It’s hard to find a comprehensive summary of how to make money online. Most articles will give you a few ideas, but I have yet to find something that is comprehensive and detailed enough to be that helpful without a lot of additional research. So I decided it would be of value to my readers to condense everything I currently know into one comprehensive summary that I will continue to update as I learn more. Every type of online income I have found can be categorized into one of nine categories. I will also include some of the most popular websites in each category.
The nine categories are:
1. Sell Unskilled Services (test websites, take surveys, etc.)
2. Sell Skilled Services
3. Sell Your Own Products
4. Sell the Products of Others
5. Invest Money for a Return
6. Create Content and Monetize it
7. Become an Employee Who Works From Home
8. Arbitrage
9. Cryptocurrency Mining
If someone thinks of something that doesn’t fit in one of these categories, please leave a comment.
1. Sell Unskilled Services
There are several websites that allow you to connect with businesses that will pay you relatively small amounts of money for simple tasks.
Inbox Dollars They will pay you cash or rewards for doing things that include taking surveys, watching video ads, using search engines, shopping, playing games, and redeeming coupons. Many surveys will pay you $.50 – $1 each. You need to earn $30 before you can request a payout.
Swagbucks Similar to InboxDollars
eJury Pays $5-10 for casting a verdict on a mock trial
UserTesting You can make $10 doing a 15-20 minute test of a website.
IZEA Get paid for tweeting, blogging, and taking photos/videos. The more followers you have the more you make.
2. Sell Skilled Services
There is an almost unlimited amount of services you can sell online, including some things you may not have thought of. For example, you can get paid for answering questions. The more in-demand skills include programming, online marketing, graphic design, and writing.
Gig Sites
Fiverr Buy and Sell all kinks of mini-jobs for $5.
Elance
Guru
Writing Sites
TextBroker
iWriter
ListVerse
A List Apart
FundsForWriters
Matador Network
UxBooth
3. Sell Your Products
One thing you need to realize is that in the information age you don’t need to have a physical product to sell. You can also sell digital products which are great because the marginal cost of production is zero and shipping costs are zero. In other words, once you invest time and money to make a digital product it costs you nothing to make additional copies.
Of course, many people want to sell physical goods, and there are many ways to do that.
Amazon – They will even store your goods for you, and do payments and shipping.
Etsy – Great for buying and selling handmade products.
Ebay – Sell all kinds of new and used goods.
Udemy – Sell Educational Products
Shopify – Shopify allows you to easily create custom online stores and they take care of payments, shipping, and track sales.
Shutterstock – Upload your photos for others to download, and make $.25 per download.
4. Sell Other People’s Products
Drop Shipping
Drop Shipping is a business where you sell a product on your website, but the product is stored and shipped by someone else; you make a profit on the difference between what you can buy the product for and the sale price your customer pays.
The can be a beneficial arrangement because you don’t have to produce a product or deal with the storing or shipping; you just worry about marketing. Your supplier can specialize in producing a low-cost product and counts on lots of people marketing their product to achieve a lot of sales.
Affiliate Marketing
In my opinion, this is one of the better ways to make money because of the amount of money you can make, and also because you scale your business and create passive income.
Affiliate Marketers are basically the salespeople of the internet. And good salesmen can make a lot of money. Traditional salespeople have to rely a lot of cold-calling and their relational skills to sell products. In contrast, a good digital salesman doesn’t need to cold-call or have a winning personality; they mostly just need to be savvy internet marketers.
There are companies in every product category that offer affiliate programs, with commissions that range from 1% to 70% or higher. The higher commissions are usually on digital products like e-books. Some of the most popular affiliate programs are:
Amazon
Wealthy Affiliate
Clickbank
For more detailed information and reviews on the above affiliate programs and others, visit this page
5. Invest Money to Generate a Return
This category can basically be broken down into investing in companies and products or just trading in the financial markets. The disadvantage of this category is that it is generally harder to make money, but the advantage is that you can make millions of dollars if you know how to. I have spent a significant amount of time learning how to make money this way and large part of the content on this site will relate to this. If you’re interested in this topic, start with the page Trading the Markets or my Total Newbie Trading Course.
6. Create Content and Monetize it
A lot of people that make a living off the internet do it by creating content and generating revenue by a combination of advertising, affiliate marketing, and selling their own products and services.
This website is going to be a case study in how well this works, and I expect that if I can create good content and get people to look at it that it should take about a year to start making decent revenue.
7. Work for a company from Home
Rather than doing contract work, some companies will hire you indefinitely to work from home.
SpeakWrite – You can make up to $15/hour for transcription.
StudioD
FastChart
LeapForceAtHome – Rate Websites
LiveOps – Call Center
8. Arbitrage
The dictionary definition of arbitrage is: the simultaneous buying and selling of securities, currency, or commodities in different markets or in derivative forms in order to take advantage of differing prices for the same asset.
Drop Shipping, where you sell someone else’s product on your site at a higher price, is one form of arbitrage. But another not as obvious type of arbitrage involves buying cheap traffic on Google or other add networks, and then filling your website with advertisements that pay out more to you than you are paying for the traffic. Essentially, you are just taking advantage pricing differences between different types of ads.
If you’ve ever clicked an ad on a website or search engine and ended up at a page just filled with a kinds of ads, you’ve probably stumbled on a site trying make money through arbitrage.
9. Cryptocurrency Mining
By this point I assume almost everyone reading this knows what bitcoin is. If you want to learn more about bitcoin you can view this Youtube video I found that does a good 2m overview of bitcoin.
Bitcoin is a type of cryptocurrency, and there are hundreds of other cryptocurrencies out there. Bitcoins (or any cryptocurrency) are created by ‘mining’. Mining bitcoin basically just means you have computers trying to solve complicated math problems, and they get rewarded for their help with bitcoins. So to mine bitcoin you need a computer with a good graphics card, a lot of electricity, and the mining software.
The big question is ‘how much can you make mining bitcoin?’. The answer is always changing, but you can get an estimate using a bitcoin calculator. I found this one which also has a table giving an estimate of how much you can make. At the time I’m writing this the estimate says you can make $.83/hour or $20/day.