Top Ways to make money online
With the digitization of the world, online businesses are thriving tremendously and the trend is not likely to regress anytime.
Yet, with nearly-instantaneous access to the planet’s population through an online search and social media, millions of people are still puzzled by the best way they can harness the power of online presence to actually make money online.
There are quite a few online businesses that bring more money; below are top ones that have proven to be highly financially rewarding over the years.
Blogging
Blogging is undoubtedly the most popular online business, which you can actually start with a very small investment. Aside from the hosting charges, the only investment will be the time and energy to research about new topics and write fresh and quality articles that will benefit the blog’s readers.
In order for a blog to become successful, you’ll need perseverance and make sure that it’s updated regularly. Once your blog begins to grow with ample number of regular readers, then you should be thinking of ways to monetize the blog.
There are several ways through which you can earn from your blog; the easiest method being standard adverts, affiliate marketing, sponsored post, and reviews. Even though most methods can give you meaningful income, most beginners usually choose the wrong monetization methods for their niche which is why blogger failure to make money is on the rise.
Blogging is more than just writing quality articles it involves content marketing, doing Proper Keyword Research, Implementing On Page and Off Page SEO (backlinks building).
Blogging is not a quick money maker, but the more your blog expands by gaining readership the more the money you make. Adsense, Amazon, and Clickbank are trusted sites to monetize your blog. Blogs can easily generate tens of thousands of dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars per month when done right.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is simply a practice where business owners’ reward affiliates through commission for each customer or visitor brought through the affiliate’s marketing efforts.
It is not compulsory to sell products all the time to make a commission. There are Different affiliate program payment methods that are utilized depending on the contract; we have Pay per Sale, Pay per Click and Pay per Lead.
With your blog, email newsletter and social media accounts, you can reach thousands of people with just one piece of content. Affiliate marketing is arguably the best way to make a living online owing to the fact that it can be automated easily and can generate unbelievable profit margins.
In affiliate marketing, your duty is to sell other people’s stuff online by posting their advertising materials on your website and social media accounts thereby getting paid for anybody that buys the product through your sites.
Many find affiliate marketing to be the fastest way to earn online since it does not involve your own products and services. Your challenge will be to figure out what market(s) to enter, build an audience in your blog and maintaining good relationships with your readers so they trust what you tell them.
Affiliate marketing requires research, hard work, and lots of luck but if you get it right, you will make tons of money. Most prominent people who struck gold in the business are Seth Godin and John Chow.
Freelancing
Aside from working from home at your own convenient time, you will also have the opportunity to promote your services to millions of potential customers. Upwork and Fiverr is the biggest resources for selling just about any professional service on the globe.
If you have extensive experience in a particular field, you might want to consider selling your services through one of these sites.
Professionals in graphic design, accounting, social media marketing, web development or SEO training, Song writing, Virtual assistant, Writing and translation, legal consulting, tutoring etc. make enough cash from these sites that made many quit their jobs and focus on freelancing.
Fiverr is one of the easiest online platforms to start to sell a wide variety of services and products. There are tons of freelancing sites with some specializing in a particular niche, for example, 99Designs only applies to graphic design.
However, like anything else, the beginning will be difficult. Extensive reviews are required to build your reputation and sourcing work as a beginner in one of these highly-competitive platforms is difficult.
Writing and translation seem to be the most competitive niche but you can find most successful people in your niche and model your profile after theirs.
Web Designing
Web designing is a business that will be in demand for the next few decades with more and more people switching to blogging and also almost every small scale business going online.
You can set up an online web designing business and with websites like Fiverr, Upwork, and Freelancer.com, you can easily get hired from all part of the world as a freelancer.
The success of this business is obvious as many people from developing countries start their web designing career as freelancers and after establishing themselves, they start their own firm hiring people to work for them
YouTube Channel
YouTube is a good platform to make money if you have the talent and skills of creating videos that people would love to watch. This could be video of anything from comedy to cooking to DIY to satire.
There is absolutely no need to invest in expensive video equipment. Just master how to use your Smartphone’s video tools to upload entertaining or informative videos. However, only original video created by you can be monetized.
Building an audience is the key to monetizing your channel. Copyright protected videos will either be taken down or the original video maker would be the one to monetize with it even if it were uploaded by you. According to Forbes, the top YouTuber, Pewdipie, earns a whopping $12 Million per year.
Selling Products on Ecommerce Websites
Amazon’s third party seller system provides a great way to get your products listed on what is arguably the largest commerce site online. If you enjoy arts and crafts or you are good at making things, you could also consider to sell the things you make on Etsy.
Etsy is a socialized online marketplace for selling homemade items.. You can sell new, refurbished as well as used items on eBay; imported electronics without warranty are also allowed to be sold.
Just create an account with eBay and you are good to sell your product after uploading the pictures and details about it along with the price. However, Ebay is a slightly unorganized place to sell your stuff and many buyers do not prefer it due to the frauds involved.
Amazon is another alternative with more organized and trusted structure to sell products.
Android App Development
Android phones presently have a monopoly over the smartphones market. IOS which is the nearest competitor is not even close enough when you consider the percentage of Android in the smartphone market.
This is the reason why shopping websites, Online Businesses, financial institutions are slowly moving towards android for business promotion as it gives them better conversion rate. Therefore many businesses hire someone who can assist them in creating a great app.
Also you can come up with an app with a unique idea that will sell by making proper market research and you can generate your revenue from the sale of the apps and through ads. However, apps require a significant investment of your time or money upfront.
Online Tutoring
People are always trying to expand their knowledge but since the internet evolution, many prefer to be taught online from the comfort of their home instead of attending physical classes.
This is a great advantage to tutors as they can take online classes based on their own time schedule. You can teach pretty much anything from languages, such as English, Chinese, Arabic, etc. to building a brand, to social media skills, etc.
If you have a specific skill or you are a teacher or someone who loves teaching, online tutoring can be the best option for you because no classrooms is needed, no marketing costs, nothing whatsoever. Websites like Tutor.com allow you to sign up and start teaching your favorite subject.
Some websites may require you to have a relevant qualification and experience. Alternately, you can consider starting your own teaching website from scratch if you have the money and required marketing skills. This actually have higher risk but you make far more money.
Sell Online Courses
In online tutoring, you get paid for the number of hours you teach therefore the income is not recurring. However, if you wish to have a source of recurring income and you have the required skills, you can make online courses and sell them at websites like Udemy.
The courses could range from Mathematics to Fitness to Money making materials to French speaking to Lifestyle, just make courses for anything that people may find useful.
You can as well promote the courses on your own website and this will make you skip paying commissions to a third party which will give you the choice of lowering the price of the courses. However, promoting courses to the public is a really a tasking job.
Others
You can also earn bountifully by managing Social Media Accounts for celebrities, as well as business owners. Domain Flipping, Self-Publish Kindle Digital Books, Email Marketing, Taking Paid Surveys and Amazon Mechanical Turk are other top ways to make money online.
Online businesses thrive majorly through number of readership therefore it can be profitable only if you have ideas that people would love. Of course, the competition is fierce which is why you must make sure you do your own research about your choice, including financial and competition analysis before jumping into it.
Very excellent points covered.
Thanks for sharing with us.
Keep posting.
Thanks Charmi,
I love to help whenever I can. If there’s a topic you will like me to write on, don’t hesitate to let me know.
There are so many opportunities to make money online. One of the very lucrative options is online tutoring. You can teach anything from English to Accounting & even Music.
If you happen to be a native speaker of any language, with at least a working knowledge of English, you can become an online language tutor and earn up to $20/hr.
That is very true Arnav. Thanks for contributing.
Keep up the great work, Denise!
I look forward to reading more of your work!
Thanks Arnav,
I’ll give it my best and more
Thanks for the compliment and feedback