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may be, I hope this guide will be a beacon in a web filled with shady “make money quick” scams and articles touting outdated methods.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 2024:
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 2024?
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 podcast hosting service in my opinion.
- Get your podcast music at Premium Beats.
- Spread the word about your new podcast to the world.
Make Money Dropshipping
There was a time not many years ago, when my facebook feed was filled with “friends” making it big with their newly found dropshipping businesses. Being a rather slow mover, I never caught the wave myself. I understand why some may find this business model attractive, but in a world where everyone is looking for instant delivery - instant gratification - selling something to someone who has to wait for 30 days+ before their goods arrive seems hard to me.
So is it all doom and gloom? Is “Dropshipping Dead?”
Absolutely not. If you can find a highly customizable product to sell, or a high quality product which people wouldn’t mind waiting for, then dropshipping is as good a business model as ever before.
Just take a look at Google Trends:
It’s a steady rising trend, meaning that an increasing number of people still are searching for information on how to start a dropshipping business.
The benefits of running a dropshipping business over a traditional ecommerce store are many:
- It requires no expensive employees
- You don’t have to store products
- No inventories to maintain
- With no inventories, comes geographical freedom [Run anywhere in the world]
- Lower risk as you do not need to order products before you make a sale
- ...and more.
It’s apparent just how much better it is to run an online dropshipping store over a regular ecommerce store.
While some “gurus” may try to sell you the idea that you can start a dropshipping business for free, wise entrepreneurs understand that any business comes with some start up costs.
You need funds to set up a Shopify store, to buy the domain, build the website, create some content perhaps and advertise.
The more you have available, the better it is, but it would be sound to say that you should have at least $1000 to start. Preferably, $3000-5000 to cover running costs the first few months.
If you are not yet familiar with the dropshipping business model, here’s how a dropshipping business typically works:
You set up a website to sell your products. Then you upload pictures of your products with their descriptions and prices. The customer buys the product and pays you online through a merchant account or Paypal for instance. You forward the order to the supplier and pocket the difference. The supplier delivers the product to your customer to complete the order. The customer normally won’t know your supplier was involved and hopefully everyone is happy.
The dropshipping business model basically lets you operate as a middle man (or woman) between the customer on one side and the supplier on the other hand.
The supplier doesn't need to do the marketing, they can focus on making new products. You find the customers and get “awarded” a 30-50% discount on their products for doing so.
Dropshipping is relatively easy to start, maintain and can yield significant profits. However, it is not a get rich quick scheme. It’s a small business idea, and it takes grit and hard work to be successful.
The only drawback of a dropshipping business is that you are relying on someone else to provide the inventory and if your supplier goes out of business you will have to find products to sell elsewhere.
AliExpress.com has previously been the go-to market to find suppliers who will ship cheap products from China. However, 99% of the products listed in the marketplace have ugly images, horrible descriptions and very variable quality. Long delivery times to the US and Europe is also a huge minus.
Where To Learn More:
>> Spocket <<: The reliable online dropshipping marketplace with US and European suppliers. You get to connect with suppliers offering quality products shipped from the US or EU meaning less delivery time and easier communication.
Connecting with a marketplace like this makes so much more sense than working with AliExpress. With quality products you get less returns, more happy customers and better brand reputation. It simply makes business sense.
Got Coding Skills? [You’re Sitting On a Goldmine!]
Whether you’re a full-stack programmer or a more nerdy one-coding-skill guy doesn’t matter. Your skills are in demand!
In today’s digital era programming skill is highly valuable and sought after thanks to rapid technology changes and the fact that almost everything now is code based.
According to a research study by Burning-Glass.com Programming jobs are growing faster than all other jobs, 50% faster than the market overall. Overall, programming jobs are growing 12% faster than the market average.
If you are looking for a traditional job or working for consulting companies, a bachelor or master degree is unfortunately becoming the norm due to high competition between candidates. However, online it is different. Self-taught is good enough and you can start making money with your coding skills right out of the gate coding apps, chatbots, websites or anything else your customer may ask for.
You can charge anywhere between twenty dollars an hour all the way up to the hundreds, with averages being around $35 according to a study in Careerkarma.com:
- Computer Programmer – $40.52 per hour
- Full Stack Developer – $36.20 per hour
- Data Scientist – $35.84 per hour
- Software Engineers – $34.62 per hour
- Web Developer – $20.41 per hour
Through our own company Digital Mercenary we provide technology consultants to the Norwegian market and it’s not uncommon for our consultants to earn $150 an hour.
Conversational marketing is the hottest right now in the marketing industry and if you want to tap into this trend, learn how to program websites, bots and tools to help business owners improve their conversational marketing. Artificial intelligence is also in its infancy together with machine learning and natural language processing.
Marketers know about all this, and how important it will be to their business and their clients, but few understand how to set it all up or do the programming. As a result the demand for people who can build i.e chatbots is high.
The same goes for Robotic Process Automation (RPA). If you have the skills to create bots to mimic and automate human tasks, you probably won’t run out of work. The demand for people who can develop, maintain and upgrade such bots is increasing and will be increasing for the unforeseeable future. If you have skills in this area or are willing to learn, you can make a lot of money for yourself.
To sweeten the deal, making bots to automate repetitive tasks normally done by humans is so easy that most tech-savvy people can learn how to do it, even if you have no programming skills.
You can even make money by programming for Amazon Alexa. If you have got programming skills, the world truly is your oyster!
How to get started?
Create a personal website showcasing your work.
Create a blog on your showcase site and use SEO tactics to bring potential clients to your website.
Start selling your services on Freelancer.com, Upwork.com and Fiverr.com . Fiverr sellers often offer lower prices, but if you cannot fill up your calendar with jobs on upwork.com, Fiverr is good for smaller tasks.
Where To Learn More:
Best Chat Bot Creator: Collect.Chat [No Programming Skills Needed]
Best RPA Creator: UiPath
Learn RPA for free - UiPath Academy
Create an Online Course [Sell Your Skills]
Everyone has some knowledge or skill set they are more proficient in than others. For instance if you love making sausages and have it as a hobby it is safe to assume that you know more about sausage making than someone who is not yet into making sausages. Hence; You’re an expert. You do not need to have years of education and experience. When you know more about a specific topic than someone else, you are an expert in that field.
This knowledge can be turned into lucrative revenue.
You can of course create a course and start a membership site as discussed earlier in this guide, but there is also another way which doesn’t involve setting up websites. Really, all you have to do is create the training material. And you can even outsource huge parts of the course creation if you want to.
You can create a course and sell it on places like Udemy or you can use a tool like Teachable to build a course website and market it.
Personally my choice would be to make money with Teachable as it gives you much more control and freedom compared to Udemy.
Make Money with Teachable - Try it here.
Teachable has over 7 million registered students and whatever your expertise is, Teachable is a great place to launch a course, both for professionals and businesses.
What can you teach people?
- Here are some ideas:
- How to write
- How to self-publish
- How to brew your own beer
- How to make … [insert whatever you’re good at!]
- How to play guitar, piano, drums, banjo, accordion…
- How to do accounting for your business
- How to invest in crypto currencies
- How to invest in precious metals
- How to, complete necessary car repairs
- How to code a chat bot
- How to be a drone pilot
- How to sail
- How to speak Chinese
- How to eat healthy & become fit in 30 days
- Self Defence for baby boomers
- How to be a barista
I came up with this literally as I typed, and while the ideas above may not be the best, you can easily see how the opportunities are endless.
Do your research and find out what people want to learn.
30-Day Expert Hack:
Find a niche you want to be a teacher in. You don’t need to know much upfront. Then simply immerse yourself in the topic for the next 30 days following this outline:
- Get the top 3 books on the topic based on Amazon rating and reviews. Read all the books at least once each, but skip all parts not bringing direct value. Don’t read life stories or anything which doesn’t add to your knowledge on the topic. Take notes.
- Expand on your notes with your own ideas and thoughts.
- Talk to yourself as if you were being interviewed on the subject. You can do this when alone in your car, or home alone. It may sound stupid, but it flat out works.
- Read the top 3 blogs or so on the topic or sub-topics you need to know more about. Be precise and picky. Take more notes and expand your notes with your own ideas.
- Create a powerpoint presentation or list of bullet points and hold a 30 minute presentation for yourself or your better-half on the subject.
This process can take seven days or 30 days but if you focus 100% on the topic for 30 days you are guaranteed to know more on the topic than 99% of the population.
You can expand your course with live webinars, 1-on-1 coaching and live tutorials over the internet using Zoom, Teams, Google Hangout or Facebook live.
Self Motivation, marketing, drone piloting, dog training…. People are looking for all kinds of coaches.
Try Teachable Here.
Sell Your School Notes
Some of us are better at school than others. It’s just the way it is. Did you take a lot of notes during college or higher-level studies?
Why not make some cash from those notes?
Maybe you’re an ex-teacher who has a lot of notes lying around the house? Or, you’re a parent doing homeschooling or helping your kids with their lessons. Why not become an online tutor for other kids? Now, you can take these notes and sell them or tutor other kids online.
How to Sell College Study Notes?
Here are 3x sites to get you started:
Course Hero (More than 10 million users)
NoteSale (UK)
Become a Mobile App Developer
Did you know that app development is the #1 software skill in demand?
Business owners all over the world know that they need mobile apps to market their business, or specific apps to improve the user experience for their customers. However, few business owners know how to create such apps.
In addition to businesses, people now spend a lot of time on their cell phones daily. And what are they doing on their phones?
They are using apps!
Actually, according to an eMarketer research study, users spend two hours and 11 minutes per day using mobile apps. That’s an average. I think it is safe to say that young people spend way more than that on apps daily. From the time spent on their mobile devices only 26 minutes is used browsing the web.
App time made up nearly 20% of total media time in 2017. For the first time in 2019 people spent more time with their mobile devices than they did watching TV and the trend is increasing. My wild guess is that by 2030 TV as we traditionally know it is dead and gone. Most young people won’t watch linear TV. On-demand is here to stay and it is the same with information - young minds want to access relevant information when they need it.
This is where apps come into play.
You can easily create apps to provide specific information or to streamline our lives.
“But I don’t know app coding,” I hear you say? Fret not.
You can start making your first app today without any coding at all. There are several app creators you can use without any coding skills.
Start Using AppyPie Today!
You can then sell add your app to the marketplaces for Android and iPhone and make money by either:
- Offer in app purchases
- Show ads in the app
- Sell the app
Where To Learn More:
- AppyPie.com
- Udacity Tech Courses [Android Fundamentals]
Earn Money Writing & Transcribing
Proficient writers are always in need, and I know at least a handful of people personally who make a full-time salary from freelance writing through sites such as Upwork.com.
Many writers will take any writing assignment they can get and end up writing simple articles on anything from kitchen appliances to digital marketing. While this may be a good, and maybe necessary, approach when you are first starting out to make enough money to keep a roof over your head and to get good reviews, it’s not necessarily the best strategy for the long run.
Depending on your interests and background you can narrow down your writing skills to a certain area of expertise and really hone your writing skills in that specific area. This way you become an expert writer, can charge higher prices and write about topics you truly care about. Examples may include anything from only writing screenplays and fiction, to writing advertising material for big brands or technical in-depth content for blogs.
How to price your work?
While some charge by the hour, the most common method is to charge a fee based on either a predefined number of words or a price per word.
A 500 word article normally cost from $5-20 on the low end to $20 to $75 on the high end. Rates could be as little as $0.01 per word all the way up to $1+ per word on the extreme.
Snippet from Clearvoice.com - Full Infographic Here.
What type of content can you write?
Here are some examples:
- Blog posts and Articles
- e-Books and White Papers
- Fiction
- Social Media Content
- Research Papers
- eMail Newsletters
- Print Collaterals
- Books
- Website Copy
- Marketing Materials
- Screenplays
- Other
Regardless of whether you are a junior writer or have been writing for years, you can make money as a freelance writer online.
What are you waiting for?
Where To Start:
Make Money Self-Publishing
Self-publishing has become really easy over the last few years with platforms such as Amazon KDP and Smashwords.
Because it’s so easy to self-publish there are unfortunately extreme amounts of pure crap being released every year. So, if you want to stand a chance as a self-publisher you must:
- Create books which is just as good as any book from a major publisher
- Have a stunning cover. Don’t do it yourself. Just don’t do it!
- Formatted correctly.
- Have a budget for marketing
So how do you achieve all this on your own?
You have to outsource.
When I wrote my Amazon Bestseller “Chasing The Storm” (as Martin Mölsted) I made sure it was top notch before even thinking about releasing it. This is a fiction novel, but if you publish anything which isn’t fiction you can probably be a bit looser on the story development. Still the book has to be free from errors, correctly formatted and have a good looking cover.
Did you know that most traditionally published books never sell more than 500 copies? Do you think you can beat that?
Here’s how you publish a bestseller in 2024:
- Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.
- Hire multiple freelancers to give feedback on your first “good enough” draft.
- Rewrite based on feedback. Feedback should include not only technical issues such as spelling errors, but also story, readability, concept etc.
- Get professional critique from a service like Cornerstones and Harry Bingham’s Jericho Writers.
- Rewrite as needed based on feedback from professional critiques.
- When the final version of your book is ready, hire an editor to do the final touch up.
- Get ISBN codes and EAN codes.
- Format the manuscript so it can be submitted to Amazon and the other eBooks stores.
- Prepare formatting for the paper-back (if you want to publish on paper as well).
- Create the cover. Get this right. Most people actually judge a book by its cover. I used Damonza.
- Upload to a distribution service or to Amazon KDP.
- Promote with a blog tour and giveaway through Bookbub.com and other giveaway sites.
- Get reviews from readers at GoodReads.com
- Get community reviews from The LibraryThing, like I did with Blogging for Dough here and Chasing The Storm here.
- Promote on your website, in social media, traditional media…
- Rinse and repeat with the next release.
The model above is best applied when writing fiction novels, but parts of it will also apply to factual books.
But what if you don’t want to write your own books?
Become a publisher and outsource the writing!
How to become a publisher and make money from Amazon KDP:
You don’t have to be a great writer in order to make money from self-publishing. You can act as a publisher only and outsource the writing.
Start by finding out what you want to publish. This could be how to guides, receipt books or anything else which helps the reader complete a specific task or goal. You can also publish fiction even if you’re not a writer. If you choose this route, you need to find a niche where the novels are short (as in have few words - you don’t want to pay for a 700.000 word long fantasy novel. ) and where there is a hungry market.
Then go to upwork, freelancer or a more bespoke service like Gotham Ghost Writers, Ka-Writer or similar services.
Then publish the book/novel and market it like crazy.
Will you make profit when you hire a ghostwriter? That’s difficult to say and I would recommend you have a solid budget before starting out. If you start with a smaller romance niche for instance and really narrow down, you can find some categories where there are solid numbers of readers and where the books aren’t necessarily top notch. They just need to be entertaining. The same goes for how to books. They don’t have to be particularly long. They just need to provide value. Because of this, you can get short novels written for less than a grand on the cheaper end.
If you go down the fiction route, a good strategy is to create a series. This way you can lose money on the first one or two books and recoup it on the backend and get a repetitive buying fanbase.
Become a Freelancer [High-Paid Remote Worker]
We are probably still months or maybe even years away from seeing a cure for the global pandemic we’re currently facing.
Never before in our lifetime have we encountered such a wide-scale, international, pandemic. However, not everything is dark. As a result of the pandemic, remote work is on the rise and companies which earlier were sceptical to remote work, or home-office work, have now turned around 360 degrees and actually started to encourage home-offices. It’s a win-win situation for smart companies; they can reduce office space expenditure which saves them money, and the workforce doesn’t have to commute resulting in potentially hours saved daily which in turn gives a better life-work balance and happier employees.
Not all jobs can be done online for obvious reasons, but iIf you have any skill which can be done online, you are in high-demand.
So how do you get started as a remote worker?
If you already have a job, you can make an arrangement with your boss. Refer to studies like this from Deloitte showing that more people work remote now than before the crisis. Studies show that productivity doesn’t decline and some businesses even report an increase in efficiency.
Start by asking for one to two days a week and show proof of higher efficiency. Then gradually ask for more remote working days until you have reached your goal of 80-100% of work hours being remote.
If remote work in your current job isn’t an option, search for a (new) job which is open to remote workers. When the company asks you what to expect to get paid, you can use the fact that you save money by not commuting to reduce your salary, hence saving the company money. This may seem to go against all reason, but if the company can save money by hiring you compared to another with the save skills they are more likely to lean towards hiring you.
You can also use a site like Flexjobs.com to search for flexible freelancer jobs. This is a good place to start if you are looking for a part- or full-time job to do remote.
Regardless of experience or industry knowledge, there are plenty of remote freelancing jobs on Flexjobs.com.
A last resort is to offer your skills to marketplaces like Freelancer.com and Upwork.com. These options will give you less stable income, but way more flexibility than being a full-time, hired, remote worker.
When Deloitte ran a survey and asked “how productive are you when working from home in comparison with working in the office?” these where the answers they received:
- Much more productive 22%
- A bit more productive 19%
- Equally productive 31%
- Less productive 21%
- Much less productive 4%
- I don't know 3%
As you can see, 72% report to be equally productive or more productive compared to working in-office. How can a business argue against that?
A last option is micro-worker sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk or MicroWorkers.
While microworker sites don’t pay much per task, they can add up to a decent side-income, and it is possible to make $1000 a month from microworking.
Start a profitable Remote Freelance Business
One thing is being a remote freelance worker, but why not start a business supplying remote freelance workers yourself? You can use Flexjobs.com and Craigslist to find people interested in working from their homes and renting out their skills to businesses.
You can find clients interested in paying for your services on Upwork and many similar places. You can also set up your own business website and use search engine optimization and paid traffic to get clients.
Using other people’s skills to build a remote worker business, is probably one of the easiest businesses to scale. There’s quite a bit of people-management involved and the margins can be low - but if you can make it work it is a great business to own.
Buy Expired Domain Names
There was a time and day when you could buy all kinds of domain names and sell them for thousands of dollars. Just see this list over the most expensive domains sold:
Domain | Price | Sale date |
CarInsurance.com | $49.7 million | 2010 |
Insurance.com | $35.6 million | 2010 |
VacationRentals.com | $35 million | 2007 |
PrivateJet.com | $30.1 million | 2012 |
Voice.com | $30 million | 2019 |
Internet.com | $18 million | 2009 |
360.com | $17 million | 2015 |
Insure.com | $16 million | 2009 |
Fund.com | £9.99 million | 2008 |
Sex.com | $14 million | 2005 |
Sex.com | $13 million | 2010 |
Hotels.com | $11 million | 2001 |
Porn.com | $9.5 million | 2007 |
Shoes.com | $9 million | 2017 |
Porno.com | $8.8 million | 2015 |
Fb.com | $8.5 million | 2010 |
We.com | $8 million | 2015 |
Business.com | $7.5 million | 1999 |
Diamond.com | $7.5 million | 2006 |
Beer.com | $7 million | 2004 |
Z.com | $6.8 million | 2014 |
iCloud.com | $6 million | 2011 |
Israel.com | $5.8 million | 2008 |
Casino.com | $5.5 million | 2003 |
Slots.com | $5.5 million | 2010 |
Data from Wikipedia and Namebio.
When you consider the fact than any of the domain names above probably was bought for less than $10 to start with, you can see the profit potential here.
However, those days are long gone. Occasionally, new domain extensions are released, like for instance .name, .coach etc, and you can pick up some good domain names if you are quick. But it’s hard.
Here’s a better way:
Use a tool like SpamZilla.io to scan the web for domain names which have just been dropped by the owner. Everyday, thousands of domain names expired without the owners interested in renewing or continuing the website. This is how I got MyWebTrafficShop.com back from the Chinese owners (after they bought it from me).
SpamZilla will scan for expired domain names, check it for spam and quality to make sure you only get a list of high quality domain names which will be great for SEO purposes.
After finding an authoritative domain name, with existing quality links pointing to it, you can use the search term “site:www.domain.com” in Google to see if any pages are still indexed. Then use a SEO tool to determine which pages are receiving the highest amount of links. Then rebuild the structure of the site with wordpress. You can use The Internet Archive to get the full website structure, and even the original design and content if you want to rebuild it with the same content.
Then, increase the strength of the website using the best SEO tactics and sell it for a hefty profit as described in the section further up this page.
Where To Start:
Spamzilla.io
Get Paid To Take Surveys Online [Tips to make it worthwhile]
The idea is intriguing.
Laying in your bed, filling out simple surveys online and making a nice income sounds like a great idea.
Thousands of people in all walks of life are earning money by simply joining survey sites and filling out survey forms.
Taking Surveys online won’t make you rich by any stretch, but you can expect to earn anything between $1 to over $50 for a single survey, with the average probably around $5-15 per survey. It may seem meager, but depending on where you live and your set-up with the sites, you can take multiple surveys a day and earn a bit of extra cash every day.
You should easily be able to pay for your weekend parties, weekly cinema visits for you +one or a few nice dinners out with your loved ones.
So, like you can see, it’s not a business idea but it’s definitely worth pursuing if you’re looking for some extra income.
#1 Survey Site: Survey Junkie:
I’m not too big a fan of survey sites in general, and it’s difficult to sort them by quality, but Survey Junky stands out as a clear choice for anyone getting started with surveys.
All you need to do is to create a profile on their website and you can start taking surveys. The type of surveys you will receive is based on your preferences. Getting paid is easy-peasy and you get paid directly to your Paypal after each survey.
You’ll earn anywhere between 50 to 450 points for every survey. As 1000 points equals $1 dollar on Survey Junkie, you won’t be earning cash as fast as with some of the other sites, but on the other hand they have a lot of surveys available so you can take multiple surveys a day. Each survey usually only takes a few minutes to complete.
Other popular survey sites include Inbox Dollars, which claim to have paid out more than $57 million in cash to survey participants, SwagBucks, iSurveyWorld and Opinion Outpost.
Here are the links to sign up:
Survey Junkie (#1)
Inbox Dollars (#2)
The rest, in no particular order:
SwagBucks
Opinion Outpost
iSurveyWorld
5x Ways To Make Surveys Worth Your Time
- Meeting a friend at a café? Arrive five minutes early and take a survey or two to pay for the coffee. You have now paid for the coffee, and can save those few bucks for something more important (like stocks!).
- Waiting at the bus stop or commuting daily? Spend your free time on taking surveys instead of playing dumb games or checking facebook. Always seek to optimize your time and make money whenever you can.
- Once a day, go through all the survey sites and check for the best paying surveys. Take the highest paying surveys. If you have more time to spare, and only then, spend time on taking less paid surveys.
- Got spare time at the office? Office workers typically “work” for eight hours a day. However, a recent study underlines what I’ve always proclaimed: The average effective work hours is rarely above three hours. Monetize the remaining hours with surveys or other activities to get more money.
- Treat surveys, not as the end to your financial needs, but as a way to get more money so you can finally invest in something which will generate more profits like for instance affiliate marketing or starting your own blog.
As you can see taking surveys isn’t a get rich quick (or get rich at all, for that matter) scheme, but if you follow the advice about you can use it as a way to fund higher income generating opportunities.
Let’s recap the benefits of taking surveys:
Work from wherever, whenever
No commuting (work from home)
So simple a chimpanzee can do it
Monetize spare time
Join Survey Junkie here.
Host Webinars [Make High-Ticket Commissions With No Product!]
You’ve probably been invited to several webinars already. They’re everywhere for a reason: Webinars are superior at teaching students, pre-selling clients and closing high-ticket sales.
This works best if you already have a social following. If not, make a plan to establish a niche specific following by building an email list or through social media. You can use paid Facebook, TikTok & Instagram ads to build up a following.
Once you have a responsive list of followers start a webinar where you teach something interesting. Once you have built trust, find related products in your niche (high-ticket) and invite the product owners to be live on the webinar with you. The purpose is to pre-frame the product, and make sales. You split the income with the product owner.
Here’s the math:
Let’s say the product owner has a new product selling for $1499. You agree on a 50% income split. You get 150 people live on the webinar. 50 people drop off during the webinar. From the remaining 100 people, for easy math, say your guest closes 12%. You’ve just made 12 sales x $749.50. Tha’s $8994. Not too shabby for a few hours of “work”.
A typical webinar lasts for around 45-60 minutes, with the first 10-15 minutes being introduction of the webinar owner and guest, 20-40 minutes “building suspense” and teaching the benefits of the product. The rest of the time is spent on Q&A and “getting the sale.”
How to get started as a webinar host:
- It all starts by having a following in your niche.
- A good webcam or a more professional video camera.
- A good microphone.
- A good PC with fast internet connection.
- A Webinar Host and Delivery Service. My recommendation for this is EasyWebinar. It has a low monthly cost and a lot of easy to use features. You can also turn recorded webinars into evergreen webinars if you wish.
Be The King or Queen of TikTok
It has recently taken a beating and been banned from the US, but I doubt TikTok will go away anytime soon. TikTok has over 1 Billion Users and more than 100 Million active users in the US alone.
Many people have built a wildly huge follower base off of TikTok. You create short, often stupid, videos and hope to be feautred on the “for you” page to get massive reach. There are examples of teens having millions of followers and making a jaw-dropping monthly income from recommending products to their followers. All because of TikTok.
The most popular types of videos or TikTok are so-called TikTok dances, songs, pranks and challenges.
How the TikTok algorithm works is a closely guarded secret, but some information has been posted on the TikTok blog.
In summary, be funny or unique and make short videos grabbing the viewers immediate attention. OnYouTube a short video may be consider a vide below 5 minutes in length. On TikTok a short video is 5 SECONDS or less!
Where To Learn More:
How To Make Money Online [Website/Blog Owners]
Many of the ideas in the sections above also applies to blog owners. You can expand on your audience, or drive visitors to your blog, from sites such as TikTok for instance.
You can use your blog audience and create webinars, podcasts and advertise your freelance services.
However, there are some methods you can use with a blog, or any website for that matter, which you can’t if you don’t have an established website.
1. Product Reviews
Write in-depth, high quality, product reviews relevant to your audience. If you’re a blogger, this is probably already on your agenda. You will be surprised to see how many blogs are not adding product reviews to their websites. So avoid it because they think it’s too much hassle, some avoid it because they think it will steal customers from their own products and some are just thinking “my site is not a review site.” Fair enough. But adding a review section to your website can drastically increase your profit margins.
Of course, you must optimize your posts for organic traffic (SEO, remember?), spread the links through social media, add links in prominent places on your blog and maybe even buy traffic to get the post seen…. But it will be worth it if done right.
Last but not least, never recommend products you can’t stay behind 100%. It will backfire, and you will lose money in the long run, just for some quick bucks.
2. Change Adsense with Mediavine or Ezoic
Adsense is a great advertising network, and I once had a network of websites where each of the sites were generating up to $100 a day on Adsense. I had created the sites with high Adsense earnings in mind, so needless to say perhaps, the sites were in high-price-per-click markets.
However, if you have more than 10k monthly sessions you can apply to Ezoic which will probably bump up your advertising income quite well. The same goes for Mediavine if you have above 25k monthly visitors.
I haven’t used any of them, except for Adsense, but after reading this article I plan on doing it once my latest niche sites are getting more visitors. Niche Pursuits reported an 80% increase in ad revenue after switching from Adsense.
3. Create Your Own Products
One of the hardest parts of selling a product, both physical and digital, is having enough traffic.
When you own a blog with a steady flow of traffic coming in, you have already got that part out the equation. Now, you can monetize the traffic with your own products.
This could be any digital or physical product, like clothes, tools or books matching the interests of your chosen niche. Digital products can include evergreen webinars, ebooks, membership sites and basically anything else you can come up with that will help your visitors.
We have ready made memberships you can sell directly to your customers.
Click Here to Discover How To Get a Done-For-You Membership Bolt-on To Your Blog.
4. Switch To High-Paying Affiliate Programs
So you’re running a successful blog, getting thousands of visitors a month and making affiliate sales and advertising income.
Are you just chasing one-time affiliate commissions and maybe some low-priced recurring affiliate income? If you are not marketing affiliate programs with high-ticket backend sales you are losing out on a huge opportunity.
Some hot long-term High-Ticket affiliate programs & Offers:
>>GrooveFunnels Affiliate Program (Untapped)
>>ClickFunnels Affiliate Program (Many Affiliates - High Competition)
>>Platinium Membership Reseller (Not an Affiliate Program - But You Get 100% Commission and deep funnel)
>>The Entre Institute (Untapped - True High-Ticket With Low Front-End. Buy The Product First To Know What Your Marketing! Extremely deep funnel with great products and coaching)
>>RA Wealth Partners (Finance Affiliate Program. Multiple income streams)
5. Good Ol’ Fashioned E-Mailing
You’d be shocked to see how many bloggers “forget” to add a lead capture form to their site. IF this is you, make sure you add a lead capture form to your website now. Like today.
It’s not hard.
Many wordpress themes have their own built in plugins for this, you can use various wordpress plugins and most worthy autoresponders will have plugins or codes you can use as well.
Start by signing up to either Aweber or GetResponse.
Where To Learn More?
How To Grow Your Business With EMail Marketing [Free Guide]
Build an Email list with Lead Magnets [Free Webinar]:
3x Ways To Make More Money Online [You’re already making $1000 a month online]
Alright, you’re on your way to online riches and a lifestyle of relaxing under the palm trees of a nice, white sand beach on a faraway island.
Great job!
Now, all you can think about is how to speed up the process of becoming 100% financial free.
Maybe the above scenario is not the exact case, but it’s a good thought to hang on to, no?
When you’re getting to a certain income level, it's common to plateau at some point. Plateauing means that your income gradually slows down and reaches a level where it flattens out.
Many of the ideas above can be applied by blog owners to increase income when their income is hitting a level where it’s flattening out.
Here are 3x additional ideas:
1. Start a Digital Agency
This may be a digital marketing agency, a website development agency or anything else you can think of.
If you can get the clients, there is a good chance you can outsource the work 100% to another digital marketing company.
Despite their quite hyped up sales video, The Entre Institute have got some great training on starting your own agency.
You can also get some free ideas over the The Digital Agency Network.
2. Sell Coaching
Regardless of what nich or market your blog is related to, there is a good chance that just by running the blog for some time, you already know 90% more on the subject than many of your readers.
Monetize this knowledge by coaching other people. This could be done through group coaching via a private facebook group, through online webinars or, like I do, one-on-one personal coaching.
3. Create Your Own Brand
With a community of readers or fans, there’s really no end to the possibilities for monetization.
Build your name into a brand or use your company / website to create add-on products. Any business can create cool t-shirts and merchandise to sell on their websites or through a service like spreadshirt.
If you’re blogging about fashion already, creating a clothing brand could be the next move. It’s not that hard, and doesn’t require a lot of upfront cost. You need to get the design done, and decide on how to sell your clothes, but much of this can be outsourced. Several clothing manufactures offer small batch production and you can hire a specialized drop-shipping company to handle delivery and returns.
Many fashion vloggers also create their own make-up line. It’s a bit trickier as you need to make sure the make-up is safe to use but teaming up with a solid manufacturer and advertiser shouldn’t be a problem if you already have a social following.
Got a high-traffic health blog? Why not do a JV with a health product manufacturer or company with an established brand? You can have your own brand and not have to be concerned about FDA approval as that is already taken care of.
Creating your own brand, doesn’t need to stop at creating products. It’s also about positioning yourself as the most respected expert in your market.
Get professionally produced YouTube tutorial videos created and stand out as someone people know they can rely on to provide trusted information. Sign up to HARO and start getting calls and messages from reporters needing your help. This can land you interviews in both national as well as international press.
Bonus Idea #1 - Become a Speaker
This one ties quite tightly in with the “brand” idea above. Once you establish yourself as an expert, being a speaker is a good way to brand yourself as a higher-level expert. There’s a good reason why you see all these people speaking on stage at conventions. They become recognised for their expertise, get more clients and even more exposure; for each public speaking job you get, you get maybe one or two more jobs if you’re a great speaker. It’s like a rocket propelling you faster and faster towards stardom each time you speak publicly.
Bonus Idea #2 - Do Joint-Ventures
I ran a record label for many years, and got to experience both the benefits and the drawback of joint venture deals. However, for us bloggers, a joint venture can be a win-win deal for both parties.
Find an expert in your niche and approach him/her with an offer. Let’s say you have a bodybuilding blog, you can contact a gym owner, or an experienced bodybuilder, in your area and ask if they would be interested in working out a deal. The bodybuilder will be the instructor in front of the camera. You can create the product, sales pages and get customers through your blog and by running an affiliate program.
You can split all profit 50/50 and if you make good money, both will be happy.
Just be sure you have a good legal document, written by a professional and unbiased third party.
Summary
Hopefully, the ideas above gave you some ideas you hadn’t thought of before and inspiration to finally get started with your online business if you haven’t already done so.
Did I forget anything? Anything else you want me to cover? Leave a comment in the feedback form below.
If you want a head start and learn how to make money online and create a solid online business, you can apply to my coaching here.