So, I went down a rabbit hole the other night looking for dumb ways that people are making money online and I ended up finding some stuff that honestly is kind of genius. Like, they shouldn't work. They sound ridiculous, but people are out there actually making real money doing this stuff.
Now, obviously nothing in this video is financial advice. I mean, these are all pretty dumb side hustles, but they're entertaining. They're weirdly creative.
And for some reason, they actually work for some people. So, let's break down seven of the dumbest ways I have ever found to make money online that somehow aren't a waste of time. So, let's start with something that sounds way too simple to be real.
Naming babies. Well, not just babies, actually. You can get paid to name a lot of different stuff, but babies are definitely the weirdest thing on this list that people will pay you to name.
So, if you head on over to fiverr. com, you'll actually see people who are selling this as a gig. I'm going to search in here for baby names and you'll see that there are multiple people offering this as a service.
And many of them have reviews, meaning that people are actually buying this as a service for them. Now, this doesn't sound like very much, like earning $20 every time you suggest a baby name. But honestly, for that amount of work, it's it's really not that bad.
But if you want some more money, if that's just not enough for you, I found this other great site called Atom. And Atom is where businesses can hold these contests to help them come up with names or taglines for their business. So for instance, recently, these were some of the contests that were held.
So we have this one right here. Someone was looking for a name for their tech startup and someone came up with the word or the name work hippo. And the person that came up with the word or the the business name work hippo earned $300.
Not that bad. Coming down here, we see another one like that. This person was looking for a name for their beauty business or cosmetics business and they got paid $300 or they paid someone $300 to come up with this name, Blumore.
Right. Let's look for one more right here because these are kind of fun. So, we have this one right here, which is another cosmetics business.
These people paid $135 in this contest for the business name of Glo. Glo. So, really not that bad.
Um, you just kind of submit these and you can be one of the winners. Now, what's cool about this is that anyone can sign up and enter these contests. There aren't like any credentials that you need.
You don't need like a marketing degree to do this. So, honestly, if you're creative and kind of witty, then you'll probably be able to come up with these names pretty easily. And then, believe it or not, you can get paid for it.
Now, if naming babies and businesses seems a little too, I don't know, wholesome for you, let's take it up a notch and get a little bit weirder. Hey, do you want to be my friend? I'll pay you.
Yes, believe it or not, you can literally get paid just to be someone's friend. Sites like Rent a Friend let you charge for virtual or in-person hangouts, text sessions, even just to be someone's check-in buddy. So, check this out.
This is the website right here. And if you come on here, you can sign up to either rent a friend or be a friend who is rented. And for instance, these are all the friends in my local community who are doing this as a service.
And you can see they give the person's name, their age, where they're from, and a little blurb about them so you can understand them better, and what they might be good for if you're looking to rent a friend. And here on the main page, we see some of the events or some of the kind of things that you can do as a rent a friend. You can be rented for going to a bar with someone, being a virtual friend, going to a club with them, going to a party with them, hiking, going to some sort of music festival.
Basically, anything that a friend would do with you, you can do as a service. And this may seem silly at first, but there are dozens of reasons why this makes a lot of sense. So, imagine for a second that someone is flying into town for a wedding or some sort of business event, and they don't want to show up alone.
So, what they can do is they can rent you just for that night just to hang out with them. So, they have their plus two or plus one, I should say, and so they're not showing up alone. Or maybe someone is new in town.
They want to go out to a bar and meet people, but they need like a wingman so they can hire you to hang out with them so they don't feel alone going out to a bar. So, if you're a very compassionate person, if you're like a good listener, I think this could be a great gig for you. And you can even do all this uh all your hangouts virtually.
In fact, I read an article about someone who got paid hundreds of dollars in a single weekend just for watching Netflix with strangers over Zoom. Okay, so let's go back to the original purpose of this video, which was to find dumb ways to make money online. And this next one, admittedly, sounds pretty dumb.
I'm talking about drop shipping. Now, if you're not familiar with how this works, how drop shipping works, this is basically it. It's very simple to understand.
We have this item for sale here on eBay, and this person who's selling it is a drop shipper. I know that because the exact same item could be found for less money on Walmart. And that's actually exactly what this seller on eBay is going to do.
If you buy from them, what they're going to do is they're going to turn around and then purchase the item for less money from Walmart. And during the checkout process, they are going to enter in your shipping address. That way, Walmart ships it directly to you, hands off for them.
So, that is how drop shipping works. And this is actually pretty easy to do thanks to some software. This is a software I use to run my own drop shipping business.
It's called AutoDS. And this actually automates most of the drop shipping process. So for instance, if I wanted to list an item, all I had to do was click here where it says add a single product, paste in the Walmart URL for it, and I can then have that item live in my eBay store, it will increase the price so that I actually make money on the sale.
And if there's any price changes on Walmart later, or if the item goes out of stock later, the the software automates all that as well on eBay. So really, anyone, no matter how dumb they are, can do this. But I think you can already see the problem with this and how dumb this business model is because you're literally selling an item for $150 or so when someone could buy it on Walmart for just $109.
So why would anyone pay more for it? Well, believe it or not, they do. I was actually able to quit my nine-to-five job back in 2017 because I was making more money from drop shipping than I was working as a lawyer.
And I think the reason this works so well is just because of convenience. People would rather shop on one site, the site that they're familiar with, the site that they've shopped on before that already has their credit card information stored in it, rather than shop around and try to find a better price somewhere else. Regardless of the reason and whether you think it's dumb or not, we've seen time and time again that it absolutely does work.
I know, pretty dumb. And if you thought that was dumb, wait till you hear what people are doing with AI voices. So, most of us know that you can make a decent amount of money with a YouTube channel.
The problem is it takes a lot of work. I actually spend a lot of time coming up with ideas for my videos, putting together outlines, recording them, editing them, the thumbnails, like all of it, it actually takes a lot of time. But as dumb as it sounds, you can actually start a YouTube channel without really doing anything yourself.
So look at this. This is a very popular channel here on YouTube. They have over 2 million 2.
6 million subscribers. And what makes this channel stand out to me, why I'm bringing it to your attention, is that all of these videos, they never show a single person's face. These are completely faceless YouTube channels, which really means that anyone can be making these videos.
Like, when I make my videos on YouTube, I have to make them because I'm always the face of the channel. But this channel right here that I'm showing you, really, anyone can be making these videos. They're not just locked into one person like my channel is.
And this isn't unique. There are other people doing it. Here's another channel with over 15 million subscribers, and it's the same thing.
Every single one of these videos are completely faceless. Now, like I said before, what's so dumb about this is that you can literally use AI to do all of this for you. So, I've come over here to chat GBT.
And what you could do first is actually ask it, hey, give me some good ideas for faceless YouTube channels. But I've done that in the past and I know that one popular type of faceless YouTube channel that does well are these horror story channels where the videos are basically long narratives, long stories that are scary with just some video over the top of it. So what I've done here is I've come over to chat GBT and I said, "Hey, write me a script for a 30 minute YouTube video that is a horror ghost story.
" And here it made one for me. An entire script that I didn't need to write myself. And this took me seconds to make.
Then once you have the script, you can plug it into 11 Labs, which is basically an AI voice generator that can turn written text into like this ultra realistic speech. It's what a lot of these faceless YouTube channels end up using for their videos so that they sound human without anyone actually having to record themselves. So, for instance, let's come back over here to Chat GPT and I will go ahead and grab this.
I'll just copy this and we'll paste it in here and let's see what it sounds like. Some stories are just stories until they happen to you. This isn't a legend.
It's not something I read on Reddit. This is what happened to me in the fall of 2016. I mean, that's pretty good.
And that's what a lot of these channels are using. Then once you have the voice over, you can use stock footage from websites like Canva to put together an entire YouTube video and you never even had to show your face. So, as dumb as that sounds, it actually works.
And because you're not actually involved in the process or don't have to be, you can actually outsource eventually the entire thing. But if that doesn't sound very satisfying to you, maybe this next one will be a little more satisfying. So imagine for a second that you can make money just by whispering into a mic, chewing into a mic, or even just tapping.
Really? That sounds pretty dumb, but it's true. Seriously, this is one I don't get, but it is seriously wildly successful.
There are these ASMR channels that do exactly that. They just make these noises into the microphone. They whisper into it.
They tap on it. They do stuff like I know what is she doing here? Like grabbing these cups and like clinking them together or unrolling tape or I guess breaking apart chocolate.
And the sound for some people is extremely satisfying. So these people will watch these really or listen to these extremely long videos like this one's 42 minutes, this one 30 minutes, and they rack up hundreds of thousands of views. So, it's a very easy way to get really, really, really long watch time on YouTube, which is the way that you make a lot of money on YouTube.
And of course, these ASMR videos are pretty easy to make. You just need a really good microphone and and that's really it. And there actually a lot of channels that where people don't even show their face.
So, if you got like a quiet room, a halfway decent mic, this might be the way to make some money on YouTube, as dumb as it sounds. Now, speaking of things that are dumb, I have to admit something to you. I am really bad at these capture things.
Like very bad at them. I never know where to click. A lot of them I just cannot solve at all.
I'm like, is that a picture of a horseshoe or is it something else? I I don't know. Honestly, I'm so dumb when it comes to these captions.
I'd be willing to pay someone to do them for me. And actually, that person could be you. There is this website that actually pays you to solve these captions.
It is completely free to use. You can do it right from your phone and you can receive instant payments for using this website. So the website is tocaptia.
com. Now admittedly you don't get paid a lot to do this, but if you have nothing else to do is an easy way to make some money. Unless of course you're me, then it's actually really hard way to make money.
And the final dumb way to make money online that I want to share with you today is admittedly not one that's entirely online, but at least part of it is. So, if you come over here to Facebook Marketplace and you just search for free, you're going to see a lot of people giving away a lot of stuff. You'll see a lot of furniture like bookshelves.
You see a lot of baby and kids stuff, small appliances, electronics. All you have to do is pick these items up and they're yours completely free. Now, what you can then do is clean them up, fix them up, and then resell them later.
Like 30 bucks, just like a low price, and a lot of people, you can actually sell these products. So, for instance, this one right here, this is a mid-century modern accent chair, and it's in really good shape, and they are giving away for free. They were trying to get some money for it, but now they are going to give it away for free.
Now, this sounds dumb, right? Why would anyone give away stuff that they could just sell? or why would someone buy something when you got it for free?
But in truth, there are a few reasons this works. First, some people are just in a rush to get rid of stuff. Maybe they're moving or something or they just need some extra space.
Other people are lazy and don't want to clean up their items or take nice photos. And other people, they really just don't know how to sell stuff on Facebook Marketplace. And there are actually a ton of people who do this with huge success.
You can come on YouTube and just search for free uh flipping free furniture and see a lot of people who are doing this. So, as dumb as it sounds, this actually works. So, yeah, those are seven of the dumbest ways I have ever found to make money online that somehow actually work.
Some of them are clever, some of them are weird, most of them are just dumb, but they all prove one thing. There are countless ways to make money online. And in fact, I'm always exploring new ideas on this channel.
So, if you want to see all my future side hustle ideas, make sure to subscribe to my channel. Then, let me know in the comment section which one of these seven ideas you liked the best. Otherwise, thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video.
Bye for now.
