In this post I will be discussing ways with which you can make a decent income online.
Making money online seems a distant dream for most of us.
When I started blogging 9 years ago, I too was quite excited by all the BIG bloggers that made money online and wanted a piece of the action for me.
But unlike what we hope for, most of us don’t make any significant dent with online earnings.
The reasons are many, beginning from the shiny object syndrome where you chase after every new idea that pops up in your mind to lack of focus to not knowing what to do.
So, here I am to guide you in this journey. I will help you make the most of your time. And get you on the right track.
Write On Medium
If you know about the events happening online, you must have some info regarding how every writer is up in arms against Google.
The reason?
Google has been taking snippets of information from websites and using that without permission to send traffic back to itself. Or to solve the query without sending someone to websites at all.
With featured snippets, Google is set at destroying lives and livelihoods. Traffic is reducing month, after month, after month because of all these changes. And companies like Medium aren’t silent, thankfully. They have initiated a paywall effectively meaning that if someone has to read stuff, they need to shell out $5 as a subscription fee.
This is great for writers since Medium pays a share of the hundreds of thousands of dollars it generates in revenue to writers based on the number of pageviews they’re able to generate for their content.
I know of a few writers who are making upwards of $10000 a month by writing on Medium. You might never reach those numbers without having years of experience writing content online. But for a newbie anywhere between a few hundred dollars to breaking the $1000 per month barrier is possible.
Plus, Medium is free to join. There’s absolutely no cost to getting started except writing great content.
Are you up for the challenge?
Write on Quora
Quora is another big platform that has hundreds of writers answering questions from regular people.
Answer enough questions and with the partner program you get to make a share of the advertising monies that Quora generates.
The pay is a pittance even with hundreds of thousands of views on your answers because primarily Quora doesn’t have a subscription program YET. And two, they only recently started accepting ads. That means there’s a lot of kinks to iron out before they make it efficient enough.
Answers I see are generally riddled with grammatical mistakes which makes it a good thing for writers whose English isn’t the finest. But with more and more writing you improve.
And that helps.
Also, Quora is a fantastic platform to market your skills.
For example, let’s say you’re an expert on gardening. You know all about which seeds to plant in which season. You can write about crop diseases and pests. You know how to harvest and get the maximum yield for your produce. With enough people reading about all these things, you get enough traction to leverage yourself as an authority who people reach out to for advice.
Trust me, it isn’t easy. It takes a lot of time. But with good ol’ persistence you get there. And once you do you can charge a consultancy fee for your specialized advice. What you charge is up to you.
Affiliate Marketing
If the word sounds new to you, it’s simply when you promote products created by other people and get a commission for each sale you generate.
Let’s say you’re writing about gardening on your gardening blog. You talk about this great new pesticide that kills all pests but doesn’t harm the crop. It retails for $100. People see your recommendation and three guys purchase it. The commission is 5%, meaning you get $5 for every sale. $15 in this case.
That’s the magic of affiliate marketing. Leverage your expertise to sell other people’s products and get paid.
Simple isn’t it?
Freelance Jobs
To be a successful freelancer you need to have some skills. Be it design, writing, editing, proofreading, creating business cards.. The list goes on.
Find out what you’re good at and sell the skill online.
There are scores of sites that make the job easy for but charge a commission too. I am talking about Upwork, Fiverr.com, Freelancer.com and other such sites where you can post a gig or apply to current job postings and get paid on successfully completing the job.
What if you are interested in something and haven’t got the skills?
I know the situation. Developing a skill and being so adept at it that you get paid it is hard work, but it can be done.
All it requires is you spend as much free time as possible learning all about the skill. If you want to learn designing start somewhere small, say designing logos. There are hundreds of tutorials that teach you how to master a particular software. Gimp is a free alternative to photoshop where you can create logos just as well.
Or you might want to use easier platforms like Canva.
Design is a skill that’s in great demand all over the world. So is writing. And so is the ability to build links.
Pick one. Master it and sell online. Easy peasy, next.
Writing Jobs
This falls within the purview of freelancing but deserves its whole section not only because of how big it is but also because of the number of years of experience I have with writing online.
I wrote for clients and I am good at it to get paid.
With writing jobs what you get paid and how for long depends solely on your ability to attract top notch clients to your business. That’s an even more taxing skill than writing itself.
If you’re not sure how to get started, you can approach job boards like those on Problogger. Here you will be able to bid for dozens of jobs that require niche-specific skills. Some want gardening bloggers, others want product review writers. Still others are looking for experts in marketing writing. A lot of people want writers who can post to other sites and build links for them.
There’s a wide variety of job postings each demanding a different skill set and experience. My suggestion is to start specializing in a particular niche with a blog or with guest posts and then approach these jobs. Instead of applying to each and every listed job, taking this route is way easier and guarantees an income.
Other powerful job boards are bloggingpro.com. A quick Google search will reveal dozens of similar sites.
Make Money Tutoring Online
If there’s one thing about India and Indians like us is that we do a great job teaching. All of us is full of advice on how the next person should live his life. If you like teaching online tutoring jobs are worth considering. There are dime a dozen sites that let you teach students. Sign up, prove your skills and start earning.
With online tutoring sites making their foray into the indian market with startups like Byju’s there’s a lot of demand within India itself. Or else you can give lessons to people from outside India as well.
Make Money Online With Micro Jobs
Micro jobs don’t require a lot of skills with the person doing the job. They’re small tasks that can be finished in seconds or a few minutes tops. Amazon mechanical turk and Microworkers list hundreds of such jobs. The downside is you need to do a lot of them to make a sizeable income.
Plus most of the jobs are only available to people from western countries. SO there’s that.
