The teen years are full of increased freedom and discovery. You’re hanging out with your friends in public, going on dates, and — in the later years — getting your driver’s license so you can take yourself everywhere.

However, you’ll quickly learn that more freedom means more responsibility, primarily in the form of money.

It can be hard to come by money as a teen. You don’t even have a high school diploma or GED yet, let alone a college degree.

Also, up until this point, you probably thought the $30 weekly allowance you earned through chores was lavish living. Then you get out there and find out it’ll cost you over half that allowance to grab dinner with friends at your average restaurant.

A job can help you pay for your new freedom, but teens have historically been stuck with roles like cashier and retail associate.

Not anymore. Thanks to the internet, there are tons of legit online jobs for teens out there.

Why Teens Should Get A Job To Make Money

Working a job during your teen years provides you with plenty of benefits.

• Earn money: You can spend your own money, rather than ask your parents. Also, you can start saving money for college tuition and living expenses.
• Learn valuable money skills: Earning an income will help you learn about budgeting, taxes, and saving your money while you’re still within the safety net of childhood.
• Increased responsibility: You’ll learn how to be professional at work. Being able to show up on time, complete tasks accurately, and maintain a professional demeanor are vital to thriving in the workplace.
• Time management skills: You’ll juggle school, extracurriculars, and a job; doing so will teach you how to manage your time as effectively as possible, a critical skill for college and beyond.
• College admissions: Colleges love seeing teens hold down jobs for many of these listed reasons. A job can boost your chances of getting into your dream school.
• Job history: A teen job helps you establish a job history early on, giving you a leg up when applying for jobs and internships during and after college. It also helps you learn how to be a good employee, setting you up for job success later on.

Survey/Rewards Sites For Teens

Teens can start making money right now by taking online surveys and completing other tasks through surveys and rewards sites.

These are our favorite survey sites and rewards apps that allow teens to use them.

1. Swagbucks

Swagbucks is a rewards app that rewards users with points, called Swagbucks, for completing all kinds of tasks. Tasks you can do include surveys, polls, shopping, playing games, watching videos, and even browsing the internet.

When you’ve accumulated enough points, you can redeem your points for free gift cards to a ton of major retailers. Alternatively, you can redeem them for a PayPal credit if you just want the cash.

Speaking of rewards, Swagbucks gives you a $5  just for signing up. You can read our Swagbucks review to learn more.

2. SurveyJunkie

SurveyJunkie will pay you to take surveys online or through their app. SurveryJunkie analyzes your profile and uses its findings to match you to surveys relevant to your lifestyle.

Because you’re matched to more specific surveys, the payouts are pretty good.

But for those rare occasions where you don’t qualify for a survey, SurveyJunkie will still pay you a few points for your troubles.

When you earn 1,000 points (1 point = 1 cent, so $10), you can cash out your earnings.

Oh, and you could earn up to 100 points just by signing up for SurveyJunkie, completing your profile, and confirming your email.

3. Shopkick

Shopkick is a shopping rewards app with several ways to earn their points, called kicks. They reward you for shopping online and in-store at your favorite places. You can submit receipts to earn kicks as well as link your credit/debit card for more earnings.

But you don’t always have to buy something to earn kicks — Shopkick rewards users just for walking into stores, scanning select item barcodes with their phone, and even watching videos about new products.

You can redeem your kicks for gift cards to hundreds of retailers.

Kicks add up fast when stacking up all the different earning methods. In fact, Shopkick claims you can easily earn enough kicks in your first week to redeem for a gift card! Learn more by reading our Shopkick review.

Jobs For Entrepreneurial Teens

Teens can do business too. Check out some of these online jobs if you want to run your own show and get a taste for entrepreneurship.

4. Blogging

Blogging is one of the most creative online jobs for teens to get. You can set up your own blog and write about any topic you desire – plus you can be the boss of 100% of the content you post.

Enjoy traveling? Start a travel blog. Are you big into fitness and nutrition? Create a fitness blog.

As long as you write authentic content consistently, you’ll grow your skills, find your voice, and attract a loyal audience of readers.

Blogs are extremely cheap to start: grab some web hosting from Bluehost for a mere $2.95 per month and they’ll throw in your domain name (your unique URL) for free. Bluehost powers over 2 million websites.

Once you purchase your hosting plan and choose your domain name, you can build a website in minutes with the BlueHost automatic WordPress installation. Now you’re ready to start writing!

After you get used to posting regularly, it’s possible to start earning money with your blog.

You can monetize your blog in several ways:

Ads: Many blogs make money by placing ads on their sites. Google Adsense is a great way for any website owner to monetize right away with ads.

Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate marketing is simply selling someone else’s product by linking to their site from your website.

When you sign up for a company’s affiliate program, they give you a unique link you can place in blog content or share on social media. Each time a blog visitor buys the product by clicking through your affiliate link, you’re paid part of the sale as commissions.

You can grow your blog faster by running ads:

It’s possible to grow a huge blog without spending much on ads, but if you want to see results quicker, you’ll want to invest in ad campaigns.

Microsoft Ads is an excellent often overlooked advertising service. We got you $100 in free Microsoft advertising credit.

Make sure you stay in constant contact with your audience:

After all the work you’ve done to capture an audience, you’ll want to stay in touch with them. Email is one of the best ways to do this. You can use email to keep in touch with your readers: informing and entertaining them.

You can easily do this with email marketing from Constant Contact. You can easily integrate a signup form on your website for readers to subscribe to and then send them emails when you’re ready. Get a 60-day free trial with Constant Contact to get started.

5. Start an E-commerce Store

E-commerce has exploded in popularity in the past decade, with entrepreneurs of all ages finding success selling products on their own online stores. But don’t worry; you can still snag your slice of the e-commerce pie yourself.

Dropshipping is the easiest e-commerce business model to enter. You create an online store, but you don’t hold any of your own inventory.

Instead, you locate suppliers and list their items on your online store at a price higher than the suppliers’. When a customer buys from you, you accept their payment, forward their info to your supplier, and the supplier ships the product directly to the customer.

The difference between your price and the supplier’s price minus expenses is your profit.

Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce store platforms. They require users to be 18, but they let your parents start a store on your behalf as a teen.

Shopify wants you to be absolutely sure of your decision, though, so they offer you a 14-day free trial. It’s fully possible to build a Shopify store in around half an hour, so you have a ton of time to make your decision.

6. YouTube

Comfortable in front of a camera? Why not start a YouTube channel?

YouTube could truly turn into your full-time gig if you’re passionate and put in the work. If a 7-year-old kid can pull in millions a year reviewing toys, you can make money on YouTube too.

YouTube gives its video creators several ways to earn:

• Ads: Display ads, overlay ads, and video ads
• Channel memberships: Offer special perks to viewers who pay a monthly channel membership
• Merchandise shelf: Create branded channel merchandise (like t-shirts) and showcase it on your watch pages
• Super chat: Viewers can pay to have their chats remain at the top of a chat feed. The more they pay, the longer it stays at the top
• YouTube Premium revenue: Earn a portion of each YouTube Premium viewer’s subscription payment

You can also do affiliate marketing on your YouTube channel.

Whether you’re reviewing a product, creating a comedy skit, or making some other type of video, you can advertise affiliate products in your videos themselves, your video descriptions, and on your main channel page.

7. Thrift and Flip Items On eBay

Got an eye for underpriced items? Thrift stores have amazing finds at rock bottom prices that you can easily resell on eBay.

After all, eBay had just over 180 million buyers as of 2019, so you’re bound to find several people willing to buy any item you find in a thrift store.

Once you’ve found some items, you can create your eBay listings. Fixed-price listings may work, but you could earn a lot more with an eBay auction listing if you find something expensive like a designer item and you craft an enticing listing.

eBay does charge a few fees to sell on their platform. However, these fees won’t be a big deal if you can regularly find underpriced thrift store items.

And again, it’s a small price to pay for access to eBay’s massive number of buyers.

8. Become an Influencer

If you’re especially passionate about a certain lifestyle and enjoy sharing it with others, becoming an influencer could be a great money move.

Influencers earn primarily by sharing affiliate links to products from companies that sponsor them and/or creating their own products that fit the niche they’ve chosen. They can also create their own blogs, start podcasts, and more.

Common influencer niches include travel, beauty, fashion, fitness, and making money online. You aren’t limited just to these, though: carve out your own niche.

For example, book lovers can become influencers in the reading niche. You could get sponsored by publishers, book companies, and companies creating book-related products.

Influencers can make money off of any social media platform, but Instagram is the big one. Tons of teens are on Instagram viewing and sharing pictures, providing you a huge audience.

Online Writing Jobs For Teens

Don’t worry if you don’t get all A’s in your English classes because you don’t need to be an ace English student to start any of these online writing jobs.

9. Fiverr

Fiverr is a freelance marketplace, which is a site that facilitates the meeting of freelancers and people/businesses that want to hire those freelancers.

It’s called Fiverr because freelancers start out offering services at $5 a pop, but you can charge higher writing rates as you prove yourself by successfully completing projects.

Speaking of rates and clients, Fiverr’s unique in that you get to customize the specific services that you offer so clients can purchase your gig as a set item. Everything from the type and scope of your services to the pricing can be modified (you can raise your rates as you gain experience).

10. Freelancer

Freelancer.com is a freelancer marketplace with tons of online writing jobs for teens available.

You can search for projects by keyword, then filter your search by various parameters like budget, type of payment (hourly or fixed-price), skills, language, and more. When you find projects you want to work on, you can then bid your rate.

If the client thinks your skills and rates suit their needs, then congratulations — you just landed your first client!

Freelancer.com also lets clients post contests to suit the more competitive freelancers. You simply follow the instructions for the contest, do your best work, and send it to the client. If the client picks your work, they pay you the contest rewards.

Freelancer.com freelancers must be at least 16 years old. The site offers several membership plans of varying prices.

The Basic subscription gives you 15 bids each month for only $0.99 per month. But Freelancer will give you a 1-month free trial of their $10/month Plus plan, giving you 100 bids and a ton of other stuff free for a month.

11. ProBlogger

ProBlogger is a job board that posts new writing gigs every day. You don’t need an account at all to use ProBlogger and it’s completely free.

As a job board, ProBlogger gigs are slightly more difficult to land than freelance marketplace gigs, but they tend to pay more.

Companies all around the world post interesting writing project on ProBlogger; it even shows you the name of the business beforehand so you can research to see if it’s a legitimate company before applying.

Payment varies by project but is generally good. Some companies tell you exactly when and how much you’ll be paid, while others don’t include any payment information or ask you to submit your best offer; still, others have something in between.

12. ContentGather

ContentGather is a site that lets you submit original pieces of writing for payment. They then turn around and sell this content to businesses that need it.

You can earn through 2 methods: submitting your piece to the Marketplace itself or seeking out and fulfilling Custom Jobs.

You can write articles between 250 and 1,500 words in one of their 47 categories for the Marketplace. When you submit your piece, it can either be accepted, rejected or returned for review. As more of your pieces are accepted, you move up their writer ranks, which range from Bronze (the starting rank) to Diamond (the highest rank).

ContentGather lists your piece for sale and pays you part of the price in advance upon acceptance. At first, you don’t earn any advance payment as a Bronze writer, but that changes as you grow on the platform.

Rejected pieces can’t be resubmitted. If they return a piece for review, you follow their edits and resubmit it for approval.

If you’d like a little more direction, they have Custom Jobs — where writers fulfill specific predetermined instructions and get paid if they do it correctly.

ContentGather writers must be at least 16 years old.

13. Write a Book/eBook

Writing your own book is much easier today than it was in the past thanks to the internet. You can write, edit, and publish an entire book without a publisher if you want.

As for selling your book, you can either list it on a site like Amazon or attempt to sell it yourself through your own website or another channel.

The obvious benefit of Amazon is you instantly gain access to a massive audience and Amazon does a lot of marketing work for you. The drawback is they take commissions out of your book royalties— which many find worth it given the benefits that Amazon provides.

Amazon is the better option if you’re willing to sacrifice some earnings to save time on all the admin stuff. Go the self-marketing route if you’re willing to put in more work to reap more benefits.

Books alone likely won’t make you rich. However, at this point in your life, one or two eBooks could earn you enough money passively to keep you from needing another job for the rest of your teen years.

Other Online Jobs For Teens

14. Sell Old Junk Online

Everybody’s got a drawer full of old electronics, boxes full of old clothes, or perhaps a crate of old books. You don’t use any of them, so you may as well sell some of them online.

Plus, spending a Saturday poking around your house can be fun. You could happen upon all kinds of old stuff you forgot or didn’t even know your family had.

eBay is probably the best platform to sell your old junk online. You’ve read the stories about the weird stuff people have bought and sold on eBay, so there’s little chance you won’t find a buyer for your old stuff.

Old electronics could be sold to Gazelle. They’ll give you an offer for your old smartphone or tablet in less than a minute.

15. Sell Your Old Video Game Accounts

Were you a serious gamer throughout your childhood, but no longer care much for the digital characters you created nor the digital worlds in which the characters live?

You can turn that digital reality into real money by selling your old video game accounts.

The most money can be found in accounts on massively-multiplayer online RPG video games like World of Warcraft or Runescape, mainly because of rare or exclusive in-game items you could only get during limited-time events.

Accounts with these items are worth a ton of real-world money because it’s impossible to retrieve these items once the in-game event ends.

Video game account marketplaces such as League of Trading exist to facilitate the exchange of video game accounts for a small fee.

Tips For Teens Starting An Online Job

So, you’re ready to start making money with an online job. However, don’t jump right into it without considering these tips first.

Tell Your Parents

First and foremost, tell your parents about your pursuits. They’ll most likely be proud and willing to help you, but you want to make sure they don’t have any issues with their teen taking an online job.

They can also help you with other essential parts of having a job, such as budgeting and taxes — and you’ll likely need parental permission to access some online jobs anyway.

Open a Bank Account

You’ll want to open a bank account to store your earnings in a secure location and start building some savings.

Most banks offer joint accounts so teens can open a bank account with their parents. These accounts typically don’t restrict access to your money any more than a normal bank account.

You’ll want to open both a checking and a savings account. Checking will be for your spending; they’ll give you a debit card for your convenience.

Savings is where the remained of each paycheck should be stored.

Speaking of savings, many teen-oriented bank accounts include tools and resources to help you learn money management skills as well.

Sign Up For PayPal

Some jobs may offer you direct deposit. However, many online jobs we’ve gone over don’t, so you’ll want a PayPal account.

Ask your parents for help setting this up if you have any questions.

PayPal takes a small fee from your earnings, plus a small fee to instantly transfer funds to your bank account. This fee is well worth the peace of mind knowing your check wasn’t lost in the mail or anything.

Learn To Budget Your Income

In the real world, you’ll end up broke pretty fast if you don’t learn how to budget your money properly.

Ask your parents for help setting up a budgeting system on a site like Mint. Also, ask them for help opening a savings account for you. Once they help you budget your income properly, you can allocate some of that money into a savings account.

Set Aside Money For Taxes

Your first teen job will expose you to the harsh truth of taxes.

You’ll need to learn about different types of employees/businesses and how they’re taxed so you can understand what to do yourself.

For the most part, with side gigs and online jobs that aren’t full-time, you’ll have to set aside money for taxes. The employer won’t do it for you.

Do your taxes under the guidance of your parents. Your tax situation won’t be very complicated, but you’ll be miles ahead of your peers if you understand tax basics by the time you turn 18.

With these tips in mind, you are ready to start taking advantage of all the different ways that teens can make money online.

Try out some of these online jobs for teens as soon as possible — it’s never too early to start earning some money online as a teenager!