Quitting that office job; money is there for the taking on the internet. Check out 13 Proven Ways to Make Money Online Here.
Waking up in your Thai beach bungalow in the morning and discovering that you are tens of euros richer: is that possible? It depends on what you are going to offer online. As a freelancer, your income is more or less proportional to the hours you work, while you can earn your wages while you are selling digital products.
With this article, we will go back to the basics. If you already know exactly where you would like to work from, but not yet exactly what you want to do, I will offer you on a tray 13 different ways to earn marbles online. Some of them overlap, and almost all can be combined. Do you want to let us know which strategy you choose in response to this article?
Earning by completing surveys
Okay, admittedly not very exciting, and it is also not scalable. However, it is a simple way to earn 300 to 500 euros extra per month online. You can sign up for surveys and savings programs. If you take a few minutes daily for this, it can quickly add up.
If you have just started freelancing or have no online work experience yet, this offers a nice option. At survey sites, they explain how you can get the most out of completing surveys. You will be amazed at how you can easily bring in a side income.
In short, for beginners and people who want a small side income, this is worth considering. However, if you want to build more on business, read on in this article.
Become a seller on Amazon
Bol.com is the largest online store in the Netherlands. But did you know that a large part of the products in this webshop are not sold by amazon.com itself, but by partner sellers?
You can start selling products yourself via amazon.com. Nowadays, it is very easy to import products very cheaply from China or other countries. For example, you buy 100 products for 3 euros that you can sell on amazon.com for 19.99. This sounds very simple, but where do you start?
Product research
You first start doing product research. Because a product that does not sell well, you will never earn anything. There are several ways to find out which product is working well. Jia Ruan is a real expert in this. He has been running a very successful business selling products on amazon.com for years. He has started a course that explains exactly how he carries out his product research.
Purchase products
Once you have completed your product research, you can start purchasing the products yourself. You can get in touch with a supplier via Alibaba or other Chinese platforms. Negotiate the price and import the products to the Netherlands. This is, of course, very briefly how purchasing works.
Start selling
As soon as you have received the products, you can offer them for sale on amazon.com. With thousands of customers per day, amazon.com is the perfect marketplace to sell your products quickly. Write a nice ad and post-professional photos to gain the trust of your customers.
Selling via amazon.com sounds very easy, but it is not for everyone. We recommend that you first familiarize yourself with the matter before you start importing products. We know that it is a proven concept where many opportunities are still open for the hard-working entrepreneur.
Become a freelancer
What is sometimes called a disrespectful hourly bill is, in reality, a great way to make money over the internet. André has been doing this for over eight years by selling his services as a web copywriter – first from Gran Canaria, then from Thailand, then from Central America and now from Lanzarote.
There are now even many employers who do not mind if you do your work remotely. Don’t have a skill that you can perform online and remotely?
You can learn to become a copywriter, but there are, of course, plenty of other specialties that lend themselves to freelancing: programmer, virtual assistant, web designer, accountant, and so on.
Become an online coach
If you are an expert in a certain transferable skill such as writing, productivity, but also a physical training form or sport, consider transferring your knowledge to others through a coaching process or individual coaching sessions.
If you are a psychologist, therapist, or addiction expert, then you can also offer your service this way. The difference between ‘coach’ and ‘therapist’ (both broadly speaking) is:
A coach helps a person to become better in a certain skill and does not always have qualifications in training itself outside the skill that is being transferred.
A therapist helps a person to deal with emotions, other people, and situations (from the past) and is often formally trained for this and can demonstrate this.
How you earn money as a coach or therapist is, for example, by:
€ 150 – € 1,500 per month to be asked as a copywriting coach for a weekly Skype meeting and giving and checking homework
€ 75 per Skype session of 60 minutes to be asked as a psychologist
€ 100 per month as a remote personal trainer and daily reminders send via Whatsapp or SMS and call weekly to discuss progress
You can offer your services via:
- All types of freelance websites, although I don’t think this is very effective.
- On this platform, coaches offer their services, and individuals can find a coach for anything and everything (Mindfulness, productivity, finances, etc.)
- Your own website and blog
- I highly recommend this option because it allows you to keep a 100% margin, determine your own price, and position yourself as an expert on your own website, without being one of the thousands.
You can also offer your services this way as a (business) consultant or advisor.
Collect commission (with affiliate marketing)
Webshops, travel organizations, insurers, and many more parties pay your commission if a quotation request or sale comes from you. Via affiliate networks such as Daisycon, you can quickly find partners in the relevant categories.
By the way, you don’t need a website to get people to click on affiliate links. For example, you can review products or services on YouTube and encourage viewers to click through to the provider’s site. Or create a list of email addresses and send out an offer or review. The affiliate marketing revolution course takes a closer look at this.
Sell merchandise with dropshipping.
With dropshipping, you are a trader with, for example, a webshop where orders come in. However, as soon as an order arrives, it is (automatically) forwarded to the supplier who takes care of the handling and shipping of the product. If contact with the customer is required, the supplier often arranges this too, but this depends on the agreement you have made with the supplier as a drop shipper.
The customer pays the drop shipper, and the dropshipper pays the supplier.
A big advantage of dropshipping is that you do not have to make any investments yourself and do not have to have stock. There is, therefore, little risk. Your only job is really to bring in new customers.
What is the difference between Affiliate Marketing and Dropshipping?
Dropshipping is similar to, but different from, affiliate marketing. The big difference is that with affiliate marketing, you forward the customer to the supplier and do not receive any contact details or payment from the customer yourself. However, you don’t have to pay the supplier, and you get paid in commission for every customer you forward. Affiliate marketing is, therefore even more accessible because you will never have to do anything with the customer yourself.
Play online poker
No-Limit Texas Hold ’em.
My first big (well, it was a lot) online money I made with poker. No-Limit Texas Hold ’em poker is a game that is often seen as a game of chance and certainly has an element of chance but is actually a game of skill. If you are better than the players at the price level you play at and continue to play well, for example, with the help of certain support programs, then you can make a lot of profit.
I played on Pokerstars and used PokerOffice as statistics software and TableNinja for hotkeys.
However, there are 3 main reasons why I advise you not to start a career as an online poker player.
Become a day trader
Day traders are people who buy shares or options during the day and try to sell them at a profit before the end of the day.
They do this via a trading platform of their stockbroker, a specialized trading software company, or via a platform that they have developed themselves for this.
To do this successfully, they need multiple monitors and a very fast internet connection to see and seize opportunities that come by immediately.
How do they make money?
The most common strategy is for these traders to grab stock, index (a specific part of the stock market), or volatile enough currency. This means that the price fluctuates quite a bit and that there is a good chance that if you buy when an object is at a low point in its usual fluctuation, it will quickly reach a peak again.
Of course, there is no guarantee for this, but there are mathematical models with which you can calculate the probability that a share will reach a certain price within a certain period. If according to such a model, the investment is favorable, then you buy that object (share, currency, index, etc.). You sell this as soon as the price has gone up again.
Day traders do not do this with large price shifts, but really with small percentages, but on a large scale. For example, they may invest € 10,000 one day and earn € 100 because the stock has increased in value by 1% that day.
However, traders often go long or short with a particular asset, allowing them to take advantage of leverage. For example, this means that they enter into a 5: 1 payout structure for the increase (long) or decrease (short) of a certain share. If that prediction is correct and they cash out, the € 10,000 they have invested is considered € 50,000. That’s the leverage. The disadvantage of this is that if the object’s price falls below or above (depending on whether you go long or short) to a certain value, you will lose your entire investment.
Are you considering becoming a day trader?
Think again.
“10% of the day traders are successful. The other 90% pays for that 10% you could say”
It would be best if you had a lot of knowledge, discipline, and analytical skills to trade profitably. You must also be able to leave your emotions and ego completely outside the door. As soon as you start trading emotionally, you will lose, just like with poker. Many people overestimate themselves and their own skills. You might get away with that in other fields, but not in day trading. Sooner or later, you will be out of business.
Build your own software
This option is not for everyone and is by far the hardest way to make money online, especially if you are just starting out and have no technical skills. Also, this is often an expensive option and one that involves (and continues to bring) a lot of work.
That said, it can be one of the most lucrative options. Here are some examples of companies (which often started as sole traders) that have released successful software in the internet marketing market:
- https://ahrefs.com (SEO tool for backlink and competition analysis, $ 99 / m)
- https://www.leadpages.net (Landingpage builder $ 25 p / m)
- https://moz.com (SEO tool for backlink analysis, among others $ 99 / m)
- https://www.crazyegg.com (Website analysis tool $ 99 p / m)
- https://www.semrush.com (SEO competitor analysis tool $ 99.95/ m)
As you can see, 4 of these 5 examples are priced at $ 99 per month. This is no coincidence. This is a very nice business model because you can accurately predict how much money will come in the next month. You know that at worst, you will lose 5% of your customers per month (there are models for this), so if you have 10,000 paying users, then you will receive about $ 1 million in cash the following month.
If you offer software against a monthly revenue model, you only have to focus on improving 2 numbers:
- the churn rate: how many people stop their membership per month?
- the number of new customers you bring in per month
Keep your churn as low as possible through a good onboarding process. This means that you do everything you can to ensure that your customers actually start using your software and derive value from it. Only then will they remain members in the long term.
Develop apps
Jeroen Baidenmann’s shopping apps allow him to work from anywhere. With his wife and two children, he opts for Gran Canaria’s sunshine guarantee this winter. He can continue programming from the pool apartment, but he also has a list of co-working offices he wants to visit in the island’s capital, Las Palmas. For the coming period, he will focus on certain niches (such as fashion), with Jeroen earning affiliate commission from purchases that users make of his apps.
Publish books
Writing books or having them published and then publishing them means that you earn passive income: you invest your time once and can then, so to speak, become rich while sleeping. Via this page, you can read how André went from $ 200 to nearly $ 1000 per month in royalties for ebooks within six months. Stores, where you can publish ebooks, include iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and amazon.com, and Amazon Kindle Store.
Create an online course
The Lean Website
Together with my business partner Jerome Knoot, I created a whole series of SEO courses in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. The great thing about this was that we only started making this when we had already sold enough in advance via the pre-order. We knew that the time investment would be worth it and a demand for our product. You can read more about this in the book ‘de Lean Website’.
To make a video course, you will need:
- Camera port
- A good microphone
- Video editing software I can really recommend this microphone from RØDE Microphones
- Plenty of lights / natural light
- Learning environment to use the videos
- A planning
- Very valuable content to share
Start a consultancy
There is something to be said for classifying this option as freelancing. Since 2008, Wouter and André have been giving tailor-made flight advice via Melookyoubook: tricks to fly to a destination even cheaper (possibly via detours). For € 29 per flight, they use their knowledge of airlines and routes to help people find a cheap flight. Some regular customers return faithfully for every journey they take. No wonder, because they help them save time and money.
Membership site
Positive Psychology Program
In my personal experience, having a membership site is the finest revenue model there is. During my life, I have probably made money in more than 50 different ways (no, not that way, you filthy thing) until I finally came up with creating a membership site: Positive Psychology Program.
Now that I get recurring income from that, it is, as with the software’s earnings model, a matter of bringing in more people and ensuring that they stay as long as possible. My business partner is building our information product and ensures that existing members bind to us, and I ensure that as many new members as possible join us. This is how we guarantee the growth of our business.
A very common way to create value is by offering information products in an online environment (built with, for example, Wishlist or Woocommerce subscriptions if you work with WordPress).
Then think of:
- online training courses
- individual videos or webinars
- books
- checklists
- guides
- or exercises
The disadvantage of this business model is that you have to keep developing and that you cannot just let yourself be heard for two months. Then you lose members. You can fix this by working ahead and ensuring that you have already scheduled product updates and emails to the supporters. This way, you can still be free from your business.
Do you have any more tips yourself? Let me know in a comment.