The people who are serious about getting ahead financially are always looking for new effective ideas and strategies that they can use to grow their income. Since you are reading this, you are probably one of these people. This article will introuduce you to a number of high-paying side gigs that can change your financial fortunes forever.

If you want to grow your income, you can either focus your energies on increasing your output at your current job – if you are paid based on performance – or direct your energies at exploring new income generating opportunities outside of your primary job. Since, most people aren’t lucky to be employed in performance-based positions, taking the second option to pursue high-paying side gigs is the most effective path.

The options you have as far as side gigs are concerned are almost limitless. Nonetheless, not many side gigs can pay $100,000 or more a year. To make this kind of money, you must avoid limiting side gigs such as doing microtasks on sites such as Mechanical Turk or signing up to participate in online surveys.

You need to focus on high-paying side gigs that can offer you some kind of leverage. Leverage, in this case, can come in the form of the magnitude of single transactions or the total number of transactions. You want to be either able to sell several units of a low margin product or a few units of a product with a big-sized margin. What you don’t want to do if you want a side gig paying $100,000 or more a year is put yourself in a situation where you can only serve one client at a time and are paid a fixed rate per hour.

Below are some of the side gigs that can pay $100,000 a year:

1.     Optimizing Auctioned Websites

Every month, website owners list thousands of web properties for auction on auction sites such as Flippa. If you scour through the listings, you will find several sites that can make a lot more money than they are currently making if the owner optimized them properly.

This strategy assumes that you already know how to make money online and can tell a good website from a bad one. You will be going in with the same mindset as those real estate professionals who buy dilapidated properties at a bargain, renovate them, and then flip them for a decent profit. It is normal to sell a website for 2X or 3X annual revenues. When you buy several websites with great potential and drastically increase their revenues, you set yourself up for a large lump sum payment down the road.

2.     Building a Community on Instagram around a Lifestyle Product

Unlike Facebook, Instagram is still young and new users still have a chance at building large followings. The engagement on Instagram is also significantly higher than the user engagement reported by other social media sites.

If you have an Instagram account, you probably follow an account dedicated to lifestyle topics such as fashion and travel that have over a million followers. Because of Instagram’s high engagement, advertisers pay a pretty sum to have these Instagrammers make a sponsored post about them. According to Influence Marketing Hub, someone with just 100,000 followers can make up to $900 per sponsored post while those with 500,000 followers can make up to $3,000 per sponsored post.

3.     Taking STEM Lessons to the Net

If you are a teacher with a STEM specialization, you have a unique opportunity with the internet to expand your classroom beyond borders. You can offer lessons to anyone from anywhere in the world with the power of the internet. Students are always looking for simple-to-understand explanations of the concepts they are trying to learn.

You can offer your lessons in text or videos on your website. When students land on your site from Google, the ones who like your style will stick around. This gives you an opportunity to sell them a premium online class that is more organized and comprehensive than the free articles and videos on your site. If the lessons are pre-recorded, this can be a top tier high-paying side gig since scaling the business will be much easier.

4.     Sell Craft Supplies on Etsy

Etsy is an e-commerce store targeting creatives and people who like artsy creations. Etsy users can only sell products they make themselves or vintage products that are at least 20 years old. Additionally, Etsy allows users to supply products that other users can use to assemble their creations.

There’s a lot of money to be made in being one of the notable craft suppliers on Etsy. One of the popular categories is Jewelry supplies. On offer in this category are items such as precious stones, charms, crystals, and beads. Since most items are bought in bulk, suppliers make good money off the orders they get. Selling on Etsy is a high-paying side gig you can start with a very small capital.

5.     Flip Pop Culture High-Ticket Items

If you keep abreast of pop culture and are always in the know when interesting items are released, you can get into the business of buying and flipping high-ticket items such as high-fashion sneakers and premium concert tickets.

Some pop culture high-ticket items sell out within minutes of being released. When Kanye releases an iconic Yeezy boot, you can bet that it will run out of stock fast. When Taylor Swift announces a concert and the tickets are offered for sale, the tickets are sold out within minutes. Often, people buy these items in bulk and resell them in the secondary market for a profit. Some pop culture items can be marked up as high as 300% above the RRP in the secondary resale market. If you keenly follow pop culture, this can be a lucrative business to get into.

6.     Start a Freelancing Agency

If you have a skill that is in demand skill such as web development and graphic design, you can put a team together and start a freelancing agency. Since this is a side-hustle, your job should mainly be prospecting for clients and coordination of projects. While you don’t have to do the actual work yourself, you should have the skills needed to do the jobs. This is because you want to be able to tell without a doubt whether or not a project your team has completed meets all the order requirements your client made.

If you run an agency, you should explicitly tell your clients that they will be working with an agency and that you won’t do the job yourself. Most freelancing sites will require you to register as an agency if you run one. You may earn negative reviews and get banned from freelancing sites if you don’t disclose this information.

7.     Build and Manage Web Properties for Local Businesses

It is amazing how many local businesses have dormant websites and social media accounts. Even worse, some businesses do not have any online presence at all. There are two main reasons why local business owners may not take advantage of the internet: either they don’t know how or they just don’t have the time to follow through. This reality presents an opportunity for you to venture into one of the most accessible high-paying side gigs out there.

If you can clearly show a local business the benefits they will derive from going online, they will certainly be willing to outsource the work to you. It goes without saying that you should know how internet marketing works. There are several cheap or free tutorials you can consume to learn about all the major areas of internet marketing including SEO, social media marketing, email marketing, copywriting, and blogging.

8.     Run an Ecommerce Store

Online commerce is highly differentiated. With just one unique spin to a product or concept, you can build a successful online brand from scratch. There are people making lots of money selling everyday items on the net. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

The tools you need to build an e-commerce store are readily available. You can use Shopify or Bigcommerce tools to handle the technical details of building a website and use a service such as Fulfillment by Amazon to handle distribution. As far as product sourcing is concerned, sites such as Alibaba.com make it extremely easy to strike a deal with product manufacturers.

9.     Start a T-Shirt Printing Service

Someone with an eye for design can successfully create a t-shirt printing service that nets more than $100,000 a year. You shouldn’t go about the business the same way the average person would, though. Your focus should be to do this at scale and sell several units of the same designs.

The easiest way to do this is to not retail the products yourself but to wholesale the designs to other sellers. With several bloggers and YouTubers now selling t-shirts on their own stores, finding partners to work with should be easy.

10. Do Affiliate Marketing to Learn How to Sell Online

One of the best ways to learn how to make money on the internet is to sell other people’s products for a commission. This is called affiliate marketing. You will learn pretty much all the skills you need to know to succeed as an online entrepreneur. To be a great affiliate marketer, you have to understand PPC marketing, SEO, A/B testing, email marketing, copywriting, blogging, landing page building, lead magnet creation, conversion rate optimization, and how to use analytics tools, among other useful skills. The beauty of the process is that you will make money as you learn.