Making money online can be an incredible way to earn a living with the internet constantly changing and influencing our lives. The most important part of this being the “work from home” term becoming more and more popular as well as the social distancing and lockdown situations experienced globally as a result of the COVID 19 pandemic.
There are millions of people making money online every day with even more people joining the bandwagon of the gig economy each and every day.
Of course, there are different peculiar reasons why people choose to make money online. They can be anything such as, but not limited to:
- To create a separate streamlined source of income to support paying the bills.
- To replace your current 9-5 job.
- To become your own boss with no one else giving you commands on what to do, how to do, and when to do it. You get the freedom to choose how you work and earn your living every day and also take credit for your hard-earned success.
- The ability to earn an unlimited amount of money because if you are very good at what you do and you always deliver what people are looking for, you will definitely make more money than you do in your ordinary day job.
For whatever reason you decide to make money online, here is a comprehensive list of 10 ways to make money online at home during COVID-19.
1.Blogging:
This has been a proven method for making money online over the years because popular blogs such as SmartBlogger, Smart Passive Income, Copyblogger, Quicksprout, and other successful blogs have been leaving a track record of success and they are still dominating the space of making money online through blogging.
The key to making money blogging, however, is to be patient and consistent along with following these step-by-step processes that will ensure you are well on your way to making thousands of dollars per month or earning six figures a year. These are:
A. Choose a profitable niche:
Choosing a profitable niche is very important for the success of your blog because passion is not equal to profit.
You need to study what people are interested in, what they are buying, what problems they are facing, and the solutions they are looking for to curtail those problems.
For example, the health industry is always a profitable niche because every day thousands upon thousands of people are looking for ways to improve their health and well-being or trying to overcome an illness they’re suffering from like people with diabetes, stroke, or even cancer.
Once you have the right niche, the next step is to start providing immense value on exactly what it is they’re looking for.
B. Improve your writing skills:
This involves honing your writing skills to become a skilled writer by creating the best content ever published on topics that lots of people care about and are interested in learning more about them.
This can be achieved by knowing exactly which type of blog content is interesting and engaging to your audience and writing about those topics, as well as having knowledge of the best writing frameworks such as list posts or how-to guides that are proven to make blog contents more popular. This way, your content becomes more helpful and valuable to the readers than any other post ever published on that exact topic.
C. Start bringing in traffic:
There are many ways to drive traffic to your blog with the largest traffic sources being Google and Facebook.
Depending on the niche you select, you might choose to focus on either Facebook or Google as the main source of traffic even though, combining the two giants will bring in the best results.
You can decide to get them to send you a decent amount of traffic by paying for Google or Facebook ads, they like that. However, you can still get that same amount of traffic as you would from paying ads and even more for free.
For Facebook, you can create and post engaging content regularly on your Facebook Page and sharing them on other relevant Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups with a link back to your blog.
With Google, it involves studying your competition and learning everything on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and applying SEO best practices as well as guest posting on relevant popular blogs in your niche with a link back to your blog.
Both of these methods take years of study and practice to master, but you should be able to start getting a decent amount of traffic to your blog after a few months.
D. Grow your email list:
Using an email marketing tool such as MailChimp, ConvertKitas well as Pop-Ups, you can start converting the traffic coming to your blog into email subscribers by offering something of value to them such as an e-book, a checklist, or even a podcast for free in exchange for their names and email addresses. This will ensure that your audience keeps coming back for more and more valuable content which helps to build and establish a relationship with them until they eventually trust you as an authority in your niche.
Growing an email list should be a top priority because this is where the revenue is. The size of an email list for a blog is the best way to predict a revenue income potential of a blog.
The rule here is that you will be able to make $1 every month for each email subscriber. This means if you have 50,000 email subscribers, you can make $50,000 per month because your email subscribers are your loyal audience who trust you and will therefore accept and buy any recommendation from you.
This is why pop-ups are important in collecting email addresses because if a person visits your blog and then leaves without handing over their email addresses, there is absolutely no chance of them coming back to your blog again.
E. Start monetizing your blog:
Now that you have a decent amount of traffic and built a sizeable email list, you can finally begin monetizing your blog.
There are several ways to monetize a blog and choose the one that works best for your niche. The most popular methods are:
- Ads or Sponsored posts.
- Affiliate Marketing.
- Selling Online Courses and E-books.
The key to success in monetizing a blog highly depends on knowing what your audience needs (i.e. what they are willing to pay for) and offering it to them.
2. Freelancing:
A freelancer is a person who gets paid to provide a service either on an hourly, per word, or per-project basis.
To succeed in freelancing, you need to have a skill that is sought after by people and is willing to pay for. This should not be hard if you are good at something or you were employed since you can turn that previous experience or skill into a freelance business by offering your services to those in need of it.
However, you do need a live portfolio to be able to land freelance jobs because your customers (clients) will ask for it to gauge and verify your skills and capability. To do this, you must create a freelance portfolio website to showcase your work but there are other freelance portfolio sites you can use for free.
For freelance writers, you can showcase your writing samples on platforms like the content. For freelance designers, you can use 99Designs.
The next step is to find freelance clients in need of your services. You can decide to find them by joining and working on freelance platforms like Upwork, Fiverr and other freelance marketplaces. Beware, however; competition is stiff in these freelance platforms as you will be up against thousands of other like-minded freelancers applying for the same jobs.
The second approach involves creating your own freelance website and then proceed to finding and pitching clients directly. This eliminates competition and makes it easy for you to select and work with the clients you want.
You can find them directly on AngelList, LinkedIn, Facebook groups, Online Business Directories like Limeleads as well as job boards such as Problogger, Contena, FlexJobsetc.
3. Create a YouTube Channel:
Another way to make money online is to start a YouTube channel. YouTube is a hugely popular site that has well over a billion users. It’s also home to top independent content creators commonly referred to as YouTube stars due to their huge fan base and net income. Some of these popular YouTube channels are:
I. Dude Perfect:
This is a Sports Entertainment Channel created and operated by five guys from the U.S with a total number of 53 million subscribers.
II. The Rad Brad:
Is a popular YouTube channel owned by Bradley Colburn a.k.a “The Rad Brad” who specializes in creating video game walkthroughs with over 2 million YouTube subscribers.
III. Prank vs Prank:
Another popular YouTube channel owned by Jesse Wellens and his girlfriend Jeanna is famous for prank-playing with total YouTube subscribers of over 7 million.
All of these channels earn over $1.3 million in yearly income revenue showing proof that you can start a YouTube channel on every topic imaginable to mankind and eventually find success.
To do this, you have to understand your passion and monitor to see if there is a demand for what you’re interested in offering. This could be anything like reviewing toys, playing video games, reviewing movies, technology, and creating a YouTube channel based on that niche.
After garnering 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of viewing time on your channel, the next step is to monetize your videos by joining the YouTube Partner Program. This gives you access to a wide range of tools that will enable you to earn money from your videos using Google Adsense.
The ads appear on the videos via display and other advertising formats and are paid by the advertisers based on impressions and clicks.
Other ways to earn money from your channel include:
A. Sales of Merchandise:
After joining the YouTube Partner Program, you can enable this tool on your account and will have access to sell merchandise to your loyal audience.
B. Brand Sponsorship:
This involves companies paying YouTube content creators to promote their brands or products in their videos.
To be successful with this, however, you need to have a large amount of fan base to draw in the attention of marketing agencies that are responsible for matching companies with social media influencers. This is also known as Influencer Marketing.
C. Fan Funding:
This is done by offering monthly memberships to your loyal fans to access your content. To enable this feature, you must have a minimum of 30,000 subscribers to your YouTube channel.
4. Sell Photos Online:
Do you have a skill for photography? If so you’re in luck because photographers are in high demand for their professional skills by bloggers, graphic designers, small to medium-sized businesses as well as large corporations who are in constant need of photos for their personal or business use.
But where do you sell your photos? For starters, you could sell your photos online on your personal website. This is because you can attractively showcase your work to attract and convert customers as well as:
- Setting your very own prices.
- Having total control over your work.
- You do not have to share your revenue with anyone.
- You set your own Terms and Conditions, among other things.
On the flip side, you can choose to sell them on popular marketplaces and earn a commission every time someone buys your work.
But before you jump into this route, make sure you read their guidelines on their Terms and Conditions as well as the commission percentage given to contributors to decide which one of them works best for you.
Without further ado, these are:
- Adobe
- Shutterstock
- Tour Photos
- PhotoShelter
- 500px
- Fotomoto
- Snapped4u
- Etsy
- Alamy
- Crestock
5. Create an App:
Making money with apps involves studying the marketplace to see if there is a demand for the type of app you’re trying to develop with the best app marketplace being Google Play and App Store.
The best way to do this is to compare or align your idea with successful apps to see if they are similar or have something in common. If they do, you just have to study the app and see whether you can add something over its functionalities and solve its weaknesses into a new and improved app.
After that, you design the app’s experience to create and ensure smooth functionality and utmost satisfaction for your intended customers and proceed to register as a developer on Google Play or App Store to commence app development.
The next step is to find a talented programmer to discuss your ideas and start coding and developing the app.
Now it’s time to test your app and make sure everything works perfectly before the final release.
Finally, you can now release your app to the market ready for download and get that cash rolling in.
6. Create and Sell Online Courses:
If you have knowledge or expertise on a subject matter people are looking for, you can make a decent amount of money selling that knowledge as an online course.
This is especially true for career-related courses such as computer programming, accounting, marketing, technology, etc. However, this doesn’t mean topics like how to make money online, how to use Microsoft Excel and other non-technical subjects don’t perform well either as long as they help to solve a problem and are therefore in demand in the market.
After selecting the perfect topic that is going to be proven valuable to your audience and creating the course around that topic, the next step is to choose where to host your online course. This could either be hosted on your website or an online marketplace like Udemy.
Obviously, you have to market your course because it’s the only way to make people know about it. This should be easier if you have an email list since they are your loyal audience who trust you and are always open to gain more and more knowledge from you.
Another medium is to use social media to tap into their large number of audiences who might be interested in your course.
7. Become an Online Tutor:
You can earn money online by becoming an instructor if you have knowledge or skill in a particular subject and can teach people who want to learn and gain more on that subject. This can be anything like Math, English, or even Kung Fu.
To do this, you need to start your own online academy and market your courses and programs to students. Here are the steps you need to begin your own online school:
- Create a website and use keyword research tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner or Google Trends to select a niche and demand for that niche.
- Visit other online academies, i.e. your competitors, and see how they operate.
- Study extensively on your chosen niche.
- Now decide on the exact topic within your niche you will be able to teach.
- Market your online academy on Google and social media to draw in a qualified audience and convert them into students.
You can also market your classes to your email list if you already run a blog and are the right fit within the niche.
8. Create and Publish E-books:
E-books are books just like your physical handheld books but ones that are downloaded and used online. They can be Guides, How To Manuals, Science Fiction, Non-Fiction, Love and Romance, Health, Technology, and basically any other topic you can think of as long as there is the demand for it. There are 2 ways to make money online selling e-books, they are:
A. Website:
You can sell your e-books online by setting up your website and publish them directly on the website, making them accessible to your readers. This means people visit your website, order the book, and they download it in a PDF format using a download link.
The real advantage to this is you get to control everything from charging higher prices to having access to customer information which you can use to sell additional products or services in the future. You also retain all the profits for yourself.
B. Publish on Amazon:
You can make use of the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing platform (KDP) to get your e-book published on Amazon.
It is a free service to use and you will have access to over 2 billion active buyers on Amazon to market your book.
Make sure to add keywords associated with your e-book as well as a long detailed description of the book so that buyers will be able to find and purchase your book when searching for books on Amazon.
Be aware that Amazon takes up to 30% commissions of the sales you make.
9. Sell Products on Amazon FBA:
Amazon FBA means Fulfilment-by-Amazon and it’s a service offered by Amazon to help sellers store, pick, and ship inventory in their fulfillment center. It costs far less to store and ship your products using Amazon FBA than it does to ship products yourself.
You can take advantage of a Prime badge given to Amazon FBA sellers which offer faster shipping, higher customer conversions, and getting featured on their product pages for maximum exposure as long as you sell your products through Amazon FBA.
You can make quick money selling your items on Amazon. They can be anything in the house you no longer need like CD’s, video games, a couch, used books, TV’s and so much more.
You may also decide to make a passive income on Amazon using the following methods:
1. Retail Selling:
You can buy products from retail stores at lower prices than Amazon prices and list them on Amazon.
2. Online Arbitrage:
You buy products from e-commerce stores and websites at the lowest available prices and resell them on Amazon.
3. Wholesale:
You buy products in bulk at a discounted price and sell them on Amazon.
4. Private Label:
This basically involves creating your own brand of manufactured products and building a listing on Amazon.
10. Sell Designs Online:
Whether you’re an art director, an illustrator, a 3D artist, or any type of graphic designer, you can sell your skills online and make money.
As a graphic designer, there are ways you can establish your own graphic design business to earn a passive income by selling your design products online. Among these ways are:
a. Create a Website:
You can create your freelance website and start displaying your creative graphic design work and market them to clients who will be interested in buying your design works.
b. Freelance Platforms/Marketplace:
Other places to sell your creative work are online design platforms where freelance graphic designers can create and sell their work to the marketplace clients in need of their services. These are:
- Upwork
- Fiverr
- Designhill
- Etsy
- 99Designs
- Creative Market
- Art Web
- DesignCuts
- Threadless
- Zazzle
- Redbubble
- My Fonts
- Design By Humans
- Society 6
- ArtFire
- Graphic River
- INPRNT
- PixApp etc.
This list is in no way an exhaustive list as there are many other ways to make money online. Whether it’s just to earn extra bucks or starting a new full-time career, there is always something for you.
Just ask yourself what you enjoy doing and what skills you have and try to match them with all the money-making opportunities here and out there to see which one is best for you.
And remember, patience, hard work, and dedication are necessary to achieve your goals.
