The student money website for everything student finance. Get the latest student discounts, student jobs, make money ideas and more!I can't work a 9-5 job. Besides they hold back my earning potential. Here are 5 ways that I make over $10,000 every single month online.
Let’s cut to the chase. You’re here because you want to learn how to make money online.
Well, if you’re looking for legitimate ways to make some extra money online without having to first purchase an in-depth training course (which always seems to cost $97) about how to make money online, then you’re in the right place!
This is my ultimate guide on how to make money online, and it’s completely free.
I’m sharing everything I’ve learned over the past decade, pulling from my own experience in earning a consistent $15,000/mo or more in side income (on the side of my day job) from online sources like affiliates, courses, freelancing and other ways to make money online that we’re exploring in this guide.
Have questions? Check out my monthly side income reports where I break down exactly how I’m making money from my blog.
👋 And by now you probably already know… one of the best ways to make money online starts with having a blog of your own. For that reason, I recently put together a free course that breaks down how to build a blog and I share the exact strategies I’ve used to turn my blog into a six-figure business.
Want my Free Course: How to Start a Profitable Blog in 7 Days?
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I'm here to tell you that you can too—you can (relatively quickly) learn how to make money online.
It won't always be easy, and you'll of course have to work hard, push through mistakes and failures along the way.
But here's the reality; the internet has opened up so many possibilities to people regardless of age, location, or background to build a sustainable, online business or side project that can make extra money online every single month.
And as I said, I've experienced this first-hand.
For the past several years, I’ve been on a mission to experiment with the best ways to create sustainable online income and chase my dreams of self-employment. And while I’ve seen my fair share of success, things haven’t always been easy either.
Along my journey, I’ve launched four separate online businesses. The first one lost me $6,537 in a matter of months, while I completely overestimated the audience size for the second. Both shut down very quickly.
But after my first two failures trying to make money online, I started to figure some important things out.
My next self-funded business hit $160,000 in revenue in its first year alone. After that first taste of self-made success, I’ve gone on to sign consulting contracts worth tens of thousands of dollars with startups like LinkedIn and Google, launch profitable online courses, and build a following of hundreds of thousands for this blog and my podcast series.
All these highs and lows have given me a clear understanding of what works (and what doesn’t) when it comes to making money online.
There’s no better time than now to build a business and make money online.
With over 3.2 billion people now actively using the internet, we’re well into a massive transformation in how the world does business. We’re living in an age where there’s no longer limitations on what you can achieve based on geographic location or lack of financial resources.
If you have an internet connection and a few dollars in your bank account, there is little that can actually get in the way of you making some extra money online.
There are quite literally hundreds of clever ways to make money online. From taking online surveys, to renting or selling your old clothes, flipping your iPhone to someone in a different country, and even buying low-cost products locally, just to resell them for a higher price on Amazon. There’s truly no shortage of unique ways to make money online.
But don’t fall for the trap of “Easy Money”
Sounds amazing, right? It is. But, before we dive in, I need to address the elephant in the room...
There’s no such thing as an online get-rich quick scheme.
Most of the quick ways people talk about when it comes to making money online are not true businesses.
Sure, some of them may be good for creating a few hundred or even thousand dollars in one-time revenue. But they’re not going to help you unlock financial freedom and achieve complete control of your lifestyle.
They're shortcuts that don't last forever—and many of the "opportunities" like network marketing giants Herbalife and others offer, often pan out to either be a scam or at the very least, damaging to your personal relationships. And I would never advocate for that.
The internet has opened up so many opportunities to entrepreneurs and forward-thinking workers. But it’s also opened up considerable competition.
Here's the hard truth: The only ways to make money online in any lasting manner, involve putting in real time, effort, blood, sweat, and tears.
This isn’t to scare you off. I simply want you to know that this guide is going to focus solely on ways to make real, sustainable extra income online. Not just a few bucks. I want to share all the mistakes I've made that got me to where I am now so that you don’t have to go through them, and can build a successful online source of income for yourself.
Don’t get me wrong, there are still a lot of great opportunities to make money online today. It’s that the most common ideas have been picked through a lot more than they were a few years ago. To stand out you need to be smart, look for the best opportunities, and be unique in the ways you approach making money online. And I’m here to help.
Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission. Know that I only recommend products, tools and learning resources I've personally used and believe are genuinely helpful, not because of the small commissions I make if you decide to purchase them. Most of all, I would never advocate for buying something that you can't afford or that you're not yet ready to implement.
So, if you’re as excited as I am now, let’s dive right into the 65 best ways to make real, sustainable money online.
Looking instead for inspiration to just make some quick cash online? Jump down to starting at #11 for a longer list of less "long-term business ideas" and instead get inspiration for other (real) ways to make money online that involve less up-front work.
65 Genius Ways to Make Money Online (on the Side) Today
We're going to start first with the top ten ways to make serious money online (with a long-term focus).
If you’re looking to build a true online business, or start a side business idea that has the potential to truly change your life (and you're not afraid of investing months & years of work into the business), this where you should start.
Through my years of experience and research, I’ve consistently found the following ideas have the best potential to create a steady stream of recurring revenue. They’ll take a lot of effort. But if you’re willing to put in the work, they could change your life, like they have for me.
One last quick thing to note before we dive in: I’m going to be talking a lot about your nichefor every way of making money online that we cover here. If you’re unfamiliar with this term, all it means is your unique topic, angle, market, audience, or voice that will make people stand up and notice your business.
It’s a competitive space online, and the more you can differentiate what you do from what’s out there already, the better chance you’ll have for success.
Alright, now let’s get into my ultimate guide of how to make money online.
1. Build a Niche Blog (or Website) and Use Affiliate Marketing
If there’s a niche you’re interested in and you can build a decent audience around it, starting a blog and using affiliate marketing to generate income is an incredible way to make money online.
I know first-hand that learning how to start a blog (let alone make money from it) can be a massive undertaking.
So, I put together a free master course for you to take that spreads out all of the work involved in starting a blog, into a series of action-packed lessons. My free course breaks the entire process of starting a blog down into an incredibly simple 7-day process for going from 0 to publishing (and promoting) your first blog post in just 1 week. I can't recommend it enough.
Want my Free Course: How to Start a Profitable Blog in 7 Days?
Enter your name and email address and you'll get instant access to my course that's been featured on Forbes, Business Insider and Entrepreneur.
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Once you've launched your blog (or niche website), the next step is figuring out which products and companies you can partner with as an affiliate to help facilitate sales of a related, helpful product for your audience of future readers.
In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is selling someone else’s product by referring customers to their online store. If you can create content (on a blog) or a resource so valuable to the people looking for a certain product and then send them to where they can actually buy it, you’ll receive a predetermined percentage of each sale.
It takes time and effort, but website owners like myself and Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income, have built life-changing careers through affiliate marketing. In fact, Pat even publishes his income reports online, showing how he made over $2 million in the past 12 months alone.
Let’s start with the basics of building your niche website and blog, then get into how affiliate marketing will work for you.
First, you need to research and validate a profitable affiliate niche. What this means is: Are there companies in your niche who will pay you to send customers their way?
You can check this in a number of ways:
- Become an Amazon Associate and then use Keyword planner to find an in-demand niche: With more than a million different products to choose from and up to 10% commission the sales you drive, Amazon’s affiliate program is a great place to get started. Browse their available products and see what connects with you. Or take it a step further and use Google’s Keyword Planner to quickly check how many people are searching for a specific term. With affiliate marketing, the more relevant traffic you can pull in, the more you’ll make off your site.
- Sign up for a reputable affiliate network: Aside from Amazon, there are dozens of large reputable affiliate networks, such as Share-A-Sale, Clickbank, and Skimlinks, that specialize in connecting you with merchants who are looking for affiliates to sell their products. They charge relatively low commission fees for the privilege of connecting you with merchants, and the merchants on these sites tend to offer much higher commission percentages or set dollar amount payouts.
- Research individual companies in your desired niche: If possible, it’s always better to become an affiliate directly with a company (if they have an internal affiliate program), as no one else will be dipping into your commission rate. This is the preferred route for most of the prominent affiliate marketers, including Pat Flynn. Unfortunately, it’s also the most work, as you’ll have to do the research yourself to see who offers programs (they’re usually listed in the website footer).
Now that you know your niche and have signed up for relevant affiliate programs, it’s time to build out your site and blog to start driving traffic.
Start by finding and buying a domain name (such as www.myaffiliatesite.com) that works for your niche on a domain registrar like Bluehost, NameCheap or GoDaddy.
Bluehost even has a nifty domain name availability checker you can use right here to quickly find out whether or not your desired website URL is available (and if it's not, they'll give you suggestions on the next best idea).
Want to Start a Blog? You'll Need to Register a Domain First.
Take 30 seconds right now to get 65% off registering your domain name and hosting with Bluehost, the most affordable and reliable blog hosting provider I've used with several websites over the years.
Once you've got your domain name, you’ll need a platform to build your site on. While you could pick a free option like Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress.com or another website builder, these won’t give you the flexibility or authority you need to build a truly successful affiliate site.
Instead, go with a self-hosted site (like my blog here is)—this means your blog will be hosted on your own server and you'll have full control over it. There are tons of highly reputable, affordable companies you can choose to host your website, like Bluehost, Kinsta, or A2 Hosting.
Then once you’ve got your domain name and hosting sorted out, it’s time to pick a CMS, or Content Management System, that will let you update pages, build your blog and integrate with all the other services you need. It’s hard to go wrong with WordPress—the CMS powering close to a quarter of the internet. Keep in mind that eventually as you start growing traffic to your blog, you'll be wise to invest in a managed WordPress hosting plan from a company with great service like Kinsta, where all of the settings are custom-tailored and optimized to work particularly well with WordPress-powered websites.
Now next, you’ll want to pick a WordPress theme from somewhere like ThemeForest, Elegant Themes or OptimizePress. This is the barebones design of your site, which you can then customize with your own branding, copy, and images. That being said, you don’t want to cheap out. It costs less than $100 to buy a theme that will make your website look professional (and you can upgrade to a completely custom design once you get the business going).
Like I said, this process can be a bit overwhelming. And that's why I put together this free master course to help break this entire process down into easy to follow steps that'll get your blog off the ground and generating readers in less than 1 week.
Want my Free Course: How to Start a Profitable Blog in 7 Days?
Enter your name and email address and you'll get instant access to my course that's been featured on Forbes, Business Insider and Entrepreneur.
Trust me, I hate spam just as much as you do.
Finally, once your blog is officially launched, it’s time to start creating content that will drive traffic to your affiliate partner’s site. Here’s what I mean by that:
Let’s say I’m an Amazon affiliate for camping gear, and I want to write an exhaustive, in-depth blog post and review of the “50 Best Hiking Backpacks for Adventuring Outdoors.” By running a quick Keyword Planner check on the organic search volume I can see that there’s around 5,500 monthly searches for the keyword ‘hiking backpacks’ alone.
If my piece of content is so unique and valuable around hiking backpack recommendations, that other reputable outdoor websites are willing to link to it and build the page’s authority, then I’d have a very real opportunity to rank high in organic search for these search terms (meaning, my page will come up first when someone searches for hiking backpacks).
Since it’s safe to assume that the purchase intent on searches for hiking backpacks is pretty high, the next logical step is that a reasonable number of site visitors would click through using my affiliate links and complete a purchase, over time.
While it often takes a significant amount of time and hard work to build up your affiliate income, if you have the ability to regularly publish high quality content that drives in targeted traffic to your website, this online revenue source can become quite substantial.
Check out my Ultimate Guide: 10 Steps to Start a Blog on the Side for my free 20,000 word guide to starting a blog and building it into an income-generating business today.
Oh! And if you're specifically interested in starting a mom blog for yourself, then check out this detailed guide from my friend Suzi over at Start a Mom Blog and she'll give you extremely curated advice for that niche 😊
2. Launch and Grow a Startup
Do you have dreams of running your own business one day? Building and scaling a high-growth startup, while by far the most difficult way to make money online, arguably has the most potential upside.
By the 3rd quarter of 2017, Venture Capitalists had invested over $61 billion into close to 6,000 startups in the US alone.
There’s money in the air, and if you can successfully create an online service, tool, or marketplace that fulfills a rapidly growing need in the marketplace, you could be on track for creating a very valuable business. However, it’ll undoubtedly take an intense dedication of time, efforts, and financial resources.
Unlike a lot of the other businesses we’re going to cover, startup founders face a whole slew of variables and roadblocks that can get in the way of success.
For one, you’ll want to have a high level of domain experience within the industry your startup is going to operate. This means a deep understanding of your customers, the issues they face, and an idea of potential solutions they’ll be willing to pay for. This is the minimum you need to get started.
After that, you’ll need to be familiar with the other major players in the space who might be good partners or acquisition opportunities, as well as an intimate knowledge of how to raise funding, market your product, hire and manage the best talent, and keep yourself financially above water.
*Whew*
Now, this may sound like a lot, but the payoff is worth it.
So where do you start when building a startup?
The most important thing you need before you do anything else is a problem. What do people need that they don’t have? What solution is currently out there that you can do better? This alone is the basis of every great startup.
Once you have that problem or need nailed, the next step is to validate that idea and make sure you’ve actually got customers who will pay for it. This means building a minimum viable product, getting objective feedback from real customers, incorporating updates, testing the market for demand, and getting pricing feedback to ensure there’s enough of a margin between your costs and what consumers are willing to pay.
Lastly, you need money to make money. Startups can cost quite a bit to get off the ground. So with your idea and market validation solidified, there are a few different paths you can follow to get your initial “seed” cash:
- Bootstrap: This means you’ll be self-funding your business. While not everyone will have the funds to pay for everything they need to start a startup, bootstrapping means that you retain 100% control over your company. If you can bootstrap your company to an exit or IPO, you’ll most likely never have to work another day in your life.
- Pitch to VCs/Angels/other investors: If you need some serious cash to grow your startup, you’ll want to put together a pitch deck and reach out to investors who might want to give you the money you need in return for a stake in your company.
- Join a startup accelerator: Another great option is to apply to a startup accelerator like Y Combinator, 500 startups, or TechStars, where a group of investors will help coach you, connect you with potential partners, and provide startup cash in return for a small stake in your company. The competition is tough to get into these, so don’t rely on them as your only path forward.
Once you’re off the ground, it’s all about customer acquisition, market validation, more funding, and growth.
Of course, that’s a simplified version of everything it takes to build your startup. Luckily, there is now more support, education, and access to funding for budding startups than ever before. And a great place to start is with this list of 101 best free and cheap online business courses for entrepreneurs I put together.
3. Build and Sell Software
Right now there’s an insatiable need for useful software.
Whether it’s an important consumer application, a specialist app to solve a particular niche problem, or even a time-wasting game you can play on your phone, you can create a massively successful business if you build software that helps people. (Look at the rise of Slack—the team communication software that went from side project to billion-dollar company in just 2 years.)
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Most of the software and apps you use on a regular basis are made by massive companies or established development studios. Well, yes. But many successful apps, particularly those in the Apple and Google stores, are created and marketed by individuals and small businesses. In fact, independent developers made $20 billion in the App Store in 2016 alone.
There are two basic ways that you can make money online by building software products.
The first follows the startup path we outlined above: You have a disruptive idea for an app or piece of software, you validate the idea with real customers, and then raise money to hire developers or a development studio to build, launch, and scale your software. If you’ve done everything right, your software will be accepted to the Apple and Google Stores and you’ll make money every time someone downloads it or pays for a premium feature.
The second (and cheaper) path assumes that you have the design and dev chops yourself to build your dream software. Naturally, it’ll take more time to get your product off the ground, but being able to bootstrap the development of your software lets you retain more ownership in your business and be more in control of your path.
If you’re willing to take the time to learn the development skills necessary to build high-quality software products (or even MVPs to help you get funding), there’s a growing roster of reputable online learning platforms like Treehouse, CodeAcademy, and Skillcrush to get you the skills you need.
4. Start an eCommerce Site and Sell Physical Products
If finding a better solution to a problem hundreds or thousands of people have doesn’t seem like an option right now, you might be better off setting up a virtual shop and selling physical items.
These days, this couldn’t be easier. Sites like Shopify have made it easier than ever to build a customizable, powerful eCommerce site in a weekend and start selling products now.
This is probably one of the oldest and most time-tested ways of making money online. Plenty of digital entrepreneurs have created sustainable businesses by either:
- Creating physical products they know people in their niche will love
- Purchasing low cost goods manufactured in foreign countries, repackaging or combining them with other products, and selling them for higher prices on domestic online marketplaces
While you’ll certainly have higher levels of success if you can nail creating and marketing your own unique product, from my own experience (and that of many other entrepreneurs), I know the extremely high costs and risk associated with starting a product-based business.
Instead, if you can find a solid product that’s already being manufactured at a reasonable price from a marketplace like AliExpress, LightInTheBox, or DinoDirect and market it to your audience, you’ll have the start of a money-making eCommerce machine.
Now, let’s get into the nitty gritty of how your online store is going to operate.
Whether you’re selling your own new products or reselling other goods, you still have to consider how much stock you’re going to carry, how you’re going to fund upfront purchasing costs, and where you’re going to store your inventory. Remember, even if you avoid paying rent on a storefront, you still need to store your inventory somewhere.
Well. Not always. There’s another option that’s become incredibly popular in the last few years (and is my personal favorite way to operate a product business), called drop shipping.
With drop shipping, you’re effectively partnering with a manufacturer or wholesaler to sell their products. This way, you don’t pay upfront costs to buy inventory, aren’t sitting on unsold items taking up expensive warehouse space, and don’t have to deal with shipping the products yourself. You simply create your site, fill it with drop shippable products, and drive in customers, with almost everything else done for you.
Of course, there’s a higher price per product and your margins are lower, but you’re able to start your online store with little more than a Shopify theme and some hosted images of your products. When a customer makes a purchase, you in turn buy the product from your supplier who then ships it directly to your customer.
No inventory. No handling products yourself. No shipping by hand. Sounds pretty amazing.
If you want to supplement selling on your Shopify store with other marketplaces, here are a few other highly lucrative options:
- Fulfilled by Amazon: Rather than drop shipping, Amazon lets you store your products in their own warehouses, making them available for Free 2-Day Shipping to Prime members. Which has been proven to significantly increase sales.
- Etsy: If you’ve got handmade or crafty products, Etsy is a great marketplace to market and sell on (bonus points if your product is geared towards a more female audience)
- eBay: The online auction giant is still in the game and especially good for selling electronics, gadgets, clothing and apparel, and accessories.
- Craigslist: While the least scalable, it can be very cost- and time-effective to sell to people locally.
Just be sure to put a lot of care into your product listings. Everything from the titles you use, to how effective the description is at convincing potential buyers your product is better than the rest, and even taking care to shoot high quality product photos can have a dramatic impact on your sales. I recommend using photo editing tools like Fotor, which gives you the ability to edit your images, create captivating graphic designs and more.
5. Find Freelance Clients and Sell Your Services
If you have a marketable skill—like writing, designing, web development, marketing, project management, or anything else—one of the easiest ways to make sustainable extra money online is to start freelancing.
And while freelancing might not be as scalable as some of the other ideas we’ve spoken about, it’s not uncommon for solopreneurs to build healthy six-figure freelance businesses for themselves. (In fact, I’ve interviewed tons of them on my podcast!)
Today, over 54 million Americans are opting to forego traditional careers and start a freelance business.
There’s plenty of work and clients to be found. If you know where to look. To start, you need to know if there is enough demand for your skill to make it worth the effort to go out looking for work. Start by searching for freelance postings on sites like Flexjobs, SolidGigs, Contena, GreatContent or one of the dozens of other skill-specific freelance job boards.
How many postings are there for jobs similar to what you do? If there’s a decent amount and it looks like there’s steady demand, put those skills down on a shortlist and start researching the companies and industries that are hiring.
I’ve written a full guide to starting your own freelance business, but here’s a quick list to get you started:
- Decide what your goal is: Do you want a bit of extra income or are you looking to go full-time freelance? It takes time to ramp up a freelance business working from home, so it’s important to know your goals from the outset.
- Find a profitable niche: We’ve talked about this a lot. But, where are you most comfortable. What niche do your skills, values, and interests intersect? Do you have 10 years of experience as a technical writer? Do you have long-standing PR relationships that’ll be invaluable in helping startups launch a successful crowdfunding campaign? Determine what makes your value unique, and lean heavily on showcasing that strength to your potential clients.
- Identify target customers: Write down exactly who you want as your client and then start researching those companies and making your list. You’ll want your portfolio and cold emails to align with the companies you’re reaching out to
- Set strategic prices: The $37.50/hr you earn at your day job doesn’t even come close to the hourly rate you’d need to charge, in order to create the same net annual income, once you’re self-employed. This infographic on calculating your freelance hourly rate can help you decide what to charge.
- Pitch, cold email, and sign your first clients: Now it’s time to go after clients. Mention them in your content. Reach out to them over email or LinkedIn. Tailor your pitch to show what kind of value you bring to the table. (You can even read my personal cold email templates).
Lastly, remember to always have a solid freelance contract in place.
You might be working on small jobs to begin with, but getting in the habit of not starting freelance work without a contract in place can save you big time down the road.
6. Start Online Coaching and Sell Your Advice
Similar to selling your freelance services, you can also start selling your knowledge and advice in an area you specialize in as a coach or consultant. If you can bill yourself as an expert, there are tons of people out there willing to pay for your time.
Being an online coach or consultant is a great way to make money online, as instead of giving your client ongoing deliverables (like when you’re a freelancer), you’re teaching them to be better, faster, stronger than the competition. Your expertise becomes the product you’re selling.
Even better, if you can find ways to package your experience and coaching skills into an easily digestible program, you have the potential to significantly scale this business model.
Now, if you don’t know people who might want your coaching services, there are a number of online tools and communities that make it incredibly easy to find clients and teach, on just about any topic area you can think of. Community driven platforms like Savvy.is, Clarity.fm, and Coach.me provide you with a network of potential clients to interact with, as well an integrated payment solution.
And while it’s one of the most limited businesses as you’re only able to charge for the time you can provide, many online coaches make hundreds or even thousands for their packages.
It’s also one of the quickest ways you can get set up and start generating revenue. All you really need is an account with one of the online coaching communities I mentioned above and expertise to share.
7. Create Online Courses to Productize Your Knowledge
If you’re already an expert in a topic—either through your current job, freelance business, or coaching—you can package that knowledge into a high-value course and sell it for years to come.
And while building, launching, and marketing an online course does take a considerable amount of upfront effort, their earning potential is through the roof (especially compared to a lot of the other online ways to make money we’re talking about).
Courses and other knowledge products like e-books, are what’s called passive income. That simply means that once the upfront time and effort is put in, with just a bit of regular upkeep and marketing you’ll be able to continue to sell and make money from them for months and years.
So, how do you go about putting together your course? One of my favorite online course success stories comes from Bryan Harris of Videofruit, who built and launched an online course in just 10 days that made him $220,750!
To hit this awesome goal, Bryan followed a four-stage process to discover, validate, and launch his course:
Phase 1: Explore and discover the best topic for his course based on the most popular posts from his blog. This ensured he knew the content was already valuable to his audience.
Phase 2: Validate that people would actually pay for his course by surveying readers and securing pre-orders. (This is an important part that so many people forget. Never spend serious time building something unless you know there’s a paying audience for it).
Phase 3: Quickly write, record, and edit the course content. As he already knew there was demand, it made sense to create the content as quickly as possible. He could always go back and update or edit based on feedback from his initial students.
Phase 4: Launch the course to his email list. The success of your course comes down to getting it in front of the right people. And your own audience, no matter how small, is usually the best place to start. That said, you need to have a clear idea of your launch plan before you put it live.
Now, what if you don’t have a blog with popular posts? Or an email list to market to? Let’s look at how you can build your own online course with no previous experience:
- Start by taking other courses you’re interested in: Not only is this important competitor and opportunity analysis, but it also gives you an idea of how a course could or should look and feel. What’s the pacing like? Is it via email, video, in-person chats? Once you understand how you want your course to look, it’s time to decide what it should include. Those same courses are a great starting place. How can you make your course better or more interesting? Do you have experience others don’t?
- Choose your niche and check for demand: The golden course combination is when you can find an in-demand niche that aligns with your skills and unique experiences. A great way to do this is to use Google Trends and Google’s Keyword Planner to look for average monthly search volume for keywords related to your proposed course content. Are people actively looking for high-quality information about this subject? Of course, if you’re already creating content for a blog, coaching service, or a site like Medium, you can test demand this way for free just like Bryan did.
- Find your niche partners, collaborators, and champions: As you’re creating your course, look for notable people who are also creating content in the space. Look att how their businesses operate and incorporate that into your own plan. You can also reach out to any influencers and make them affiliates for your own course. This way, they’ll be incentivized to share your content with their own audiences (which can be a major way to generate your first sales—it helps if you're using one of the best CRMs for small business—and start building your own community!)
- Create a killer course experience: With your course validated and in the works, you need to figure out how people will take it. Most course creators choose to host their courses from their own websites. This way, they get all the value of bringing customers back to their site on a regular basis. I host my own courses from a subdomain on my own site so I can easily add more. The course experience is incredibly important as well. And after trying most of the solutions, I highly recommend Teachable—an online platform designed specifically for courses.
- Build your audience on a course community: If you’re just getting started building an audience for yourself and want to leverage communities already actively looking for content you can choose to host and sell your online course on a site like Skillshare or Udemy. These are easy, cost-effective ways to build an audience and test your niche to see if there’s demand for it.
- Market your course: The beauty of using a course to make money online is that you can continue to sell it for as long as you’d like. Look for niche communities on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Reddit that might benefit from your content. Guest post on relevant blogs and sites. Look for anywhere you might be able to get in front of the right people. With just a few hours a month you can continue to generate sales.
8. Launch a YouTube Channel to Entertain and Educate
While YouTube recently changed its monetization program, if you’re able to hit their new minimum bar of 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of view time in the past 12 months, it’s still an incredible place to make extra money online.
YouTube is arguably the world’s second largest search engine (after Google) and is the third most-visited site in the world. In 2017, almost 5 billion videos were watched on YouTube every single day!
Rather than making money through subscriptions, YouTube channels are based on a traditional advertising system. Meaning the more viewers you get, the more you make. Once you’re approved for the YouTube Partner Program and can start including ads on your videos, with every 1,000 views, you will make approximately $2-$4. Which might not seem like a lot, but if you have 100 videos with 5,000 views a month each, that would be $1,000–$2,000 already. Just imagine if your videos start hitting millions of views!
Building a YouTube channel is a lot like starting a blog or website, except that you’re working in video—not writing. The first step is to choose what kind of videos you’re going to create. Most successful YouTube channels fall under one of two categories:
- Educational content: People always want to find the quickest way to learn something new. And YouTube searches including the phrase “How to” are growing 70% year over year, making YouTube an incredible place to teach what you know.
- Entertainment: Web series, product reviews, comedy sketches and pranks, vlogs, even video game walkthroughs—there’s so many different ways you can entertain people through your YouTube channel.
Next, you need to set up and build your YouTube channel. Your YouTube channel is your homebase for all your content. If you already have a Google account for Gmail or Google Drive, then you can use that to log-in to YouTube and start setting up your channel. Pick a username that works for you and is memorable (if you’re using an existing Google account you’ll have to edit your username in Google+).
You’ll also want to make your YouTube channel more easily found by adding relevant keywords under the “Advanced” section and picking your targeted country (where you think most of your viewers are). If you have a personal blog or site, add it as an “associated website.”
Now, it’s time to start creating and uploading content. Make sure you’re using a high-enough quality camera (most smartphones will work but I’d suggest at least having a tripod so your footage isn’t shaky), but don’t worry about being perfect at first. The beauty of YouTube is that you can continue to test out different content and styles as you find what works for you. Instead, stick to a regular schedule to build up your subscriber base.
You can optimize your videos to rank higher by experimenting with attention-grabbing descriptions and previews as well as using relevant tags. You need to stand out and make people want to click on your video.
As you start regularly putting out content, you’ll hopefully start to build a bit of an audience. But to start seeing real money from YouTube you need to market your videos elsewhere. Share your channel on Twitter and Facebook. Distribute videos anywhere else you can think of. Also, interact with comments and build a community around the videos you’re making so people will share it with their friends.
Once you hit the 1,000 subscriber/4,000 hour threshold, you can start monetizing your videos by selecting “Monetize with ads” under the Monetization tab of your channel. While it can take a while to build up a decent following for your YouTube channel, it can be a lot of fun to do as well as become a steady source of extra income.
9. Record a Podcast and Share Inspiring Stories
Podcasts are super hot right now, and for good reason. With how busy our lives are getting, more and more people are looking for passive ways to take in content. Which makes them both a great opportunity to build an audience and to make money online.
And while it will take time to build up a big-enough audience to attract advertisers and other ways to make extra income from your podcast, the opportunity is there. John Lee Dumas interviews entrepreneurs seven days a week for his podcast Entrepreneur on Fire and now makes more than $200,000 a month from it. In fact, John publishes all his income online and showed that he’s made almost $13 million since launching in 2012.
The podcast market is constantly looking for new, quality content. And luckily for anyone trying to get started, it’s now easier than ever.
Starting a podcast, like making a YouTube channel or blog, comes down to telling interesting stories and building an engaged audience. I’m probably sounding like a broken record by now, but you need a niche that you’re interested in and there’s already a demand for. Come up with a list of topics you’d like to talk about and then search iTunes charts, Google Trends and other podcast research sites like cast.market to see what’s currently out there and popular.
Next, you’ll need the right tools. You can be as complicated or simple as you want depending on your comfort with audio equipment, but at the minimum you’ll want a microphone and software for recording your voice. Companies like Behringer, Blue, Focusrite, and others sell studio-quality plug-and-play podcast setups that can get you recording today.
Now, it’s time to plan out your show. If you’re doing an interview-style show, you’ll now want to start getting some guests involved. You can use your existing social network to reach out to people you already know or are connected with on Twitter or Facebook. You can also head to Medium or Amazon to find authors or experts on topics specific to your niche.
Once you’ve gathered a list, put together a template outreach email (as you’ll be doing this over and over) that’s short and clear with expectations. Tell your potential interviewee who you are, what your podcast is about, and what you’re asking of them. Do a few test interviews with friends and family to make sure everything is being recorded at the quality you want and then book your first episode.
If you like learning new software or are experienced with audio editing, you can put the show together yourself. Otherwise, there are lots of services you can find that will help edit and build your show on place likes UpWork and Fiverr.
Congrats! You now have a podcast episode that’s ready to be uploaded to iTunes, SoundCloud, or anywhere else and promoted alongside the rest of your content!
The last step is deciding how you’ll market and monetize your podcast. The larger of an audience you have, the more chances you have for monetizing it. Create a basic website for your show and start sharing episodes to your network. When you’re ready to monetize there are a few options you can choose from:
- Traditional advertising (sponsors)
- Selling your own products
- Donations and crowdfunding
- Selling “subscriber-only” content
- Putting on live shows
As Aaron Mahnke, creator of the Lore podcast says:
“I always tell podcasters to use as many streams as possible. Don't just sell ads on your show. Don't just sell T-shirts. Don't just do crowdfunding. Do all of it. Combine it and find the right mix, and together it adds up to something that's stronger and more dependable.”
10. Join a Remote Company Part-Time (or Full-Time)
While most of the ideas for making money online we’ve covered so far can be done on the side, if you’re looking to completely change your career and start working online there are thousands of companies looking to hire who don’t care where you are.
More and more companies and startups especially are embracing remote work—where you use online collaboration and communication tools to do your work from wherever you want. And you don’t have to be a 20-something hotshot designer or coder to reap the benefits of working remotely. Many remote positions are for customer support positions or other customer-facing positions that don’t require specialized skill sets.
Better yet, they aren’t all full-time either, meaning you can find a remote company and job that works as a way to make extra money online.
If you’re interested, here’s a list of some of the best places to find remote jobs today:
- Flexjobs
- SolidGigs
- We Work Remotely
- Remote.co
- Remotive
- Skip the Drive
- Virtual Locations
- Remote OK
- Staff.com
- Working Nomads
- Jobspresso
- Europeremotely
- Jobscribe
- WFH.IO
- Outsourcely
- PowerToFly
- Landing.Jobs
- AngelList
- Authentic Jobs
- The Muse
- Idealist
- Indeed
...
Now, let's talk about the rest of my picks for the best ways to make money online.
If you’re looking to build a new career online, the first ten ways we just ran through are some of the best, long-term plays for making money online. However, for a lot of people (myself included), you probably want to find other, quick online business opportunities where you can start seeing a return more quickly.
Which is a great idea. Of course, making money online takes patience and effort. But there are lots of proven ways you can get started making money today without the long lead time of building a startup or getting your own freelance business off the ground.
Also, no matter what your career, it’s important to diversify where your income is coming from. This means having multiple revenue streams from multiple sources, like selling your freelance services, affiliate and passive income, as well as coaching and other online odd jobs.
Not only will this multiply the money you’re bringing in in a serious way, but it protects you against any sudden changes in the market or in your business. Remember that old saying about putting all your eggs in one basket? A few hours a week committed to just one or two of the following opportunities will put you in a much stronger position to be financially safe and independent.
So, no matter what your speciality or niche, there’s a way to use your skills to bring in extra money online for you here:
11. Test Websites
You probably have a pretty strong idea of what makes a good website. Is the design clean and easy to navigate? Does the content make sense? Luckily, there are plenty of people out there who want to hear your thoughts. And they’ll even pay you decent money for it (most sites pay ~$10 per 20 minutes, or ~$30 per hour!)
To test these websites, you’ll be asked to visit the site in question and record your reactions and thoughts as you go through it. To get started making extra money online by testing websites, sign up for some of the most popular services like UserTesting.com, Userlytics, TryMyUI, Userfeel, TestingTime (for people outside the U.S), or Side Income Jobs.
12. Narrate Audiobooks
The audiobook industry is booming, yet only 5% of books ever get made into audio format. If you’ve got a background in acting, or if people have said you’ve got a voice made for the radio, you can make extra money recording audio versions of independent and popular books. Sites like ACX connect authors with audiobook performers. So, whether you’re an author looking for more ways to sell your book, or an actor/voice actor looking to make some extra income, you can sell your services online.
13. Write and Sell an eBook (Amazon Self-Publishing)
So many people dream of writing a book, but never go through with it. Yet no matter what, I’m sure you have experience and value you could give through writing a book. By packaging your skills and knowledge into a downloadable eBook that helps people learn a skill, advance their careers, or start a businesses, you can change someone’s life and even make good money online.
Better yet, you can even upload your own book to one of the world’s largest book sellers: Amazon. With Amazon self-publishing, you set the price, retain the rights to your book, and get access to Amazon’s massive audience. For every sale, you keep 70% with Amazon taking the remainder as a fee. If you want to get started, check out Leslie Samuel's great guide to selling eBooks online or follow Tara Gentile on CreativeLive as she shows you how to use your existing body of work to write an eBook within the next week. Who knows, you might just write one of the best business books of this year!
14. Do Micro-Jobs on Amazon Mechanical Turk
Amazon Mechanical Turk is a service that lets you make money online through doing paid microtasks. Each task is something simple that requires human interaction like rating search results, checking for the right spelling on search terms, categorizing the tone of an article, or even basic translating. You can do these tasks from anywhere you want and make money online from the world’s largest e-retailer.
15. Join Freelance Job Sites (Like Flexjobs and SolidGigs)
It can take time to build up your personal freelance business. Yet, there is more demand than ever for freelancers. So, if you want to kick start making money online through freelancing you can join one of the top freelance networks, such as Flexjobs, SolidGigs, Contena, Upwork, Fiverr, or PeoplePerHour. Sign up, build your profile, upload some samples of your work and start making extra money by doing small freelance jobs.
Even if you already have experience or freelance clients, these networks can be a great way to supplement your income and keep work coming in without spending too much time on cold outreach.
16. Sell Your Services on Niche Sites Like 99Designs, Cloudpeeps or TopTal
If you’re a skilled worker in a specific niche, like marketing, design, or software development, there are specialty marketplaces that cater just to you. These are amazing places to make money online as you know that the people visiting them are looking specifically for the skills you have. Check out places like 99Designs or Dribbble for designers, Cloudpeeps for marketing and SEO professionals, and TopTal, Crew, or Gigster for high-level software developers. Once you've built up your development skills, you can begin building a brand for yourself as a higher-value consultant and start charging brands for larger projects like implementing an entire WordPress security overhaul or migrating a website from http to https.
17. Do Graphic Design for Local Companies
Walk around your neighborhood or town and I’m sure you’ll see tons of great local businesses with terrible design. However, with increasingly easy-to-use tools like Adobe Illustrator, Venngage, Stencil, and Visme, just about anyone with a creative mindset and a good amount of motivation can start making money online by being a graphic designer for local companies.
18. Email Marketing with a Niche Newsletter (The Skimm, Mister Spoils)
How many email newsletters are you bombarded with every single day? There’s a reason for that. Marketing to an actively interested group of email subscribers is one of the best ways to make money online. There have even been million-dollar businesses built from simple email newsletters like TheSkimm, or Mister Spoils. Each newsletter targets a specific type of user with interesting, daily content, while also partnering with relevant companies and affiliates to bring in extra money. If this seems daunting, it’s not. Tools like MailChimp, ConvertKit and AWeber make it easier than ever to get started with email marketing. And another great option to consider (with the largest free plan available) is SendPulse, with their ability to send up to 15,000 emails per month to 2,500 subscribers, and then affordable plans starting at under $10/month as you grow from there.
19. Sells Products on a Shopify Store
If you’re serious about making money selling things online, it’s pretty much impossible to not recommend Shopify. The platform gives you everything you need to get your online store up and running in less than a day including a custom domain, beautiful templates (so you don’t need design skills), secure payment options, and they can even take care of marketing and shipping for you. Whether you’re promoting your own products, designs, or curating other products for people in your niche, Shopify is the best option for powering your online store.
20. Sell Your Crafts and Art on Etsy
Etsy is the most popular online marketplace for handmade goods and crafts. From bracelets to phone cases, rings, furniture, and more, Etsy is perfect for anyone who is creative and wants to sell their handmade creations. As long as you have the space, this can make for one of the best ways to make money online that can be started with a very limited investment. Consider these 5 steps to starting an Etsy store, from Handmadeology.
While Etsy is a great place to get in front of potential customers who wouldn’t have otherwise found you, once you’re up and running and have built a decent audience, you can move your store over to Shopify and retain a larger portion of the income you make from selling your goods.
21. Become an Influencer on Instagram
Build up a following on your Instagram account and you could quickly be making extra money online. Major brands, gear companies, and even startups are willing to shell out $500-$5,000+ per post to get in front of your audience. While it’s getting harder and harder to build a massive Instagram audience, if you already have a solid niche and are posting quality content regularly with a great camera for taking Instagram photos, with a few small tweaks you can make yourself an influencer. Check out this awesome article from Shopify on how to build and grow your Instagram following to get started.
22. Sell Your Art and Designs on Society6
While Etsy is fantastic for handmade goods that you’ve already created, if you’ve got killer designs that would look good on phone cases, t-shirts, or even wall hangings, pillows, and duvets, you can sell them on Society6 without paying anything to start. Society6 lets artists upload their designs and create their own shops where they choose what products their designs can be used on. That means one design can be used to make a whole range of awesome products that are printed and shipped on demand whenever someone buys from you. With top creators making thousands every month just from selling their designs.
23. Local Business Consulting
If you've developed valuable skill sets or picked up certifications within your industry over the years, offering your consulting services to local business owners can be a lucrative way to make money online. Whether you're an expert marketer, business strategist, or manufacturing aficionado, there's likely a local business owner who's willing to pay you to help them solve an issue with their company. Start with this 18-step checklist to becoming a local business consultant from Karyn Greenstreet and then use my guide to crafting an effective cold email to convince them to hire you.
24. Sell Stock Photos Online
If you have a fondness and talent for taking pictures you can make extra money online by becoming a stock photographer and selling your images to a stock photo company like ShutterStock or iStockPhoto. You’ll get royalties every time someone licenses an image you’ve submitted. To really be successful, build your own photography website to be able to showcase your portfolio and start getting higher-paid private corporate work.
25. Rent Your Home or Room on AirBnB
Not only is Airbnb a great way to make extra money online by renting out your spare bedroom, but you also get the benefit of meeting new people (if that's your kind of thing). You can even rent out an entirely new apartment just to manage as an Airbnb.
But don't make the mistake of thinking this will be a passive source of income—you're on call whenever you have a guest and you'll always need to keep the place clean for incoming visitors. On top of just renting on Airbnb, consider offering your guests paid add-ons, like Lauren Gheysens', Royal Day Out in London, England—where she gives visitors a local's only tour of the city, complete with bespoke 18th century costumes.
26. Start an Online T-Shirt Business
It’s sometimes hard to comprehend just how much people love t-shirts. And with the right niche, marketing, and tools, you can create an online t-shirt business that makes you extra money online while you sleep. (Even Bloomberg and Forbes feature stories from entrepreneurs who've done just that.) Services like TeeSpring make it easier than ever to create a t-shirt drop-shipping business where they handle the sales, printing, and shipping, and you’re only responsible for design and marketing. Or you can even buy into well-established franchise businesses like Rhea Lana that sell fashionable, affordable kids clothing and get the backing of a proven organization to fuel your online sales. For more tips, check out this simple guide to launching and marketing an online clothing store by my friends over at Selz.
27. Sell Your Expertise on Clarity.fm
If you’ve got experience and expertise in a specific area of business, there are hundreds if not thousands of business owners who would love to jump on a phone call and pick your brain. This can be an easy way to make extra money online and to hone your skills to use in your consulting or freelance business. Sites like Clarity.fm let you create a profile where entrepreneurs and business owners can pre-pay to book a phone call with you for a set amount of time. Whether you’re an expert in raising money for startups, building apps, or running a restaurant, you can make extra money selling a few minutes of your time to people in need.
28. Answer Professional Questions on JustAnswer
If it’s not clear yet, information and expertise are two of the most consistent and lucrative ways to make extra money online. If you don’t like talking on the phone, you can sign up to get paid to answer professional questions on JustAnswer. There are thousands of questions being asked every month from people looking for help from lawyers, doctors, mechanics, vets, and more. To apply, you’ll need to supply your professional verification, resume, and a form of identification.
29. Become a Virtual Assistant
If you have a knack for organization, you can make money online as a virtual assistant helping people to keep their days in order. A virtual assistant will do everyinthing from bookkeeping to research, database entry, booking travel, and managing email. It can also be an awesome way to rub shoulders with some very important people, build up your professional network, and of course grow another stream of income. You can find great gigs on UpWork, Fiverr, Indeed, and Remote.co.
30. Get a Commission-Only Sales Gig
If you’re willing to take on some risk and have the heart of a true hustler, you can make extra money online doing commission-only sales for startups and other businesses. While you won’t be getting a regular salary, with the right sales strategies and skills as an inside sales rep, you can make decent money for each sale you bring in. And because you’ll most likely be working with startups, if you can negotiate a little equity you could profit big time if you're pitching a solid product and the startup succeeds.
If you need to brush up on your sales skills, check out online courses like Sales Training and Prospecting on Udemy, The Guide to Pitching and Selling Clients on CreativeLive. And once you’re ready, head over to Angel List and see if there any open sales position opportunities align with your interests.
31. Teach English as a Virtual Tutor
Teaching and tutoring English as a second language is a great way to make money online, not to mention open some doors for you to travel the world if you'd like. While full ESL (English as a Second Language) accreditation is recommended, as long as you’re a native speaker and have the ability to teach, there are people in countries such as Hong Kong or the UAE who are willing to pay upwards of $25/hr for you to tutor them English via Skype. Check out Indeed, Learn4Good and Remote.co for remote english tutoring jobs or sign up on a specialized site like VerbalPlanet or Chegg Tutors.
32. Guest Post as a Freelance Writer for Niche Websites
If you’ve got a way with words and expertise in a niche, there are plenty of sites that will pay for articles and content you write. Think of the sites you read regularly. What can you contribute to them that would be interesting? Research your niche and then look for ways to pitch articles. Many sites will simply have a submission or contact link in the footer. To get started, check out my full guide to becoming a freelance writer on the side and then submit your articles to places like Instash, Listverse, TopTenz, A List Apart, International Living, FundsforWriters, and Textbroker.
33. Write on Medium’s Partner Program
Medium is an online community where anyone can post articles and essays and get them in front of their audience of millions of monthly readers. While it can be a great place to build your audience for your own blog or find customers for your consulting business, with Medium’s new Partner Program, you can now make money online whenever someone reads your articles. Register for free and you can choose whether your articles are freely available or only readable by those people paying $5/month for a premium Medium membership. You’ll make money based on the amount of people who read and engage with your posts each month.
34. Help People with Their Tax Prep
It’s not the sort of online money making opportunity that’s covered in glory, but everyone needs a set of eyes to make sure the numbers add up at the end of the year. Every business and most individuals need someone to help prepare tax returns, especially time or resource-strapped small business owners. The Income Tax School provides an array of training programs that'll certify you with tax prep in as little as 10 weeks, and once tax season rolls around you'll be able to charge an average of $229 per return as a freelance tax preparer with this side business idea, reports CNBC.
35. Transcribe Audio and Interviews
Journalists, doctors, lawyers, academics, and researchers record interviews every single day and need someone to transcribe what’s been said. So, if you’re comfortable with listening to the same audio over and over while writing it down you can make good money online doing transcriptions.
Most services pay anywhere from $15 to $25 per hour of transcribed audio. If you specialize and have training in legal or medical transcription you can make even more. If you’re a beginner transcriptionist you can find jobs at Transcribe Anywhere, TranscribeMe, Quicktate, Rev, Tigerfish, and Crowdsurf.
36. Proofread Articles
As long as there is still the written word, there will always be editors. Freelance editing and proofreading not only pays a decent hourly wage, it also gives you the chance to read about potentially interesting topics too. What's more, pursuing freelance writing & editing as a business idea can afford you a lifestyle that lets you travel the world as a digital nomad. You can find lots of job postings from companies and individuals in need of writing, proofreading, and editing services on Contena, which makes this a high-demand opportunity to make money online.
37. Private Labelling and Selling Products on Amazon
More than half a billion products are sold on Amazon every month, making it an incredible opportunity to make money online. But, like everything else that involves making money online, you have to do quite a bit of work to earn it. One option on Amazon is to find products that are already made and buy and sell them at a discount. For example, you could research generic products such as clocks, keychains and mugs to attach to your brand. For an incredible deep dive on how to make extra money with this strategy, check out how digital marketer Neil Patel recently did this as a public experiment right here on his blog.
38. Online Travel Consultant
If you love to travel and find yourself randomly searching for airfare sales or browsing Lonely Planet, why not carve out a niche for yourself as a private travel agent? My friend, Mark Jackson did just that, making extra money online with his travel consulting side business. Start with word of mouth recommendations from friends who know they can count on you for the cheapest flights, and then move on and create a Facebook or LinkedIn group to invite people who want to stay on top of the latest deals. Eventually you could spin this into a full-time consultancy teaching people how to make their dream trip a reality.
39. Do Virtual Odd Jobs on TaskRabbit
If you don’t mind doing other people’s chores, then TaskRabbit is a great option for making money online. Earn extra income by walking your neighbor’s dog or mowing Mr. Smith’s lawn. It might seem like not the most lucrative option, but the top taskers reportedly earn as much as $7000 a month, making this a full-time way to make money online for some.
40. Clean Up Search Engines
Ever see a Google result and say “How the heck did that get there?” While Google and other search engines use powerful algorithms to determine what pages to show for search results, there are real people making money online by making sure the machines are doing their job correctly.
With sites like Appen and LionBridge you can make money by conducting researches on predefined search queries and providing feedback for results based on their relevance.
41. Enter Online Contests for Company Names and Slogans
Do you constantly come up with witty one-liners? Do you dream of the days of Mad Men-style advertising? If you’ve got some branding chops or just come up with imaginative copy, there are lots of opportunities to make money online through company naming and slogan contests. If you think you have a knack for names check out the Squadhelp platform where you can earn a little extra money online by naming brands, services, products, company slogans and even help out on the logo design front if you've got the chops.
42. Get Paid for Being Healthy
It doesn’t pay much, but if you’re a healthy person and want to make a bit of extra money online, the AchieveMint app will reward you for doing things like walking, tracking your food, or taking health surveys. AchieveMint works by connecting to fitness apps you might already be using like Fitbit, RunKeeper, Healthkit, and MyFitnessPal and then giving you points for certain actions. For every 10,000 points, you earn $10 with no limit on your earnings.
43. Write Reviews of the Places You’ve Been
When was the last time you went to a new restaurant without looking it up online beforehand? Or bought a product that didn’t have at least a few 5-star reviews? It seems like more and more our world is run on reviews. And you can make money online by writing them. Get started by creating accounts on sites like Vindale research, Software Judge, FameBit, CrowdTap, Influence Central, and Modern Mom. However, before you run off and start writing, be sure to check the small print on each of these sites. Writing reviews isn’t a huge source of guaranteed income and you want to make sure that it’s worth your time before you get going.
44. Do Data Entry for Companies
If you’re a stickler for details and have quick typing skills, you can make money online by entering data for companies. Simply search “data entry” jobs on places like Craigslist, Indeed, or UpWork.
45. College Admissions Essay Editor
If editing and advising college students on how to write compelling 500 word essays on topics such as "You were just invited to speak at the White House. Write your speech," seems like something you would want to do, you can make good money online.
Trust me, tons of parents will pay you to edit admissions essays and offer constructive feedback for their children. Look for open positions at top editing companies like Scribendi, Top Admit, or Essay Edge or post your services online on Craigslist and other marketplaces.
46. Help New Teachers by Selling Your Teaching Plan
Being a new teacher can be nerve wracking. Which is why so many people are looking to buy your old teaching plans to help them feel more comfortable in front of their first class. If you’re a teacher, you can make money online through a site like Teachers Pay Teachers, which lets you buy and sell your original teaching materials.
47. Give Your Opinion in Online Focus Groups and Surveys
If you want to help shape products in their early stages, joining an online focus group or answering survey questions is a great way to make extra money online. They don’t pay as much as some of the other options we’ve highlighted, but you can join groups on sites like Survey Junkie, Swagbucks, and IPSOS that pay out through Amazon gift cards, check, or PayPal. You’ll be asked to provide a bit of information about your demographics (age, location, etc…), but after that you can get going making money through surveys.
48. Maintain Artist Fan Pages
Your favorite artist, musician, or entrepreneur often needs help maintaining their fan pages on Twitter and Facebook. If you have a bit of a background in social media you can make money online looking after these pages by looking for jobs on Fiverr.
49. Look After Other People’s Pets
In 2017, there were almost 90 million pet dogs in the US. Which has opened up a huge opportunity to make money online as a dog watcher or sitter. Specialized sites like Rover or Care.com connect pet owners with pet walkers, sitters, and boarding houses to help look after their best friends when they’re at work or on a trip. If you’re an animal lover, you can make extra money and get to spend some quality time with a furry friend.
50. Sell Your Old Smartphone and Other Tech Goods
The global used smartphone industry is worth a staggering $5 billion. Which means that old phone you forgot about in your cabinet could be worth some serious money.
There are tons of sites online that will either buy your old smartphone outright or let you list your phone for the thousands of people out there not willing to shell out $1000+ for a shiny new iPhone. Check out Orchard, Gazelle, Swappa, or Glyde to make extra money online by selling your smartphone or other electronics.
51. Sell Your Old Books
If you want to clear some space out in your house and have a big stack of books you’ve been holding onto for too long, you can make money selling your books and textbooks online. Stores like Half Priced Books and others will give you cents on the dollar for each of your current books while you can check what your book is worth by simply entering the ISBN number on Book Scouter.
52. Rent or Sell Your Clothes Online
Is your closet bursting with clothes you’re simply not wearing anymore? Rather than take them to a local thrift or consignment store, you can make money online by renting to selling your clothes. Check out sites like Tradesy, SnapGoods.com, Loanables.com, and RentNotBuy.com.
53. Online Dating Consultant
Believe it or not, some people have such a difficult time with dating, they don’t even want to participate in the online (or app-based) component of it. If you’re a smooth talker, you can leverage that skill into making money online as a matchmaker on sites like Relationship Hero.
54. Rent Your Car on Turo
If you own a car but barely use it, you can make some easy money online by renting it out on Turo. Before you freak out, rest easy knowing there’s a $1 Million insurance policy on all cars rented on Turo, plus drivers are prescreened.
55. Become an Online News Writer or Columnist
You don’t need to have a degree in journalism to make money online as a reporter or columnist these days. Plus, there are many news websites that can always use a bit of help on getting local coverage.
Some of them, such as The Examiner, will compensate contributors based on ad revenue generated per article written.
56. Buy and Sell Domain Names
Imagine being the original owner of Insure.com (which sold for $16 Million in 2009).
Domain name trading has been around for the last couple decades, and while most slam-dunk names have long been sold off, there’s still plenty of others that you can get your hands on for relatively cheap and broker as a way to make money online. Before you dive in, however, beware that some experts doubt the long-term viability of this idea for making money online. However, there’s always the change you might just land on a lucrative domain name for a future billion-dollar company. To get you started, here are some tips from GoDaddy, arguably the world’s largest and most famous repository of domain names.
57. Do Data Analysis for Companies
Got a thing for numbers? Plenty of companies pay talented contractors who are good at data analysis, making this a potentially lucrative way to make money online, if you have the right credentials and experience. Platforms like Upwork and Digiserved are just two of many websites that are great for freelancers with an analytical prowess.
58. Online Personal Trainer or Fitness Coach
If you’re a fitness buff and have the right combination of charisma and business sense, working as a part-time online personal trainer can be both physically and financially rewarding. Once you build up a reputation and client base for yourself, it could easily turn into a full-time endeavor for you. Check out this interview with several fitness blog owners who are making a living online, from MonetizePros. As well, I'd recommend checking out this resource if you want to take this business idea seriously and get started with a business plan for your personal fitness trainer business today.
59. Sell Your Songs
The music industry might not be as strong as it was in the 80s, but there are still plenty of ways to make money online as a musician. Sites like SoundBetter let you sell your services as a songwriter, producer, or session musician to thousands of customers a month. While Musicbed, Music Vine, Marmoset, and SongFreedom are perfect for licensing your music to TV shows, movies, and web series.
60. Subcontract Your Extra Work and Start an Online Agency
Once you’ve established yourself in any of the numerous freelance verticals online, spending your time focusing just on doing inside sales (booking freelance contracts with high-value clients) and then subcontracting your work out to other freelancers can be a great way to make money online.
Rather than simply selling your own time, you’ll be building a business that can scale and grow beyond the hours you have to sell each day.
61. Create DIY or Cooking Videos
You know those top-down cooking or craft videos you just can’t seem to get away from these days? There are people out there making a living from them. 78% of B2C companies depend on user-generated content, like those videos, for their marketing campaigns. You can sign up as a creator on a site like Darby Smart and potentially work with brands like Nordstrom, Mattel, and BarkBox. Or, learn how to master PPC advertising and you can use the content to build your YouTube following and monetize through ads and views.
62. Edit Videos Online
Video is growing like crazy. And more and more people are looking for professional help cutting their raw footage into viral-worthy content. If you have the right software and a bit of skill, you can easily make money online as a video editor. Check out these article of Fstopperson how to become an online video editor and then look for relevant jobs on Mandy.com, Creative Cow Job Search, or ProductionHub.
63. Build a Niche Website
Find an audience for your passion or hobby and you’re all set to make money online doing something you love via a niche website. That of course, is easier said than done. Creating a profitable niche website takes time and is not intended for the faint of heart. But, if you can hurdle the steep challenges and positively answer a few key questions on whether the website business idea you’re thinking about is profitable, then you can begin building it and eventually monetize through advertising, affiliates, or other relevant products.
64. Become a Contract Customer Service Superstar
Like talking to people and helping walk them through problems? You can bring in extra income as a contract customer support superstar for companies all over the world. Due to the 24/7 nature of online businesses, companies are looking for people in different time zones to help deal with issues that their users are having. Better yet, if you have experience in service or retail you’ll be perfectly suited. Check out indeed or the other remote job boards I listed earlier to find opportunities.
65. Buy an Existing Website
Websites aren't too dissimilar to stocks. Many are junk, but some can generate serious income for you, making buying an existing website a strong potential idea for making money online (if you have an eye for spotting the diamond in the rough).
You can buy and sell websites in the hope of generating future earnings based on their user traffic, current revenue intake, domain name, or some other factors that might be a hidden cash cow everyone else has overlooked. Interested? Check out marketplaces like Flippa and Flipping Enterprises to learn more.
66. Become an Online Notary
Every year, hundreds of millions of documents are notarized in the United States: wills, mortgages, citizenship forms, handgun applications. While for decades, this has all been done in person, there is a budding crop of sites that allow notaries to take their services online. If you’re already a notary, you can sell your services online. Or, if you want to get started, check out the National Notary’s checklist for becoming a certified notary.
67. Run Corporate Workshops
Another way to utilize your talent and business skills is to run corporate workshops online. Businesses are always looking for unique ways to help educate their workforce, and if you can package your talents into a day or half-day long session, you can sell that to companies all over the world to make money online. Start by building a portfolio and then reaching out on LinkedIn to influencers at relevant companies to see if they would be interested in you teaching their team.
68. Lend Your Voice to Voice-Overs
Has anyone ever told you you have a voice for radio? Are you great at creating original characters with just your voice? There are tons of people looking to pay for quality voice overs for their corporate videos, animation series, or educational videos. Check out Fiverr and UpWork or create a profile on a specialized site like Voices.com or The Voice Realm to get started making money online doing voice overs.
69. Small Business Marketing Consultant
If you have experience with marketing, SEO, or a knack for getting people excited about the products and services you use on a regular basis, think about refining your skills and putting them to work making money online as a small business marketing consultant in your region—especially if you can become a local SEO expert and can help local clients rank higher in their search results.
Businesses of all sizes are in constant need of bringing in more customers, which is where you come in with your business idea. Start by pitching creative small business marketing ideas to local businesses and you'll be sure to impress the first set of clients you begin working with in your area.
70. Rent Your Camera Gear
Thanks to online marketplace websites like KitSplit, it's never been easier to rent out your camera gear that spends more time sitting in your closet than it does in the field. From cameras to lenses and so much more, there are over 40,000 people using KitSplit to earn a passive income from renting out the camera gear they already own.
Did you try to make money online before but did not get success? Then no need to worry anymore!
Because we have already trained more than 7,00,000 people across the world & they are successfully making $300 to $2000 (INR 20,000+) per month.
We are showing you below some of the best ways to earn money online. You can also download our training package which will help you to grow your income very fast.
And yes, everything in this website is Absolutely Free & Without Investment.
18 Ways to Earn Money Online
Check some of the best ways below & start immediately-
1. Make Money with Online Surveys
Here you can make money by completing small surveys which takes 5 minutes to 20 minutes depending on the requirement of a particular company.
You need to write your feedback & opinion in a survey. You just have to select your choice from the question & there is no need to write anything.
You can make $1 to $20 depending on the length of the survey, your profile & the country you are living in. You can find more about paid surveys and join 20 best survey sites.
2. Earn Money with Blogging
I have been making money with blogging from the last 7-8 years. I have made more than 1 million dollar (almost Rs. 7 Crore+) with blogging. I was so confused when I started blogging.
I had absolutely no idea about blogging when I started in 2010. I worked very hard but made no money with blogging for almost 1 year.
But I never gave up! I was doing my research on topics like, ‘how to create a blog’, ‘how to write on your blog’ and ‘how to promote your blog’.
And things started in my favor after 1 year. I made my first $100 from blogging in 2011. Then there was no looking back. Today I am earning $25,000 (Rs 15 Lacs+) per monthfrom blogging.
You can know more about my blogging journey, my income proofs and a complete guide on how to start a blog on MoneyConnexion.
3. Earn from PTC sites
If you want to make some extra income but don’t have much time then you can make money by joining some trusted PTC sites.
Here you need to click & read the advertisements for 10 to 3o seconds & get paid for each & every advertisement you view.
There are many sites where you can register & make money by reading ads.
All sites are free & there is no investment at all.
I will show you only those sites that pay regularly to their member and give better rates for clicking ads.
Click to join list of 5 best PTC sites, & start earning.
4. Become a Captcha Solver
If you have more free time (2 hours a day) then you can add further income in your pocket by working as a captcha solver.
This is one of the easiest way to earn money online. As a captcha solver, you need to read the captcha images & type the exact characters.
You need to be very fast in order to earn better income. You can get paid up to $2 for every 1000 captchas you solve.
If you are interested in this then you can check this list of 10 best Captcha work sites.
5. Earn with Affiliate Marketing
If you are serious about earning money online & you are a hard working guy who wants to make big income then affiliate marketing is for you.
There is more scope for affiliate marketing than before because of the high growth of online shopping.
There are hundreds of online merchants like Amazon, Flipkart, eBay, Clickbank, CJ etc. where you can signup & promote their products.
In affiliate marketing, you are simply helping customers to buy the right product by creating a simple website & in return you can earn 4% to 20% commission.
You can signup for Free Training so that we can send you one of the best guide on affiliate marketing that can help you to earn great income.
6. Become a freelancer
Freelancing is another popular way to make money after blogging & affiliate marketing. As a freelancer, you can work with small or big companies on a temporary basis & provide them your services.
Freelancers can make $500 to $2000+ per month depending on the type of freelance jobs you will do for your client.
You can work as a content writer, web designer, graphics designer or provide services like SEO, data entry, video testimonials, digital marketing etc.
There are dozens of popular websites like UpWork, Freelancer.in, WorkNHire, and many more freelance sites that can give you the ready platform with ready clients.
7. Virtual Assistant
A virtual assistant is like a personal assistant who can earn money by working online for someone without being physically present.
He can do variety of tasks like taking care of websites, counseling, writing & proofreading, publishing content, marketing, coding, website & app development, research etc.
There are dozens of companies like HireMyMom, MyTasker, Zirtual, uAssistMe, 123Employee where you can signup for virtual assistant work.
8. Writing Job
Writing is another better way to earn money on internet through writing different types of content.
You can write for blogs, companies, institutions, individual people etc. Different types of writers get paid differently.
Normally people get paid $5 to $20+ for writing 500 words content.
If you don’t have writing skills then you can read this post and become a freelance writer.
You can go to the sites like UpWork, iWriter, WriterBay, FreelanceWriting, TextBroker, ExpressWriters.com, FreelanceWritingGigs.com to find the content writing jobs.
9. Micro-working
There are more ways that can help you to make extra income by working in part time. You can easily make $200-$300 per month by doing simple tasks on different sites.
Here you can work on variety of different tasks like identifying an object, rating & commenting on different sites, visiting some websites, finding contact details, doing small research, writing small articles etc.
There are many websites like mTurk, MicroWorker, SEOClerk, ClickWorker, GigWalkwhere you can work as a micro worker & earn extra income. After signup, we will show you how to work as Micro-worker and make money.
10. Become a YouTuber
YouTube is one of the hottest trend in earning money online. You can start your YouTube channel, upload some quality videos and then become a YouTube partner to make money online on YouTube.
You can create different kind of videos like prank videos, comedy videos, kitchen recipes, how-to-do videos, travel tips, or anything you think, is useful for people.
Once you get the videos views and subscribers for your channel then you can apply for YouTube partner program.
Once you get the approval, people will see the ads along with ads in your videos. You will make money for each views your video receive.
You can shoot videos from your smartphone or any DSLR camera.
You can read this ultimate guide to make money on YouTube.
11. Become an online seller
Online selling is not like traditional selling. You don’t have much scope of selling your items outside your local market but in online selling, you can sell your product all over the country.
There are 2 ways to sell anything online.
Either, you can create your own website and sell your products from your website OR become a seller on any famous shopping portal like Amazon, Flipkart, eBay, Snapdeal etc.
Second option is much better you will get existing customers of these popular portals.
Now you must be thinking that what can I sell when I don’t have any product?
I have seen many Amazon and Flipkart sellers who don’t have any product but still they are selling number of products on these sites.
What you can do is, roam around your city & check for the best products you can sell on these sites. You can find the wholesalers and distributors who can sell you these products at a highly discounted rates.
You can list these products on Amazon, eBay etc. and make money by selling at a higher price.
You need to try the best products that you can sell at lower than market price. Trust me, its easier than your thought. Only thing you need to do is take action.
12. Domain Trader
Domain trading is another high profit business you can do online. But here you need some investment for buying the domain.’
You must be an expert OR you should get detailed knowledge before you start this business.
You can buy domains from GoDaddy or other domain registrar for less than $10 & sell in future to the needy person for hundreds of dollars. Your skill here is to identify great domains that are not booked yet & companies in future can try to buy that domain.
When companies don’t find the domain of their choice, they contact the domain owner for the deal & it’s in your control to fix the price. You can even put your domains on auction so that people can buy directly at your desired price.
13. Website flipping
Like domain trading, website flipping is also a hot business to earn money online. Here you don’t deal with domains but websites.
You have to create a website, work on it for 3-6 months or more so that you can start making money from the websites.
After earning for 2-3 months, you can put that site on auction on Flippa , EmpireFlippersetc. You can easily get 15-20 times price of your monthly earning from that website.
It’s much easier to grow an old sites than creating a new site and the grow this new site.
Many experienced people buy websites from Flippa, work for 3-4 months on these sites and make double or triple income.
14. Provide training & consultancy
There is a big scope of earning money online if you have some good skills that people need. Like you can provide training on spoken English, computer courses, any technical course, Feng shui, medical treatment and any other things.
You can promote your business through a website or a Facebook business page.
You need to promote your website or Facebook page in order to get the potential leads.
You can get many customers through a good follow ups.
15. Stock & Forex Trading
Stock trading & forex trading is a very lucrative way to make money for those who has good idea of the market.
There are number of free or paid courses available on internet that can train you for online trading.
You can even read newspaper like Economic times or watch TV channels like CNBC to become more expert in the field. Its risky to enter into this market without sufficient knowledge.
16. Earn money from your smartphone
There are various smartphone apps that can pay you some extra income by completing some simple tasks on your Smartphone.
There are at least 20 money making apps that if you install in your smartphone, can give an extra income of $200-$300.
You have to take simple surveys, complete offers by signup on other websites, play games, watch videos etc.
You don’t need to take any extra time to earn from this as you can make money on the go.
17. Sell photos online
This is another use of your smartphone. You can take high quality images of nature, places, people, things, dishes, homes etc. & sell them online.
There are number of big sites like ShutterStock, Fotolia, , iStockPhoto, Photobucketwhere you can submit your photos. Whenever some customer wants to purchase your photos, you will get paid as per the price you fix.
You can get paid multiple time for the same photos. Read this MoneyConnexion post for more details.
18. Sell old stuff on OLX or Quikr
I am sure there may be number of things in your home that are lying unused for months & if you take little efforts, you can earn some good money.
You just need to do 2 things, i.e. find out all the items that you are no longer using, take high quality photos of these items from different angles & list these items on OLX & Quikr for sale.
Not only this, you can also ask your friends & relatives for selling their old stuff. You can help them selling these items & make some commission.
So these 18 ways can provide a perfect answer for your query ‘how to earn money online” & yes, you can shoot an email to us in case of assistance.
71. What'd I miss?
With the explosion of online businesses, there has never been a better time to look for ways to make money online.
From huge, life-changing endeavors like starting a business, to taking on part-time consulting or coaching clients or just answering surveys, there’s certainly a few ways you can start making money online today and feeling more financially safe and secure.
What did I miss?
Let me know your own personal ways for making money online (in the comments), share some details, and I’ll add them to the list 😊
Yes, you can make money online. That sounds really dumb to say and I hate saying it because that phrase alone sounds scammy as hell.
Anyone can make money online and I’m not trying to blow smoke up your ass.
There isn’t a crazy system that you need to learn or mystery that you need to solve.
Go on Pinterest and check out any big blog. Everything they do to make money is sitting right there in front of you.
It might seem so obvious to you that you don’t actually believe it. You might think that there is a secret that you are missing but there really isn’t. If you study enough success stories you can see the methods that they use.
In this post, I’m going to explain to you the 5 different ways I make money online and how I was able to achieve each one.
Who the Hell am I?
My name is Paul Scrivens and I run over twenty (!!!) blogs in different niches.
Before you get the wrong idea, you don’t need to run this many blogs to make this kind of money. I just do it because I like to understand how to be successful in a number of niches.
Currently, across my sites, I make over 5 figures every single month. It varies from month to month depending on the niche and what I’m promoting but every month I’m guaranteed (okay, nothing in life is guaranteed but it’s consistent) to make at least $50,000. Check out this blog income report that I created to see where the money comes from.
Here is a screenshot of one of my sites bringing in money almost daily:
Note: I can’t receive bank deposits over the weekend so some days in the above image are skipped.
If you want to get an idea of some of my sites (besides this one) then here is a list of some of them:
- Obstacle.co
- Thrive/Strive
- Mama Paisa
- Dare to Conquer
- The Daily Nutrition
- Keto Bootstrap
- Miss Fit Living
- Bogoten
As you can see, I’m pretty varied in what I do and it’s important to keep in mind that all of these sites contribute towards the money I make each month.
What about the other sites? They are still in the grow out phase so they won’t be added to the list until they start bringing in money as well.
First Things First
Before I dive into the 5 ways I make money online I want to talk to you about the most important aspect of making money online no matter what route you decide to take: building an audience.
If you can build an audience online then you have an easy road to making money.
This is a basic concept to understand. If you have an audience that pays attention to you, you can make money.
Remember that.
It’s the core concept of any audience whether it’s online or offline. Without an audience (clients, customers, members), you have no business.
The problem is that many people just don’t know how to build an audience or don’t put any focus on building an audience. Instead, they concern themselves with blog themes, Twitter posts, and other small things that don’t move the needle.
This is a big reason why the very first course you encounter in the Billionaire Blog Club revolves around Pinterest. You need to learn how to build an audience and that means getting traffic.
Seriously, if you have a blog and have decided that you need to start building up an audience then Pinterest is a great place to start. I have a Pinterest Course available to Billionaire Blog Club Members and a book on how to increase traffic with Pinterest. That’s how important I think it is.
If you can get traffic to your site then the whole world begins to open up for you.
It’s great that some bloggers will tell you that you don’t need much traffic to make money and they aren’t wrong, but if you can get a lot of traffic everything becomes much easier for you.
If I have a blog that is getting 100,000 page views a month that means that I’m probably getting at least 50,000 people to the site (most blogs will do between 1.2 to 1.4 pages per session). That means I have to try and get some small percentage of those people to buy something from me if I really want to do well. If I can’t get them to buy something then (in some cases) I have ads running on the site that will make me money anyways.
With a decent ad network, like AdThrive or Mediavine, 100,000 pageviews should net you between $800-$2000 a month.
As the number of people visiting my site increases, the chances of me making more money increase. That should be easy enough to understand with one caveat. The traffic just can’t be random traffic. It has to be traffic that is interested in what I’m writing about.
You aren’t going to bring 100 vegans into your hot dog shop (no you don’t serve tofu dogs).
It’s a pretty simple formula but for some reason, many bloggers (and other website owners) don’t put a lot of time in figuring out how to get traffic to the sites.
Make It Easy With a Good Niche
Now, let’s address something else which is going to be bad news for some of you.
If you want to make money online then I’m not going to tell you to follow your passion. Instead, I advise you to do stuff that has been proven to work.
If you like the idea of starting a blog then know that there are only 7 blog niches that get good traffic and make good money.
There really is no reason to try a different niche for your first blog.
I’ve spoken with people that want to start blogs on the topics they are most passionate about and they assume that they will do well simply because they believe other people love the topics as much as them.
Wrong.
What people love are things that make their lives easier and better. Why do you think how to make money blogs, personal finance blogs, and health blogs do so well?
Don’t hesitate to start a blog in a big and popular niche. The audience is already established in those areas so it’s pretty silly to avoid them.
With that being said let’s dive into the ways that I make money online.
Every penny that I earn starts with my blogs. I’ve put together a free 12-day blogging bootcamp for you that goes through every step that I take to build a successful blog.
The 5 Ways That I Make Money Online
I’m going to surprise you here and say that one of the ways isn’t by blogging.
Nobody pays me to blog.
However, the whole reason why I can make money online is because of blogging so if you want to make money online I suggest you get into blogging.
Blogging is your marketing platform. Fancy marketing people like to call it content marketing.
Blogging gives you the opportunity to build an audience which in turn gives you the chance to open up new revenue streams.
Get this straight, blogging opens the doors for a ton of opportunities for you. So when you see other people talk about the virtues of blogging, they aren’t talking about how awesome it is to write a piece of content.
In fact, one of the last things I want to do is sit down at a computer and write.
They are talking about how blogging levels the playing field for individuals to be able to reach thousands or millions of people similar to a bigger company.
My site, Keto Dash, reaches over ONE MILLION PEOPLE A MONTH. That’s completely insane to me.
Every single way that I make money online is directly connected to my blogging but I don’t want to say I make money by blogging.
That might be a small technicality but I wanted to get that out of the way.
1. Ads
This is the second easiest way from a technical standpoint to make money online because you don’t have to do much to get them set up. If you use one of the ad networks that I mentioned above then they actually do all of the work for you!
What you do need though is a shit ton of traffic for this to be effective. By this, I mean at least 30,000 page views before you even want to consider putting ads up on your site.
I don’t use ads on all of my blogs but the few that I do, I use AdThrive or Mediavineand both have been wonderful.
Now I know the question you are asking is how much money do I make for the amount of traffic that I get. I get paid every time an ad is shown on my site but you get fractions of a penny for each view. For this reason, ad dollars are measured in CPM.
This means that for every 1,000 page views I make $X amount of money.
So with AdThrive/Mediavine, depending on the niche and the quality of ads, the CPM fluctuates between $5 – $30 per 1,000 page views.
If I do 100,000 page views in a month (the minimum you need to apply to AdThrive) then I will make anywhere between $500 and $2,000 for that month. Again, it’s dependent on the topics that you write about.
Not bad, but not great considering the other ways that you can make money.
However, ads are the most passive way to make money online. Your only focus is to get people to continue to come to your site which can be challenging in its own right.
As of May 2018 I do about $15,000 a month in ad revenue.
2. Affiliate Marketing
This is the easiest way to make money online from a technical standpoint because you don’t have to do anything but post a link on your site.
That link points to a manufacturer of some product that will pay you every time someone purchases from them.
For example, if I run a car blog and I sign up for an affiliate program with a car parts shop, I can link the different car parts that I like on my blog and when people click on the link and purchase from the car parts shop I get a cut.
The commission that you get is totally dependent on the affiliate program. There is no status quo. I’ve seen percentages range from 4% to 90%.
However, making money with affiliate marketing is a lot harder than people present it. You might think that all you need to do is put a link on your site and then watch the money flow but that isn’t the case.
You have to do a lot of upfront work to convince your audience that they want/need a particular product. If you can’t do that then your links will just sit there unclicked.
If you want to learn more about making money with affiliate marketing then check out this guide to affiliate marketing.
I also have an awesome course dedicated to affiliate marketing that will show you all of the steps that I take to make money with affiliate marketing.
3. eBooks
I love writing eBooks because you can make them as simple or as complicated as you want. The easiest way to make an ebook is to simply write it in some type of word processing application (Word, Pages, or Google Docs) and export it as a PDF.
There you go. You now have an eBook that the world will enjoy.
eBooks are a great starter product for many bloggers because everyone has the tools to create them.
Some people believe that your ebook has to be super long for it to be successful and I’ve seen 4-page ebooks do well and 200-page ebooks bomb.
It’s completely dependent on the subject matter and what problem you are trying to solve.
If you don’t even want to set up your own website you can go directly through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing to reach millions of people instantly. Of course, you are dealing with a lot of competition but I know authors that make over $40,000 a month with their Kindle books.
I have two ebooks out right now:
Both books were created with Apple Pages so you don’t need fancy technology to make these things happen.
What service do I use to sell them?
I use DPD for the Pinterest book and SendOwl for the weight loss manual only because I wanted to try out both services and haven’t found one to be better than the other.
4. Online Courses
This is one of the most lucrative ways to make money online when you have an audience.
To make $1,000 with ads (on a good ad network) you need to do between 70,000 – 250,000 page views a month (remember it depends on the niche). That’s a lot of people!
To make $1,000 with affiliate marketing you might need to sell a couple dozen/hundred items.
With online courses, you can make $1,000 by selling just a couple (dependent on price).
For example, the current price (as of this writing) for the Billionaire Blog Club is $400+. To make $1,000 this month from the site I will need to sell 3 seats.
That doesn’t require me getting 100,000 people to the site. Hopefully, it only requires less than 100.
Out of these 5 methods, online courses are both the most technically involved and the most time-consuming.
I love teaching people but I hate the process of making courses just because I like instant results.
With my online courses, I have to come up with an outline of what the video is going to be about, plan the shots, hope that I can do it in one take, edit the video, convert the video, and then upload the video.
This takes hours and my throat always hurts when I’m done.
But again, I make most of my money from online courses so the effort is worth it.
5. Membership Sites
Technically the Billionaire Blog Club is a membership site that happens to have courses in it. However, most people think of membership sites as having recurring monthly or quarterly fees.
The Billionaire Blog Club is a pay once and you get a lifetime membership type of deal.
It’s the same thing with my weight loss membership site, Keto Dash.
Each of these sites brings in over $20,000 a month.
Let me repeat…
EACH of these sites brings in over $20,000 a month.
Membership sites can work a number of different ways. You can simply offer a forum. You might offer monthly video lessons. You can think of a number of different things but you must make sure that you are providing continuous value to your audience.
Membership sites usually work best once you have an established audience to work with. Starting them from scratch without an audience is difficult because people join membership sites with the intention of interacting with other like-minded individuals.
If they are the first one to the dance and nobody shows up for days or weeks then they will quickly lose interest.
More Ways to Make Money Online
These aren’t the only ways to make money online. There are a ton of other options:
- Podcasting
- Dropshipping
- Ecommerce
- Offering services
- Freelance writing
The list goes on. In fact, I’ve written 15 more ways to make money with your blog that you should check out.
So where do you go from here? If you’re interested in getting a blog started I suggest you begin with my free 12-Day Blogging Bootcamp to get a feel for everything I do to grow a successful blog.
Remember, you don’t need to have as many blogs as I do to make good money. Most people do it with just one and I could as well but if I’m going to teach others how to build successful blogs, then I need to show I can create successful blogs in other niches.
Nobody likes the person that fakes the funk.
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