You have your website, and you’re wondering if you can make money online from it. You’ve read a few ways to make money online, but there are so many of them that you don’t know which to pick.
In this article, I’ll give you ten realistic methods you can implement to make money online. But first, there are a few things you need to know.
Let’s get started.
What You’ll Need First
Before you start making money online, there are a few things you need to set up for the method to work effectively. One of the vital things is generating and maintaining web traffic.
Web traffic essentially refers to the number of people that visit your site. Ideally, you’d want to have high traffic coming through your site because the chances of scoring a conversion will higher.
There are a couple of ways to drive traffic to your site One of the most effective ways is doing search engine optimization because it helps your site rank high on the search engine results pages. So if you prepare quality content that ranks on the first page for keywords relevant to your audience, you’re likely to drive traffic. It’s necessary to rank on the first page because 75% of people don’t check pages further down.
To know what the search engines are looking for, here are some of the crucial ranking factors:
- Page Speed – your pages need to load fast, as speed is a ranking factor, and reduces bounce rate.
- Optimized Content – your content needs to be SEO-optimized.
- Security – keep your site secure, as any breach might penalize your ranking and reputation. An SSL is a bare minimum you need to protect your site. It’s also a ranking factor for Google.
- Mobile-friendly – over 53% of all online traffic comes from mobile devices. This means your site must be optimized for a quality mobile browsing experience.
SEO helps you optimize these factors, so you rank high, but it might take some getting used to. There’s a simple way to do optimization, that is, by using a web hosting service that has various types of hosting plans.
Web hosts will usually have an SSL certificate – in this case – Cloudflare pre-installed. It also usually provides optimized templates, and the host will usually help guide you through website optimization.
Once you have it all set up, let’s take a look at the ways to earn money online.
1. Local Dropshipping
Dropshipping is a low-risk business model where you can run a store without needing to have any inventory. There are three key players here: the manufacturer, the retailer (you), and the customer.
The manufacturer is responsible for making the products, holding inventory, shipping the products directly to the customers on your behalf, and do the restocking – basically anything to do with the product.
You, as the retailer, are only responsible for selling and marketing the manufacturer’s products. You set up your pricing scheme to earn a profit.
The customer buys the products directly from you, and if any issues arise, they’ll contact you for further information.
It’s best to do a local dropshipping at first, focusing on your region as it will ease marketing and let you break into the market quicker, bringing you a faster initial ROI.
2. Promote Your Skills
Another way to earn money is to promote your skills by becoming a freelancer. There are plenty of projects you can do, from writing, programming to graphic design. Freelancers will usually go to sites like Fiverr or UpWork to look for tasks.
Those sites are bidding platforms, meaning that freelancers with the necessary qualifications and skills can bid for the jobs. The client will then choose who to pick to do their project.
The pay differs depending on the sites and jobs. Some offer hourly payment or project-based payment.
3. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online. It’s relatively easy to do because you don’t need your products or services to sell. Instead, what you do is promote products or services from other companies and earn commissions from every sale made.
The best way to promote companies is by focusing on content marketing because you can easily create a listicle of the best things and insert the companies there.
A good place to start with affiliate marketing is becoming a part of Amazon Associates. You essentially promote Amazon products and earn a commission when someone purchases them or signs up to Amazon after clicking your affiliate link.
4. Run an Online Course
Another way to earn money is to share your knowledge with others by creating online courses. You can sell your course through online learning sites like Udemy.
To create an online course that will become popular and successful, you can try analyzing similar courses already on those learning sites. Take a look at the reviews and see which aspects of the course people praise the most.
From that, try creating something better and solve the problem people had in other courses. A good tip is to have your first lessons to be free. There, try to be as informative as you can to get the people’s attention and end the first lesson with a cliffhanger, so interested students are more likely to want to know more and purchase the course.
5. Rent Ad Space
A great way to earn passive income is by renting out your ad spaces on your site. Google AdSense creates a way for you to make money from your site quickly.
How it works is you create ad spaces throughout your site. Then, through Google AdSense, advertisers will bid to place an ad in one of the slots. The highest bidder will get their ads shown.
Google AdSense will also handle the billing process to make sure you receive your payments.
6. Become a Virtual Assistant
A virtual assistant is someone who does administrative work for clients from the comfort of their homes. You’ll do tasks like writing, bookkeeping, managing social media, order processing, and even customer support.
Freelancer sites like the ones mentioned above also provide projects as a virtual assistant if you want to go to a specific location that posts just virtual assistant jobs, head over to Virtual Assistant Jobs.
7. Become a Consultant
If you’re an expert in a particular field, you can earn money by becoming an online consultant. Ideally, you should have years of experience in the area as a working professional. Then, to differentiate yourself from other consultants, focus on a niche that not many are doing.
For example, a marketing consultant can focus on a specific area like helping you market using backlinks.
The next thing to do is create a great resume to support your occupation. Try placing in any certifications or licenses you received in your field. Once you have all that, you can turn your website into a consulting business.
8. Create Content
Creating content can vary from doing photography to streaming games on Twitch. It’s relatively easy to do. You just need to:
- Understand your audience – know what they want, and how your content can be entertaining to them.
- Know what kind of content format you’ll do – whether through writing blog posts, streaming games, or displaying your photography portfolio.
- Know your assets – Take advantage of the existing assets like your social media accounts and email list to promote your content.
- Publish and regularly update – There are many content creators out there, and they’re always creating new content, so should you.
9. Write Sponsored Posts
Sponsored posts are premium contents that brands pay you to create and distribute. Usually, the more followers or subscribers you have, the higher the pay will be.
Take a look at some of the best practices when creating sponsored content:
- Relate the post to your audience – since your audience members come from specific backgrounds, try making sponsored posts that relate to them. Does it solve their problems? Or does it help your followers in any way?
- Keep the same tone throughout all your posts – don’t make it sound too apparent that it is a sponsored post. Instead, use the same tone and style as your other posts that are non-sponsored. This way, your audience will find it easier to be relatable.
10. Sell Your Website
When you have high traffic, superb uptime, and reliability, but you don’t use the website anymore, you can consider selling your website for profit.
To do so, you need to know these things:
- Know your site’s long-term value in advance.
- Optimize your website before selling.
- Focus on the essential statistics of your site.
- Sell on platforms like Empire Flippers.
Conclusion
Now you know the ten sources to make money online. All that’s left is for you to implement these methods to your site.
Remember that to start earning money. You need to have high and constant traffic. To do that, you’ll need to optimize your site.
Good luck!
Guest author Juliet Jones
Juliet is an Editor at PRable.org, all in one content marketing agency.
She loves creating articles about technology, innovative product reviews, and technical writing to help scale up digital growth. She is a writer by day and a frustrated singer by night.”
