How to Make Extra Money in Retirement From Home

Intro.

Just because you’re heading into retirement, doesn’t mean you have to rely on a pension alone. A large proportion of people still like to work in their retirement years, others like to keep busy with a hobby. So why not make your hobby into a small profitable business.

With several presentable options that may suit you, I’m hopefully going to give you some ideas to consider. In fact some of these options may even become an asset that you can pass onto other family members in the future.

So let’s have a look and see what options may suit you, to make extra money in retirement from home.

Setup Your Own Online Drop-shipping Store

With the advancement of online infrastructure and services, dropshipping is becoming an extremely attractive way to make money online for a lot of people. When some people think of running an online eCommerce store, in the back of their mind is the thought of inventory and garages full of leftover items.

But this is not the case anymore, not since dropshipping has become fashionable and more accessible. So how easy is dropshipping?

Dropshipping is easier than you think, and may be a great opportunity for those heading into retirement. I’ll explain how dropshipping works, so you can assess if this would suit you.

How Dropshipping Works

To begin with, you’ll be required to setup an online store, just like any other eCommerce shop. The easiest way to do this is through a dedicated eCommerce hosting provider. Two that come to mind are Shopify and BigCommerce. I’ve used Shopify in the past, so I’ll use them as an example.

Within Shopify, you’ll set up your brand, purchase a domain name, fill out your account and payment details and get your shipping configured. You will also choose a theme for your store, which will give a unique feel to your own branded website.

Now, dropshipping is when you ship a product direct to the customer, instead of housing it yourself and then packaging it up, and posting it yourself. So what you need to do is find manufacturers or suppliers that will dropship for you.

The most common place people use to dropship is AliExpress, an Asian website where you can purchase extremely cheap merchandise. Because these Asian stores are so inexpensive, you can mark up the prices quite substantially. Other alternatives to AliExpress are listed below:

• Deal Extreme
• Light In The Box
• Bang Good
• Mini In The Box
• CES Deals
• Tiny Deal

So lets run through the process of how this will work.

You have your Shopify store set up, now it’s time to add products. As an example, you may choose a golfing store. So you advertise golf tees. You go searching on AliExpress for golf tees. Now, you want to make sure to get the cheapest shipping possible, so look for shipping that includes ‘ePacket’.

Once you’ve found the correct criteria, you can add these exact tees to your website. Download the images and upload them to your store and give them a price.

Now when somebody comes to your store and purchases the golf tees, you’ll have that money in your account. It’s now up to you to purchase the golf tees from AliExpress, and have them ship it directly to the customer.

Be sure to include a note to the AliExpress retailer that you don’t want any receipt enclosed. This is to ensure the customer doesn’t know it’s coming from AliExpress. You’ll be sending them an invoice through your store via email.

Where to Get Educated in Dropshipping

Now that you understand the process of how dropshipping works, you’ll want to get a better understanding of the intricacies. By this I mean how to set up your shipping correctly (including the free+shipping technique), sending invoices, collecting customers email, dealing with customer complaints and returns, setting up product variations (such as sizes, colors etc) and so much more.

Running an online dropshipping store is a fulfilling activity, and can generate some high incomes. With these great profits though, come more responsibility. You must keep your customers happy, and run a store in a professional manner.

I’ve reviewed numerous courses on this website, including multiple eCommerce courses. By far my preferred eCommerce course is Adrian Morrison’s Ecom Success Academy. Adrian not only teaches the Shopify side of things, but also how to advertise with Facebook and managing all the other day to day tasks. Other eCommerce courses tend to forget these finer details.

As an alternative, eCom Lifestyle University is a much cheaper course, but almost as valuable. Ricky Hayes is the creator, an Aussie who shares his broad knowledge in eCommerce dropshipping. 

What you may appreciate about setting up an online eCommerce store in retirement, is that the store can be passed onto younger family members in the future. The more money your store makes, the bigger this valuable asset becomes. This would be a great future inheritance, but you’d need to teach others how to run the store before passing it over.

Become an Affiliate Marketer

The exact model of income generation that I use, and is ideal for any retired person. Affiliate marketing involves promoting any company’s products or services, in exchange for commissions.

Because affiliate marketing can be set up with a simple website, you won’t have the larger ongoing costs associated with an eCommerce store. This is a cheap method of sustained profitability, but can take a little longer to gain traction.

My ideal method of traffic generation is free traffic through search engines like Google, and I’d suggest you make this a priority. Search engines will reward you with higher rankings in search engine results pages (SERPS) if you follow simple SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) rules.

You can also use paid advertising or social media to advertise your promotions, making affiliate marketing a brilliant way to make money online.

How Affiliate Marketing Works

This is such a simple process that you don’t need to be a young techno guru to succeed. I began this affiliate marketing website you’re reading now, at nearly 50 years of age, so what’s stopping YOU.

The basic process of affiliate marketing goes like this.

You create a website in a particular niche, let’s take ‘running & marathons’ for instance. You write some articles about your niche topic, and provide some items that may help with what you’re describing.

Let’s say you want to promote fitness trackers. You join affiliate programs that sell different fitness trackers. To find these, type into Google ‘fitness trackers + affiliate programs’. You’ll find an abundance of merchants that sell fitness trackers with an affiliate program.

Once you’ve joined and been accepted into the affiliate program, you can begin promoting their products. You’ll need to grab the affiliate code from within the affiliate program, and place it on your website attached to the product. You can see how to do this here.

You can get a more in depth explanation of how affiliate marketing works with by reading my Beginners Step by Step Guide to Affiliate Marketing.

Where to Get Educated in Affiliate Marketing

There’s only one platform that can provide everything you need. I’ve reviewed several affiliate marketing courses here, with quite a few really good quality. What they can’t all provide though, is integrated tools that can help you.

I’m a member of Wealthy Affiliate, the all in one solution that offers all the best advice and training. Their ‘Online Entrepreneur Certification’ course is exactly what’s required, teaching the most up to date SEO methods to rank your articles highly in search engines.

Not only do they provide internal tools to help with content creation, keyword research and website building, they can also host your website which is all inclusive in the membership fee.

What you may also like, is the 7 day free trial. In fact you can keep the free membership should you wish, and even keep the free website. What do you have to lose.

Oh, and there is a community of thousands, all willing to help each other and offer great advice. Many of these members all full time affiliate marketers, and are always happy to help. You can check out Wealthy Affiliate here.

Sell Products on Amazon

We all understand just how big Amazon is, but have you ever considered selling your own branded merchandise on Amazon. This is a different model than running your own eCommerce store, but requires just as much effort and input. It will certainly keep you busy in retirement.

Selling your own items that have your own logo or design can be extremely satisfying. Especially when you can make some large income returns by using this method of online sales.

You will need to be active with this venture, and I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re just searching for a part time hobby.

How Selling on Amazon Works

This model involves learning how to find previously manufactured products that are being offered as PLR (Private Label Rights). This is where you can brand these products as your own, then resell them on Amazon.

Amazon has its own fulfilment center, which you can use to distribute your products. So, as opposed to the dropshipping model, you can use Amazon Fulfilment to do all the heavy lifting for you.

There’s a fair bit to learn in this industry, with discovering which products have the potential for large profits, how to get your products to rank highly on Amazon’s platform and many other aspects which can impact your bottom line.

Where to Get Educated in Selling on Amazon

Well, I’ve seen some fairly average courses that claim they can help educate you when it comes to selling products on Amazon, but I’ve also come across one course that stands out, and really does provide a great insight with exceptional training.

It’s called Search.Find.Buy, and is put together but a guy named Ben Cummings. I’ve totally gone through the course myself, and can recommend it as my No.1 course to learn how selling on Amazon works, and the best methods to implement.

Complete Surveys/Tasks

In my opinion, the above methods are going to make you a lot more money than completing surveys and/or tasks. In all honesty, the easiest method to make some pocket change, is to fill out some surveys. But on the flip side of that, the payout rate is extremely poor, and some may consider this a waste of time.

The reason being is that you may get paid $1-2 to complete a survey. But the survey may take you 40-50 minutes to complete. Is your time really worth this amount, or do you value your time more than that. This is something only you can decide, but I believe I’m worth more than $2-4 per hour.

Surveys are simple enough to do, and they can be tailored to you as an individual. I’ll touch on how you can get started with surveys or tasks, and where you can start getting into them.

How Surveys & Tasks Works

This is not much more difficult than somebody asking survey questions in the street or on the phone. But when it comes to survey online, you’ll need to register an account, and fill out your payment details so you can receive money.

What concerns me with these types of websites, is that recently, many similar type sites have popped up, but they are SCAMS. You really need to be careful when choosing a survey site to work with, I’ll advise you about this soon.

So, once you’ve done the formalities, you may answer some questions about yourself. This will give the platform you’re signed up to, an idea about the types of surveys they’ll display to you. There’s no point giving you surveys about children if you don’t have any.

As far as tasks go, this may be visiting websites and checking them out, downloading apps to your phone, giving your opinion in polls, entering a sweepstake or referring others to the survey platform.

Where to Get Started With Surveys

There are a few websites that are well known for survey filling and task completing. Here’s a few legitimate platforms to get you started.

SwagBucks
Opinion World
OnePoll
Toluna

As I mentioned earlier, I’d urge you to do your research before signing up to any survey or task sites. I’ve reviewed several here which are scam sites. Here’s a few that are illegitimate and DO NOT PAY their members.

CloutBucks
InfluEarn
Paid4Clout

As I also mentioned, surveys are only going to pay you small amounts of money, so if you find you’re not earning enough, I’d step it up a little and give affiliate marketing a go.

Other Options

The above are not the only options to make money in retirement. You could try your hand at freelance writing, which is a passion of many. If you’re a good reader or writing, you may find writing articles for companies or blogs an ideal solution to earn extra income in retirement.

Alternatively, you may be the creative type. In which case, creating digital designs may be right up your ally. You can sell your digital designs on a platform such as CafePress, which houses thousands of designs for others to leverage, for a fee of course.

If you enjoy taking photo images and you’re pretty good at it, then why not sell your images on stock image websites. Your images will have to be vetted, but if you understand what these stock image websites are searching for, you can tailor your images to suit.

YouTube is the largest and most popular social channel on the internet. People now love watching videos rather than reading information. There are many ways you can leverage the YouTube platform, from affiliate marketing to blogging, to attaching adverts to your videos, to directing visitors to your website.

Wrapping Up

I really admire anyone that has the foresight to think about how they’re going to fund their retirement. Governments are not helping out pensioners in the slightest, so why not beat them by earning more money in retirement from your own online endeavours.

A venture such as affiliate marketing can bring in an income 5x what the pension pays, easily. If you give yourself some to to set this up, be consistent and persistent in keeping it active, and also be patient while Google is indexing your articles, you could well be earning a great income for a long time to come.