The 5 Strangest Things I Did To Make Money Online

Some of them even worked

Ladies and gentleman of the jury, I didn’t intend to become one of those shady people always moving from one online hustle to the next. That wasn’t the plan. I had a great career as a paralegal and I wrote cat detective stories in my spare time. I was respectable and sensible. But life got… lifey. Do you know what I mean when I say that? There was one drama after another, I quit my job to be a full-time carer for a family member, intending for that phase to only last a few weeks and a few years later, I was still caring and was now broke. Add to that the fact that I was suffering from acute agoraphobia because I had been at home caring and lost all my confidence and my earning potential wasn’t great, to say the least.

I had to try something. So I tried everything. Except for selling farts in a jar. I read about a girl who did that once and ended up in hospital because she was eating too many beans. However, I digress.

I remembered my old Medium account and thought I would impart some of my wisdom to other people who are thinking about trying these things.

Now, there were a few that worked really well that I would definitely recommend, and they are totally legal, if morally questionable, but I can’t because of Medium’s pesky terms and conditions. *shakes fist* So, I will share the five most Medium friendly ones here for you.

I sold my sole (that’s not a spelling mistake)

I’ll start with the one that depresses me the most because I know that there are people out there with little empires dedicated to selling shoes that have been… ahem, well-worn. I am not one of those people because I ran out of shoes and didn’t have the disposable income to buy more, even second-hand.

I stumbled across this hustle by accident. A family member of mine has an eBay business and he sells literally anything. He was selling a pair of tatty old slippers and I asked if anyone would really buy them because they looked vile. He said yes, of course people buy them, but only if they smell. We had a chuckle and forgot about it… until someone randomly approached me on Twitter asking if they could buy my old footwear.

I took it semi-seriously but the sale eventually fell through, so I started using my eBay account to list all the shoes that I really should have thrown away. I had tons of hits and an inbox full of questions.

So, what happened? Well, I made a little bit of money and I got really grossed out with some of the suggestions potential buyers were sending me. I gave up after only a short time, but I know that this is a potential goldmine because some of the people who bought shoes from me were people with trashed shoe businesses. I suspect there are men making money out of pretending to be women selling their shoes online. I know of one, and if there’s one, there’s probably a thousand.

The most interesting thing though is that the way I made the most money out of this is not by selling shoes, but through my blog. I wrote about the experience and it has been my most viewed post every single day for about four years. So that ad revenue, although small, had been trickling in and adding up. Unfortunately, most interactions are from women who sell shoes leaving their details in the comments section for men to find. However, I firmly believe a rising tide floats all boats so carry on ladies.

I made fifty shades of grey look family friendly

I think I’ll have to be careful what I say here because Medium will potentially get annoyed with me over this one. There is money to be made in erotica, and it gets good organic traffic. It kind of has to, because Amazon won’t allow you to advertise erotic fiction and a lot of mailing list companies don’t like it either so organic traffic is the bulk of your sales. I wasn’t even that good at it and I still made money, so if you’re an excellent writer with a filthy imagination, I’d say your chances are good.

But how, you might ask, do I stand out from the crowd? Romance is the top selling fiction category in the world and some argue that the market is saturated. There might be some truth in that, so the trick is to go niche. Then niche again. And niche down even further. You cannot possibly be niche enough. Because there is a lid for every pot and no matter what weird stuff you write, there will be someone out there who is getting hot about it.

There are topics you obviously can’t write about — illegal things. If it’s illegal in real life, don’t write it, because Amazon will ban you, they won’t lift the ban and you’ll probably be put on a watch list somewhere. I’m not kidding. So keep it legal, keep it niche and use the same level of professionalism with your writing that you would with any other job. Because as a reader of erotic fiction, can I just say, the last thing the world needs is yet more badly written smut thrown out there in half an hour.

I convinced the world I was an influencer for a few weeks

I have never been popular in my life. I was always last picked for teams at school (I’m very short and not good at sports), I had a small group of friends rather than being widely liked as some of my peers were and I would say I’ve been bullied on some level at almost every job I have had. How on earth was I going to convince brands I was popular and they should work with me?

It wasn’t hard, but it was time-consuming. The biggest problem with looking like an influencer was the fact that I was in my late 30s, extremely ordinary and not very interesting — so I wasn’t confident in my image as an influencer for those reasons as well as still having all the scars of being overlooked, ignored and flat out disrespected from my school days. However, we all know that Instagram is all smoke and mirrors (and filters). Not much is genuine over there and the glamorous young things are just like everybody else. It still worried me though that I wouldn’t be able to get a large following or look popular.

I followed and followed — and unfollowed anyone blatantly not interested in me. I commented and shared and commented and shared... It was so boring. I took literally hundreds of photos and used the any picture with an angle that doesn’t make my nose look like the count from Sesame Street. I slapped black and white filters on anything where I looked my age (grey covers a multitude of sins). Then finally, I had over 5,000 followers who had no idea who I was and weren’t interested in much I was saying but liked my posts because they were doing the same as me and trying to look more popular than they really were. 5,000 seemed to be a magic number for lots of brands and the work started pouring in. I got more freebies than actual cash but it all counts. Plus, even my dog started getting influencer jobs.

Of course, these things don’t last. Repeat work never came because my referrals were low and I’m now about to have less than 4,000 followers because they’re trickling away one by one. I gave up the “hashtag ad” lifestyle a while ago.

But for someone who grew up feeling like a lonely misfit, who got bullied in jobs as an adult and never really felt popular, it was sweet for those few months it worked and that feeling was priceless.

I got kicked out of a network marketing company

First of all, let me say I think network marketing is a great business model for people who are sales oriented and personable. That’s not me. I have this kind of honesty tourettes that makes me incapable of telling people a product is super fantastic and has to be part of their daily routine when I know it’s just a standard, not very special version of everything else that’s on the market.

I signed up to a popular British cosmetics company’s sell-at-home range and did quite well initially. However, they had a timescale — you had to sell X amount of goods within a certain number of days or your account was closed. I was about to put through all the sales to meet that target (I somehow managed to convince friends and family to buy from me) but I found that my account had already been closed.

My upline was pretty pushy and I was feeling very pressured, which I know is normal in sales but I really don’t have the right personality to be a salesperson. She wasn’t happy that I had liked a less than positive comment about the pressure on us on Facebook. She was stalking all the brand’s ad posts on the platform to hone in on potential new downlines and noticed me liking that one comment. So, she ditched me.

I laughed it off because I knew it wasn’t going to work out in the long term but I was a little annoyed at missing out on that large commission I would have gained from my last order. It did work out well though because although it never really put much money in my pocket, I am probably the only person I know to ever get kicked out of a pyramid scheme – aren’t they always desperate to get people to join? – and relating the story has helped me brush off all the people I haven’t seen in years who come out of the woodwork wanting me to sign up to their essential oil business. So, it’s probably saved me a lot of drama over the years.

Nobody Gets Kicked Out Of Pyramid Schemes – Except Me

Not sure I deserved that, to be honest

laceydearie.medium.com

I sold books full of blank pages

Alright, I’m going to annoy a few people here but I’m not going to be fake about it. I sold books full of blank pages. Just lines and nothing else. And you can call this “low content” or “no content” all you want, but it’s essentially an empty book that takes very little effort to create. After spending years of my life hunched over a desk in the middle of the night writing books that were carefully thought out and crafted… after taking creative writing course after creative writing course and trying to be the best writer and publisher I could possibly be… after all that stress of trying to make a career out of writing when I had extreme anxiety and few options… making more money out of blank pages than hard work felt soul-destroying and weird.

But it was money and I took it because I had a mortgage to pay and a family to feed.

I got some bad reviews because people thought the lines were too close together. After some of the scathing and hurtful and extremely personal things reviewers have said about my fiction over the years, I just shook my head at the screen, sighed and shut the laptop down whenever I saw those one star comments.

Actually, the most profitable low content thing I have published in a long time is puzzle books which you can read about in my post detailing how I created a puzzle book in an afternoon and it became my biggest seller in 2021.

I Created A Puzzle Book In An Afternoon and Made Over $500

So far…