5 Ways To Make Money Without Leaving Your Bed

Money. Whether you love it or hate it, you need it to survive in the world. And if you’re living with a chronic illness and want to get the best medical care possible, you’re going to need a lot of it.

It’s hard enough to make ends meet in today’s world when your body is perfectly healthy and firing on all cylinders. But when you’re living with one-or-more chronic illnesses, just getting by can seem like an impossible task.

For a lot of people with chronic illnesses, as much as they might want to, holding down a regular job just isn’t an option. Whether it’s not being able to be on your feet eight hours a day, not having the energy to constantly interact with people, the inability to get ready and travel to your job, or something else, there are a lot of reasons why a conventional job won’t work for you.

Fortunately, there’s never been a better time to make money in unconventional ways. You can even make enough money to support yourself without having to leave your bed. That’s what we’re going to talk about in this article. We’re going to look at five different ways you can make money without having to even leave your bed.

5 Ways To Make Money Without Leaving Your Bed

Table of Contents

Everything on this list can be done from the comfort of your own home – your own bed, even. While you don’t have to be a tech genius to make money with these things, you do need to at least have the internet and a device to access it. A laptop computer is definitely the best option, but you can get started with nothing more than a half-decent smartphone.

1. Blogging/Website

I’m going to put this at the top of our list of ways to make money without leaving your bed because, well, I’m doing it right now. If you enjoy writing and feel like you have a unique perspective you’d like to share with the world, creating a website and blogging can be a great way to make money.

You don’t want to just blog about whatever happens to be on your mind at the moment. While there’s certainly nothing wrong with doing so, it’s unlikely to make you any money. If your goal is to just blog for fun, then write about whatever your heart desires. But if you want to make money by blogging, you need to pick one topic (or niche, as it’s called in the blogging world) and stick to it.

You’ll want to pick a niche that interests you, you’re knowledgeable about (or learning about), and that you can write about often. Over the years, I’ve created websites in several niches: fitness, nutrition, nootropics, cannabis, self help, and others. These are all topics I’m interested in, know a lot about, and can write lots of blog posts about.

If you decide to start a blog-style website, consistency is key. You want to have a regular publication schedule. It doesn’t matter if you publish once a day, once a week, or once a month. Just be consistent. And don’t expect overnight success. It takes months and months for a new website to start getting a lot of visitors. But if you stick with it, the readers will come.

So let’s say you’ve picked a niche, created a basic WordPress website, have been publishing one blog post a week for a few months, and are starting to get some readers. How do you turn those readers into dollars? In other words, how do you monetize your website?

There are a variety of ways you can make money by blogging. Here are just a few of them, but there are plenty of others:

Affiliate marketing – One of the easiest ways to make money blogging. All you have to do is tell your readers about a product or service you like and add a link from your website to that product or service’s website. If one of your readers clicks the link and ends up ordering the product or service, you get a commission. Typical commissions can range anywhere from 5%-25% or more.
Advertisements – Another easy way to make money with a website is by offering ad space. There are a number of businesses that will do most of the work for you, Google being one of them. You just place the ad where you want it on your website and Google AdSense will do the rest. Every time someone clicks on the ad, you get paid. Each individual click is usually only worth pennies. But once your blog starts getting a lot of visitors, those pennies can add up to a lot of dollars.
Subscription – Once you start getting a lot of regular readers, you can charge a subscription fee to access premium content. This works best once you’ve already established yourself and have a devoted following of readers. But it can be very lucrative.
Offer a service or product – Let’s say you used to work in finance before you were diagnosed. You could start a finance website and offer hour-long (or however-long) consultations for a fee. Or maybe you really like hand-crafted jewelry and you start a website about it. You could make your own hand-crafted jewelry and sell it through your blog.

These are just a few ways that blogging can make you money, but there are many others. Starting a blog-style website can take some time up front but, once you get the hang of it, it’s really not that hard. If you’d like to learn more about making money by blogging, check out this article: 5 Ways To Make Money Blogging in 2021.

2. Vlogging/Video/YouTube

Another great way to make money online is by starting a video log, aka a video blog or vlog. Vlogging is a lot like regular blogging except you’re using video instead of words. All of the things I mentioned about creating a blog also apply to creating a vlog. You have to pick a specific niche, put out new videos regularly, and patiently give your audience time to find you.

YouTube is, without question, the most popular platform for sharing video content. There are 31-million YouTube channels with over 5-billion videos in total.¹ And YouTube has 30-million active users every single day. That’s a lot of people watching a lot of videos. And some of the people putting out those videos are making a lot of money.

If you’re more comfortable in front of a camera than you are a keyboard, starting a vlog can be a great way to make money without leaving your bed. If you’ve got a smartphone, you’ve already got a camcorder. It’s best to buy high-quality lighting and recording equipment when you can afford it, but not necessary to get started. All you need is your cell phone, a YouTube account, and an idea of what you’re going to be talking about (what niche you’ll be in).

So, how do YouTubers and other vloggers make money? Pretty much the same ways that regular bloggers make money: advertisements, affiliate marketing, selling services or products, consultations, offering premium content for paid subscribers, and more. There’s certainly no shortage of ways to monetize video content.

YouTube makes it super easy to make money with advertisements. All you have to do is opt-in to their monetization program. Then, YouTube will do the rest. They’ll place partner-sold ads at the beginning, end, and sometimes middle of your videos. Every time someone watches one of your videos (or more accurately, one of the ads on one of your videos), you make money.

Now, we’re not talking big bucks. We’re talking pennies for each view. But if you consistency put out high-quality content and build up a following, you can make some serious money through advertising alone. If you manage to build up to 1-million subscribers, you can pull in around $60,000 a year just from YouTube ads.² And if you also throw in other forms of monetization like affiliate marketing or offering paid consults, you can earn a very comfortable living – and all from the comfort of your own bed.

3. Narrating Audiobooks

Audiobooks have become incredibly popular over the past few years. While actual physical books that you can hold in your hands are still more popular than ebooks or audiobooks, the audiobook market has been steadily on the rise. Audible is by far the biggest audiobook seller. They are to audiobooks what Amazon is to regular books and ebooks (although Amazon bought Audible in 2008, so technically Audible is a part of Amazon).

Audible offers over 200,000 titles. That’s a lot of audiobooks. Someone has to not only write each of them but narrate them, too. That someone could be you. And you could do it without even leaving your bed.

A lot of authors like to offer audiobooks in addition to print and ebooks but don’t want to do the narration themselves. While many authors do like to narrate their own books, many don’t (me being one of them). That’s where you come in.

You can make money by narrating other people’s audiobooks. There are basically two ways to get paid doing narration: You either get paid a flat fee for your work or you get a percentage of the royalties that the audiobook generates. This arrangement is called royalty sharing. Whenever an audiobook that you narrated sells a copy, you and the author split the royalty (which is usually 20%).

ACX is a marketplace where you can find audiobooks to narrate. But they aren’t just a marketplace. ACX is the marketplace. They have a massive distribution network including Audible, Amazon, and iTunes. Through ACX you can offer your narration services and browse through hundreds of projects looking for narrators to audition. If you find a project that interests you, audition for it by sending a sample of your narration.

Anyone can become a narrator. But if you have a distinctive, authoritative, or simply-overall-pleasant voice, you’ve definitely got an advantage. Combine that with a good work ethic and you can make a lot of money narrating audiobooks. And you can do it without leaving your bed.

4. Tutoring/Giving Lessons

Is there something that you’re particularly talented or skilled at? Are there any hobbies you’ve been at for a long time and know a lot about? Do you excel in any given subject and want to make money from it? If so, tutoring or giving lessons can be a great way to make money and you don’t even have to leave your bed to do it.

There are a number of websites that connect people with various skills to people wanting to learn those skills. Each platform offers a different way for you to share your knowledge with others. You can give one-on-one lessons or create an entire course for your students to take at their own pace.

Udemy is one of the most popular platforms for people to connect and learn. They boast an impressive 50-million students worldwide.³ As a Udemy teacher, you create an online course in a subject you’re knowledgeable about for your students to take. Then you get paid every time someone takes your course.

Other platforms allow you to tutor someone live through video and voice calls. Tutor.com is one example but there are plenty more. Once you sign up and advertise what subject(s) you’re knowledgeable about, students can take one-on-one lessons from you. You simply pick a time to connect and get to teaching. And you can do it without having to leave your bed (though I’d suggest changing out of your pajamas).

5. Translating

Do you speak a foreign language? If so, you’ve got a lot of money-making options. You could actually use all five of the ideas on this list to make money. Let’s say you speak English and Spanish. You could start a learn-to-speak-Spanish blog or vlog, narrate Spanish audiobooks, or create a learn-to-speak-Spanish course. But you’ve also got a fifth option: translate.

Translators are always in demand. While Google Translate is great, it’s far from perfect. People still need to hire human translators for a variety of things. If you speak and write a second language, you can make some good money from the comfort of your bed by being a translator.

There are translation-specific websites like Translate.com where you can sign up and offer your services. You create an account, list the languages you speak/write, and can look for translation jobs that are right for you.

And then there are platforms like Fiverr where you can offer your translation services. Unlike Translate.com, Fiverr isn’t specific to translating. On Fiverr, you can offer a variety of services and charge whatever you’d like. I’ve actually used Fiverr for a number of projects, but not as the one offering a service. I’ve used it to look for a variety of freelancers, from ghostwriters to illustrators. I think Fiverr is great and have had a lot of success with it.

If you are fluent in a second language, you can monetize that skill from the comfort of your own bed. Some languages present more opportunities than others. Generally, the less common a language is, the less work there will be but the more it will pay. But even for common second languages like Spanish, there’s no shortage of translation jobs out there if you know where to look for them.

Conclusion

Just because you’ve got a chronic illness doesn’t mean you can’t make some serious cash. All five of the money-making methods on our list can be done without leaving your home – or even your bed.

But you have to be willing to put in the work. There are lots of people making millions of dollars every year doing the things we’ve discussed here. Some of them even have rare and chronic diseases. It definitely can be done. But just like with everything else in life, you get out of it what you put into it.

Do you have a rare and/or chronic illness and work from home? Are there days where you manage to get your work done without leaving your bed? If so, I’d love to hear all about it in the comments section at the bottom.

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