The internet has created lots of opportunities for people ever since its inception, one of these great opportunities is the ability to make money online at the comfort of one’s home. Have you ever thought of a world where all you need to do is sleep and play and still be making money? That is what the internet brought about (I no longer see browsing the internet and creating income streams as work, I see it as play).
Even though there are several ways you can make money online you should not fail to realize that there are still some scams online. This post will be talking about 12 legitimate ways to make money online.
1. Blogging
Nowadays, almost everybody is a blogger because they have discovered the true potential behind it. Blogging is one of the best ways to make money online because it can also lead to many other streams of income, for example, you can use blogging to influence your product creation, you can use blogging to get freelancing opportunities, you can use blogging to gain more affiliate sales and many other things like that.
There are several ways to make money online from blogging but one of the best ways is to focus on building a community first which you can later monetize.
When trying to make money blogging, traffic is money because it is traffic that will lead to ad clicks, affiliate sales, and many other online money making opportunities.
2. Advertisement
This is another great way for you to make money online. There are various types of advertisement and you don’t need a website to make money from all of them. There are several types of advertisements, some of which are:
- Contextual Advertisement: This type of advertisement is the one that is tailored towards a specific type of visitor. There are several methods used to display these types of ads and one major factor used is the most common keywords on the page. A great example of a contextual advertisement system is Google Adsense.
- In-Text Ads: This is another type of ad that you can use to monetize your blog. It works best if you are not focusing on building a strong community and you hope to get most of your traffic from search engines. A great example is Kontera Ads.
- Banner Ads: This is another great type of ad used on most blogs (including on this blog). The amount you will make strongly depends on your traffic and your niche. There are several ways to get advertisers for your site if you rely on this method of advertising and one great way is to make use of third-party advertisers like Buysellads.com.
You will notice I said you don’t have to have a website to make money from advertisements, yes! I didn’t swallow my words. One great way to make money online from advertisements without having a website is by writing for revenue sharing sites like shoutmeloud.com. You will be able to fill in your Adsense details and anytime your ads get clicked you will notice increased earnings in your Adsense account.
3. Freelancing
Freelancing is one of the best and most effective ways to make money online. We all have one skill or the other and these skills of ours can be further used to help us add money to our pockets while working at the comfort of our home.
There are several ways to make money online from freelancing, you can decide to look out for companies looking for people to help them do some jobs or make use of third party sites like eLance.com.
If you would love to freelance and you don’t think you have any skills that is needed you can work on developing some skills, it can be learning HTML or any coding language, and it can be learning how to write articles in various niches. There are several sites you can make use of when trying to get freelancing opportunities and some of the most popular ones are Elance.com and ODesk.com
4. Affiliate Marketing
Another great way to make money online is by making use of affiliate marketing. I recently wrote a guest post here outlining some steps to affiliate marketing success and I will be summarizing my points below:
- Choose a profitable niche
- Find a primary keyword – there will be several profitable keywords but find a primary keyword that relates to the major objective of your affiliate site, this keyword will be used to register your domain name.
- Find a product to promote – you can visit clickbank (the largest affiliate network) to find a product to promote.
- Register a keyword-rich domain name – this will make it easier for you to rank for your primary keyword.
- Write a killer product review – the review should be useful but shouldn’t give too much detail to the extent of making your visitor feel that there is no more need to buy your affiliate product.
- Build backlinks – this is where the traffic comes; building backlinks is the secret to ranking in the search engines.
- Rinse and repeat – you can then repeat the above steps to make more money from affiliate marketing.
You don’t necessarily need to practice unethical marketing to make money online from affiliate marketing and the above are steps you can follow.
5. Consulting Services
Another great way to make money online is by offering consulting services online. You surely went to school or are an expert at something and you can leverage this skill of yours to make money online.
If you are a doctor then you can create a website that will be focusing on helping people live a healthy live, on this website you can be laying emphasis on your consulting service and you will be able to get more response and make more money online.
When trying to get more consulting gigs it is very important to build your online profile and credibility because the more trusted and respected you are the easier it is for you to get more customers.
6. Product Creation
Another great way to make money online is by creating products to sell online. If you are a banker, you can create an eBook that gives more information on how to be a successful banker or how to overcome some of the major problems bankers face.
If you are a software developer you can also take a look at the community around you and see what major problem people face the most, try to create a product to help them solve this major problem.
There are several steps to take before creating a product and I will be listing the three most important steps below:
- Market Research – Try to research effectively before creating your product, don’t just create a product because you think it will be good but research effectively and make sure there is a true need for your product.
- Payment Options – Try to research how you will get paid for your product, creating a quality product is not enough, you should also make sure you wouldn’t have any problems getting paid or delivering products. Some payment providers might not deliver a product to buyers until they know if the transaction is genuine, this type of check might lead to more problems on the side of your customers if they don’t get what they paid for immediately so you might as well research effectively before using a payment solution. It is also very important to make sure you have several payment options because this will also increase the number of sales you will make.
- Promotion – It does not end in you researching and having a good payment provider, one of the most important steps you must take is to make sure you have a good promotion campaign because it is people who will buy your product.
7. Creating a Book and selling it Online
One great and underutilized way to make more money online is by creating a book (in hardcover) and then selling it online.
Depending on your area of expertise you can create a hardcover book and then sell it using websites like Amazon and Ebay.
When trying to create products like this it is very important for you to spend enough time researching the search trend for your product, try to make sure your product has a name that is regularly searched in Google, Amazon ranks easily in Google so if you research effectively you won’t having problems selling your product because your product page on Amazon will dominate the first page on Google with little efforts from you.
8. Online Auction
You can also make money online by listing products on auction sites. If you have some products you no longer use you can make money from disposing those products. Some of these products might be old books, computers, mobile phones, and many other items. All you need to do is list them on auction websites like Amazon or Ebay.
9. Website Flipping
Website flipping is a really great way you can make money online, if you are very knowledgeable about the subject of your choice and you have good knowledge of SEO then you can develop a website in less than a year and sell it for tens of thousands of dollars. There are a lot of factors that comes in place when trying to sell your websites for profit, but if you want to know more about the subject you can read this comprehensive guide on website flipping by Glen Allsopp from Viperchill.
There are several factors that comes in place when trying to sell websites for profit, one of the most important factors to consider is how you will be monetizing and promoting the site because when you want to sell a website you will be paid based on how much you earn from the website monthly.
There are many places to sell your website but one major place to use is Flippa, this site is the leading website flipping site and is trusted by lots of people worldwide.
It is very important to install a solid stats tracking tool (preferably Google Analytics) on your website from day one because this can also impact the amount you will be paid for your website as most buyers take look at your website stats before buying.
10. Content Sites
Another way to make money online is by writing for content sites like Associated Content and Infobarrel, you will be paid according to the views your article gets.
Many of these sites are trusted by the search engines and it is very easy for them to rank for keywords. When trying to write for content sharing sites, the first and most important step you should take is to look for low competition and high traffic keywords, once you get these keywords you can begin to write articles about them and then work on building backlinks to your articles. With time, your articles will begin to rank more in the search engines and it will lead to more earnings for you.
Many revenue sharing websites will pay you $1 for 1000 views on your articles but you might want to check to see if this is the case with them before getting started with them.
11. Online Surveys
Another great way to make money online is by participating in online surveys. There are many companies spending millions of dollars employing various people to test and give their opinions on their products, these companies now discovered that a cheaper and better alternative will be to make use of the internet and allow various people from the world to give their opinion.
When trying to make money online using paid surveys, it is very important to give your genuine opinion only because this will also help these companies.
There are a lot of scam companies in the online survey business so it is very important to research effectively before joining an online survey site.
12. Membership Sites and Paid Forums
Making use of membership sites and paid forums is another great way to make money online. One great advantage of this type of income opportunity is that the income you will make will be recurring thereby making it easier and worthwhile for you. There are several factors to consider when trying making money online from membership sites and paid forums and some of them will be listed below:
- Is the income justifiable? – You wouldn’t want to charge $100 monthly for a site without updating it regularly.
- How often will it be upgraded – this is another great factor to consider when trying to get the best from your membership site. Your customers want continued value and they see no reason in paying when the site is not upgraded.
- Security – You should also make sure you test your site for security issues so that others won’t go and access your product for free.
If you could take the right steps, membership sites and paid forums are one of the best ways to make money online because they bring about recurring income, so you don’t need to keep launching and promoting to sustain your income.
Conclusion
There are several ways to make money online and the above are 12 powerful and genuine ways to make money online, most of these methods don’t need you to spend anything to make money online.
Which is your favorite method to make money online from the above? Which other methods do you want to add to the list? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section!
Onibalusi Bamidele is a young entrepreneur living the internet lifestyle, you can subscribe to his blog to get more great tips on making money online.