Introduction to Earning Money Online
You’ve probably landed on this guide because you clicked on a result from a Google, Bing or Yahoo search or someone you know recommended this post to learn how to make money online and gave you the link.
I also know that you probably would like to make money as quickly as possible. Maybe you’ve tried making money online already and failed, maybe you’re making pennies online and look for a better way or you’re brand new to the whole idea of making money online and wonder if it is all a hoax. Maybe you run a business and are looking to increase revenue.
Or maybe something totally different.
Whatever the case may be, I hope this guide will be a beacon in a web filled with shady “make money quick” scams and articles touting outdated methods.
I’m not going to insult your intelligence with get-rich-quick nonsense, nor am I going to waste your time on generic answers like “sell your used clothes on Letgo” or “Get a dog walking gig.”
Duh.
You want real executable tips on how to make money online NOW, but also how to scale it into long-term monthly income - be it full-time or a side hustle.
Word of warning: Don’t waste your time on penny-income-schemes like low quality Surveys, Paid to watch videos, Mystery Shopping… It’s less than minimum-wage income. You’d rather just work at McDonalds. Never settle for minimum wage jobs. However, if you’re doing survey sites the right way, you may be able to make a nice side income from it. More about that later.
Now, with that out of the way, let’s move on.
We’re living in a digital era. Rapid technological change is the new norm. Nothing is static any longer… And the good thing is that it is easier to learn how to make money online now than ever before.
Today is the best time to start!
So, let’s dig into the details.
Disclaimer: This article contains affiliate links. If you choose to purchase anything through the links below I may receive a small commission at no cost to you. However, these are all tools/services I have tested and the opinions in this article are all mine and not colored by any monetary incentives. You can read my full affiliate disclosure in my Affiliate Disclosure.
This is How You Make Money Online in 2026:
This guide has been divided up into three main sections.
The first part is for you who is new to the concept of making money online. Maybe you’re brand new or you have tried and failed. This section is called “How to Make Money Online [Newbies].”
The second part is for those of you who may or may not have made money online yet, but who have a website or blog set up already. This section is called “How to Make Money Online [Website/Blog Owners].”
The third part is for you who are already making $1000 or more a month online, but want to scale or find new income streams. It’s called “3x Ways To Make More Money Online.”
Regardless of where in your online marketing journey you currently are, the tips below should help you start making a minimum of $1000/month from the comfort of your own home. Or a beach in Hawaii. Whatever keeps you motivated. 🙂
How To Make Money Online [Newbies]
Affiliate Marketing
Companies are always on the lookout for great ways to spread the word about their products. They therefore create partner programs known as affiliate programs which you can sign up to and start promoting their products. You will be given an affiliate link which basically is a special link containing your unique ID. When someone buys a product through your link, you get a percentage of that sale. For digital products this is typically in the range of 40-75%, but it can be as low as a few percentages for physical products. It can also be more than one hundred percent on the higher end for some digital products and Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) offers.
Being an affiliate is one of the best, and fastest, ways to make money online. It was how I made my first dollar online and it is still a big part of my income. It’s my favorite business model.
It’s a brilliant business idea: There’s no inventory to keep. No products to create. It’s easy, fast to set up and can be insanely profitable.
The best place to get started as an affiliate newbie, is to sign up to the ClickBank Affiliate Program. They’ve been around for ages and is probably the most established affiliate network for digital products. It’s completely free to join and they accept newbies.
Sign up at Clickbank.com and navigate to the section called Marketplace. That’s where you find the offers to promote. The user interface is quite 2005 looking (old!), however navigation is fast and painless. Offers are grouped in categories. When looking for an offer to promote it is a good idea to sort by Gravity and find offers which pay a minimum of $20 per sale on average.
How to market your affiliate offers?
This is a massive topic on its own. The short answer is that you can either create a niche blog around a certain topic and promote relevant products on that blog or use paid traffic. So…
The first way is to create a blog around a certain topic. This should be a topic you have some knowledge in, or a topic you could be interested in learning more about. For instance, I started a blog many moons ago about trout fishing and I didn’t know squat about that topic. Now, I love trout fishing so much that I bought a house close to one of Norway’s most famous trout fishing rivers.
The second way is to use completely free methods and just cloak your affiliate link with a shortener like bit.ly. You then take that link and promote it on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and wherever you can reach possible buyers. Be creative and you’ll always find great ways to market your links. But be helpful and relevant. No one likes spammy, irrelevant posts.
The third way is to use paid advertising and drive visitors to your offer that way. You would then typically create a one-page website or a small blog known as a landing page and use this as a bridge page between the ad that people click on and the product you are promoting. The reason for doing it this way, is to warm up the prospect to the offer and thus get a better conversion rate. It is also necessary to stay above advertising rules on the various advertising networks.
The most common advertising network for newbies is Facebook/Instagram. You can learn how to run ads on Facebook for free on YouTube but beware that you may run into outdated content so watch only up to date advice. The great thing with Facebook ads is that you can learn how to run ads on the platform really fast if you just follow the right, up to date, advice. Running an ad on Facebook can be done for as little as $5 a day which makes it a good place to start.
Where to Learn More:
If you want a head start, and also get ready to use Facebook campaign templates, ads and offers already making a profit on the platform, this Facebook Marketing Course is currently the best place to start. It’s not free, but it’s worth every penny.
Other popular paid Facebook advertising courses includes:
- Commission Hero
- Super Affiliate 3.0
Start a Profitable Blog [The Right Way]
Gone are the days when you could slam up hundreds of lame looking wordpress sites with automated tools and make autopilot income from the search engines. (Oh, those were the days).
Making a profitable blog today requires lots of blood, sweat and hard work, but it can also be utterly rewarding and create life-changing income when done the right way.
When I first wrote my eBook “Blogging for Dough” several years ago, I wrote about what worked then. If you’d apply that knowledge today, you’d be kicked and beaten by Mr.G (Google!) and you’d probably never see a single dime in return. Unfortunately there is a lot - and I mean A LOT - of dated advice still being taught on YouTube and even in newly made courses. Some of this is just terrible advice. Most of the advice I gave in “Blogging for Dough” is still valid today, but the link building strategies are totally outdated. There are plenty of other outdated books on the subject which will potentially waste years of your time trying to rank and make money for no to little return on your investment.
Lots of blogging advice will tell you to pick a niche you’re passionate about, then write articles on that topic for months and years. The goal is to make $1000 a month 18-36 months from now.
Hey, F**k That!
Who wants to work for no pay for years to maybe make a tiny grand a month a few years from now? Well, not me. That’s for sure. And I hope you neither.
Don’t get me wrong.
Blogging is a long-term strategy but you should start seeing small success within 3 months if you follow a smart strategy. By leveraging your time and money and doing this right you could have life-changing, job quitting, income six months down the road from now. Not six years.
So how do you make money with a blog in 2026?
You focus on a niche where you can provide a service or coaching. This will be your main income source when your site is new and still has few monthly visitors. It makes perfect sense. Let’s say you only have 250 visitors a month. If a little less than 1% of those visitors turn into clients for your service or coaching @ $500 a pop you’d make a thousand bucks that month.
Compare that to affiliate income and you would with the same conversion rate, which is rather common, make two sales of $35 each. Maybe. That’s $70 compared to $1000. What do you think smart people choose?
Once you get a thousand visitors or more a month, you expand with affiliate offers, your own offers or whatever. But start with coaching or a service.
Also, a recent study from ahrefs.com shows that 90.63% of all web pages on the internet get zero traffic from Google, and 5.29% of them get ten visits per month or less.
“90.63% of pages get zero traffic from Google. Ahrefs study over One BILLION web pages.”
So make sure you start with keyword research to identify terms that will actually drive visitors to your website. Then build the best content you can, and create buttloads of quality and relevant backlinks to establish authority.
Where To Learn More:
- Authority Hacker (Faster Methods To Success)
- Wealthy Affiliates (Solid training, low price, but slower methods)
- My 1-on-1 Coaching (Get up and running in no time! Blog Creation And Monetization Methods Included and Done-For-You)
Buy and Sell Websites
Several marketplaces exist purely to sell more or less established websites.
Usually the marketplaces operate as an auction where the highest bid can walk away with an established website. Other websites operate more as personal brokers who will only recommend vetted buyers and sellers for a more bespoke experience.
A good strategy is to buy a good wordpress based affiliate website with a terrible looking layout which is making $50-100 a month in income. You can buy such websites for 5-18x monthly income. Anything less than 4x revenue should be a red flag. If your business can afford it, you can of course start with more expensive websites, but the reason why I recommend starting with sites in the $50-100 income range is that this way you can start small and learn as you grow without too much financial risk.
With easy to use tools and a few hundred bucks of additional investment you can give it a makeover giving it an updated look, more solid content and some additional backlinks. Work on increasing conversion rates and the income possibilities are endless. You can then keep the site for long-term cash flow or sell it for a profit once you have increased the monthly revenue.
You can also buy websites related to plumbers, lawyers and other local service providers and rent them out for a monthly profit in the range of $500-2000+ if you can drive enough traffic to the site from the search engines.
Only you know what’s right for you and your business model, but once you have established a system you can flip websites or create evergreen cash cows on demand.
Most popular marketplaces:
Places like these are of course not free from scammers and some sellers will try to inflate the importance of their websites before trying to make a sell. So, like with any other transaction both offline and online it’s necessary to do your due diligence. Luckily, all of this can be done online with rather simple tools.
This Checklist dives deeper into all areas of a website due diligence but for the sake of keeping this short, here are the bullet points:This was a brief introduction to due diligence when investing in a new online business.
Start a Membership Site [Recurring Income]
If you already are “somebody” in your industry with, let’s say a following on social media of a few thousand people, it makes perfectly sense to start a membership site.
But it’s not just for established experts. Just like niche blogs, membership sites work best when they are tightly related to a certain topic or niche. The narrower the better as it will establish you as the go to source for that specific information. So instead of creating a community around SEO for instance, create one around SEO for Insurance Lawyers. Hey, there's your next million dollar business!
Membership websites are a value exchange so you will have to provide good content to keep retention rates high.
If you are not familiar with membership websites, they are private websites with exclusive content where only (paid-) members can access the content.
As long as you continue to provide valuable information to your audience they will be happy to pay for your monthly subscription. The old adage is that the average retention rate for membership sites is 3x months. The Membership Guys has debunked this myth, claiming it is closer to 12-18 month. Listen to Podcast here.
So what can you provide to your members to make sure that they keep paying for their monthly subscription?
Here are some ideas:
- Online Workshops
- Live Webinars - Make it interactive and answer questions.
- Informative step-by-step guides or checklists. Add new ones monthly.
- Ebooks - Dive deeper into a certain topic.
- Offer your other products for free or a discounted price.
- Community forum
- Offer new cheat-sheets monthly
- Exclusive access to tools - You can develop or whitelabel relevant software.
- Deep discounts into relevant products they’ll need.
Sounds like a lot of hassle?
It doesn’t have to be. The membership fee would be relative to the amount of content and value you deliver. What if you could just offer a killer newsletter, or monthly video live Q&A, and just charge $7 a month? Do you think you can provide $7 of value? I think you can.
So, with all the potential hassle why would you bother?
Recurring Income.
I love that word.
If you are just starting your online business or as a young entrepreneur - This is your holy grail. No more chasing new one-time affiliate payouts. You just need to focus on getting 10 new subscribers a day and you have a growing stream of cash hitting your bank account.
You can basically work once and get paid for years and years to come. The content can be drip-fed to the members so they will get the feeling you’re continuously working behind the scenes to provide value. Live webinars and workshops can even be sold as exclusive upsells for additional revenue.
The other reason is because you will build a loyal customer base and establish yourself as an authority figure in your industry. While it’s not hard to set up a membership site, few will take the work and as a result those who go through the hassle will automatically be regarded as the go to person in their industry.
Basically, you both get recurring revenue and build authority at the same time.
However, while recurring income from a membership site is an intriguing idea and something which can work well if you keep your churn rate low, there is an even better solution.
It’s called FREEMIUM.
What is a freemium membership site?
A freemium membership site is a membership site where you give away some training for free on the front-end and members can choose to upgrade to more training videos (for instance) at a later time. The reason why this works so well, is that once the visitor has become a free member, there is little reason for them to cancel their membership. It’s free. Also the ones who upgrade to a paid membership will do this for a one-time fee, so there is nothing to cancel. The benefit to you as the website owner is that you can market to these people through your mailing list, and you can cross-promote other offers on the backend. Our research shows that the freemium model has a 3x higher value per customer than the traditional recurring model.
You can see the concept in action on my Membership Marketers Club Website Here.
The freemium model can take longer to break even on the front-end, but it is proven to create more long-term income compared to recurring membership sites.
Where To Learn More:
- Membership Marketers Club (Free Silver Access)
- The Membership Method (Webinar)
How To Get Started With Your Own Membership Site:
Alternative #1:
- Get 10 Done For You Freemium Membership Sites (also included in my 1-on-1 coaching)
- Create a blog, or run paid advertising, to get visitors to your new freemium sites.
Alternative #2:
- Get a domain name and premium wordpress hosting.
- Build a membership site from scratch using wordpress and WishList Member. WishList is a great tool for creating customized membership sites and a tool I can strongly recommend.
- Another great tool, which doesn’t require WordPress and is much cheaper is Fresh Member. Fresh Member is used by a lot successful membership sites and is 100% self hosted. Prices are very reasonable as well. Check them out here.
- Market it like crazy, using your marketing skills.
Regardless of which path you choose, both alternatives above can help you earn a job-quitting income and be used as the main source of income for your business.
Podcasting Your Way To Awesomeness
I’m quite nerdy when it comes to SEO and when it comes to reading blogs and books on subjects I am deeply interested in like affiliate marketing, blogging, investing, real estate and wealth generation.
However, I rarely listened to podcasts until just a few years ago. Now, I just can't get enough of them. It’s such a great, and easy, way to accumulate new knowledge and to get to “know” your peers and other experts in the marketplace.
And, I am not the only one to have found the benefits of podcasts. Just see this quote from Brandastic:
“In 2020 over 155 million people listen to a podcast every week. Around 24% of the US population (68 million) listen to podcasts weekly. Podcast listeners consume an average of seven different shows per week. There are over 700,000 active podcasts and 29 million podcast episodes available.”
With a tool like PodBean, starting a Podcast is easy. Use social media and podcast directories to drive visitors. If you already have a social media following, getting listeners is even easier.
There’s no limit to the concepts and ideas you can use for podcasts. While some popular podcast run hour long interviews, others are journalistic true crime spin-offs. Humor is popular amongst podcast listeners in general, and business podcasts are strongly on the rise.
One of the great things with podcasts, is that you can piggy-back on others authority. Let’s say you are starting out a podcast on real estate investment, but you don’t have a name in that vertical. What you do is that you find someone in the real estate market who already has a following and invite this person. When you find someone saying yes, you use their name to break you way into higher profiled experts you can interview. It’s normal to share podcasts you appear on in social media, so now all the fans of these real estate experts will be pointed to your podcast. As a result you can invite even higher profiled experts, get more listeners and eventually start taking sponsored content and ads.
You will learn a lot from interviewing these experts, and some podcast hosts have said it’s like being paid to get an education. Not too shabby, huh?
Here’s how to get started with podcasting:
- You need a PC or Laptop with recording capabilities. Audacity is a free and good enough tool to start with.
- Sign up with Podbean - $9 a month for unlimited hours of podcasting. It’s super easy to get started, and by far the easiest po