Whether you’ve been looking for ways to supplement your income or you’d like to start your own business at home, you’ll be happy to know there are many ways to make legitimate money online. In fact, there are so many that sometimes the sheer number of choices can be confusing, so in this article we’ll give you an overview of five of the most common ways you can successfully make money online.
1. Selling Things – Most people think of EBay when they start trying to figure out how they can make some extra money online, because it’s a very quick, easy, and inexpensive way to get started. Ebay is not your only option of course, because there are many excellent places you can sell things online. There are numerous other auction sites for example, as well as general “for sale” sites such as Craigslist.
Most people start selling things online by clearing out their own house. By collecting everything you don’t need or want anymore, and creating advertisements or auctions online to sell them, you can make money and declutter your house at the same time.
Once you’ve gotten past that initial step, then you have a couple of choices. Some people simply expand their initial model and start collecting unwanted and unneeded things from friends, family and neighbors. You could even run a local newspaper ad offering to haul off these types of things at no charge. This provides you with more products you can list and sell online.
Other people prefer to go more towards a retail style money making opportunity. Instead of collecting used items from other people, they buy low cost new items from inexpensive sources. Then they add a markup to those items and sell them for profits online.
2. Offering Services – Another excellent way to make money online is to offer specialty services. If you write well for example, you could build a list of clients who pay you to write articles or books for them. If you have a knack for graphic design you can offer this service to advertising companies, websites, and other small businesses for a fee. If you know how to develop websites or do different types of web or computer programming, you can sell those services to other businesses and individuals too.
There are a wide variety of skills and services which other people will pay you for online. Simple things such as research, mundane data entry, consulting, interviews, and more can all be offered to other people, businesses and organizations for a fee.
3. Writing for Websites – Since the Internet is primarily still a heavily text-based medium, anyone with at least moderate writing skills can easily make money online. The better your writing skills are of course, the more money you’ll be able to make. Not everyone is cut out to provide professional services like those noted above, so a popular alternative is to write for specific websites in a more job-like fashion instead.
There are many websites online which will pay you to write content for them, and you don’t have to have any special training or degrees either. These types of sites don’t pay professional level earnings, but they can be an excellent option for someone who just wants to make a bit of extra money to make ends meet each month.
4. Writing for Yourself – This online money making option is more like creating a business for yourself. Many writers go this route when they want to make more money than the general writing sites pay. With this approach you can make money by creating your own website or blog, and you can make money by writing books and reports that you sell to others.
When you write content for your own websites, you often make money from advertising that runs on your site. If you have your own books available for sale, you can promote those books on your site and make money from the ongoing sales of those.
If you choose to simply write books there are many options in that respect as well. You can publish print versions at Amazon for example, and you can publish electronic Kindle editions with no upfront cost. You could also provide other digital versions of your books – aka EBooks – in PDF format which buyers can download immediately after paying for them.
5. Promoting Other People’s Products – Not everyone can or wants to write for a living of course, so there are many other options available instead. The most popular option online is to simply promote other people’s products. Then, each time one of those products sells as a result of your promotional efforts, you earn a sales commission. This is referred to as affiliate marketing.
You can promote other people’s products in a number of ways. You could pay for advertising on the main search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN for example. You could also pay for advertising spots on popular websites, and you can use the classified areas of for sale sites such as EBay and Craigslist. You can even advertise online products with offline classified ads.
Share A Sale is a free affiliate network that I recommend. They have over 2000 merchants and tens of thousands of products you can choose to make money from.
