30 Money Making Part-Time Businesses

If you are looking for business ideas or businesses that you can start easily on your own without investing a lot of money, then you came at the right place. The businesses presented here can be done as part-time at first and if it will succeed you can go full time with the business.

In each one, you’ll find the basic concept of the business, what product or service it provides to your customers, and how it is operated, and (if any are necessary) what equipment or facilities or help will be needed.

But whatever business you choose, remember that no business can succeed without your effort.  Remember that determination and hard work are the mother and father of success.  If you supply those, and use the information here, you can’t miss.  I know there are a lot of ideas going around in the minds of our readers that they could probably share with us. Good luck!

1. Make Blogging a business.

If you enjoy writing, find an interesting topic niche you’re passionate about and blog about it. You can make money thru advertising, affiliate products, selling a merchandise and many more. Blogging requires time but with patience this can be a lucrative business, all you need is a computer, some time, patience, and some energy to consistently write. I’ve known a lot of bloggers who make money blogging.

2. Run a “Consignment Shop”

It requires very little capital and accepts goods for sale from members of the public and sells these items for them on a commission basis.  You might try a wide variety of items at first, to see what sells best and most regularly.

3. Cookies and Candy making.

Homemade cookies and candies can be a great seller. You can make candies, bake the cookies, package them well, and resell them through a local gift shops or local tourist shops. Often, you can find people in your social network who will buy batches from you for special occasions. These are great for birthdays, parties, reunions and special events.

4. Soap and Candle making.

Making amazing homemade eco-friendly soaps and candles isn’t as hard as you might think – it just takes time and patience. Biodegradable detergent soaps and homemade scented candles are all-time bestsellers. Items like these can easily be sold via your neighbors, local gift shops and through websites.

5. Online Store Retailing/ Wholesaling

With the advent of Internet, online selling is just an easy business to start with no money capital at all. You can start selling online, like in ebay, with just the use of the Internet, your computer and some product suppliers. You don’t need a physical store either to sell products online. Observe other sellers in ebay or in ecrater, a booming free marketplace and ask about tips on how to start online selling. This is very fun business and you’re making money even when you’re asleep.

6. Throwing Parties for Profit

Everyone loves to go to a party, and nowadays some smart operators make a mint running them for everybody who wants to attend.  You can too!  Hire a hall and a band, plan to set up a bar (if you can get a temporary liquor permit), and promote the hell out of it with ads, handbills, bumper stickers and lamp-post posters.  Special parties aimed at a particular group do best, such as singles, or under-thirties, or over-forties.  This idea is especially good in college towns.

7. Start a Hobby Center

Make money on your unused space (and maybe the power tools you’ve already paid for!)  Turn your available space into a woodworking center, your spare bedroom into a photo darkroom, and your garage into a pottery workshop with a wheel and a small kiln.  Rent the space and equipment by the hour, expand into more hobbies as time and money permit, and charge additional fees for instruction in any of those fields you’re good at. This is good for children, teenagers and even for elderly.

8. Organize a Babysitting Service

One of the troubles most people find is that their babysitter is always busy just the night they want to go out.  You set up a service, finding good reliable teenage girls and boys, middle-aged or older women, and act as a go-between, providing sitters whenever your customers want them, collecting the fees, and paying the sitters.  Advertise your service, and handbills house-to-house locally being a good way.

9. Make Money From Your Hobbies

Are you an expert at something that you do at home for fun?  Then make it pay off for you!  If you’re a gourmet cook, give cooking lessons.  If you’re an accomplished painter in oils or water-color, offer a portrait-painting service.  If you’re a skilled carpenter, design and make custom cabinets to order.  Almost any hobby you’re good at can be turned to making a profit if you think about it carefully, and decide who could use your expertise – as a consultant in that field, if nothing else.  All you really have to do to get started is to place an ad!

10. Publish a Buy/Swap Paper in Your Town

Get money from both ends in this sweetheart deal. Publish the weekly paper with classified ads from the public offering stuff for sale, arranged according to category, and charge the people for their ads (some operators let them pay only if and when they sell, but in that case charge them a percentage of the selling price, 5% for smaller items, 2% or 3% for automobiles), and then sell the newspaper as well, through local newsstands and by subscription (in the mail).  Once you have a fairly decent circulation, local merchants will also pay you for display ads, because they know people really read buy and swap newspapers religiously cover-to-cover.

11. Do Custom Photo Developing

Quality is essential, and speed is generally also required, although you can charge a premium for rush service.  If you already have an elaborate dark-room set-up in your home, so much the better, but if not it can be fitted in anywhere you have room, the basement being ideal, since windows are not a requirement.  You must be able not only to develop and print every normal size of film from 35 mm to 8″ x 10″ but handle enlargements up to a minimum of 30″ x 40″, and preferably 5″ 8*” or more, and do copying both of opaque material and slides.  An ability to offer retouching, restoration and coloring as well is helpful, even if you have to send that specialized work out. Use photo editing tools to make your photos more engaging to your readers

12. Publish a Part-Time Jobs Directory

Make this a newsstand book, as well as offering it, with small ads, by mail order.  List all the possible jobs people can get part-time, especially angling it at college kids on vacation, teachers after school hours, housewives with time on their hands, and moonlighters looking for part-time second jobs.

13. Run a Children’s “Explorer Club”

Take kids on Saturday and Sunday  outings.  Ten kids each day, to zoos, farms, theaters, children’s shows and sports events.  A small micro-bus (rented and, or eventually bought) can be used to travel in.  Many parents are delighted to  have weekend days to themselves, even though it costs them some dough.

14. Be an Instructor

Teach whatever you know.  Your trade, profession, cooking skills, a second language, woodworking, chess, photography, knitting, karate, bridge, auto repair, etc.  People will pay for good lessons in these useful and enjoyable skills. You can also set-up your website and do online teaching.

15. Run a Floor Scraping/Polishing Service

You buy or (at first) rent, a heavy-duty machine, and do the cleaning and waxing of fine, hardwood floors.  If the floors are in very bad condition, machine sand them and them completely refinish them with modern super-durable polyurethane finishes.

16. Operate a Children’s Hotel

This is sort of a “boarding house” for kids while their parent go away for a week-end or two-week vacation.  Requires a large house, and preferably, a large yard or grounds, swings, slides, and facilities useful for kids. Must be done very responsibly and carefully.  Also, don’t take very young children (less than 9 or 10 say) because they may require too much dressing, feeding, etc.

17. Start a Jewelry Making Business

If you love jewelries and you have a good eye for detail work and a lot of patience, homemade jewelry making business can be quite profitable. There are many opportunities to sell such items through local gift shops to your friends or at websites.

18. Operate a Photo Copy Center

The secret of this is not just selling one or two copies of each original (although on a 300-page original manuscript, that can add up too), but using one of the latest high-speed high-quality mass-production photocopies so that you can compete with the guys operating those quick printing services, by turning out 100 or 200 resumes, letters, or circulars just as fast, and probably a great deal faster, for the same (or potentially less if you want to be competitive) money as they charge.  This way you have two kinds of work, giving you twice as many customers, and twice the profit opportunity, and with the right location, a chance to clean up.

If you want to offer even more services, and have the space in your shop, as well as the potential customers, you can offer Xerox reductions, and Xerox copies in full-color, which are remarkably good.  The color machine will also make color copies directly from 35 mm. color slides in one quick step.

Of course, you can consider using other brands of xerographic copiers, such as IBM, Kodak, Savin, Canon, Minolta or others, but although you may theoretically save money, make sure of their service policies, and that they have field servicemen in your locality, or you may find yourself stuck with a copier on the fritz for a week, which could ruin your  business.

19. Campground Store-On-Wheels

Use either a panel truck or a camper body on a pick-up truck chassis.  Go to public park areas and campgrounds selling charcoal, paper plates, water-melon, ice cream, eggs, milk, bread, insect repellent, sunglasses, newspapers, etc.

20. Create a New Tour-Bus Service

This could be a fun and profitable if you know how to manage this kind of business. You must be creative about it, and study all the tourist spots around your hometown, to discover some original and different places to travel to on day trips which will “turn on” your prospective customers, and get them to sign up.

The rest is easy. You get competitive quotes (from commercial bus companies) for a quality bus to do the round-trip, with a suitable stopover at the destination point (enough to do the sights, shop and maybe eat as well).  Then you figure you tour price per person so you can make a profit even if the bus is only half full or so.  Then you have a safety margin – and if you sell every seat you will do very well indeed.

Then all you have to do is sell.  You put little ads in your local papers, paste up flyers wherever you can (supermarkets are good), contact local travel agents (of course you give them a percentage on what they sell for you), local hotel clerks, etc., and you also contact women’s clubs, religious groups, fraternal societies, factory social organizations, schools and universities and so on (they may take a whole bus, or even two, and you give them a special price, naturally).

21. Run a Pet Sitting Service

Opportunities abound in the pet care industry. Consider walking dogs during the day, grooming or training pets on weekends, or boarding animals overnight. Even if you’re not equipped to keep others’ pets in your home, you can offer to wash and groom animals at clients’ houses, or check in on their pets at their home while they’re away. Owners often need someone to watch their pets on weekends and holidays, so pet care can be an easy business to start if you work during the week. You can hire responsible teenagers to help you.  Advertise with posters in pet shops, veterinarians’ offices; and if they’re cheaply available, get the mailing lists of local pet owner’s groups and other animal welfare groups, as well as membership lists of dog and cat clubs.

22. Breed Tropical Fish

This requires only a moderate amount of space and a small investment in equipment.  Properly done, it needs only a small amount of your time yet can make you a good profit.  You can obtain your beginning stock from the large wholesale dealers.  You can sell direct to consumers (the hobbyists) or to stores in your area.

23. Be a Used Car Buying Consultant

With a knowledge of cars, plus the proper test equipment (for checking the engine, transmission, brakes, font-end alignment, and chassis), you go with your customer to check out the used car he is thinking of buying.  Advertise your service next to the ads offering used cars for sale.  After a while you will get to know people in this field and you can pick up more money by acting as a middleman in sales between private individuals.

24.  Operate a “Give a Party” Service

You rent out everything needed for a party:  tables, chairs, punch bowls, table cloths, cutlery, and napkins.  You can also supply waitresses and bartenders, finding them through agencies that supply temporary help such as Manpower.  But if you can find good workers yourself, you can save the agency fee and make more money.

25.  All-Out Service

You line up the specialists in fixing and doing almost anything, and take care of getting them customers by delivering handbills to homes and placing ads in supermarkets and local papers.  They pay you 5% of every job refer to them, which can soon add up.

26. Bed and breakfast service.

Do you have some extra space in your home? Turn that extra bedroom into a “bed and breakfast” room. This works particularly well if you have a somewhat classic home or live near an area that attracts regular travelers and tourists.

27. Catering Services

Though highly competitive, the market is also incredibly niche-driven: You could focus on small dinners, cocktail parties, corporate events, or lavish socials. To minimize costs, start by cooking at the site where you’ll be catering. As your business grows, consider renting kitchen space. Starting a food catering business can be fun and profitable.

28. Rental Equipment

Be the source of supplies for do-it-yourselfers. Working only Saturdays and Sundays, when they do, you rent out power tools, such as circular saws, jigsaws, reciprocating saws, gasoline chain saws, electric drills, electric planers, belt and orbital sanders, routers, paint sprayers, wallpaper-removal steamers, staple guns, pumps, home cleaning machines, Roto-tillers, and other equipment for daily fees. Operate out of your garage. If you have video-k or a karaoke machine, you could also rent that one especially for birthdays, parties and special occasions.

29. Housecleaning Service.

Many people simply don’t enjoy cleaning their houses and are willing to pay a reasonable price to have someone do the work for them. This is a great way to earn extra money in the pocket, particularly if you have time off during the weekend. Staring a house cleaning business is a perfect option for part timers.

30. Picture Framing, In Your Own Home

Relatively inexpensive materials with a good sense of color and style and a reasonable ability with carpentry tools, will build a large custom-framing business, since people who spend money on art won’t skimp on the frames either, if they want a good-looking result.