How To Make Money Online For Stay at Home Dads

You are home with the kids all day, and somewhere in the back of your head there is a number. It might be the cost of a Christmas gift. It might be the price of a trip you want to take the family on. It might be something simpler, just a little breathing room in the monthly budget. Whatever the number is, you want to contribute without signing up for a 9-to-5 that wipes out the whole point of being home in the first place.

This post breaks down 10 real ways to make money online that a stay-at-home dad can work around nap times and play dates. No income screenshots. No overnight success stories. Just 10 methods you can start with the time and tools you already have, straight from the video Alston recorded on this exact topic.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A plain-English breakdown of all 10 money-making methods covered in the video
Real numbers from the video: drop shipping margins, web hosting recurring revenue, service arbitrage profits
How to use free platforms like Fiverr, Thumbtack, and Udemy to land your first paying client without prior experience
Why affiliate marketing is the only method on this list that can make you money while you sleep
Why email marketing is what makes affiliate marketing scale from a few commissions to a reliable monthly income
An honest look at the real drawbacks of each approach so you can pick the right one for your situation
A free quiz at finder.platformproof.com that matches you to the method that fits your actual skills and schedule

Method 1: Blogging and YouTube Videos

The first method Alston covers is content creation, either a blog, a YouTube channel, or both. The natural topic you already have is your own life as a stay-at-home dad. There is a real audience for this. People want to know what it actually looks like to be a man who is the primary caregiver. What did your friends say when you told them? What does a stranger on the street do when they see you alone with a stroller? What did you expect going in versus what you discovered after a few months? That raw, specific perspective is content no one else can replicate.

Alston suggests talking about your day-to-day experience, doing a day-in-the-life series, comparing how you were raised versus how you are parenting, and addressing the misconceptions people have about stay-at-home dads. All of that is original content that costs nothing to produce except time and honesty.

You can monetize a YouTube channel or blog in two main ways. The first is ad revenue through Google AdSense, which pays you based on views and clicks. The second is product reviews. When you are a stay-at-home dad, you are testing diapers, wipes, baby carriers, monitors, and stroller brands whether you intended to or not. Writing or filming honest reviews of those products and linking to them through affiliate programs turns your normal purchasing decisions into income. Day-in-the-life content, product comparison posts, and experience-based articles all fit this lane and compound over time.

Method 2: Drop Shipping

Drop shipping means running an online store where you never physically touch the product. You list an item, a customer buys it, and you order it from a supplier who ships directly to the buyer. The margin between what you paid the supplier and what the customer paid you is your profit.

Alston gives a concrete example in the video: say you find a product on Alibaba for $3.99. You list it in your store for $9.99. The customer pays $9.99, you pay $3.99 to the supplier, and you pocket roughly $6.00. You are the connector between the buyer and the source. You do not hold inventory, you do not ship boxes, and you do not need a warehouse. Your job is to find products with a working margin, price them right, and drive traffic to your listing. The work is front-loaded in research. Once a product is converting, the store runs with minimal daily attention from you.

Method 3: Building Websites

Many small businesses have no website or an outdated one. If you can deliver a clean, working site, they will pay for it. What Alston points out is that you do not need to already know how to build websites to offer this service. You bid on jobs through platforms like Fiverr and Thumbtack. When you win a job, you go to YouTube or Google and search how to build a WordPress website. Someone online has already done what the client is asking for and will walk you through it step by step.

You take a week or so, build the site, turn it in, and the client is satisfied. That first project teaches you more than any course would, and you got paid to learn. The next project is faster. After a few projects, you have a portfolio and reviews, and jobs start coming to you instead of the other way around. This is work that can be done after the kids go to bed or during nap time, a few hours at a stretch.

Method 4: Start a Web Hosting Reseller Business

This method pairs naturally with website building. Once you have built a site for a client, they need somewhere to host it. Instead of pointing them to GoDaddy, Bluehost, or Namecheap and walking away, you become their host. You buy a reseller hosting plan from a large provider, which gives you a block of storage you can divide into individual hosting accounts. You sell those accounts to your clients under your own brand or arrangement.

Alston puts the math directly in the video: roughly $100 per year per customer. That is recurring revenue, meaning a client you sign once keeps paying you every year as long as their site is live and they are happy with the service. A base of 20 clients is $2,000 per year from renewals alone, without any new sales needed to sustain it. Scale that to 50 or 100 clients and the recurring revenue becomes meaningful without requiring proportionally more work. After the initial setup and sale, the main ongoing task is handling occasional support questions.

Method 5: Service Arbitrage

Service arbitrage is the model where you sell a service at one price and hire someone to deliver it at a lower price, keeping the difference. You act as the account manager. Someone else handles execution.

Here is the exact example from the video: you land a website project for $1,000. Then you hire a developer on Fiverr or Thumbtack to build it for $500. You just cleared $500 without doing the technical work yourself. The client gets a finished website and is satisfied. You handle communication, manage revision requests, and collect payment. This works for graphic design, writing, video editing, logo creation, social media management, and any other service that can be contracted out. Your skill is sales and client management, not the craft itself. Once you have a reliable freelancer to work with, the model runs nearly hands-off after the sale is closed.

Method 6: Selling Digital Photos

If you are taking photos anyway, your camera roll might already contain sellable assets. Stock photo websites and apps let you upload images that other creators can license for use in blog posts, YouTube thumbnails, social media, and marketing materials. You post the photos, and when someone downloads one, you get a cut of the sale.

The income per individual photo download is modest, but the photos do not stop selling after you post them. A good image in a popular category, whether that is lifestyle, family, outdoor scenes, or everyday objects, can generate small but consistent payments for years after you took the shot. For a stay-at-home dad with a decent phone camera and time in the park, this is one of the lowest-effort passive streams on this list. It is best treated as a supplement to other income rather than a primary strategy, but it costs nothing to start.

Method 7: Selling Your Services Directly

This is the broadest category on the list. What can you do well? Graphic design, copywriting, blog posts, essay writing, logo creation, social media content, data entry, bookkeeping, transcription, proofreading. Businesses, bloggers, and entrepreneurs are constantly looking for people who can contribute on a freelance or contract basis. Alston notes in the video that he himself has actively searched for freelance writers to contribute to his own blog.

The platforms to find this work include Fiverr, Upwork, Freelancer, and Thumbtack. You create a profile, post your services, set a price, and accept the jobs that fit. Early on, the rate might be lower as you build reviews, but the model does not require a set schedule that conflicts with being home. You take on jobs that fit your day, complete them in pockets of time between childcare, and invoice when the work is delivered.

Not sure which of these 10 methods fits your actual schedule and skill set?

Take the free quiz at finder.platformproof.com to find your best starting point.

Method 8: Teach an Online Course

If you have solid knowledge in any area, whether it is a professional skill, a technical certification, a hobby, or a craft, you can package that knowledge into a course and sell it on a platform like Udemy. Alston does this himself. After getting his Amazon Web Services (AWS) certification, he built courses about AWS on Udemy. Once those courses were live, they started selling on their own without requiring him to be present for each transaction.

The video recommends spending about an hour to an hour and a half per day building your course. That timeframe fits naturally into nap time. You record one lesson, maybe two, edit it, and upload it. Over several weeks of this, you have a complete course ready to publish. The income does not arrive instantly. It takes time to accumulate reviews and for the platform to surface your course to more students. But once a course gains traction, it sells without additional work from you.

An important point Alston makes: you do not have to already be a deep expert to teach a course. If you are genuinely interested in a topic and willing to learn it thoroughly, you can learn it, document the process, and then teach what you learned. The learning journey itself can become the course. Alston’s own AWS courses started after he got certified, not before he became an expert. He learned, packaged it, and resold the knowledge.

Method 9: Affiliate Marketing

Alston calls this the last and possibly best method on the list, and the reason is one specific quality: affiliate marketing is the only method here where you can make money while you are asleep. Every other method requires you to be active and present for income to flow. Affiliate marketing does not.

Here is how it works: you create content, a blog post, a YouTube video, a social media post, that addresses a specific problem your target reader has. Within that content, you recommend a product or service that helps solve the problem and include a trackable affiliate link. When someone clicks the link and buys, you earn a commission. You did not create the product. You did not ship or fulfill anything. You just connected the right person to the right solution at the right moment.

The example from the video: if your reader wants to lose 10 pounds in their right foot (his exact words, used intentionally as a simple illustration), you create content addressing that problem, then link to a relevant product in your description. The reader clicks, buys, and you earn the commission. That content keeps ranking and the link keeps converting after you have moved on to other things. The income is semi-passive once the content is live and indexed.

Method 10: Email Marketing Alongside Affiliate Marketing

Alston bundles email marketing with affiliate marketing because the two are designed to work together. The core claim he makes in the video comes from his experience: it takes between 5 and 12 touch points with a potential customer before they are ready to buy. One blog post or one video is rarely enough to convert a first-time visitor into a buyer.

Email marketing closes that gap. When someone arrives at your content via a YouTube search or a Google result, they may not buy anything on the first visit. But if they join your email list, you can follow up with them repeatedly over the days and weeks that follow, each time adding more value and more reasons to trust your recommendation. That sequence of follow-ups is what turns a casual reader into a paying customer. Email marketing is what makes affiliate marketing grow from occasional commissions to a predictable monthly income stream.

Honest Drawbacks: What the Video Does Not Spell Out

Every method on this list is real, but each one has a genuine obstacle worth naming before you invest time in it.

Blogging and YouTube both take months before any meaningful income shows up. The content compounds over time, but the early period is pure investment with no return. If you need money this month, this is not the right starting point.

Drop shipping requires product research, store setup, and often paid advertising to generate traffic. The margin on any single sale is slim. It works at volume, which means it works after you have done the research to find what converts and at what price point.

Building websites is learning-intensive at first. The tutorial-plus-client approach that Alston describes does work, but you have to be comfortable figuring things out under a real deadline with a real client waiting. The first site will take longer than expected. That is normal and it passes.

Web hosting reselling starts slow. Your first several clients may take months to acquire. The recurring revenue that makes this model attractive only materializes after consistent sales effort upfront. The model rewards patience.

Service arbitrage depends on finding a reliable freelancer on Fiverr or Thumbtack who does quality work at the price point you need. That search involves trial and error. A bad freelancer on a client project damages your reputation with the client, not the freelancer’s. You carry the accountability.

Selling digital photos generates very small amounts per download. This is best treated as a supplement to other income rather than a standalone strategy. Unless you build a large catalog of high-demand images over time, the income will stay small.

Selling services directly trades your time for money. There is a ceiling on how much you can earn because there is a ceiling on how many hours you have available. It is a strong starting method, but not a long-term wealth-building model on its own without eventually moving into arbitrage or passive income.

Teaching courses requires significant upfront time to create the content before any money comes in. The Udemy algorithm takes time to surface new courses to potential students. You may spend weeks building something solid before the first sale arrives.

Affiliate marketing and email marketing require the most patience of anything on this list. Building content that earns search traffic, growing an email list, and writing follow-up sequences that convert all take months of consistent work. The payoff is that the income becomes genuinely passive once the systems are in place. Most people quit before they reach that point.

Find Your X

The hardest part of this list is not the work. It is picking one. If you try to run three of these methods at once during nap time, you will make real progress on none of them. You need to pick the method that matches your current skills, your available time blocks, and how quickly you need to see results.

That is exactly what the free quiz at finder.platformproof.com is built to help you do. Answer a few honest questions about your schedule, your skills, and what kind of income you are looking for, and it points you to the path that fits your actual situation. No email required to see your result. Start there before you start anything else.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need money to start any of these methods?

For most of these methods, the starting costs are minimal or zero. Creating a YouTube channel or blog costs nothing upfront. Selling services on Fiverr or Thumbtack is free to join. Affiliate marketing can start with free content on a free platform. Drop shipping and web hosting reselling do require some upfront spending on a store platform and a reseller hosting plan, but both can be started for under $50 per month.

How many hours per day do I realistically need?

Alston specifically designed this list around nap times and play dates, so he is describing blocks of one to two hours at a time. He recommends about an hour to an hour and a half per day to build a course. For freelance services, you complete work during whatever time windows you have available. None of these methods require a full 8-hour day to start making progress. The consistency of those small blocks over weeks is what adds up.

Which method on this list makes money the fastest?

Selling your services directly or doing service arbitrage are the fastest paths to actual income. You can bid on your first job this week and deliver it within days. Blogging, YouTube, and affiliate marketing are the slowest to start generating income but the most scalable over time. Choose based on how quickly you need cash versus how much passive income matters to your long-term goal.

What is the difference between selling services and service arbitrage?

When you sell services directly, you do the work yourself and keep all the revenue. When you do service arbitrage, you hire someone else to do the work at a lower cost and manage the client relationship, keeping the margin between what the client paid you and what you paid the freelancer. Arbitrage pays more per project but requires finding and trusting a reliable freelancer. Selling your own services requires only your own time and skill.

Can I do affiliate marketing without a website or YouTube channel?

Technically yes, through social media posts or email lists, but a website or YouTube channel gives you a permanent home for content that search engines can index and surface to new readers for years. A social media post disappears from feeds within days. A blog post or video can bring in clicks two or three years after you published it. For long-term affiliate income, building a content home base is strongly recommended over relying solely on social platforms.

What is drop shipping and why does it not require holding inventory?

In a drop shipping arrangement, you operate the storefront but the supplier handles fulfillment. When a customer orders from your store, you place the same order with your supplier at a lower price and enter the customer’s address as the shipping destination. The supplier ships directly to the customer. You never touch the product. Your job is running the store, researching products with workable margins, and driving traffic to your listings.

Why does Alston recommend email marketing alongside affiliate marketing?

Because research shows it takes between 5 and 12 contact points with a potential customer before they are ready to buy. Alston cites this range directly in the video. One visit to a blog post or one view of a video is rarely enough to close a sale. An email list lets you follow up repeatedly over days and weeks, building trust with each message until the subscriber is ready to click your affiliate link and purchase.

Is web hosting reselling a real business or just a side hustle?

It starts as a side hustle but carries the structure of a real business because the revenue is recurring. Clients pay annually to keep their site hosted, which means your income grows as you add clients without losing old ones. At 50 clients paying $100 per year, that is $5,000 in recurring annual revenue that does not require 50 new sales every year to sustain. Whether it qualifies as a real business depends mostly on how seriously you treat the client relationship side of it after the initial setup.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “How To Make Money Online For Stay at Home Dads,” YouTube, https://youtu.be/XU6idw3HCh0
Alibaba, wholesale marketplace, https://alibaba.com
Fiverr, freelance services marketplace, https://fiverr.com
Thumbtack, local services platform, https://thumbtack.com
Udemy, online course platform, https://udemy.com
GoDaddy, web hosting and domain registrar, https://godaddy.com
Bluehost, web hosting provider, https://bluehost.com
Namecheap, domain and hosting registrar, https://namecheap.com