If you want to earn six figures while working from home, consider a career in social media marketing.

Social media marketing is among the fastest-growing careers in the U.S., according to LinkedIn, spurred by the rapid adoption of e-commerce and shifts in consumer behavior post-pandemic. 

TikTok, Instagram and other platforms have become essential tools for businesses to engage with customers and promote their products or brands — and companies are eager to hire people who can help them use these platforms effectively.

Job boards FlexJobs and Freelancer.com are seeing a boom in the number of remote, hybrid and freelance social media marketing roles.

This demand shows no signs of abating: The Bureau of Labor Statistics notes that the digital marketing landscape — including social media marketing — is expected to grow by 8% annually, with nearly 200,000 new jobs expected to be created by 2030.

While some marketing jobs prefer candidates to have a bachelor’s degree, it’s not a prerequisite for a successful career in social media marketing.

What’s far more important, says Toni Frana, FlexJobs’ lead career expert, are the technical skills you bring to the table: Most social media marketing roles require a strong understanding of SEO, data analysis and social media advertising. 

Hiring managers also seek out people who can shoot and edit videos, manage online communities, coordinate partnerships with influencers and develop corresponding marketing campaigns to drive profit, says Sebastián Siseles, vice president of international at Freelancer.com.

Some of the most in-demand roles in this field include influencer marketing managers, social media marketing specialists and content strategists, per FlexJobs and LinkedIn.

Salaries range depending on experience, with entry-level roles starting at around $50,000 per year and seasoned strategists or managers earning upwards of $120,000.

To get started in social media marketing, you can watch tutorials on YouTube or take online courses to earn a certification in specific skills — LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, HubSpot and Google all offer certificates in digital marketing and e-commerce. 

Frana also recommends creating an online portfolio that showcases any relevant social media marketing projects or work you’ve done, including client testimonials.

This hands-on experience can be as valuable as a college degree, Frana adds, as it can demonstrate a deep understanding of engagement strategies, content curation and community management.

According to Fiverr, a freelancing marketplace, most freelance social media marketing jobs are remote, too, so social media marketing professionals can work from anywhere and set their own hours, as long as they meet their project deadlines.

Fiverr has seen steady demand for social media marketing services over the past six months: Between May and October, searches for “social media content manager” rose 493% on its platform. Searches for social media account setup, management and content editing also shot up. 

The more experienced you are, the higher you can set your rate: Social media marketing specialists on Freelancer.com charge as much as $125 per hour. 

Jennifer Shealey, a freelance digital and social media marketing specialist in Vero Beach, Florida, charges anywhere from $85 to $245 on Fiverr for her services. 

Digital marketing started as a side hustle for Shealey, who became a full-time freelancer a few years ago after losing her job as a project administrator at a tile company. 

The 46-year-old says building a roster of recurring clients and diversifying her offerings — she designs websites, creates content for Instagram and writes SEO copy for YouTube — has helped her build a successful freelance career. 

She has made over $600,000 in sales since joining Fiverr in 2014. In 2023, Shealey earned over $100,000 from freelancing on Fiverr.

Beyond the lucrative earning potential, Shealey says one of the best parts of working in social media marketing is the flexibility — both in scheduling and creative freedom. 

“It’s the kind of job you can do from home, from a van or on the road while traveling,” she says. “If you’re into creativity, analytical work and constantly learning new things, it’s a great field to get into. We certainly need more people in digital marketing, even I can’t keep up with the demand.”

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Back in 2007, I dropped out of college, despite owing about $50,000 in student loans. Believe it or not, it was the smart choice for me at the time. 

None of my friends who’d graduated were landing jobs. I knew I’d need to go even further into debt to finish my degree. And I’d already landed a great position as a public policy assistant. 

Still, starting out on such shaky financial ground was far from ideal.

Feeling uneasy about quitting school, I thought all I could do was grind it out at my job. But I’d found a passion that got me excited outside of work: video creation, which included capturing moments and telling stories. I was thrilled when I discovered this site called YouTube where I could upload my videos for free and share the links with friends.

At the same time, social media platforms like Facebook and then Twitter were becoming popular — and I realized I was pretty good at figuring out how to use them. 

I had no idea how much of a game-changer these discoveries would be. Fifteen years later, my fun hobby has become my career: It allows me to make about $18,000 a month in passive income, according to my calculations from a recent month’s deposits, and work only four hours a day.

A couple years after I dropped out of college, a friend pointed out that I had a knack for understanding video content and social media platforms. She suggested I could do it professionally. 

It was the aha moment that changed everything. My side projects weren’t just fun. They were teaching me valuable skills that were increasingly in demand. 

This led me to take the strategies I was learning about content and social media and start a side hustle. I was basically a one-woman show posting on Facebook and Twitter for small businesses to help bring them brand awareness.

I worked evenings and weekends for over a year before I quit my full-time job in 2010 to go all in on my agency.

To market my new business, I leveraged my video editing skills to share tips and tricks around social media marketing, including tutorials, resource recommendations, and content strategies. 

DON’T MISS: The ultimate guide to earning passive income online

During a particularly tough month with almost no revenue for the agency, I decided to try something new: selling a course teaching businesses how to create their own videos. I pitched the course to my modest email list of a couple hundred people, offering a special pre-launch price for early sign-ups. 

That was my first taste of passive income — as I recall it, I made about $1,000 in revenue in a single day from one email. 

The early validation and surge to my bank account was all the momentum I needed to create the content, which I delivered via live hour-long webinars once a week for six weeks. 

It took me about 30 hours in total to make and teach the course. But once the course was created, it became an easy source of passive income as I made it available for purchase on my website and social media channels from that point forward. 

Over a decade later, my passive income portfolio has evolved significantly.

I’ve created more than 1,000 videos about productivity and brand-building for my YouTube channel, AmyTV. Each one takes me about an hour to prepare and another hour to film, and can continue earning money indefinitely through advertising revenue and more. 

For example, a video I posted in December 2020 called “Plan Your Best Year Ever! My 7 Step Goal Setting Process” keeps growing in views every month and directing people to purchase my planner.

My community began asking time and again for something that laid out my philosophy on video content strategy. I realized that my audience was telling me they’d buy books, so I started writing them. 

I began with, “Vlog Like a Boss: How To Kill It Online With Video Blogging.” Then “Good Morning, Good Life: 5 Simple Habits to Master Your Mornings and Upgrade Your Life.” Most recently, I published “365 Days of Good Morning, Good Life: Daily Reflections to Help You Go After the Life You Want.”

I self-published through Amazon’s print-on-demand and audiobook creation platforms. Each book took an average of three weeks to write, followed by a couple months of design to get it ready for print and e-book formats. Since 2017, the three books have sold about 40,000 copies.

“Good Morning, Good Life” inspired my first non-book product: a paper planner helping people streamline their morning routines and be more productive. This has brought in over $140,000 in sales.

On average, my personal brand brings in about $18,000 monthly in passive income between YouTube ads, affiliate revenue, brand deals, and books and other products sold. 

I’ve learned that when you show up in service of others, amazing things can happen — including making more money for a better life.

Amy Landino is a personal brand coach and the award-winning creator of AmyTV on YouTube. She is an instructor in CNBC’s online course How to Earn Passive Income Online. Follow her on Instagram.

Want to make extra money outside of your day job? Sign up for CNBC’s online course How to Earn Passive Income Online to learn about common passive income streams, tips to get started and real-life success stories.

Even billionaires think about starting side hustles.

If Mark Cuban were 16 years old again and “needed to make some extra money,” he’d start one specific side hustle in just three steps, he tells CNBC Make It.

First, he’d learn how to write prompts for artificial intelligence language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. Next, he’d teach his friends how to use those prompts on their school papers. “Then, I would go to businesses, particularly small- to medium-sized businesses that don’t understand AI yet,” says Cuban. “Doesn’t matter if I’m 16, I’d be teaching them as well.”

More than half of Gen Zers in the U.S. currently have side hustles, a LendingTree report found in February. AI prompt engineering — or, the ability to phrase inquiries to chatbots to get desired responses — can be a particularly lucrative opportunity. The average pay for AI tutors starts at about $30,000 per year, and full-time AI prompt engineers can make up to $129,500, according to job board platform ZipRecruiter.

DON’T MISS: The ultimate guide to earning passive income online

You don’t need a college degree to become an AI prompt engineer, but you do need practice — and, often, certifications — to learn how those large language models operate. Some online certification courses, like Vanderbilt University or IBM’s offerings on Coursera, say you can master the basics in one month.

Cuban’s hypothetical side hustle is more high-tech than his actual first job, selling garbage bags door-to-door to his neighbors outside of Pittsburgh at age 12 to save up for a new pair of basketball shoes. He continued to earn extra cash as a teenager by selling collectibles like baseball cards, stamps, and coins, eventually helping him pay to attend Indiana University. There, he bartended, hosted parties with cover charges and even picked up work as a dance instructor.

After a brief post-college stint in banking, Cuban turned to entrepreneurship full-time. He sold his first company, a software startup called MicroSolutions, to CompuServe for $6 million in 1990. His second company, audio streaming service Broadcast.com, made him a billionaire when he sold it to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1999.

Today, Cuban has a net worth of $5.7 billion, according to a Forbes estimate. He spends much of his time advocating for his online pharmacy Cost Plus Drugs, which aims to make a variety of common prescription drugs more affordable by selling them at cost, plus a 15% markup.

 “I was a hustler … I have always been selling,” he said during an episode of ABC’s “Shark Tank” that aired in 2016. “I always had something going on. That was just my nature.”

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that Mark Cuban sold garbage bags door-to-door at age 12.

Disclosure: CNBC owns the exclusive off-network cable rights to “Shark Tank,” which features Mark Cuban as a panelist.

Want to make extra money outside of your day job? Sign up for CNBC’s online course How to Earn Passive Income Online to learn about common passive income streams, tips to get started and real-life success stories.

With home insurance rates rising, homeowners are increasingly opting out of coverage.

In fact, 1 in 13 American homeowners is currently uninsured, according to a recent Consumer Federation of America study. While the number is relatively small, it’s grown from about 5% of all homeowners to 7.4% since 2019.

Considering that the average annual cost of homeowners insurance for a $300,000 mortgage has increased 23% to $2,230 in the last year, it makes sense why some homeowners are foregoing insurance or letting their policies lapse to save money. 

But it may not be worth the risk; one disaster can ruin your finances.

“The question isn’t, ‘Can I afford homeowners insurance?’ But rather, ‘Can I afford not to have it?’ says  Cathleen Tobin, a certified financial planner in New York.

Not paying for homeowners insurance “is definitely a huge mistake,” says Alaina Hixson, director of sales and operations at insurance provider The Churchill Agency. “While home insurance is often not cheap, the investment can save thousands and even hundreds of thousands in some cases.”

That’s because home insurance protects against major perils like fire, theft and water damage, generally covering your home, personal belongings, liability and even living expenses if you’re forced out of your home.

Homeowners usually owe a deductible of about $1,000 or $2,500, on average, and the insurance pays for any remaining repairs, Hixson says.

Most homeowners are required to maintain insurance through their mortgage, but those who’ve paid off their mortgage or bought their home with cash may chose to skip it or let it lapse. Without insurance, they’re left fully exposed to costly repairs if disaster strikes.

And the risk of being caught without coverage is growing, too: The number of natural disasters causing $1 billion in damage has more than quadrupled since the 1980s, according National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Experts generally recommend having enough insurance to cover the cost of rebuilding your home and replacing personal items based on current construction and material costs, rather than the market value. To keep premiums affordable, consider choosing a higher deductible—provided you have savings set aside to cover it if needed.

Flood damage is major risk in certain areas, but can be overlooked since standard homeowners policies typically don’t include it. About 50% of American homeowners are unaware that flood coverage is an additional policy, according to a recent survey by insurance trade group Trusted Choice.

To get flood insurance, you need to purchase it as an additional policy, either through the National Flood Insurance Program or a private insurer.

Many people don’t carry flood insurance because it typically isn’t required by mortgage lenders unless the home is in a high-risk flood zone. However, that doesn’t mean the property can’t flood, says Hixson.

“I think a lot of folks will be surprised how affordable flood insurance can be, especially when they are in less risky zones,” she says.

If you already have home insurance, consider reviewing your policy to ensure your coverage limits are adequate, know which perils are included and identify any gaps, particularly for risks like floods. 

Want to earn more money at work? Take CNBC’s new online course How to Negotiate a Higher Salary. Expert instructors will teach you the skills you need to get a bigger paycheck, including how to prepare and build your confidence, what to do and say, and how to craft a counteroffer. Pre-register now and use coupon code EARLYBIRD for an introductory discount of 50% off through Nov. 26, 2024.

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When I was a child, my parents would buy lottery tickets and talk about what they’d do if they ever won. It was a fun discussion around the dinner table, but it was a dream that always seemed out of reach. I often thought to myself, “Why not find a way to get rich with better odds?” 

Now, as the parent of two young kids and the owner of my own business, I feel like I have hit the jackpot — but not by leaving anything to chance. 

Four years ago, I left an unfulfilling 9-to-5 job in higher education administration and started selling digital products on Etsy. Today, I make $10,000 or more per month in passive income from four income streams. 

These are the three books that shifted my mindset about money, helped me build wealth and gave me the ability to live life on my terms.

In “Change Your Questions, Change Your Life,” Marilee Adams, PhD, a leadership expert, professor, and entrepreneur, explains there are two types of questions we can ask ourselves. “Judger” questions are blame-focused, while “learner” questions are solution-focused.

After I read this book, I realized how much my internal dialogue influenced my mindset and the results I achieved. When I faced challenges, instead of being hard on myself and saying “What’s wrong with me?” I started asking, “What can I learn?”

Adams has a great resource called a Choice Map. It’s essentially a flow chart to help avoid judgmental language and overcome roadblocks.  

When I started taking the course that ultimately helped me start my passive income business, for example, I doubted whether I could succeed. However, instead of giving up, I used the choice map and shifted my mindset by asking, “What’s best to do now?” 

This question helped me stay focused, break tasks down into manageable steps, and persist, until I ultimately built the foundation for my passive income business and started to see real financial results.

No. 1 lesson: The language we use to talk about ourselves can shape our reality.

“The Simple Path to Wealth” grew from a series of letters about money and investing that JL Collins, a blogger and expert in personal finance and investing, wrote to his teenage daughter.

At the beginning of his book, he shares “a few key guidelines” about money. Some of my favorite pieces of Collins’ advice are: 

• “Spend less than you earn — invest the surplus — avoid debt.”
• “Avoid fiscally irresponsible people. Never marry one or otherwise give him or her access to your money.”
• “Try saving and investing 50% of your income. With no debt, this is perfectly doable.”
• “When you can live on 4% of your investments per year, you are financially independent.”

To follow his advice, I sat down and created a budget that allowed me to spend less than I earned and invest the difference. Then, in 2015, my husband and I decided to save and invest 50% of our income in low-cost index funds. 

We didn’t chase complicated strategies or try to time the market. We simply focused on consistent, automated contributions to index funds. 

After nine years, we are now at a point where we can work more fulfilling jobs, even if they pay less, because we have a nest egg working in the market for us. Collins calls this “F.U. Money” — enough money not to have to answer to the whims of a boss if you don’t want to, because you are no longer living paycheck to paycheck. 

No. 1 lesson: Avoid debt. Save and invest your money in a low-cost index fund. Use invested money to buy your freedom.

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, professors and innovators in design thinking, are known for teaching a popular elective at Stanford University called “Design Your Life,” which was the foundation of the book.

In “Designing Your Life,” Burnett and Evans encourage iteration and embracing experimentation, rather than waiting for the “perfect” path to appear.

I first read this book while studying positive psychology in grad school. It was 2020, I had just had my second child, and I was dreading the idea of working a full-time office job. 

By putting the exercises from this book in place, I used design thinking to explore careers that would help me lead with my strengths. I realized that while hours of meetings drained me, project-focused work energized me and helped me get into a creative flow.  

I often return to this book because, as Burnett and Evans say, “a well-designed life is a life that is generative.” As much as we try to plan for the future, our goals and dreams constantly evolve, and life is full of surprises.

I thought earning passive income would be the key to my happiness. However, once I had it, I realized I missed the human interaction I got at work. Continuing to iterate helped me to find teaching and writing — roles that allow me to work on projects and interact with people without having to do a traditional 9-to-5.

No. 1 lesson: Happiness comes from designing a life that works for you.

Rachel Jimenez is an entrepreneur, professor and mom of two, with a passion for helping others achieve their personal, professional and passive income goals. She runs an Etsy store as well as a blog, Money Hacking Mama, where she shares financial wisdom and practical advice for women navigating their careers, businesses and life.

Want to earn more money at work? Take CNBC’s new online course How to Negotiate a Higher Salary. Expert instructors will teach you the skills you need to get a bigger paycheck, including how to prepare and build your confidence, what to do and say, and how to craft a counteroffer. Sign up today and use coupon code EARLYBIRD for an introductory discount of 50% off through Nov. 26, 2024.