Unconvential Ways to Make Money with your Creative Skills

It’s been 2 weeks since I have considered myself unemployed and you know what?  I am so flipping busy and much more exhausted than I have been in a long while.  But it’s a good kind of busy and, more importantly, I am still paying the bills.  I have decided to put off my traditional job search until after the holidays (if at all) so that I can make a go of this latest idea of mine.  Basically I put together a big board of all of my careers and figured out what skills linked them all together.  Then I pooled all of the knowledge I’ve learned over the years at these seemingly unconnected job choices so that I can figure out how to creatively make money from it all.  I decided that if I make a little here and a little there, it will add up to a lot overall in this new optimistic reality of mine.  So here are some of my ideas to get the cash flowing:

Teachers Pay Teachers
I know that this is a very career specific way to make money, but it’s worth a shot.  After all, I did teach for 6 years, so you’d think that I have a few tricks up my sleeve that I can benefit from.  Now even though the big moneymaking earners on here are the math & science lessons, I figure that I can give it a shot with my art lesson plans, rubrics and the like.  I’m encouraged by the fact that some of the new top earners have made over $20,000 in the last few months.  I really like the fact that once you upload your product, it sits forever, potentially making you money.  But the best part so far is that the most popular sellers seem to be the ones with quality products, not a great quantity of crap.  Although this will be a time consuming affair, I look forward to working on maybe 1 upload per week and then sitting back and waiting to see what happens.

Facebook
Normally when people make money on facebook, it’s through advertising.  But I have discovered a lot of local people are making garage sale groups for my town and selling items on here using the beauty of local pickup.  So all of those items that I don’t deem eBay worthy can still be sold here for a few bucks.  Plus all you do is upload a photo and name a price, so it’s even simpler than eBay.

eBay
Speaking of which, since I used to manage 2 eBay retail stores, it is easy for me to get back into selling.  Things have changed slightly since I was an active eBay seller (100+ items per week) but it’s not too hard to jump back in.  Heck, the listings are even free now up to 50 listings per month, so how can I lose?  I predict that this is going to be my big money maker in the beginning and sure enough, I’ve already sold over $1000 of stuff from the garage in the past week.  Now the advantage for me here is also that my husband is one of those guys who always has electronic bits/parts/crap that people give him.  So I have an endless supply of things to sell and I am only limited by my boredom, hence quitting this business years ago.

Recycling
Remember that wonderful husband?  Well, he also gets a lot of recyclable items from work/friends/etc that are not worthy of selling on eBay.  I’m talking scrap metal, cables, computer parts and tons of other things that I can’t even recognize.  So after he gets a truckload’s worth, we have been going to the scrapyard on the weekends to get cash for it all.  Depending on the stuff (tin, copper, etc) we can sometimes make $500 on what looks like junk to me.  The secret is to know what you’ve got – some things sell better after you take them apart; some don’t.  Plus it takes time to sort through it all and divide it up into piles of each type of material.  Hopefully soon I will be taking over this task after my husband teaches me the basics.  That way he gets his nights and weekends back and I get to help out our family even more.  One word of caution though: as a woman, I would not go to these commercial recycling places by yourself.  I’m not saying that they are “dangerous for women,” but I know that I would get taken on the pricing and I might even get hit by a forklift since I am so scatterbrained sometimes.  Plus who wants to lift 1000 lbs of dirty metal out of a pickup by themselves?

Professional Organizing
This is another dirty way of earning money, but it means that you will truly have to go through someone’s dirty crap in their house to earn at this.  Now, I have always been an organized person, meaning I played with my barbies by color coordinating their wardrobes when I was little.  So this skill comes easy to me with practically no training other than HGTV and years of magazine reading.  If you think you are  up for it, then start out by helping out your friends with their homes for no payment, but take pictures to build your reputation and portfolio.  I just recently helped out a girlfriend with her pantry… which turned into basically organizing her whole kitchen and took from 9-5pm.  If that sounds like fun to you (and it truly does to me!) then have at it and see where the word of mouth leads you.