Hi there, you might have found this page while searching for ways to make an extra buck or two online legitimately; you are definitely in the right place! This article seeks to provide the most comprehensive information regarding ways to make money online working from home or even at the office during your spare time anywhere in the world.
All known legitimate ways of making money online have been covered in this article with in depth explanation and examples. The good thing with using the internet to make money is that you don’t need to have a college degree or any special qualifications, all you need is the ability to read, write, operate a PC and the internet and you’re good to go. I have also made a YouTube video explaining all I wrote here, view it below.
Although it’s quite lengthy, I promise it is worth the time so please take some time out and read it word for word and please, don’t just relax after reading it, go online and use the knowledge gotten to research for more information to give you a better understanding of how online businesses work. Good luck!
1. Affiliate Marketing
In recent times, affiliate marketing has become the most common and best way to make money online from home. Affiliate marketing is simply marketing products not owned by you and getting paid a percentage of every sale your marketing attracts.
A lot of companies have affiliate programs which anyone can sign up for and make lots of cool cash. Super successful affiliate marketers like John Chow make over 500,000 US Dollars yearly with little effort as they have built a system over time which now makes affiliate marketing easy for them.
Affiliate programs usually pay between 3% – 10% the value of the items sold and issue a payout when a minimum payout limit has been reached at the end of every month.
How to Become a Successful Affiliate Marketer
To become a successful affiliate marketer, you need to do the following:
- You need a platform to promote the affiliate products on such as a blog or social media account on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and the like.
- The products you want to promote should be related to the niche of your platform, for example if you want to be an affiliate marketer for airlines, your blog or social media page should be providing information about airline related topics. This is because people who visit a page usually are interested in the content of that page and will hardly pay attention to an advert which is not related to the content they are looking for.
- After getting the above, you can then check for companies with affiliate programs in the niche your platform belongs to; you can simply search Google or other search engines for such affiliate programs by typing the name of the company or niche you want to be an affiliate for followed by the phrase “affiliate program” for instance if you are interested in marketing Johnson & Johnson products, you simply type “Johnson & Johnson affiliate program” in the search engine box and if you can’t find an affiliate program for that company, you can type the company’s niche and add affiliate program to it and search, for instance if you couldn’t find an affiliate program for Johnson & Johnson, you can simply search for “Consumer goods affiliate programs”, this will bring up a list of affiliate programs from which you can choose from.
- Big ecommerce websites like Amazon, eBay and Alibaba have affiliate programs which you can register for and choose which products to promote on your platform as they have a wide variety of products.
Tips to make more money online from Affiliate Marketing
- Do not use more than two affiliate programs on your blog to avoid user dissatisfaction.
- Refrain from putting too many affiliate ads on your blog to ensure user experience is excellent. Putting up so many ads upsets a lot of users and can cause them to stop visiting your platform. It also does not really boost your earnings, use ads moderately.
- Use affiliate links efficiently: Most affiliate platforms enable you generate text links to product pages, in my experience these text links tend to convert more than banner ads.
Popular Affiliate Programs in the US
Some popular affiliate programs are listed below.
Amazon Affiliate Program: Amazon has one of the oldest, biggest and most popular affiliate programs in the world. It is open to people worldwide. Amazon Associate program’s website is https://ift.tt/luLXhW
eBay Partner Network: eBay also has a very good affiliate program. You can register at https://ift.tt/3kFV042
AliExpress Affiliate: The Chinese ecommerce site also has a good affiliate program. The website is https://ift.tt/3EPwiX3.
AdPlosion –This is an affiliate site where you can earn by selling leads, clicks and products from the company’s advertisers. They also offer incentive points in addition to commissions, the website is Adplosion.com
Avangate – This is an affiliate program for online software and cloud computing businesses. You can market popular computer software through this platform, register on Avangate.com.
Clickbank – ClickBank is a very popular platform for affiliate marketing of digital products. It connects owners to digital content to affiliate marketers. Clickbank’s website is clickbank.com/marketplace.
Several service providers on the internet such as domain name registrars and web hosting companies also have their own affiliate programs which you can promote and earn good money online. Some of them include GoDaddy, Hostgator, Bluehost, etc.
Amazon Affiliate Marketing
The Amazon Associates program is one of the earliest and most popular affiliate programs in the world. The program enables you make money from home by promoting Amazon’s products on your blog or social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram using unique affiliate links and ad display banners generated by Amazon.
Amazon Associates program just like other affiliate programs pays you a specified percentage commission on each sale on their website referred from your blog or social media platform with commission percentages of up to 15% for some items.
How to become an Amazon Affiliate
- First, you will need to have a blog which is getting visitors daily or a social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) page with a good number of followers.
- Then head on to the Amazon Associates webpage to register and create a new account.
- Once you’ve successfully registered and approved, you will be shown your affiliate dashboard and tips on how to use the platform.
- Find affiliate products you want to promote and get the html codes, widgets or banners to use on your website or blog.
2. Blogging
Blogging is the most talked about legitimate way to make money online and is probably the most profitable. Blogging is basically writing about personal topics which can range from babies to food and so on.
In years past, many internet entrepreneurs realized that they could make money by creating many micro-niche websites and blogs, Micro-niche websites are websites focusing on a sub-group of a niche, for example this blog’s niche is about “Technology” which is a big niche, a micro niche of this blog’s niche is “Phone Reviews”.
These dudes found out that by creating dozens of micro niche sites with little traffic daily, a few hundred visitors daily, they would have thousands of visitors in total and make good money with little work as a few posts on each blog would fetch them traffic, unfortunately for them however Google discovered their trick and made it extremely difficult if not impossible for niche sites to get any organic search engine traffic. Google has made it in such a way that only Authority sites in a niche can get search engine traffic.
Authority niche websites and blogs are those who have established themselves over the course of time, usually some years as trustworthy sites with relevant information on the topic/niche they blog about. The advantage of authority niche blogs/websites over general authority blogs/websites is that since they provide specialized information in a certain area, they tend to get higher Google Adsense CPC’s (Cost per click) because specific advertisers compete to get advertising space on their sites.
Authority sites also have better affiliate marketing profits, more direct adverts and sponsored posts as companies consider them better for targeted adverts than general niche blogs.
How to Become an Authority Website/Blog
To be an Authority site, you must be willing to:
- Create lots of original, high quality, useful and shareable content for users: Do not write content for search engines, write them for people and search engines will appreciate you with quality traffic.
- Post content regularly: Do not publish 50 posts in a day and publish another 20 in the next 2 months, its better to post 1 article daily for 50 days. Search engines and people like regularly updated websites
- Be active on social media: Have social media accounts for your blog/website, share your content regularly on them, grow your following and interact with them daily.
- Invest your time and money in Search Engine Optimization: Your best bet to get massive organic traffic is to have your website and content optimized for search engines.
A lot of people have forayed into blogging and then abandoned it after a short while mostly because they couldn’t make any money or as much money as they expected. So how can you succeed where others have failed?
Here’s how:
- Understand that blogging is not the only way to make money online, there are many other ways listed in this article.
- Pick a blogging niche which you are passionate about, have good knowledge of and which has a good number of monthly searches on search engines.
- Do not make making money your sole objective: This is the reason why most blogs crash and burn, let your main objective be to provide visitors with the best content in your niche and watch your traffic and income soar.
- Take search engine optimization (SEO) very seriously: Search engine optimization refers to the techniques used to enable websites rank higher on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS). In the past, even without SEO, blogs and websites used to get decent traffic from Google and other search engines but nowadays it can be said that blogging without SEO is a waste of time.
- Explore different ways to monetize your blog: Use Google Adsense, Affiliate Marketing, Direct Adverts, Sponsored Posts, Sponsored reviews, Product sales, etc. A lot of bloggers make the mistake of thinking they can only make money through advertising or affiliate programs such as Google Adsense, this cannot be farther from the truth because if you create a blog which is an authority in a niche, there are several ways to monetize your blog traffic.
There are a lot of websites which teach people how to build blogs and make them profitable, popular ones include problogger.com, copyblogger.com, wpbeginner.com and more.
3. Buy and Resell Domain Names
The buying and selling of internet domain names also known as ‘Domain Flipping’ is one of the oldest known ways of making money online legitimately. Although the popularity of this method has decreased over the past few years, some few smart people are still making cool bucks doing it.
Tips on how to make money buying and reselling domains from home
The process is quite easy really but you have to be smart about it and there are two ways to do it which are either by registering a new domain name or buying an expired domain.
- For the new domain registration, what you need to do is come up with a catchy domain name in your head which will be valuable enough to be paid for by individuals or corporations, a good example can be based on a popular event happening at the moment for example an Indian guy named Priyavrat sold Sumo.com domain name for $1.5 million to SumoMe.com, such an unbelievable ROI.
- The second method is by buying expired domains; due to the popularity of domain flipping in the past, a lot of domains were purchased by individuals who have since dumped them as they couldn’t get a good offer, there are still some valuable expired domains and a good eye will spot them. You can visit expired domain listing sites such as expireddomains.com. For example, I bought a 20 year old domain that had just expired and used it to build a product reviews website that gets thousands of visitors monthly due to the old age of the domain.
Domains are very cheap to buy and most domain registrars sell domains for about $10 yearly and there are lots of free coupons to enable you get discounts of up to 90% on domain names, a simple search online will reveal them. Popular domain registrars include GoDaddy, Namecheap, etc. There are also websites which teach on how to spot a profitable domain name.
4. Sell Websites
Websites have become valuable assets just like real estate and other investments. There are many people willing to buy profitable websites at good prices. As a matter of fact, several top websites in the world have been sold by their founders to big companies and individual buyers for millions of dollars and you can also be one of them.
First, you have to own a website or a blog and you can do that in two ways.
- By starting your blog or website: This is the slow and hard way to do it but it is far more profitable depending on how good you are at running a blog or website. You can start a blog or website on Blogger, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal or other platforms, start publishing articles and getting visitors, the more visitors you get, the better your chances of finding a good buyer.
However, the process of getting thousands of visitors is far harder than it sounds, it will also cost you a good deal of money but not too much depending on how big you want your website to be. There are many things that need to be in place for a blog or website to get many visitors, they include search engine optimization, social media ads and all these cost money.
Once your blog or website starts getting many visitors, you can monetize it through various ways such as Google Adsense, Direct Adverts, Sponsored Posts, Affiliate Marketing, Product sales, etc.
- By buying an already established website and reselling it: This is easier than starting a blog or website from scratch but will cost you a lot of money. You can research online or hire an individual or company with expertise in identifying websites with good prospects to find a profitable website, you can contact the website owner, administrator yourself to propose a purchase or you can go through website sales platforms to help you approach the website owner. You can then decide to sell the website at a higher price for profit after a while.
Websites usually sell for about 20 to 30 times the monthly profit they make because web traffic is volatile and can change anytime with search engine algorithm changes. Some websites through which you can buy or sell websites are Flippa.com, Latonas.com, etc.
5. Online Consumer Research
Feedback from consumers means a great deal to companies because it helps them improve their products to meet consumer taste and focus more on what works rather than using trial and error methods therefore many companies are willing to pay you to help them get honest feedback from their clients. Types of consumer research include product testing and mystery shopping.
Product Testing: There are companies willing to pay you money to test their products, many tech companies do this and it is called beta testing where a product is tested by people before it is manufactured in bulk and released to the public so that improvements can be made based on consumer preferences.
Depending on the company and the product, you could be given money or given the the product you are testing or both.
Mystery Shopping: Is another method of consumer research used by companies; Companies pay you to pretend to be an interested customer and then ask you to review the products and services provided to you in the buying process, the reason for this is to know how well their staff treat customers and to know whether the quality of service is good enough for customers to ensure that their customers continue patronizing them and find them good enough to refer other people to.
In some cases, you might have to do the consumer research in person, payments for each consumer research task ranges from $25 – $50.
Some websites which pay for consumer research are:
Slicethepie.com – This website pays you to listen to and review new music .
Google User Research – Google is one of the top companies which take user research very seriously and pays for it.
Microsoft Research Panel – Microsoft also pays you to give them feedback of their products you have used..
GlobalTestMarket.com – You get paid for answering questions on certain topics.
6. Cost Per Action (CPA) Marketing
Cost Per Action websites pay you when someone clicks your referral link and completes an action on that website, it has been one of the most popular legit ways to make money online over the years especially with bloggers, the others been Pay Per Click Ads and Affiliate Marketing.
Examples of actions which people are required to do to get paid are; inputting zip codes and email addresses. Filling free credit report forms, etc. The costs of each action vary from $1 with some as high as $20.
Best ways to earn more money online with CPA websites
- Start a blog: To register for a cost per action site, you need to have a blog or website where you can promote the CPA links. You can use WordPress, Blogger, Joomla or Drupal to start a blog and its best to blog in a niche (topic) you are well versed in and passionate about.
- Start getting legitimate organic traffic: To make good money through cost-per-action sites, you need to get a lot of free traffic from search engines such as Google, Bing, etc and this requires having a good number of high quality content on the topic you are blogging about.
- Register on the cost-per-action sites and start promoting their offers, Some popular CPA sites are Affiliate.com, MaxBounty, Clickbooth, CPA Lead, Offer Vault , Clickbank, etc.
- Research and read articles on CPA and how to improve your earnings with it, there are lots of quality information online which a simple Google search will unveil.
7. Developing Mobile Apps
Mobile app development is probably the fastest way to becoming a millionaire or even a billionaire in this generation.
In times past, small time mobile app developers had to struggle to sell their apps to companies and individuals who usually offered them measly amounts for their hard work. Those days are gone as there are now online platforms where you can upload your app to and make money from sales, in-app purchases, in-app adverts and other means.
Mobile app developers can also sell their apps online on websites such as Flippa, Sellmyapp, etc in a competitive bidding process to get the best offer.
To make money from home developing mobile apps, you can either be a software developer i.e. programmer or you can hire someone to build an app for you and while doing that, make sure you ensure you and the developer sign the necessary legal documents to avoid been defrauded.
Here are a couple of sites online where you can make money selling your mobile apps: SellmyApp.com, Flippa.com, Chupamobile.com, Fliptopia.com. All these websites help you find buyers for your app, you can also buy apps on the same platforms.
Ways to Monetize Your Mobile App
Using Google Play Store: Once you develop an app, you should upload it to the Google Play store, you stand to make money through different ways such as:
- Showing adverts in your apps: You can apply for Google’s Admob mobile advertising program which will show ads in your app once you are approved for the program. You then make about 68% of the money a click on an ad on your app is worth.
- In-app purchases: This is the most popular way of monetizing your app because you can afford to allow the app be downloaded for free which means a lot of people are more likely to download it than a paid app.
Once your app catches people’s attention and has their loyalty, they will purchase the in-app items needed to move from one level to another hence making you a lot of money. Apps such as Candy crush and Temple Run have made millions of dollars with this method.
- Paid Apps: This way usually works well when people have had used your apps in the past and enjoyed it, hence you can put a price tag on the new apps before they can be downloaded in the Playstore and make money from every download.
Google charges a one time developer fee of $25 to register an Google app developer account on the Google Play store.
Using Apple App Store: All the things listed above for the Google Playstore apply to Apple’s App store too however Apple charges developers a yearly subscription fee of $99 and charges companies $299 yearly.
8. Digital Marketing
Digital marketing refers to the various internet marketing methods used to promote goods and services, it is a relatively new field with moderate competition as only few people know and understand how it works. Digital marketing is divided into several fields, the most popular are: Search Engine Optimization, Email Marketing, Pay Per Click Advertising, Social Media Marketing and Video Marketing.
Use E-Mail Marketing to Sell Products and Make More Money
Email marketing is a popular online sales technique which predates most of the other ways to make money online. Although of recent, many spammers have made a nuisance of email marketing, decent sales can still be made through it.
Email marketing as the name says is simply sending emails to a bunch of people, usually your subscribers trying to convince them to purchase a product, service or to visit your blog or website.
When done correctly, email marketing can be a very powerful marketing tool, I personally don’t usually open random emails but whenever I see an interesting title, I am tempted to open.
Tips on how to use email marketing correctly to boost sales and make more profit.
- Create very catchy Email Subject/Title; This to me is the most important thing in email marketing, a catchy email subject or title will increase the rates at which people open your emails.
- Write short appealing content in the body of the email which can convince the readers to buy what you are selling, don’t beat around the bush but don’t be too direct in your approach.
- Include a link to your website or blog for further information on the email content so that interested readers can get more details and make a decision to buy.
It is worthy to note that email marketing works best when the emails are sent to subscribers of your website or blog. This is because they are more likely to be interested in what you have to offer than random people.
Sending mails to a few hundred loyal subscribers will be far more profitable than sending emails to thousands of random people. In order to do email marketing, you need an email marketing service, some reputable ones are Aweber, Getresponse, MailChimp, etc
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is the use of proven and legitimate techniques to improve the organic search engine rankings of websites. Organic traffic is free and hence very cost effective for any business.
Anyone can learn the art of search engine optimization using free resources available online and practice with a free blog from blogger.com or wordpress.com.
When you gain enough experience and have been able to understand the workings of search engines thereby ranking your website or blog on the first page of Google, Bing or any other search engine for competitive keywords, then you can make money by offering your SEO skills to companies and individuals who need it.
Good SEO professionals are in high demand all over the world and are raking in big bucks from it to the tune of millions of dollars, examples of top SEO professionals are Neil Patel of Neilpatel.com, Rand Fishkin of Moz.com, Brian Dean of Backlinko.com and many others.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Social Media Marketing is the use of social media to market goods and services offered by individuals and businesses. Making money with social media marketing can be achieved in two ways namely:
- Creating a Social Media Page and Placing Paid Ads: Anyone can create his or her own social media page on either Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and other popular social media networks and post engaging content on a particular niche or general topics.
When the social media page gains a substantial following usually from ten thousand followers and above, you can put up posts inviting individuals and companies to advertise on your social media page for a fee, the amount you can charge per ad depends on the number of followers you have.
- Using Social Media Adverts to Reach Prospective Clients: If you own a business, social media is a very good tool to make more sales, most of the big social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin offer advertising platforms whre you can create ads and target specific groups of people and locations. Once you create your ad and pay, it goes live and you get reports on the performance. Many companies and small businesses are using social media marketing to sell their products and are getting very good returns on investment, you can also pay to have your ads placed by specific social media accounts as mentioned above.
Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)
This refers to the use of paid adverts on websites to market products and services. The premier program for PPC adverts is Google Adwords where advertisers pay Google to place their adverts on Google Adsense publishers’ websites. It is called pay per click advertising because advertisers are billed for each click on their ads.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Refers to the use of pay per click adverts on search engine result pages (SERPs) such as Google search results, Bing search results and others to market websites and web pages.
Pay Per Impression Advertising (PPM): This type of adverts are those which advertisers pay per view I.e. impression hence it is also called Pay Per View advertising.
A very good online platform to learn pay per click advertising is Wordstream.com
Video Marketing
Another great way to make money online is by video marketing also called vlogging. Websites such as Youtube, Dailymotion, Vimeo and recently Facenook are platforms where you can upload your self created videos and get paid for it.
The process of video marketing is quite simple, simply register on any video streaming platform and start uploading unique viral videos on topics you are good at such as comedy, tutorials, reviews and more. Then register for their advertising programs to enable ads on your videos, for YouTube the advertising program is called YouTube Partner Program.
Market your videos by posting the links to them on your social media pages and tell your friends to tell their friends. With time, your video could go viral and make you lots of money.
There are two major ways to make money with videos which are
- Pay per View Adverts: This type of adverts make money for you once someone views the ad in your video.
- Pay per Click Adverts: With this type of advert, you only make money when a viewer clicks an ad in the video and not when he/she views it.
You might be wondering how you can make money online with all digital marketing as a whole, well you can do so in two ways.
- Learning the skills required to become a digital marketer, you can choose one or more digital marketing specialties and get educated in them and then get employed as a digital marketer or better still work on your own as a freelancer or own your own digital marketing company.
- Using digital marketing to promote your goods and services and hence gain more buyers and much more profit.
9. Writing e-Books
Writing books in the past used to be quite tedious and costly due to the need to print, market and other stuff but with the internet, anyone can be a bestselling author. Electronic books or e-books are the rave these days and a lot of people are publishing e-books daily but only very few of them go on to become bestsellers.
Why is that? It’s because a lot of people writing e-books are doing it solely because they want to make quick money and readers tend to see through them easily. To have a successful e-book, you need to put in a lot of hard work and effort, here are some tips to help.
- Write on a topic you are an expert or at least very good in; this will enable you write a very good ebook based on your experience.
- Do a lot of research: By doing research, you will give your readers the best and that will definitely pay off.
- Start off small: Write short e-books or intros to your main e-book and offer them to your readers for free: If they like what they read, the likelihood that they will buy your ebook is higher.
- Start a blog: A blog gives you a platform to showcase your expertise in any field and hence having a blog with many readers on your ebook topic will be very beneficial.
- Give your ebook a catchy title: The title of your ebook can make or mar your book, a lot of people consider a book’s title first before anything else.
- Use Social Media: After publishing your ebook, make sure you post links to your e-book sales page on your social media pages and ask your friends and family to help you do so too.
- Advertise: A lot of people fail to realize just how important advertising is, there is a limit to how much you can make from ebook sales without advertising. Create catchy adverts on paid advertising platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, etc and also on free platforms such as web forums and website comment boxes.
- Get Feedback and Reviews: Feedback and reviews from your readers are very helpful as they help you know where you need to make improvements and also serve as testimonials which can help bring more sales for your ebook.
There are many online platforms where you can sell your ebooks, some popular ones are Amazon Kindle, Bookbaby, Flickrocket, etc.
10. e-Commerce
E-commerce is one of the biggest ways to make money online, e-tailers such as Amazon, Zappos and others have made and are still making billions of dollars in sales every year from selling goods online. You can make a lot of money selling online too, listed below are some ways in which you can do just that.
Third Party Selling on Amazon
You must have seen goods sold on Amazon by independent parties (Third party), these sellers send their goods to Amazon fulfillment centers and Amazon then lists them on the site and help the seller ship them when a purchase is made. Many people have been doing this and are making cool money from home with it, in fact over 40% of products listed on Amazon are from third party sellers.
Selling on Amazon is a big deal because you can reach millions of potential customers and you do not need a physical store thereby reducing a lot of startup costs. Amazon also has measures in place to ensure both the seller and the buyers are not defrauded.
Amazon has two categories of third party sellers namely:
Individual sellers: This category is for sellers who wish to sell less than 40 items each month and is okay for beginners as listing your products on Amazon is free and you pay $0.99 per sale and other selling fees.
Professional sellers: This category is for sellers who want to sell more than 40 items a month. There is a monthly fee of $39.99 and other selling fees. This category of sellers have many features which Individual sellers do not have such as setting different shipping rates for different products, offering special promotions to customers, etc.
Amazon allows all third party sellers’ list products in over 20 categories and Professional sellers can list their products in at least 10 more categories.
How to become a Third party Amazon Seller
- Choose what you want to sell on Amazon: It should be something you can source easily and quickly
- Choose between the Individual and Professional selling plan based on your needs
- Register on Amazon Seller Central
- List your products in the relevant categories with non-deceptive high quality images
- Sell your products to customers
- Ship using Fulfillment by Amazon or by yourself
- Receive payment for successful sale and delivery from Amazon
- Smile to the Bank!
Buy Goods Locally and Resell them Online
This is a really good way to make cool money online from home. It involves doing a little research around your neighborhood or other places you go to and comparing the prices of items in those places with prices found online.
There is a great possibility that the goods sold locally are less expensive than the same goods found online and if that is the case, then you can start buying the items locally and selling them online at a cheaper price than what other online retailers are offering.
Examples of things you can buy locally and resell online are vintage stuff, collectibles, etc.
Tips on how to make money buying locally and reselling online
- Make sure the goods you buy locally are original and of good quality so that you can have happy customers, happy customers will translate to more sales through referrals.
- Register for and list your locally sourced goods on ecommerce platforms which accept third party sellers such as Amazon, Etsy, etc
- Set up a personal ecommerce website: You can develop one from the scratch or pay a web developer to help you build it and if you do not have the money for it, you can stick to bigger ecommerce websites which allow you sell on their platform.
- Upload high quality pictures of the locally sourced items on the site with catchy descriptions
- Do not inflate your prices; You can make a lot of profit when a lot of people buy from you at lower prices
- Promote your goods and e-commerce website through word of mouth, social media and advertise on Facebook, Google Adwords, Radio, etc if you have the money.
- With time, as your popularity increases, you can add more general items to your e-commerce site but do not derail from your original idea of selling locally made products.
Your Own e-Commerce Website
Another way to make money through e-commerce is to own your own e-commerce store. Owning an e-commerce store has been made easy with the advent of simple e-commerce store building platforms such as Magento, Shopify, Woocommerce, X-Cart 5 and more.
To start an ecommerce website, you can either employ the services of a web developer to build one for you from the scratch or using one of the aforementioned platforms and if you are tight on budget, you can build it yourself using e-commerce website building platforms.
Once your ecommerce website is set up, you can upload products and services you have for sale and employ various offline marketing and digital marketing strategies to bring traffic to your ecommerce store. Digital marketing is very crucial to the growth of any ecommerce store particular pay per click advertising, social media marketing and search engine optimization.
You can choose to make your online store a marketplace i.e. where vendors can list their items for sale and you provide logistics and support or you can choose to sell your own goods exclusively. You can also have both options if you want.
Sell collectibles online
Collectibles also referred to as Collector’s items are a good way to make money online from home because your thrash just might be another man’s treasure. Examples of collectibles include: Comic books, baseball cards, photographs, art works, newspapers, sports cards, video cassettes, jukeboxes, etc.
You can sell your collectibles on many websites on the internet, a couple of them are:
Ebay: The ecommerce auction website has millions of people looking for different things so listing your collectible there will definitely bring you buyers and the auction process makes your profit prospects awesome.
Craigslist: There is no better place on the internet to sell your collectibles than on craigslist.
Alibaba: Aliexpress, Taobao: The Chinese websites have buyers from all over the world willing to buy anything listed on the sites. List your collectible there and get a buyer instantly.
Other websites include Amazon, Etsy, etc.
There are also specialized websites for each different type of collectible, a simple Google search using for websites selling that type of collectible will land you on those websites.
The most valuable and highest prized collectibles are vintage items and antiques so take a look at your grand dad or grand mum’s stuff, find and sell a collectible online today!
Sell Stock Photographs Online
Stock photographs are those which have been licensed to be used for certain purposes. Stock photography has been growing over the past few years especially online. There are several websites where you can sell your stock photography work at very good prices, the most popular among of them are: Alamy.com, Shutterstock.com, iStock Photo.com, PhotoShelte.com , Fotolia.com, PhotoMoolah.com, Smugmug.com, etc.
In order to make good money from selling stock photography online, you need to shoot high quality photos using a very good camera and also research to find out the types of stock photographs that command the highest prices.
11. Freelancing
Freelancing is one of the most popular legitimate ways of making money online from home. Freelancing is simply doing any type of job without having a particular employer, you can render your services to anyone who needs them and is ready to pay.
Freelancing is a very broad term which encompasses all types of freelance jobs, there are tons of freelance jobs in almost any field you can think of on the internet ranging from writing, graphic design, search engine optimization, digital marketing, translation, programming, transcription and many more.
Typically, freelance jobs can be gotten from freelance websites such as Fiverr, Freelancer, Elance, Odesk, etc.
Tips to make more money from Freelance jobs
- Get to know what you are really good at: This is to ensure you stand out among the thousands of freelancers in any given field. When you offer services in a field you are really good at and are passionate about, you tend to provide outstanding services to your clients who will appreciate you by patronizing you more, giving you good ratings and referring more customers to you.
- Offer your services for free at the beginning: This is to attract customers as there are many other players in the game, with time as your ratings increase, you can start charging for jobs but do not charge too much as there are competitors who will offer lower prices to lure prospective clients.
- Create a blog: Having a blog on the niche you are doing freelance jobs in will help a lot as you can show prospective clients your work through it and you can also get more clients through your blog visitors. You can start a free blog on blogger.com.
- Don’t take more jobs than you can handle: Taking more jobs than you can handle might cause you to miss completion deadlines and this will result in negative reviews from clients which is really bad for business.
Freelance Writing
One of the most popular legitimate ways to make money online from home is Freelance Writing, there are many successful freelance writers making thousands of dollars monthly.
The money doesn’t come easily though, to get to that level, you must put in tons of work and you must be very good at it.
Freelance writing is simply writing articles, thesis, etc for individuals and companies without working permanently for them, freelance means you can choose who to work for. The most popular way to get freelance writing work is through freelancing websites such as Fiverr, Freelancer, Elance, etc.
To become a successful freelance writer, you need to be a good writer and be willing to devote a lot of time and effort into freelance writing.
To start freelance writing, all you need to do is to simply register on a freelance writing website and start looking for jobs. Jobs don’t come easy though because there are a lot of freelance writers out there, Here are some tips to succeed and get more jobs on freelance writing platforms.
There are other platforms where you can do freelance writing work and be paid well also although they require significantly more work. Some popular freelance writing sites are:
Listverse – Pays $100 for every post they accept. They accept list posts only with a minimum of 1,500 words and 10 things on the list.
TopTenz – Pays $50 per post, article must be in list format like Listverse and must be at least 1,500 words.
Others are A List Apart, FundsforWriters, Mashable, iWriter, Textbroker, etc
12. Internet Life Coaching
Life coaches help people improve their quality of life, find fulfillment and achieve their highest potential. They have become quite popular over the years and the good thing about been a life coach is that you don’t have to be highly educated or trained, all you need is common sense, a good sense of family values and passion for helping others.
Life coaching has been valued as an over 2 billion US Dollar industry which is still growing daily. There are various types of life coaching, some include; Health and Wellness coaching, Relationship coaching, Career coaching, Charisma coaching, Audacity coaching, Spiritual coaching, Business coaching, etc. To be a successful life coach, it is best to specialize in a life coaching niche which you have a wealth of experience and are passionate about.
An internet life coach is a life coach who utilizes the internet for his/her coaching, this could be done by coaching people through websites or blogs, video streaming platforms such as YouTube, Video calling through Skype, Social media- Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Tips for Successful Internet Life Coaching
- Find out what drives you: This is to ensure you don’t become a coach in something you are not passionate about as that might bring negative effects. Know why exactly you want to be a life coach and why in your chosen specialty.
- Don’t lay too much emphasis on the money: As with any business whether online or offline, set your sights on been the best at what you do rather than on how much you can make and watch the money come easily after that.
- Get knowledge on your life coaching specialty: Read books and take courses in your chosen field of life coaching, having more knowledge will make you more valuable to your clients and also make you a better person.
- Learn from other Life Coaches: The best way to learn is by studying those who have been there before you, learn from their successes and failures and be better than them.
How to Become an Internet Life Coach and Make Money from it
- Get a Website/Blog: The easiest and best way to get clients in this day is to have a blog on which you regularly post highly interesting and authoritative articles on topics related to your job as an internet life coach. As people visit your blog, you gain a loyal following who might retain you as their personal life coach and also refer you to other potential clients.
- Create Social Media Pages: The effect of social media on business cannot be overemphasized, create Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social network pages and add them to you blog. Engage with your followers on the social media platforms and watch your client base grow rapidly.
- Offer your services for free: This technique always works, offer people your services for free for a limited period and you will definitely see an increase in client numbers.
- Expand your earning options: Write and sell e-books, organize paid webinars (online seminars) and more.
Life coaches earn around 40,000 US Dollars annually but you can make much more than that depending on how good you are.
13. Online Crowdfunding
Crowdfunding simply means when lots of people (crowd) invest their money to fund a business and it is increasingly becoming a popular way of making money online, in fact last year Crowdfunders reported huge returns on investment.
There are a lot of startups and businesses which need capital to run or expand their business and are willing to borrow funds to pay back at an interest rate or give the investors a percentage share of the business.
There are different categories of crowd funding with the most popular being:
- Peer to Peer Lending: In this form of crowd funding, investors lend funds to individuals and businesses at a fixed interest rate through online platforms. Borrowers are matched to lenders with the lowest interest rates in a bid to increase competition and drop interest rates.
- Equity Investment: Investors receive equity (shares) in the business for the money they invest. Just like any company stock, with increase in the value of the company, you make profit and with decrease in the value, you make a loss. Some online equity investment platforms are: AngelsDen, Seedmentors, Seedrs and Crowdcube
- Asset Based Finance: Small companies sell their unpaid invoices to Crowdfunders who pay around 80% to 90% of the unpaid invoices and receive 100& of the unpaid invoice values after about 45 days, therefore giving investors between 10 to 20 percent ROI. Market Invoice and Platform Black are examples of asset based finance crowdfunding companies.
The disadvantages of crowdfunding are majorly the fact that you are not protected against the collapse of a business which means you can lose all your investment before even seeing a dime in profit and that you are not in control of the business decisions.
To protect yourself from total loss of your crowdfunding investment, it is paramount that you carry out due diligence and research the business you want to invest in thoroughly and also seek advice from experienced investors and business analysts before investing your hard earned money.
14. Website Development
Good web designers and developers have been making big bucks since the development of the world wide web and even though the advent of content management systems such as WordPress, Blogger, Joomla, Drupal, etc has greatly reduced the number of jobs available for them, talented web designers and developers are still in high demand.
A website designer or web developer is a programmer who uses web programming languages to create websites and web applications. To become a website designer or developer, you need to be passionate about programming so that you won’t get frustrated along the line. Aspiring web designers can learn how to write code, compile code, debug code and execute code with free tools found online such as free ebooks, free Youtube web design and web development tutorial videos, mobile apps which teach web programming such as the W3Schools App.
There are many web programming languages available today but the most important are:
HTML: Means Hyper Text Markup Language and is the standard programming language for website development.
CSS: Means Cascading Stlye Sheets and is used together with HTML, it is used for programming styles in websites and web applications.
JavaScript: Is the main programming language used to program HTML and the entire web.
PHP: Means Hypertext Preprocessor and is very widely used. It is a free open source web scripting language.
JQuery: Is a Javascript library whose function is to make Javascript easier to use on websites.
MySQL: Websites are made up of databases and SQL allows you access and edit database files. SQL means Structured Query Language.
Many organization recruit web designers and pay them handsomely to build and maintain their websites, you can also find plenty of freelance web design and development work on freelance websites such as Elance, Freelancer, etc.
15. Websites That Pay
Did you know that there are websites which pay you to use them? Well there are quite a number of them that are ready to pay you to shop, take surveys, test products, use their search engines, use products, etc.
These websites are not going to give you big bucks but they can put some money in your pocket. Although there are many scam websites out there which ask you to do stuff and say they’ll pay but they never do, there are a few legitimate websites which pay for the jobs you do.
Some popular legitimate paying websites are:
Swagbucks – Have a variety of ways to make money on the site such as taking surveys, using their search engine, etc
InboxDollars – Pays users to take surveys, shop, use their search engine, etc. Also give a $5 signup bonus.
Project Payday – Pays users to use their products for a trial period, they pay to lure people to use their products with the hope that they will eventually buy the product or forget to cancel the trial and get an automatic renewal.
IZEA – IZEA pays users to blog and tweet photos and videos on their timelines, they pay more money to users with higher numbers of twitter followers or blog traffic.
There are many more legitimate paying websites, do a Google search with the phrase “legitimate websites that pay” to find them.
To make substantial money from websites that pay for completing tasks, its best to sign up on many of them so that your combined income from all of them will be worthwhile.
16. Teaching Online
Providing answers and tutoring is also a very good way to make money online working at home, there are quite a number of individuals making a comfortable living doing just that.
Answer Questions Online and Get Paid
This is a good type of work from home job. There are a lot of websites which pay you to answer questions on specific topics, most of the sites require you to sign up to start answering questions and making money.
Some of these websites are:
Chacha – You get paid when you answer questions sent by people through text messages. Register at becomeaguide.chacha.com
FunAdvice.com – For every question you answer, you earn a point which are then accumulated and converted to dollars.
Just Answer.com – This is good for experts in specific fields, you get paid to answer questions asked by people about things in your field.
Knowledge Generation Bureau (KGB) – This is similar to Chacha and involves answering questions by text messaging. They pay 10 cents for every full response and 5 cents for validation responses.
LivePerson – This too is a service which allows you earn money by answering questions in your field of expertise through phone calls, you are allowed to set your fee per minute of call.
Ether – Pays you for answering questions on an Ether phone number given to you, you can set your rate by the minute or hour and schedule your calls to be within a certain period.
Web Answers – This website allows registered users answer questions and pays them with a share of their Google Adsense revenue. The amount you are paid depends on how good your answers are among other factors.
These websites might not make you millions but they will surely put some extra money in your pocket.
Teach What You Love Online
Do you love teaching? Now you can make good money online from the comfort of your home by simply creating tutorial videos and selling them for a fee. Online platforms like Lynda.com, LinkedIn Learning, Coursera and others offer tutors the opportunity to make good money by creating tutorial videos on topics they are experts in and get paid each time a user buys the tutorial video.
To start making money tutoring online, simply register on an online paid tutoring platform, create extensive and easily comprehensive tutorial videos on topics you are knowledgeable in and watch the money flow in. That is not to say you will become a millionaire overnight though!
17. Virtual Assistant Jobs
A Virtual Assistant is a a person who assists clients with a variety of tasks depending on his/her specialty working from a remote location usually from home. A virtual assistant job is one of the best legitimate ways to make money from home as it is free and less stressful than an office job.
There are no specific services which a virtual assistant offers, every virtual assistant does tasks depending on their skills and virtual assistant job descriptions are as wide as the internet itself. There are virtual assistants for every task on the internet.
You can choose to specialize in one or two services and be the best at them or offer a wide range of services. With time, you can even hire some people and start your own virtual assistant company.
Here is a list of some services offered by virtual assistants also known as virtual professionals:
Graphic design, Project management, App development, Data Entry, Transcription, Copywriting, Website building, Video/Audio editing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Management, etc
How to become a Virtual Assistant
- Find out the skills you are best at and offer services related to those skills, don’t be a ‘Jack of all trades and master of none”
- Register and try out various platforms which hire virtual assistants, some of them are:
ODesk.com, Freelancer.com, Elance.com, HiremyMom.com, Mytasker.com
- Stick to the platform you like best.
- Make sure you do your best in every task and watch your earnings soar with time.
Virtual Assistants earn from $20 to over $100 every hour depending on the type of work they do. The key to been successful in every online business and any business at all is to focus on been the best in what you do and not focus on the money. Been the best will definitely bring you truck loads of cash.
Hopefully, you have read all 9000+ words and now understand the A-Z of internet businesses and how to make money online in the comfort of your home. If you work hard and have patience, within a short time, you might just become a boss of your own and sack your boss.
The truth is making money online is hardly a walk in the park, it takes hard-smart work, time, dedication and patience but eventually you will make the big bucks if you don’t quit!
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