How can I make $5,000 per month working from home?

How can I make $5,000 per month working from home?

I executed something similar years ago with Airbnb. I started on my couch with one home that I airbnbd full time. My first home cost $17,000 to rent and furnish. I had this place for exactly two years and I profited $118,000. I quickly ramped up to 18 homes then raised a friends and family round and grew to 80 homes. I followed that with a $3.7m seed round last year.

Note 99% of your work will be from your living room, but you will have to leave it at some point:(

1. Pick an uncontested short term rental market. What I mean by this is- markets where short term rentals/Airbnb/less than 30 day rentals are legal.

2. Find a home or apartment in an area that is highly demanded by tourists but not highly demanded by locals. This is important because tourists will pay a premium for this area which means bigger revenues, meanwhile if it's not highly demanded by locals you will pay less rent.

3. Get a landlord to remove the 'no sublease clause' ie get them to allow you to Airbnb the home.

4. Furnish the home stylishly, colorful, and inviting.

5. Have professional photos taken.

6. List the home on all the major vacation rental websites like Airbnb, Flipkey, HomeAway, Booking.com etc

7. Hire a cleaner/check in person.

8. Rinse and repeat until you have enough places the are equal to or > than 6 figure income.

Bonus: acquire properties a month or two before high season begins so that your pay back period is shorter. Example: acquiring a place in Denver in mid Dec means it will take 4mos+ to hit the profitable season as tourism is dead Jan-March. If you start mid March you are only a few weeks away from 7 mos of profitable season April-Oct.

Requirements:

1. You will need to learn a bit about pricing trends. When are large conferences? When are music festivals? Is there a difference between the two regarding how you price or when you take a booking? Do prices jump during the marathon? What's the price difference between high season and low season ie how does my place differ in Summer vs winter in Palm Springs, Aspen, or Scottsdale? Here are some examples:

A. During big conferences when prices are really high, let's say $1000/night vs your normal $500/night people tend to arrive the day before the conference and check out on the last day of the conference. This means if the conference starts on Monday and ends Wednesday your Sunday rate should be in line with your Monday and Tuesday, but your Wednesday should be much less.

B. Conference goers book way in advance while leisure events like a music festival see a lot of last minute bookings. I do not worry if my place is not booked a week before a music festival, but I do worry if it's not booked a week before a dentist convention, for example.

C. If I am getting more weekend inquiries (requests to book) than weekdays then this means one of the two are not properly priced. Either my weekdays are too expensive or my weekends are too cheap.

2. How to negotiate with landlords and how to make them feel comfortable about you vacation re taking their home.

3. You will need to be available 24 hours a day. You will not work 24 hours a day, but undoubtably a guest will lose their keys at 1am and call you at some point:(

4. Learning a big about designing jokes and photography will help your cause.

5. Undertstanding Finance, such as ROE and IRR is not a requirement to be profitable, but it certainly won't hurt.

6. You will need a few dollars to get started, approximately $5,000-$10,000 at the minimum.

Another Method

The easiest money right now is in e-commerce. Setting up a niche e-commerce site with Shopify and sourcing products from Alibaba is like shooting fish in a barrel if you have the cash to purchase the inventory and invest in advertising. Now of course it’s not without risk. But in my opinion, it’s the fastest and most direct path from 0 to $5000 or more per week.

Pick a niche that is popular. It can be anything as long as there is a Facebook page closely related to the niche that has a strong following. Let’s say you’re going to go with horses. There are a lot of people who love horses. And from what I know, people who love horses don’t just really like horses…they F*#%ing LOVE horses so go to Aliexpress to start. (You can use Alibaba once you find successful products but aliexpress makes it easier to get started and is more transparent with costs).

Once at Aliexpress type in “horse jewelry” and filter by “# of Orders.” This will put the most popular items at the top and basically guarantees that the products you choose will sell. This is important. Don’t guess here and don’t choose what you think looks good.

Pick the top two selling items and buy 50 of each. They will most likely cost between $1 and $2.Once you get them take pictures (must be high quality) or find pictures from the internet and upload both products to your Shopify store and mark them up at least 1000%. Then show a discounted sale price of 20% off that figure. Name your store “Horse Beauty” or “Amazing Equine” or something that obviously shows you specialize in horse jewelry.

Research how to write descriptions that sell. Find other successful e-commerce stores and follow their template. Install a plugin that recommends other products at checkout and set it up to recommend whichever item of the two that they didn’t buy. 10–30% of the people will end up buying both items and the mark-up on the second item is your profit. The mark-up on the first product covers your advertising costs. Then just advertise the heck out of it on Facebook, targeting horse lovers and optimizing for conversions (sales). Test different ads until you find a winner that keeps your conversion cost below break even on the sale of one product. After you get good you should be able to make money on the initial sale too.

Another One:

If you want to make $5000/month with just your laptop - the true answer is (as always): Hard and Smart Work.

In saying all of that, here are my top 6 tips:

1. Sell something you have at least a slight interest in. (Something Legal) It's this interest or passion that will ultimately push you through the days of low sales or technical issues.

2. There are a billion hacks you can use to make your listings rank higher, store look prettier, drop shipping run smoother - research and utilize as many as you can, they WILL save you thousands of dollars and a lot of time.

3. Systematize as much as you can - the reason why Online selling sometimes fails, is because the sellers gets over it because they have to manage too many processes and it doesn't work out to be a very good $ per minute of work rate. Systematize and Outsource as fast as you can.

4. The way to make BIG money is to constantly sell what people (the masses) are searching for. Don't spend hours of time researching products, just start stocking what ever the newest craze is. Use Trendosaur or Terrapeak to see what the next top selling product will be and stock up on it. Trendosaur showed us the selfie sticks about 2 months before the craze blew up here in the US and we ended up making $65,000 Revenue in one month.

5. If you haven't worked it out already, you will need SOME money to start an online store, ie, money to access a computer, purchase food to eat to stay alive to use the computer etc.

6. Money doesn't make you happy. Meaningful interpersonal relationships do. (Nothing to do with making selling things online I know, but I just wanted to throw it in there)