Making money as a teenager can be tough. You’re not an adult yet and you may not have the credentials you need to get a job. A lot of jobs require a post-secondary diploma from an accredited college and you obviously haven’t had the chance to go to a college.
Can you still make money as a teenager? Yes, you can! Here’re some things you can sell to make money as a teenager! The good news is that none of these things require you to send out hundreds of resumes or work at a fast-food chain for $10/hour. You can make money in the comfort of your own home!
Table of Contents
1. Your hair
Look at the prices of what these hair are selling at. You see that many people’s hair has been sold on the right side of the screen. Even a 20″ silver granny hair has been sold for $440.
Hair price varies by length and color.
Your hair may be worth more than you think! Most buyers require your hair to be more than 10″ in length while some may even require your hair to be 16″ in length.
You’ll want to take good pictures of your hair from all angles (make sure to blur out your face for privacy reasons). Don’t cut your hair before you got the money.
Lighter hair colors tend to sell more since they are rarer. Darker hair colors sell for less but there are still plenty of buyers.
Many people buy your hair to make wigs and then sell it for more. You can also learn to make a wig if you want but that’ll take some time.
Virgin hair is more valuable. Virgin hair is hair that hasn’t been tampered with. Haven’t been dyed, permed, highlighted, bleached, etc. Some may even require virgin hair to not be straightened or curled before. If you have taken a curling rod or hair straightener to your hair before, don’t worry, just don’t do anything to your hair for a while and let your natural hair return before taking pictures so people get a more authentic feeling of what hair they’d get when they buy your hair.
Here are some of the best places to sell your hair:
- Hairsellon
- BuyAndSellHair
- Online Hair Affair
- World of Wigs
You may also want to consult your parents before you suddenly cut off your hair. They may be a bit shocked if you suddenly lose 20″ of hair. This depends on your relationship with your parents. I know some of you don’t tell your parents anything.
Click here to learn the 50 ways to make extra money today!
2. Slime
Here’s Marisa who started her own slime business at 17. She was just a teenager then. She is making $65k USD per month (the title is in pounds) selling slimes.
The main ingredients in slime are contact lens solution, food coloring, and glue.
Depending on the slime you want to make, the ingredients would be different.
Here’s the ultimate guide on how to make money selling slimes. It covers everything from what tools you’ll need, where to set up your shop, how much it costs to start a slime shop, where to get your containers for cheap, where to get shipping materials for free, etc.
3. Clay art
Look at how cute the following clay art is.
The artist also has a shop on Yahoo but the most common platform for anyone to sell their art is on Etsy. Look at this adorable air-dry clay art of a pink dog. It’s selling for $20 USD (I live in Canada so the price is listed for $26 CAD) per dog. It had 429 sales in total and an average of 5 stars. I’ll be honest, the dogs don’t seem to be extremely high-quality. Don’t get me wrong, I love it. The point is, for the artsier of you out there, you can do this too.
You’ll need the following to start making air-dry clay art:
Click here to learn how to start a podcast and make money.
4. NFTs
Believe it or not, you can make money selling NFTs. It’s quite difficult to sell your NFTs without building up a community on Twitter and Discord first so that should be your objective.
You’ll have to make your NFTs rarer by selling less of them if you got a small Twitter and Discord following.
For example, if you got 1000 followers on Twitter and 2000 members on Discord, making only 100 NFTs available to be bought and sold would be a good start.
You can also earn artist royalty on the continuous buying and selling of your NFT. Most artist royalty is around 8% to 11%.
Click here to learn everything you need to know about NFTs.
Will most NFTs be worthless in the future? Click here to find out!
Should you invest in NFTs? You must know this! Click here to read.
Are NFTs bad for the environment? Read here.
5. Opinions
There are a lot of survey sites you can make money from. Swagbucks is one of them.
You can sell your opinions by taking surveys to make money. You’d be trading your time for money so you won’t be able to scale and make more money but this is something you can do.
How to make money streaming on Twitch. Read here.
6. Social Media Shoutout
You can make money by building up a following on social media first(ex. Instagram, Twitch, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, etc) and then you can sell shoutouts.
You’ll talk about someone’s business or account in a shoutout in exchange for money.
You can use Canva.com to make simple pictures to drive people to follow you on Instagram.
How to make money writing on Medium, click here.
7. YouTube Adspace
You can build up a YouTube channel and when someone clicks on the video, an ad would play and there will also be ads on the side of the video for people to click on and for you to make money.
Want to learn how to make money on YouTube and how much YouTubers make? Click here.
Read here for the 12 most profitable YouTube niches.
8. Stock photos and videos
There are many places to sell your photos:
- Pixelbay
- Unsplash
- Adobe stock
- Shutterstock
- Alamy
You can also sell videos in these places. If you know there’s an event happening, you can go there to take pictures and videos that you can sell under the tag “events”, “parade”, etc. Of course, you should let the people know that you’re taking pictures of them first.
Or, get a friend to split the profit with you. They’ll be the model and you’ll take pictures of them doing random things (within legal ground). For instance, a picture of them reading, arguing, laughing, napping on the table, visiting a library, shopping, walking in a park, eating a sandwich in a park, etc.
Some stock photos are able to generate its owners millions of dollars over a few months. The more pictures and videos you make, the more you can find a winning stock picture or stock video to make you passive income for years to come.
How many articles do you need to blog full-time? Read here.
9. Sell print-on-demand merch
Print on demand products are products where a person can upload a design and the design gets printed on the product when someone orders it. The merch is then shipped to the customer without the person handling the product.
You can make a lot of money with POD products. It works best if you already have an audience. If you don’t have an audience, build a brand on social media first, or, you can sell your POD on RedBubble where there’s a marketplace for people to search and find your POD merch.
Places you can sell your POD include:
- Society6
- Redbubble
- Amazon Merch
- Printful
- Shopify
- Spreadshirt
- Zazzle
To build an audience, you’ll need to build a brand as a content creator. Let’s find out how to become a content creator and make money this year. Click here.
10. Your voice
You can do a voice-over for people who need it. It could be for a Youtube channel or for a children’s book for instance. Sell your voice-over gigs on Fiverr.
Make money with these 20 easy gigs on Fiverr. Click here.
11. 3D Designs
You can use TinkerCad to build 3D models and then sell the 3D designs you created to people. They can print it out using a 3D printer.
TikerCad is free and is beginner-friendly. They even teach you how to build 3D models on TinkerCad!
It’ll take you maybe a month to learn how to use TnkerCad well but once you learned how to do so, you can make a lot of 3D models to sell.
Where to sell your 3D models:
- TurboSquid
- CG Trader
- Renderosity
- Cubebrush
- Sketchfab
Are you going to college soon? 12 Things to NEVER buy as a college student, click here!
12. Sell fonts on CreativeMarkets
Did you know that you can easily make fonts for free and then make money selling them? Check out this full guide on how to do so.
One woman even made a million by selling her fonts!
13. Sell your words on KDP
Some people are able to make thousands or tens of thousands per month selling books on KDP. KDP stands for Kindle Direct Publishing and it’s a program by Amazon.
You may be surprised to find out that it’s free to self-publish your books. If you like writing, you should give this a try.
I wrote this comprehensive guide on how you can make money by self-publishing on KDP. It’s easier than most people think! And it’s still not too late to get in on this!
14. Sell your English language skill
If you can speak English well, you should know that there are a lot of people who struggle to do this and would love to pay someone to teach them.
VIPKID is one place you can sell your English language skills by teaching them to others. Teach it to kids who are learning English in other countries.
In most cases, all you have to do is to speak English to these kids. You don’t need to know how to speak their languages. It’d be helpful to have some books and toys to demonstrate things with. For example, you can hold up a toy carrot and repeat “carrot” to the kid and have them repeat after you.
Once they gain your trust in your skills, it’s almost a guarantee that they’ll come back again and again for your lessons.
You can make $10–35+ an hour teaching kids English. Not bad for a teenager.
Are doctors really rich? Find out here.
15. Sell bath bombs
These teen sisters sold $20 Million worth of bath bombs!
Some of the basic ingredients in bath bombs include: You can find many of these ingredients in your kitchen!
- Baking soda
- Salt
- Starch
- Citric acid
- Coconut oil
Anyone can make bath bombs. It’s a lot easier than you think. You’ll want to create a variety of bath bombs to suit your customers’ preferences.
You can sell your bath bombs on Etsy. It’ll cost you 25 cents per listing but it’s free to set up your shop.
You can also market your bath bombs on TikTok and other social media sites to gain an audience. It’ll be even better if you can demonstrate how the bath bombs dissolve underwater in a video. You don’t have to include yourself in the video if you don’t want to. Just your hands are fine.
These teen girls are able to become their own bosses by selling something simple that everybody can make. They even got their parents to quit their jobs and join in on the family business!
Want to be your own boss too? 8 Reasons you should be your own boss, read here.
16. Sell book club memberships
It doesn’t have to be a book club membership. It can also sell membership for those interested in gaming, programming, blogging, photographing, NFTs, etc.
Especially if you got a good knowledge of the subject, you can make a lot of money with these membership clubs. Your friends or anyone else would have to pay money to join.
You can start your membership club on Facebook group or Discord for instance.
You can also start your own club on your own website. I recommend HostGator for hosting. They also give you a free 1-year domain name. That’s it, all you need is hosting and a domain name to get started building a membership club on your own website.
You can open your club to anyone at first and then later on changed to a pay structure. Some people will complain but if you want to make money, you have no choice. You can decide how much you want to charge. Either as a one-time payment or monthly payment. You can also decide whether you’ll only charge new members or everyone will need to pay.
Final thought
There are many ways to make extra money as teenagers. I hope I have given you some great ideas. If so, please consider subscribing to the mailing list. I blog about making money so you’ll be the first to know when a new idea comes out!
Want to be your own boss? 11 Reasons to start a blog, read here.
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