You may do trading, staking, and holding to earn money in crypto. You may also do some other task related to crypto in this forum, try to go to services and there are some people who asking for help and will pay you in return.
Staking a coin is not considered investing to make money. I mean it is "investing" as in you have it, and you could definitely sell it when the price increases, so all of those things are investing into it, but usually when you invest, that is considered something just financial only, whereas when you do staking there is something tech related as well, staking requires a bit of knowledge in how to do that.
Staking is also something you do without really caring about the price directly, for example I start staking a coin today and want to stake it for 7 days and want to get out, I do not really care about the price as much as I care about my staking reward, if I can make a decent return from my staking, price could stay the same, so stakers usually care about the period they stake and not long term.
Of course, investment and staking have their respective advantages. we can stakin to get the number of tokens for each specified time period, but we must complete the set time to collect the tokens, in contrast to investments where we can sell them at any time if we feel the price is suitable for sale.