The fastest way to get started making money online post coronavirus is through freelancing. 

Why? Well, almost anyone can do it!

With all of the other methods listed below, it can take a certain amount of experience or even startup capital in order to begin your journey. But with freelancing, the barriers to entry are much lower.

The basic premise is that you exchange your services for a fee. You don’t need a fancy website and you don’t need to cold call or email people in order to find clients.

As you’ll see below, there are a number of already well-established websites that are designed to help freelancers get started, offering all the tools you could possibly need.

Different types of freelancing

There is an almost endless list of freelancing jobs. Let’s take a look at some of the more popular roles you could undertake, all from the safety of your laptop and between lessons.

• Online Tutoring – Perhaps you have a lot of experience in a specialist subject? If so, you could teach children or adults online. A great starting point could be teaching English to students from abroad. All you need is a TEFL qualification to get started.
• Writer – This can involve writing about absolutely anything. Blog posts, emails, sales copy, ghostwriting, you name it.
• Graphic Designer – Do you have experience with graphic design? If so, there is an abundance of work available online. In fact, the demand for graphic designers is only ever on the rise as more people understand the importance of a great-looking website or personal blog.
• Programmer – Did you know the average wage for a computer programmer in the US is more than $86,000?! If you have programming experience in any language, there is work to be found.
• VA – The job of a virtual assistant is varied and depends largely on the client’s needs. The highest-paid VAs can juggle multiple clients, fulfilling tasks that those hiring them simply don’t have the time, energy, or skill levels to do themselves. It takes little to no experience to get started as a VA.
• Video Editor – With the rise of YouTube and other video platforms, there has been a similar increase in the demand for skilled video editors, both for brands and full-time YouTubers who make a living from publishing content to their audiences.
• Podcast Editor – Similarly, podcasts have recently become hugely popular. Editing down hours of speaking into a digestible podcast takes time and skill. This a freelancing job option that is huge with potential right now.
• Social Media Manager – Are you great at handling a range of social media platforms? If so, there are businesses out there crying out for managers to take over their many accounts. If you specialize in growing audiences in one or more platforms, and stay up-to-date with industry trends and tactics, this could be a great option.
• Customer Service – More and more businesses have taken to setting up remote customer service centers. You don’t necessarily need to be skilled in any one industry to get started as a customer services rep, you just need to be personable and friendly, with a willingness to help solve customer needs.
• Data Entry – Sure, this may be a mundane job but, someones gotta do it! If you are looking for a straightforward job role that pays the bills and leaves you plenty of free time, this could be perfect.

The best way to get started freelancing today

For all of the freelancing job ideas discussed above, I recommend heading over to Upwork and Fiverr. These are the world’s two largest online marketplaces for freelancers looking for clients.

Upwork.com – start making money online freelancing

Upwork alone has more than 12 million freelancers (and counting) but there’s still ample room to make a name for yourself and build a successful career. To stand out, however, it’s best to follow a few important principles.

• Make your profile professional
• Include as many examples of high-quality work experience as possible
• Start your wages lower than you might like, and increase over time
• Over-deliver on all of the projects you take on, and build up great 5 star reviews from the outset
• Focus on relationships and building long-term work contracts with clients

2. Sell Courses

If you have deep knowledge in a certain industry, then selling digital courses can be very profitable. Best of all, it is 100% remote work friendly, and there is a LOT of demand for home based learning and upskilling since Covid.

Nowadays, it is 100% possible for anyone to create an online course and market it worldwide overnight. How? Keep reading …

How do you build and sell an online course?

Courses come in all shapes and sizes and are usually a mixture of articles, videos, and audio.

In my experience of producing 6 & 7 figure courses, video-based courses are by far the best choice. They allow you to offer a lot of value and these days are fairly easy to create.

Here are a few crucial steps:

1. Build an audience FIRST – This can be an email list or a large social media following. Either way, build up an engaged audience who already see you as an industry leader.
2. Offer something unique – Don’t just create a course on “Your Industry: Everything You Need To Know”. Instead, tackle a specific angle, addressing a definitive issue your audience faces.
3. Make use of online course software – Sites like Teachable and Thinkific take a LOT of the leg work out of the process, even offering sales page builders, which are structured to convert well.
4. Use Udemy and Skillshare – If you’re struggling to build enough demand and find your target audience, then you can publish a course through sites like Udemy and Skillshare. These are huge marketplaces where millions of people go every year to find courses they are interested in.

3. Start a Blog

Starting a blog is by and far one of the best ways to make money moving forward. Blogging is a fantastic, almost passive revenue source (once it’s built), and can generate a steady income for years. Plus it’s an asset you can sell for what I call ‘forever money’.

But, isn’t blogging dead?

Heck no!

In my opinion, blogging is only just getting started. We live in a world where absolutely anyone can build a blog to showcase themselves or their brand and build a huge personal following.

A blog isn’t just a space to talk about your trip to Hawaii or complain about politics. It’s your personal presence online. A place to expand into all manner of ways to build a business.

How To Make Money Post Coronavirus: How do bloggers make money?

There are a multitude of ways to make money blogging. Here are some of the most popular methods;

• Ad revenue
• Affiliate Income – When readers click a coded link and make a purchase
• Courses
• Selling physical or digital products
• Flipping it – Building a blog for the purpose of selling it on a site like Flippa.
• Sponsored content – Publishing posts sponsored by a brand
• Becoming an Influencer

How To Make Money Post Coronavirus: What is the best way to start blogging?

Though blogging is by no means dead, the blogging landscape has changed. To become successful these days, you really need to dial in on your target audience.

I recommend starting a blog with a few key questions already answered:

• Who is your target audience?
• How will you make money?
• What can you offer that is different?

Pumping out the same old content as everyone else will get you nowhere.

Successful blogs require thousands of readers each month, with search engines offering your best bet at generating targeted readers.

But getting your content to rank on sites like Google and Bing is tough. There are hundreds of ranking factors and the blogs that succeed focus on writing top-quality content and then getting other websites talking about and linking to their site.

There’s a lot to learn, but plenty of room for beginners. To get started, I recommend reading my in-depth guide which covers all aspects of building a successful blog:

How To Start A Blog And Make Money: The Complete Guide For Solopreneurs.

4. Become an Influencer

The biggest influencers can command hundreds of thousands of dollars, just for publishing one post on Instagram!

Compared to traditional advertising, social media allows influencers the chance to reach hundreds of millions of loyal fans with the click of a button.

Christiano Ronaldo for example earns MORE money from social media than he does actually playing Football.

Cristiano Ronaldo’s Instagram

How is this possible?

With such a huge audience who care about what he says and promotes, big brands are happy to pay large amounts of money to have their products endorsed.

But don’t worry, you don’t need to have millions of followers to learn how to make money as an influencer.

How To Make Money Post Coronavirus: How do influencers make money?

Here are just a few of the top ways influencers make money.

• Sponsorship – The most obvious one. Brands pay influencers to sport their branded gear in exchange for visibility across their channels.
• Ads – If you build your following on YouTube or Facebook then you can allow the platform to add display ads to your videos and receive passive income with no extra effort required.
• Affiliate Income – If an influencer recommends a product, and a follower clicks a link and makes a purchase, then the influencer receives a commission.
• Courses – Covered in more depth above, a way to package up your skills and command a relatively high price for sharing your knowledge.
• Products – Many influencers create and promote their own physical products and then sell them to their fans.
• Books – Many of the bestselling books from the last few years have come from influencers.
• Speaker – You can charge thousands of dollars in exchange for speaking at industry events.

How To Make Money Post Coronavirus: How do you become an influencer?

Aside from the bikini models, the best and most popular influencers stand for a clear set of values.

They offer a sense of leadership & direction in our ever-expanding digital world.

Just look at Dwayne Johnson.

He has long been a famous wrestler-turned-actor. But you could argue that the fame he now enjoys goes far beyond his acting or wrestling abilities.

Instead, he is at the forefront of many new initiatives that encourage equality, fair play, and, above all else, hard work.

The man is tireless.

He commits himself to a rigorous routine pushing his mind and body to the limit. People admire him for it, and it’s amassed him more than 224 million Instagram followers;

Dwayne Johnson a.k.a. @therock on Instagram

Clearly we’re not all Dwayne Johnson, but it pays to know what your message is and who you want to influence.

Perhaps you want to help women find their voice, inspire teens to get off their phones, help people over 50 improve their health, or like me, inspire people to become solopreneurs or digital nomads and live their best life, doing something they love to do while traveling the world!

Beyond this, successful influencers make use of every platform at their disposal.

They tweak the content they publish on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and anywhere else, to suit that community, in turn, building large followings on each platform.

In turn, building large followings on each platform. For a more detailed approach, check out my in-depth guide on how to become an influencer (without wearing a bikini).

5. Write a book

Becoming a successful author is no longer as difficult or as expensive a task as it once was.

There’s no need to hunt down a publishing house and spend months of your life tirelessly promoting a new book in order for it to become a success.

Like all things, the internet has revolutionized the book world, with self publishing through sites like Amazon becoming increasingly straightforward.

Watch my interview with the lovely Julie Cordiner sharing the benefits of being a self-published book author;

How To Make Money Post Coronavirus: How to make money as a successful book author

The simplest way to publish a book is the self-publishing route.

I’m going to quickly dance over the actual writing part of this section, but for a more detailed look at how to pick a topic for your book, create a title, and then write it, I recommend this guide here.

Once your book is finished, you will then need to fund the following key areas:

• Editing
• Formatting
• Creating a cover

The cost of this depends on the quality you are looking for and how much you can afford to spend. Sites like Upwork and Fiverr are the perfect place to find freelancers to help you.

Beyond this, simply make use of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform;

Kindle Direct Publishing

Here, you’ll bring your book to life and immediately gain exposure to millions of potential customers.

This isn’t to say your book will be an instant success.

How well it does depends on how much you promote it elsewhere, and, if you’ve already built up a sizeable following on social media or a blog then this will come in very useful.

Check out my step by step guide on How to Self Publish on Amazon Kindle & Get Your Own ISBN No!

6. Start a Podcast

The facts are in … podcasts are HUGE!

In fact, almost one-third of all Americans listen to podcasts on a monthly basis; and the stats are similar across other countries.

Popularity for podcasts seems to have exploded over the last few years and there is plenty of space for new solopreneurs to enter and get started.

How To Make Money Post Coronavirus: How do you make money with a podcast?

The ways in which you can make money at school with a podcast are similar to blogging or being an influencer.

• Ads / Sponsorship – Sponsors typically pay on a CPM basis (per thousand listens). With owners pocketing anywhere between $20-$50 per thousand listeners. Alternatively, you can arrange direct sponsorship for a set fee.
• Affiliate Income – Promoting products discussed during the episode.
• Subscriptions – You can include some sort of paywall where listeners can only access your podcast by paying a monthly subscription.
• Premium content – Many successful podcasts have a Patreon account or similar, which allows them to offer extra content to listeners wishing to pay for it.
• Courses
• Products
• Books
• Speaking engagements

How To Make Money Post Coronavirus: How do you start a podcast?

All you need to get started is a microphone and a popular topic.

You can talk about absolutely anything, but the most successful podcasters focus on a specific niche. Just as you would when starting a blog or vlog.

Tools like Garageband or Audacity make it easy to record your show and then trim and edit it down to a finished product.

When I started my podcast a few years ago, recording, editing, and uploading episodes was a nightmare that involved a lot of plugins and manual labor. Nowadays, it’s a lot different.

After I have recorded and edited my new podcast, I upload it to a service called Anchor (which is now Spotify for Podcasters). Spotify does all of the heavy lifting for me, including distributing and promoting the episode across all relevant platforms, including Apple Podcasts.

Listen to Your Lifestyle Business podcast on Anchor.fm

For more tips, read my comprehensive guide on how to start a podcast.

7. Become a YouTuber

As the second-largest search engine in the world, YouTube is THE place to be right now if you want to promote your message, build a following and make some extra cash.

The biggest YouTube stars have hundreds of millions of followers, bringing in an equally obscene amount of money every year.

It’s entirely possible to build a successful YouTube channel and make money, all from the comfort (and safety) of your own home.

If you’re someone who loves being on camera or even just stitching together footage, this one is for you.

First up …

How To Make Money Post Coronavirus: How do you make money on YouTube?

Here are the main ways YouTube stars make their money:

• Ads – Once you hit 1000 subscribers and 4000 public watch hours, you are able to apply for the YouTube Partner Programme. With this, you decide where ads appear in your videos and YouTube handles the rest. You get paid on a CPM basis (revenue per thousand views). Stars like MrBeast and PewDiPie earn tens of millions of dollars a year, as they generate billions of views.
• Sponsorship – As your channel grows, it’s entirely possible to get big names to sponsor your videos in exchange for a shout out. The more views you get, the larger the sponsorship fee you can charge.
• Affiliate Income – In your video descriptions, you are able to include affiliate links to products your viewers may wish to purchase.
• Courses
• Products
• Books
• Speaking engagements

MrBeast – YouTube channel stats (powered by VidIQ)

How To Make Money Post Coronavirus: How to start a successful YouTube channel

Starting a successful vlog comes down to many of the same principles of other online businesses. You first need to pick a niche and decide what your message will be.

It’s best to produce regular content that focuses on similar topics. This helps grow an engaged following, as well as getting YouTube to rank you for competitive searches.

For example, if you love computers, then you could start a YouTube channel reviewing new computers, computer games, and software.

If you’re a heavy gamer, then your channel could revolve around you playing games, showing hacks, and just generally having a good time!

There really is no strict formula, as YouTube channels take all shapes and forms. The key is to publish consistent content, ideally once or twice a week.

You should also focus on YouTube SEO.

This is the art of making key changes to your videos and descriptions in order to get your videos to show up first when people search for specific keywords.

8. Sell on Amazon FBA

A few years ago, my husband and I started an Amazon FBA business and went on to grow it to more than $3 million a year in sales!

And guess what …

When we started, we knew NOTHING about selling through Amazon. We started with a few thousand dollars and grew it rapidly from there.

The great news is, the potential for new sellers to make a healthy income through Amazon is still there.

In fact, Amazon is one of the few companies that benefited massively from Coronavirus, as online sales continue to grow year on year.

How To Make Money Post Coronavirus: How does Amazon FBA work?

On paper, the process of Amazon FBA is relatively straightforward …

1. You decide on a product you’d like to sell – Tools like Jungle Scout are a huge help here.
2. Find a supplier willing to manufacture the product for you.
3. Negotiate with a shipping company to send your product to Amazon fulfillment centers.
4. Amazon handles everything else – including sales, shipping, returns, and refunds.

Did you just notice something really awesome?

That’s right, at no point in that entire process do you ever have to even TOUCH a product.

Not only is that very Covid-friendly, it means you can build a huge business without the need to leave your home.

To learn more about how to make money with Amazon, you should really check out my ultimate Amazon FBA guide.

9. Start your own eCommerce store

If you’d rather be in control of the full sales process, then you could always start your own eCommerce store.

What can you sell?

Absolutely anything!

From selling products you craft yourself to dropshipping to online arbitrage, the choice is yours.

I highly recommend reading my very detailed article to starting your own e-commerce store for a step by step guide, but let’s look at how to get started here;

How To Make Money Post Coronavirus: How do you build an eCommerce store?

What do you want to sell? Knowing what you want to sell on your e-commerce store will help determine the business model you choose, whether print on demand, dropshipping, private label or handcrafted products.

Once you know what you’ll be selling and the model you’ll be working with you can create your brand and build your store.

The great news is the tech gods have made it so easy to create a store you could be up and running in a day and that’s no exaggeration.

Here are some of the best platforms to get started

• Shopify – Shopify is possibly your best bet for building a high-quality eCommerce store with minimal time and effort. For set monthly fees, they offer a whole host of templates for you to personalize based on your product range. They also have in-built checkout processes, allowing you to accept payments in many different currencies.
• WooCommerce – If you are already familiar with WordPress, then you can integrate eCommerce functionality directly to your site with the WooCommerce plugin. If you already have an existing blog, and want to expand into the eCommerce market, then this makes getting set up very easy!
• Etsy – This is a huge online marketplace, where independent sellers list homemade crafts. It operates in dozens of countries, offering you the chance to immediately gain access to a huge audience of potential customers.
• eBay – Similarly, creating an eBay store is another way to help kickstart your brand. Just be sure to offer excellent customer service and encourage buyers to make their next purchase directly from your own website.

How To Make Money Post Coronavirus: How do you grow a successful eCommerce store?

Building a successful eCommerce store is entirely possible, but will require a fair amount of hustle. Unlike Amazon FBA, you will be responsible for all the elements of the customer journey.

This includes maintaining a website, updating stock, reaching new customers, dealing with inquiries, handling returns, and so on.

But it can be an incredibly rewarding (and profitable) venture!

10. Become a TikTok star

Founded at the end of 2016, TikTok is perhaps the most successful business to evolve out of students in front of a camera.

With more people spending a lot more time at home, the app seems to have exploded in popularity, with roughly 1 billion active users acquired to date.

This number is growing, and it’s currently one of the hottest and fastest ways for you to build a huge following and monetize your audience.

How do you make money on TikTok?

There are thousands of budding solopreneurs making large amounts of money on TikTok. Some of them already successful influencers, others newcomers to the game.

In many cases, youngsters have found ways to grow vast audiences in a matter of weeks.

Just check out Charli D’ Amelio who has so far gained more than 100 million followers through publishing videos dancing in front of the camera.

Here’s how to monetize an audience in order to make money on TikTok.

• Donations – TikTok actually has a built-in capability for viewers to send their favorite creator’s money! They first buy “coins” and then send these to their creator who then converts them into “diamonds” and withdraws them to their PayPal account.
• Selling products – Much like any other influencer platform, if you have a large following of loyal viewers, you can launch products for them to buy.
• Growing and selling accounts – This has been a common practice for years across social media platforms (even if it goes against some guidelines). Brands will pay decent amounts of money to purchase a channel that already has a large following.
• Sponsorship – Just like Instagram, companies pay creators to sponsor their products in videos on their account.
• Ad revenue – In June 2020, TikTok launched its Creator Fund, with $200 million to share out between creators. The system is nowhere as sophisticated or advanced as the ad revenue program offered on Youtube, but can still allow creators to earn ad revenue if they get large amounts of views each month.

So, why not use TikTok to make money online as a beginner.

How to grow a TikTok channel

There are a lot of different things you can do to grow a TikTok channel. But the main thing is to deliver some form of entertainment in as little as 10 or 20 seconds.

For some, this means commenting on other people’s videos, and for others, it’s dancing to songs.

One of the biggest reasons people tune in to TikTok is to take part in and check out other people’s attempts at TikTok challenges (such as the Old Town Road challenge from 2019).

Much like YouTube, it seems like posting frequent content and appealing to a particular demographic is the key to growing on TikTok.

How To Make Money Post Coronavirus: Summary

Whichever path you opt for, the real secret to financial success post-coronavirus is taking that crucial first step. Each of the 10 ideas I’ve shared offers a promising avenue to boost your earnings and inch closer to financial autonomy.

For those who’ve tasted the perks of working from home and cherish this newfound flexibility, there’s every reason to believe you can turn it into a full-blown lifestyle.

And remember, this article is just the tip of the iceberg. Dive deeper into my blog, and you’ll discover hundreds of strategies to make money online, craft a thriving lifestyle business, and unlock the doors to ultimate financial freedom.

Good luck!