You know money isn’t the key to happiness, but it doesn’t hurt. So today I am going to tell you 12 ways to make money online from home.
Having a little bit of extra money and being able to monetize your personal brand or things online is amazing and it can actually relieve a lot of anxiety and stress.
I know it’s made a significant difference in my life, so today I wanna tell you 12 ways to make money online.
If you’ve read my content before, you know that my preference is to usually focus on things that I’ve actually done and have experience with and in this case that’s gonna also be true.
I’m gonna be focusing on 12 ways that I’ve either made money online or services that I’ve paid for from other people.
So it’s literally how I helped other people make money online because I hired them. So we’re gonna go ahead and jump into my top 12 ways to make money online.
This will be a mix of both passive and active income activities, so if you’re more interested in ways to make passive income online.
I have a couple of blogs about that, let’s go ahead and jump into the first way that I want to help you make money online.
1. Digital Art And Graphic Design:
One of the first ways I ever learned to make money online was when I was much younger and I was focused more on digital art and graphic design, and it was with on print on demand products.
Print on demand products is pretty straightforward. It’s things like posters and mugs and tote bags and things like that, that you can put either characters or artwork or graphics on, typography, that kind of thing.
And as somebody who had a background in Photoshop and digital illustration and Adobe,
That was a lot of my focus at the time.
I actually was able to make some decent money doing that with sites like DeviantArt and Zazzle and CafePress.
So these are websites that let you make these print on demand products, they cost you nothing up front, and you make what’s called royalties.
Royalties are a form of passive income, and again, once you’ve done the initial work, you continue to reap the benefits long after that.
So making products in as many of these digital websites as possible is actually really lucrative.
In fact, most YouTubers, myself included, still do that with merchandise. I do that with me, create awesomely and always be creating t-shirts, and my other merch.
So that’s definitely a route you can go. For that I use Spreadshirt.com and that is a place where you could actually do that if you are an online content creator or a digital artist.
So it’s definitely one I’d recommend. Another option is Teespring, and even Amazon has something called Amazon Merch.
So again, these are all places where you can sell things in terms of print on demand products online, and it’s just one of the ways you can make money online if you happen to have that skill set.
As you guys know, I’m a creative entrepreneur, so a lot of these are gonna focus around creative skills, but not all of them will.
But this next one does too, and it’s selling stock artwork and photography.
2. selling stock artwork and photography:
What that means is sometimes I have to get stock photography or even stop motion graphics or stock audio.
So there’s a great opportunity if you are a musician, an illustrator, a designer, a photographer,
to make money online from marketers and content creators who just need more assets for their brand.
And so you can sell on places like Adobe Stock, Can Stock Photo, iStock Photo, or the Envato Marketplace, or Creative Market.
These are all great websites that will let you sell stock resources to people who need them, people like me.
And so this is one of the ways that you can make money online. I used to do some of this. I don’t do it as much now, as I just spend money on it and put money in other people’s pockets.
Actually, I have a great success story that I wanna tell at some point about someone in this community who in four months did like $125,000 by selling resources and stock templates in the Envato Marketplace.
I will save that story for later though. Maybe you’re not a creative type like me. That’s okay, tip number three is for you then.
3. being a virtual assistant:
One of the ways you can make money online is by being a virtual assistant.
By being a virtual assistant, you don’t necessarily have to be a great photographer or a great illustrator or artist, you could actually be doing some data entry.
You could be doing copywriting, you could be doing any number of tasks. You could be doing social media, you could be doing productivity, there are so many things that we hire virtual assistants to do.
It could be literally managing someone’s inbox for them, I know that’s something that causes
my stress and anxiety.
It could be taking appointments, it could be scheduling people for podcast interviews. There are so many opportunities in sites like Upwork.
For example, to be a virtual assistant and to just take on some of those tasks that a business or an entrepreneur might need.
So I would look into that and see what skills you have that might be in demand. I know that a lot of people don’t feel that the rates in these freelance sites are that great.
But if you’re needing a few extra bucks or you’re not making any money right now, I don’t see the harm.
It’s something that I go to, to hire out for, so I use Upwork for that, and I think that for a non-creative, skilled task that there’s actually a really great opportunity there.
For creative skills, often I usually hire people directly as freelancers, but when I need something that’s not necessarily that complicated or technical,
Then I’ll go to a place like Upwork and I’ll hire somebody to do virtual work for me remotely, and it works out pretty good.
So if you’re somebody who has the skills that might be more technical, or might be
something that’s not that involved, then maybe this is a good place for you.
4. sell Amazon and eBay stuff:
Tip number four is something that just about anybody can do, probably at any age, and that sells Amazon and eBay stuff.
If you go to Amazon and eBay, you can sell used products. If there’s something that you aren’t using, it’s gathering dust on your bookshelf.
You have some old camera equipment that you upgraded from, you can just sell it on eBay or Amazon and you can make a few bucks.
If you have a hobby that you quit, you quit Magic the Gathering, you quit Yu-Gi-Oh, you quit Pokemon, guess what? You can sell that stuff to people who are still in the game, and you can make a few bucks.
I did this even throughout high school and college, and on occasion, whenever I’m doing spring cleaning, it’s something I still do.
So I would just take a look at selling stuff online with eBay or Amazon, even Craigslist if that’s your thing, just do it in a public place.
Don’t go to people’s houses or anything. And I think that that’s actually a good way for you guys to be able to make some money from the internet.
Requires no technical skill at all, it just means you have to be willing to get rid of stuff that you don’t wanna use anymore.
5. YouTube partner program:
Being a YouTuber is awesome, and there is an opportunity for you to make some money online with this, usually in the form of passive income through YouTube ad revenue.
If you don’t have YouTube ad revenue enabled yet, because it does take having at least 10,000 views on your channel to do that, and your content has to be advertiser-friendly.
You can make money off of YouTube Red, which is basically a pool structure from their subscription model, where based on watch time.
All of us get at least a little something. So you can make some money there.
Also, if you have at least 1,000 subscribers, if you do live to stream, you can enable what’s called YouTube Super Chat,
Through that people can donate money to you in any amount that they want, and so there’s an opportunity there.
I actually do pretty okay whenever I do a live stream, as far as Super Chats, and so it is
a lucrative opportunity. Not everybody gets rich being a YouTuber, not everyone makes a
living being a YouTuber.
I make enough money off of YouTube directly where I guess I could have a comfortable living.
I prefer to build actual businesses, that’s just me though, and I like a diversity of revenue, I like diversity in a lot of things.
I just feel less anxiety that way. So there are at least three ways for you to directly make money from YouTube itself, and obviously, you can monetize with other things.
6. online sponsorships:
Another way to make money online that is kind of specific to YouTube, but it’ll work if you’re a podcaster or if you’re on Instagram or Snapchat as well, and that takes online sponsorships.
Online sponsorships mean you have to have a little bit of a following in content or social media platforms, like YouTube, or host a podcast, or a popular blog, or have a significant following in Instagram or Snapchat.
Some platforms where you are an influencer will allow you to be able to get sponsorship opportunities with brands that want to reach your audience, and you can make a really decent living on sponsorships.
A lot of YouTubers and Instagram influencers and Snapchat influencers make their majority of their money in this way.
One of the things I recommend you do if you want to make money online as an influencer is one, know your numbers cold, know what to ask for, and maybe put together a media kit of some kind.
If you want more advice on this, let me know your questions about influencer marketing in the comments section, and how to become an influencer, and how to work with sponsors.
But you are an expert, there are plenty of ways for you to make money online, especially if you’re a practitioner of something that is technical in nature or very difficult, say social media or marketing, or maybe something in the computer sciences field.
There are a lot of things. It could be anything, even helping with personal development or health, or fitness, those kinds of things do very well in a lot of areas.
Obviously, you can write eBooks and you can sell eBooks online, especially through Amazon and Kindle, and iBooks.
This is a very lucrative opportunity. Andy Weir who wrote The Martian had to go directly to online Kindle publishing because he was turned down by publishers who said no one would buy the book.
And apparently, people wanted to buy the book, in fact so many people that Miramax then decided to buy the movie rights.
So you know, you never know what happens there. You can go directly to the market and the people will decide, the market will decide.
The gatekeepers don’t really have the power anymore. So I would recommend you do that, there’s also the opportunity to publish audiobooks directly to Amazon as well, and that’s another lucrative way to make money online.
In fact, I think technically you can charge more and get better margins on the audiobook than on both the print and the eBook.
So just kind of keep in mind that audiobooks are performing better than ever. In fact, a lot of my favorite books for building online businesses or taking care of finances or marketing.
I just find that that’s more practical for my time than reading the eBook most of the time,
or the physical book.
So maybe that interests you. One of the books that I’m definitely gonna recommend you listen to is Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk.
I’m also gonna recommend Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins, these are probably just two of my favorite books and they’re the kind of thing that motivates me to, well, work harder
than I’ve ever worked.
If you’re an expert in something or a practitioner, another opportunity for you to make money online is through paid membership groups.
7. paid membership groups:
This is something that has been very beneficial for me on multiple levels, and you can do this in a lot of different ways.
I used to build my membership group on a website called Kajabi, that is one of the more expensive ones, but I like it for the features.
I like it for the ease of use, I like it for the speed, but there are other options out there like Teachable and Thinkific if you need something that is free.
You could also use any of these platforms to develop online courses around the thing that you’re an expert in.
I really think that fitness entrepreneurs have a really great opportunity when it comes to developing both membership groups and online courses, and it’s definitely something
that I think more people should explore.
I think it could be great for a lot of different people, I think that even people who are experts in coding.
Web development and app development could help teach a whole new group of people if they actually pursued doing it in this way.
I think it’s a great alternative for people who may not be able to afford to go get this information in college or don’t have the patience to hunt through a million YouTube videos.
I think that these things are very practical, and I’ve seen that people are willing to pay for them.
They’re things that even I have paid for in the past.
So that’s just something that I would recommend you look at as another way to make money online if you have something that you’re a practitioner in, or that you feel that you have a level of expertise in.
One of the last things I’ll talk about for the experts out there is, ultimately, you should look at consulting and online training.
I think you should look at doing potentially free and paid webinars, and try and use those things, to grow your email list, obviously.
But I also think paid one-on-one consulting could be very lucrative for you. Many of you may not realize this, but paid one-on-one coaching consulting is actually one of the biggest.
Ultimate parts of my revenue stream in my online business ventures.
It’s probably the thing that I think, more or less consistently every month, probably makes me more revenue than anything else.
Whether it’s YouTube advertising, whether it’s sponsor deals, in terms of a single source
of revenue, I think it outperforms everything.
However, it is a harder thing to be successful at, because you actually have to be able to prove
your results.
Your body of work, have great recommendations, have a strong brand behind you, and you have to know how to price the things that you’re doing appropriately.
You also have to be able to put together the right presentation materials, you have to have a system, and there’s a lot of costs initially in terms of what it takes to keep that business up and running.
There are a lot of online services and things you have to do, there’s accounting, there’s invoicing, so it’s not necessarily for everybody.
It may not be practical for the far majority of you, but I thought it was important to highlight it because it is an active income stream that is service based, that is very challenging for some but very lucrative.
It could be the thing that is best suited to some of you out there, that will make you the most money. So, just putting it out there.
8. online copywriting:
Another great opportunity, especially for those of you who work from home is to do online copywriting for publications, and also for what is called content mills.
Essentially these are websites where you do ghostwrite and that one’s not nearly as lucrative sometimes, but again, if you’re looking for some extra money, it’s better than zero.
If you get the opportunity to write for publications that you like and that you enjoy that fit a niche or a thing that you’re good at, then it’s actually really good.
I have had this kind of relationship with a few great publications, and it’s done very well for me, and it’s also helped me with exposure for my own personal brand, so I think it has multiple benefits to it.
I don’t necessarily know that all of you could make a living at it, but if your passion is writing, I’m sure you could find a way to do it.
I think beyond writing for other platforms, I think that blogging and doing online advertising.
Building your personal brand around that could have multiple opportunities for you to use some of the other ways we talked about making money online and loop it back to your content.
I know that there are several great blogs out there that do six figures in revenue by doing these methods, so it’s something I would look at.
I actually did okay with my blogging stuff in terms of making some ad revenue, the better part of that later came from doing sponsorship stuff related to that and bundling it with other things.
I’m also exploring those opportunities with my podcast now, so beyond copywriting, I would say online content creation as a whole has a lot of different opportunities for you to monetize.
One of my favorites is one of the last things we’ll talk about, which is affiliate marketing.
9. Affiliate marketing:
Affiliate marketing is something I’ve managed to do very well across multiple affiliate websites
and deals and platforms.
It’s not just Amazon guys, there are so many opportunities out there for you to do affiliate marketing.
Obviously, you know affiliates that I’ve worked with in the past, you know that I’ve done affiliate stuff with Bluehost, and Wix, and HostGator.
Also with Tube Buddy and even for the sign up for Kajabi, and it also gets you guys 15% off if you wanna build a membership site or build your online courses there.
There are so many great affiliate programs out there, there’s ClickBank, there’s Commission Junction, there’s ShareASale.
I’m sure there are other websites out there that have 10 and 20% or better affiliate deals for you. Even with things I’m doing with future online courses will have affiliate deals.
So these are opportunities where if you can’t make a product of your own, or you don’t have the time for that, if you use something and you wanna review it anyway, and you believe in it.
If any of you want to use the same gear I’m using to produce the same results I’m getting,
then you guys have that opportunity.
It costs you nothing extra, but I get a small commission for that, and that’s great for everybody involved because it encourages more people to be honest.
They’re using and why they use it and give away a little bit of their secret sauce, but they’re getting something compensated in return, and you guys as viewers are getting to know a little bit of what’s behind the curtain here.
So I think that if you do it well, and you do it from a place of authenticity, that affiliate marketing can be great for you guys for making money online.
Just don’t pedal crap that you don’t actually use or actually like.
I think that that’s really bad, and that’s scummy, and a lot of people try to do that, but when I think it works the best is when people know that, well this is what you use every day for your work or your business or your content.
So if you’re using it, yeah I kind of wanna use it because I want similar results. So I think that that’s just the best way to do affiliate marketing.
One of the practical things I would say to do is if you do affiliate marketing, do reviews of what you’re using.
Then provide some actual use case for how you used it, and I think that that goes a long way to just demonstrating the thing very well, representing the brand well.
If you’re smart, what you can do is, you can do that and then you could actually promote or tweet it and let the brands know, and the best part is, maybe they become a sponsor later.
So there’s again, multiple opportunities here. I think you guys should explore all of these ways of making money online and see which ones work best for you.
Again, me, I do a lot of the things here, I diversify my income, and that ultimately has proven to be the most successful.
I brought up the Amazon Affiliate program, but there are so many ways to make money on Amazon and similar to Google AdWords, which also works for YouTube for the AdSense program.
I would say that you could do Amazon native ads on your content and blogs, and I would especially look at doing that if you’re a podcaster.
The reason is that you can actually kind of control the CPM rates there a little bit, and that’s actually really interesting because it helps you kind of determine how much money you can make.
You can’t raise it to something astronomical and expect ads or things to show up, but it actually, I think actually financially, is better to have Amazon ads on your website.
The blog then it is to have Google ads on your website and blog at this point, and then I prefer to use obviously Google for the YouTube advertising side.
But between doing affiliate marketing with image-based banners from Amazon, and also doing Amazon’s native CPM ads, I think that those are some of the best ways.
If you’re gonna focus on written content and blogging, for you to make money online.
I think later you combine that with some of these methods like I talked about, you diversify as much as possible, and then I think that’s what ultimately helps you to get a little bit more financial freedom, make a little bit of extra money.
There’s no overnight success here, there’s no get rich quick. I’m just telling you the things that I did, and that all of them combined added up really well, and that there’s something that you can explore.
This stuff doesn’t take a lot of money to invest in, some of it costs zero to invest in. The main thing is just to educate yourself about as much of it as possible, and I provide you with some of that information here on the blog.
Anyway, guys, I know this was a long one, but I wanted to give you 12 great ways to make money online, and I wanted to give you some context.
I didn’t want this to just be some stupid list blog where it’s just, oh do this, do that, with no actual practical way to apply it and so I hope this was helpful to you.
If you still have questions, definitely let me know in the comments section down below, let me know if you want some dedicated blog on how to use some of these 12 methods of making money online.
And so, maybe I can do those or a walkthrough. I just wanna see what would be the most helpful to you, so let me know in the comments section.