Online jobs are suitable for everyone, from students to retired people. With more parents working from home and college students looking for flexible part-time jobs, online work is the perfect answer to making money from home.
There are many ways to make money online and many people are making a substantial income from the comfort of their homes.
Here's a look at some of the best ways to make money online for beginners.
Some methods of making money online include paid surveys, Fiverr gigs, selling on eBay or other auction sites, providing freelance services, selling products, affiliate marketing, YouTube marketing, and placing ads on your site.
Some of these will be more suitable for you than others. Just choose the ideas that best fits your skills and interest.
1. Participate in paid surveys
Participating in paid surveys is one of the easiest ways to make extra cash online. You won't get rich from doing surveys. But it's an easy way to make extra money quickly.
Paid surveys are easy to fill in and anyone can do them from the comfort of their home. You basically answer simple questions and earn money for participating in surveys.
Are surveys legitimate? And why would people pay you for your opinion?
Yes, participating in surveys is a legitimate way to make money online. Companies and businesses need to know what potential customers want before bringing new products to the market and they want to know how they can improve existing products and services.
They hire market research companies to conduct surveys and gather the opinions of customers and potential customers. They offer incentives to survey participants for filling out questionnaires. Some surveys pay cash money (e.g. through Paypal) while others provide gift certificates and prizes.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Surveys are free to join. You don't want to pay anyone for a membership or a list of survey companies. You can find many websites that provide free listings of surveys companies. Here are some of the best survey companies to get you started:
Survey Junkie pays for surveys, product testing, and focus groups. Get paid up to $75 per survey with one of the highest-rated survey sites. Choose from many easy, short surveys. Get PayPal cash or gift cards. Join Survey Junkie here.
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2. Provide Fiverr gigs
Selling gigs on Fiverr is another easy and fast way to make money online. Fiverr is a popular outsourcing platform and thousands of people are visiting this site every day to look for people who can do some work for them.
Businesses, bloggers and marketers use the services provided on fiverr to outsource tasks. They are looking for providers who can do some work they can't do or don't want to do themselves.
I have used Fiverr for graphic design services, video creation, social media marketing services, data entry, WordPress services and others.
Fiverr started out with $5 gigs. But Fiver's pricing structure has changed a lot in recent years. Providers are now increasing their basic fees with Packages, Upgrades and Extras. To see how sellers are pricing their packages, go to Fiverr and click around a category you're interested in.
Below you see how examples of a Package
The type of gigs you can provide is almost unlimited. Just use your experience, skills imagination.
3. Sell on eBay or other auction sites
Selling items on eBay is one of the hottest and easiest ways of making a lot of money online.
eBay is a huge money maker for a lot of people, including myself. One of the best things about eBay is that eBay generates traffic for you. Also, you can make a serious income from home without a website or a mailing list. That's why I consider it one of the easiest ways to start making money online.
Many people start on eBay by selling some items they have laying around the house that they don't want anymore. But you can make a full-time income by selling on eBay while only working part-time. You can also combine eBay sales with dropshipping. I personally don't use dropshipping but it's a way to get started on eBay without having your own products or spending a lot of money up front.
3 eBay Tips:
- Choose a product with a high profit margin. Personally, I'm selling high-priced items to the luxury market and doing very well with that.
- Use the right keywords in your title and descriptions so that people can easily find you.
- Provide great images of the products you're selling.
To learn more about selling on eBay, read my blog post about how to make money on eBay.
I also have an post about dropshipping.
4. Provide freelance services
Providing services is one of the most popular ways for making quick money on the Internet.
If you have skills that are in demand, you can provide freelance services and promote them online. You can make a steady income online by offering services that web publishers need on a continual basis.
Popular services people need online include web design and programming, writing, editing, graphic design, transcription, video creation and posting web content are in big demand as web publishers always need fresh content.
If you’re interested in becoming a freelancer and providing services from home, you may want to read my other blog post, 12 Online Jobs – Work from Home or Anywhere where you’ll learn more about these services:
- Virtual assistant
- Transcription
- Freelance Writing
- Freelance Proofreading
- Bookkeeping
- Graphic Design
- Web Design
- Medical Billing & Coding
- Scoping
- Coaching
- Teaching
- Tutoring
If you are interested in learning more about transcription work from home, sign up for my FREE TRANSCRIPTION MINI-COURSE to find out if transcription is the right kind of work for you.
There is also an ongoing need for internet marketing services such as search engine optimization, setting up and managing advertising campaigns (e.g. pay per click campaigns and Facebook advertising), keyword research, setting up autoresponders, online newsletters, mailing lists, and more.
Finding a niche and selling a variety of products is a great way to make money online. You can sell on eBay, Etsy, Amazon, a variety of other sites and through your own website.
You can sell your own products, affiliate products or dropshipped items.
If you’re interested in selling other people’s products or services, check out some of my blog post, How to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing.
You can sell physical products, e.g. clothing, jewelry, crafts, hardcover books, pet supplies and more.
Sell digital products and information products such as ebooks, online courses, software (plugins, apps), audio, video, webinars, video tutorials and paid memberships. Creating courses is one of the best ways to generate passive income with your blog. If you don’t want to create digital products, check out my blog post, How to Make money with private label rights (PLR).
One of the easiest products to get started selling online are printables such as planners, checklists and templates. They are also very popular. You can sell them on Etsy and other online sites.
6. Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to get started in internet marketing.
If you’re interested in selling other people’s products or services, check out some of my blog post, How to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing.
In short, affiliate marketing is promoting other people’s products or services. Affiliates drive traffic to the merchant’s website and receive a compensation from the merchant.
Promoting affiliate products on your blog is typically more profitable than adding Google AdSense ads or other advertising networks because affiliate products (especially digital products) can pay 40 to 75% in commissions and higher.
If you want to get started in affiliate marketing the easy way without a website, you can share affiliate links on Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook (some Facebook groups) and other places that allow it. It's a quick way to get started in affiliate marketing.
But if you want to make it really big in affiliate marketing and achieve consistent results, I recommend setting up a website and learn email marketing.
You can easily find products that fit your niche is by using affiliate networks.
See my listing of the Top 10 Affiliate Networks and Directories in 2020.
If you're interested in learning more about affiliate marketing, check out some of my blog posts about affiliate marketing:
- How to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing in 2020
- 12 Powerful Keys for Beginners to Become Successful at Affiliate Marketing
- Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing by Michelle.
Click here to get Michelle’s free ebook, Affiliate Marketing Tips for Bloggers and find out how she’s making $50,000 per month in affiliate marketing.
7. YouTube video marketing
Ranking YouTube videos is a lot easier to get traffic than ranking in Google and can get you a large amount of traffic.
One way to create a video is by using screen capture software to show information about a digital product.
An even more effective way is to create a video review of your product or an affiliate product. When your prospects see you demonstrate how you use a product on video, it will help you build trust and increase sales.
And if you don't want to create your own videos, you can find video creation services on Fiverr and freelance sites.
8. Make money with social media
Today, there are more opportunities than ever to make money with social media.
You can make money with Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and other social networks. Here are just a few ideas:
- Promote your own products, art, crafts and services through social media.
- Promote other poeple's products as an affiliate.
- Get paid to send other poeple's messages to your followers.
- Get paid to set up and manage other poeple's social media accounts.
- Make money with YouTube.
Check out my blog posts that provides 12 Ways to Make Money with Social Media.
and another post on How to Become a Social Media Manager.
9. Sell stock photos
If you love photography selling stock photos is a great way to make money online. There is a huge demand for images online that marketers and websites use for their publishing needs. Marketers and bloggers need constant images for their sites and for social media marketing.
You can earn royalty fees each time your image is downloaded from royalty free image sites under certain circumstances. The more images you have uploaded the more money you can make. And, once uploaded this is totally passive income.
There are several ways to make money with your stock photos:
- Submit photos to stock photo agencies.
- Sell photos on Etsy, Creative Market or other marketplaces.
- Set up your own stock photography website.
- Submit photos to specialized membership sites.
Top stock photo marketplaces
You can earn royalty fees each time your image is downloaded from royalty-free image sites under certain circumstances.
If you enjoy photography, this can be a good way to make extra money. And once you’ve uploaded the photos, it’s easy, passive income.
Below are some stock photo agencies that accept photo submissions:
- Shutterstock
- iStock Photo
- Big Stock
- Dreamstime
- Deposit Photos
- SmugMug
- Fotolia
- Alamy
- PhotoShelter
- 123RF
- Can Stock Photo
- Adobe Stock
- Getty Images
The pay for photos can range from $0.25 to $120 per sale depending on the site, license the customer buys and more. From some sites, the majority of sales will pay $0.25 while others pay around $1.00 per image download.
10. Put advertising on your blog or site
Advertising is a great way to create passive income with your blog. You can join advertising networks and place their ads on your blog. You have to create a website or blog, provide good content and sign up with an advertising program. There are many advertising networks to choose from depending on the traffic your site is getting.
There are no minimum traffic requirements to be able to put up AdSense ads on your blog. That's why many people start with this advertising network. To make sure you're accepted, read their requirements and have some good content on your site before signing up for Adsense.
With Google AdSense, you get paid every time someone clicks on your ads. You don't have to sell anything and nobody has to buy anything from you to make money. After putting the Google AdSense code on your site, the ads are generated automatically and are targeted to your content.
Other advertising networks that don't require a minimum amount of pageviews include VigLink and Media.net. They are great alternatives to AdSense and a good option for new bloggers.
There are advertising networks that pay better but they require a minimum amount of traffic. When you qualify for their minimum traffic requirements, you can replace your AdSense ads with better paying ads from Mediavine (requires a minimum of 25,000 sessions per month) or Adthrive (requires 100,000 monthly pageviews). And that's when advertising will really pay off.
Advertising is a great way to create passive income with your blog and you can make substantial earnings from advertising if you have a high amount of traffic and qualify for some of the better paying ad networks.
11. Data entry work
Data entry work is easy online work. If you're interested in data entry work, check out my article, How to Get Legitimate Data Entry Jobs from Home where I provide a list of companies that provide data entry jobs. I also mention some crowdsourcing jobs where you work on small tasks online.
As you can see, there are many ways to make money online. Use one or more of these ideas to get started making money online!
Survey Junkie pays for surveys, product testing, and focus groups. Get paid up to $75 per survey with one of the highest-rated survey sites. Choose from many easy, short surveys. Get PayPal cash or gift cards. Join Survey Junkie here.
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Disclaimer: If you purchase a product through a referral link, I will get a commission at NO extra cost to you and it helps me to keep providing you with quality information.