What's the laziest way to make money online as a complete beginner in 2025? Honestly, right now there's a million different ways to make your first million. We're living in a time where opportunity is bigger and better than it's ever been before, while the barrier to entry has also never been this low.
As someone who's made over $10 million online, I'm going to be using all of my experience and knowledge to help you understand what opportunities are actually worth your time, ensuring they make you good amounts of money but also with the least amount of effort possible. I'm going to be breaking down all of these opportunities by how much effort it takes to actually make money, since we're looking for the laziest options, how much cost is involved, how much risk there is, and most importantly, how much potential there is to make crazy amounts of money long term. Because it's not enough to just make good money with low effort; we want to ensure that anything we get into is going to help us unlock financial freedom, time freedom, and location freedom, so we can actually live life on our own terms through pursuing this.
The first opportunity I'm going to break down is affiliate marketing through short-form content. Affiliate marketing is very simple. All you do is go find amazing brands, companies, or products you enjoy and see if they have an affiliate structure.
If they have a good deal, you grab the product you like, film a video with it, and get people to purchase it through your link. The easiest thing is to just go on Amazon and have an Amazon storefront, but you can also promote digital products through things like impact. com or cj.
com. You really can do anything; there's an affiliate marketing structure for almost every product in the world. If you can learn the skill of mastering short-form content and simply selling other people's products in your videos, you can make some insane money.
You don't have to worry about customer support, legal issues, hiring people, or running a company. When it comes to the effort level of this side hustle, I would say it's medium. Essentially, the effort's pretty low because all you have to do is grab a phone, film a video, and put a link in it.
However, to truly master storytelling and really get perfect hooks and actually create viral videos, it's going to take a long time to master that skill. But once you do master it, that's a long-term talent that's never going to go away. Most importantly, when you make videos online, they're essentially digital pieces of real estate; they don't disappear.
So if you have a viral video that consistently makes money for weeks, months, or even years, that's the definition of passive income. Even though the effort level is kind of high, I would say it's very worth it. Next, let's look into the cost.
With affiliate marketing, all you really need is a phone and an internet connection, and if you're sitting and watching this video, I'm assuming you have both, so there's virtually no cost. Now let's talk about risk levels with affiliate marketing. Essentially, the risk is really low because you don't have any startup costs, but you can potentially risk losing a lot of time.
Obviously, time is the most important thing in the world, but in the starting phases of your journey, it's best to only be losing time and not risking any money. Now let's talk about the potential with affiliate marketing. Honestly, there isn't really a cap on how much you can earn, so I'd say it's very high.
I personally make millions of dollars a year through affiliate marketing myself. All of my free drop shipping courses are essentially affiliate marketing. Shopify and other companies pay me a lot of money to make those free videos.
So as someone who's personally making millions a year doing this, I can say the potential is very high. A lot of people don't talk about this, but most of the live streamers that are incredibly famous, making a ton of money, are all making money from promoting gambling sites. They're all affiliate marketers, essentially, and some of them are making millions of dollars a month.
I'm going to give affiliate marketing an A. The next opportunity we're going to look into is investing, and this is going to be a very big blanket statement. We're going to be talking about meme coins, NFTs, crypto, stock options, and Forex.
There's really an endless list of opportunities when it comes to investing money. Investing is truly the definition of lazy money, but with that upside of almost no work being involved, there are a lot of downsides. When rating this on an effort level, I would say it's low to high.
If you're just simply looking up meme coins that you think are going viral and just clicking a couple of buttons and putting it in, that's really not too much work. But if you're actually looking at technical analysis, looking at charts when you're doing your trading or investing, that can be a crazy amount of effort, and it's a huge skill that you have to learn. So when it comes to the effort level, it's basically up to you.
Going over cost, this is incredibly high. For you to make any money trading or investing, you have to have a lot of money upfront, especially if you want to do it relatively safely. Yes, you can always put $1,000 in a meme coin and it could 300X and you could make a ton of money, but the risk level associated is astronomical.
It's also probably not going to happen, and even if you do make that money, you're going to be addicted to that income source, and you're probably going to end up losing it by. . .
Gambling again, to actually get into trading and investing properly, I’d say you need a minimum of $10K, and that's even incredibly low risk level. This is obviously infinite; you can go to literal zero and lose everything you put in. So overall, I would say this is just a form of gambling.
The only time it's actually an income source and you're actually doing it properly is if you're preserving wealth and not really looking to make insane amounts of wealth through trading or investing. When it comes to the potential, obviously it's very high, especially if you're looking at mem coins and NFTs, but obviously that risk associated is pretty insane, and overall I just don't think this is worth your time at all. This opportunity would overall get a D in my books.
Opportunity number three is Drp Shipping, which is essentially just selling other people's products on your own personal website. Whenever you get a sale, the manufacturer ships that order to your customer. Effort levels with this are incredibly low, as close to zero as you can really get.
If you want to get started with Drp Shipping, the best thing you can do is go to yourfirst. store. This is a company that gives you handbuilt custom Shopify stores for 100% free.
The store is also filled with eight winning products that are handpicked by me and my team. Yes, this is one of my own companies. Once you claim your store, you're also given a free six-hour course that teaches you how to take that store up to its first six figures in sales profitably.
So you really don't have to do anything; you're hand-given a store with products that are ready to sell right now and a free six-hour course that teaches you what to do. Let's talk about the costs associated with getting into Drp Shipping. You need a grand total of $2; $1 is for your Shopify plan, and the other dollar is for AutoDS.
AutoDS is the company that does all the fulfillment, so they help you source products, connect them to your website, so every time you get an order, it's automatically fulfilled by them, and you don't have to worry about a thing. Now, let's talk about risk. Since you put in $2 and you have to dedicate almost no time because you're getting a handbuilt store with products and a course, I’d say the risk is zero, but technically it is $2 of risk.
Now let’s talk about potential with Drp Shipping, and I want to go into this one a little bit more in depth. The potential with Drp Shipping is essentially limitless because you can learn how to build a Drp Shipping store and then convert that into a genuine brand, where you actually start getting inventory, hiring employees, working with influencers, and creating a real company. At that point, brands like that can be sold for hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.
But obviously, we're getting into a different level where that's not like a lazy way to make money online; that's creating a full-time company. But the opportunity inside Drp Shipping is insane, and what I really love about it is it teaches you all the skills that you would need to be a successful businessman: hiring, taxes, marketing, inventory, legal structures—it basically teaches you everything with the lowest risk involved, and that's why Drp Shipping has a very special place in my heart. I'd give Drp Shipping an A ranking.
Now, let's talk about TikTok Shop. This one is actually pretty insane; I can say with full confidence that TikTok Shop is the craziest opportunity I've seen in my eight years of making money online. There are moms on TikTok Shop literally bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit a month, and all they're doing is using their iPhone to make pretty boomer videos.
Some people are even making millions of dollars a month on TikTok Shop; it's absolutely insane. Now, when I say TikTok Shop, I'm talking about it from the creator side, not from the business owner side, like the people who are actually selling the products on there. I'm talking about the people who are making videos and content to promote those products.
Creators on TikTok Shop really have two different income sources: through videos or through live streams. Videos have massive potential to make insane amounts of money, but live streams are very easy at making consistent income. I personally know two people that are making $100,000 a month consistently just through TikTok Shop live streams.
They used to be my past students, but they quit Drp Shipping, went all in on TikTok Shop, and in their first 90 days, they were already making $100K a month in profit. It's absolutely absurd! The opportunity is so crazy that I even tried to do this myself.
I did a 30-day challenge, and in those 30 days, I went live 15 times. I only worked 35 hours out of the entire month just doing live streams from my phone, and I made over $6,200. It was probably the easiest money I've ever made in my life.
So when it comes to the effort level associated with TikTok Shop, I’d say it's the lowest that I've ever seen. All you really need to do is grab a phone and show up. Think of doing a full-time job that's 40 hours a week; I only did 35 hours in a month and I made more than 70% of full-time working Americans.
If you break down my $6,200 in income to how many hours I worked, I was making $175 an hour. That's more than a surgeon; it's just ridiculous. Now let’s get into the costs associated with getting into TikTok Shop.
You would think it would be zero, but it's actually. . .
$400 or even more. The reason is you need a TikTok account that has 5,000 followers, and when you're buying one of those accounts, the lowest you can get for an actual, really high-quality account is around 400 bucks. Talking about risk, it's pretty low.
I mean, you are putting $400 in, so that's a decent risk for some people. But if you calculate the opportunity associated with it, it's an incredibly low risk in my eyes. Live streams are almost a guaranteed income.
If you were only focusing on videos, I would say the risk level's higher, but also the reward level would be higher because if you have one viral video, some people are making millions off just one video. It's incredible. But when you actually do live streams, the money is pretty consistent and pretty much guaranteed if you just show up.
Also, all the money you make, you can just instantly transfer to your bank. Talking about the potential with TikTok Shop, I think it's pretty much limitless. There are people out there doing $3 million a month.
There isn't a side hustle that only requires a phone and some free time that can bring in that high of a potential. And it's not only that your potential is incredibly high; it's crazy how guaranteed your income can be at the lower levels, meaning that if you just want to simply replace your job and work from home almost instantly, you can guarantee that you're making more than your old hourly wage. TikTok Shop can almost 100% guarantee that you can do that within your first couple of weeks to a month of getting into it.
And this isn't financial advice; that's going off my personal experience. So, this one for me has to be an S+. Now, if you want to learn how to get into TikTok Shop, me, Luke, and Noah created an amazing course and community teaching you guys exactly what they're doing to make $100,000 a month in profit.
They show you behind the scenes of everything they're doing, they reveal their product to you, and show you exactly how you can follow their steps and get into this industry. If you want to come join the course and community and get personally taught by me, Luke, and Noah, then scroll down to the description of this video. There's going to be a link to join.
Use code SHOP at checkout, and you'll save 20% off of the course. With that being said, I hope you enjoyed this video, and I will see you in the next one.