The Best Ways to Make Money as a Teen in 2020 (Ultimate Guide)
By: Nick Saraev
Tags: Startup, Teens, Teenagers, Side Hustle, Passive Income

It’s not as easy as most people think to make money as a teen.

Getting a local job can be hard and usually pays very little. People are less likely to trust you since you’re young, even if you’re mentally more mature than they are. Plus, having a boss blows.

Luckily, you don’t need a job to make money — you can make it on your own from the Internet if you put in a bit of time and energy. Here are 7 top ways to make money as a teen in 2020.

🔥 Buy/Sell on Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist 🔥

In business terms, this is called arbitrage. It’s the oldest and simplest way human beings have ever made money.

The way it works is, you find something undervalued on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist. It could be a sofa, a TV, a car — anything. You inspect it for damage, and note that damage to the seller. Then you haggle the price as low as possible before buying.

Once you’ve bought, you can either flip it immediately or spend a bit of time restoring it so you can sell it for more. This is the same way flipping real estate works, by the way (but there’s no Facebook Real Estate — yet!)

🔥 Start A Marketing Business 🔥

The majority of marketing now takes place online. But the majority of businesses were still started off-line by older people that don’t fully know how the Internet works.

That’s your advantage. You grew up with the Internet since day 1. You’re faster, smarter, and better at anything online than most older people, and you can use that advantage to make a business.

Millions of guides have been written on how to start a digital marketing business. My favorite is this one. It’ll take you a month and perhaps $300 to really get going — but if you do, you could be making tens of thousands of dollars by the end of the year. Talk about beer money.

🔥 Take Online Surveys 🔥

A very low-investment way to make money as a teen is by taking online surveys.

It works like this: you join a website like SwagBucks or SurveyJunkie, you enter a bit of personal information, and then they start sending you surveys that are relevant to you that you can fill out to make cash.

It’s not a whole lot of money — on average, between $5-$10/hour — but it’s still money. If you get fast enough, you can do it in the background between homework or movies.

🔥 (If 18+) Amazon Mechanical Turk 🔥

Amazon Mechanical Turk is an epic online factory. People submit jobs that computers still aren’t good at (like reading text from an image and then entering it into a database) and then pay you based on project completion.

Some people on Mechanical Turk make more than $10/hour! Most make close to $4 or $5, though — but keep in mind the majority of Turkers are from less educated countries and generally have less efficient workflows.

To sign up, go to https://www.mturk.com/ and follow the registration process.

🔥 Start YouTubing 🔥

Tons of teens make thousands of dollars a month on YouTube, and most of you already have everything you need to get started: a phone camera and a mic.

Make videos about trending issues. Or something you’re passionate about. Or just vlog about your day and your life. As long as you provide value to your viewers, you’ll grow.

It won’t be fast (unless you go viral), but if you put enough time and energy into YouTube, it’ll easily pay you the most out of any of the other 6 ways to make money as a teen.

🔥 Write Simple Articles For Companies 🔥

If you’re raised in North America, one you probably take for granted is that you have amazing English skills. You can easily leverage that to write short, simple articles for a lot of money.

Since the pool of article writers is global (check out UpWork or Fiverr for bad examples), the average writing level is actually pretty bad. It’s not hard, either — companies will give you a topic, sometimes with an outline included, and ask you to write a certain number of words. Some companies will pay as much as $20-$30 per article, and each article could take you 1–3 hours to write.

The best part is, you can do it entirely from home! All you need is a computer with internet connection. Plus, if you tell your English teacher you’re writing for money I bet you’d get mega brownie points.

🔥 Learn To Edit Videos 🔥

Just like writing articles for companies, editing videos is a great way to make money as a teen.

It doesn’t really require much skill, and you can get started today with simple software like Adobe Premiere or Final Cut. To get started, watch a 20-minute tutorial video like this and play around for a few hours.

Once you learn two or three simple transitions and how to cut, you can already start charging for simple gigs. I know teens that easily make over $15/hour doing this while still going to school.