What does money mean to you? Does it mean the freedom to travel? To live anywhere on your terms? Maybe it means a life absent of fear? Or the ability to spend time with those you love instead of working at that dreaded day job you can no longer stand? Maybe money means happiness. Even if it’s only temporary.
Money can mean many things to many people. It’s not everything. We all know that, right? But it is meaningful. Especially when you lack money. When you struggle to make money online or offline, the difficulty level of life increases exponentially. It’s not fun when you can’t make money. Not one bit. But with a topic so taboo as money, it’s no wonder why so many struggle to make much of it.
The truth? No one likes to talk about money. Not in person and not around others. Because the lack of money is painful. When you struggle to make money it hurts. It hurts when you can’t pay your bills, or buy your kids that gift they’ve been wanting for their birthday. You shed a silent tear and beat yourself up about it for months on end. It’s not a good feeling.
However, there are ways to make money online that you haven’t explored. There are ways to alter your life and turn things around. To do that you must open your heart and mind to the endless array of possibilities in front of you. There’s no reason to wallow in pain. Money is abundant. It’s everywhere you turn.
How To Make Money Online
If you’re at the end of your rope and you’re tired of playing it safe and trying to conform to society’s standards, then please listen up. Because if you’re serious, you can make money online in a thousand different ways. You can make money passively in your sleep, or actively while you’re awake. The only difference between those who can actually pull it off and those who struggle is one thing and one thing only—belief.
Look, money isn’t everything. But money does buy you one very important thing—time. Time is the ultimate luxury, isn’t it? When you work a day job, you have very little time to yourself. Without the luxury of time, you can’t pursue your passions, travel the world, or spend your waking hours with the ones that you love. Clearly, money does solve some problems. Maybe not all of them. Just some of them.
But something is holding you back from making money. Something is getting in the way of your ability to break free from the rat race and escape this so-called matrix. Something is standing between your ability to increase revenue or finally find a way to make more money than you’ve ever dreamed of. You could learn a million different strategies for making money, but without shifting your beliefs about what’s possible for you, it’ll be a continuous struggle.
1—Join The Gig Economy
One common way to make money online is to join the gig economy. The gig economy lets you deliver services to people from around the world. The best part? You can provide services locally and other services remotely. The remote services don’t require you to be in a specific location. You could join the gig economy from a white-sanded beach in the tropics or a rural village in Eastern Europe.
Some of these gigs require no skills at all. They only require your time. Other gigs require different skill sets. Some of them require you to market your services and ensure positive feedback. Others require no feedback at all and simply place you into a random queue to fulfill services. It all depends on what apps you choose and the line of work you’re interested in doing.
Sites like Fiverr, one of the originators of the gig economy, allow you to make money selling small micro gigs. Originally, the site started by primarily offering five-dollar gigs. You could purchase all types of microservices for just five dollars. That fueled explosive growth for Fiverr. Today, you can buy and sell gigs at all price points.
You can also use sites like Upwork and Freelancer, which require you to bid on projects. In the beginning, collecting positive reviews and feedback when you have no history is the challenge. Other gig sites include TaskRabbit for local tasks, Rover for dog walking and sitting, Care for babysitting, Rev for transcribing, Tidy for house cleaning, Mechanical Turk for micro-gigs, and others.
2—Create An Online Course
An online course is a great way to share your knowledge and wisdom with the world. If you have a skill set that would benefit others, turn it into an online course and sell it to others. Many people think that you need to spend a lot of money or time to build an online course. In the past, you did have to. But that’s no longer the case.
Many platforms help turn your knowledge into cold hard cash using simple tools and interfaces. For example, you can use our online course builder tools in our sales funnel software to create your online course with zero tech skills. You don’t need any coding skills to do this. And you can use premade templates and our drag-and-drop editor to put this together.
Then, all you need to do is make a simple landing page with a good lead magnet to generate leads and market your course. You can use social media, YouTube, blogging and other free sources to get the word out there. Or, if you’re savvy, you can run paid ads directly to your lead magnet and use email marketing to convert prospects into buyers.
You can also build online courses on other popular platforms out there such as Udemy, Teachable, Kajabi and others. However, if you want full control over your online course and its content, setting up an online course here is the best way you can make money online by selling your knowledge and wisdom. Although this is not the fastest way to make money, it can eventually make you money in your sleep by generating passive income.
3—Sales Funnels
Sales funnels are like magic little money-making machines. If you don’t know what a sales funnel is, read this deep-dive explanation. Sales funnels are like websites except they have just one path forward. That’s why sales funnels have an average of 137% higher conversion rates than websites. Websites have so many options that it leads to overwhelm and lack the focus of a single direction forward.
There are many ways you can make money with sales funnels. And you don’t need to be an expert to do this. The first way is to just design sales funnels for others and sell them in this marketplace. This helps you generate passive income. That means you do the work once and get paid over and over again. That’s a big difference from working a day job where you do the work once and only get paid once.
There are other ways you can make money with sales funnels. You can also sign up as a certified funnel builder where you can paid on a per-funnel basis working directly with clients. As a certified funnel builder you’re listed in a directory where companies can find you. This is great if you’re looking to work directly with clients. You can also hunt for clients on Upwork, Freelancer and other sites.
Another way you can make money with sales funnels is to build sales funnels for your business. There are many types of funnels you can build. And depending on your needs, there is a sale funnel for every objective. If you want to generate leads, there are sales funnels for that. If you want to make sales, there’s a sales funnel for that. And if you want people to fill out an application, sign up for an event, and so on, there is a sales funnel for every situation.
4—Flip Websites
Another way to make money online is to flip websites. Websites can be bought and sold online through various websites such as Flippa and Empire Flippers. This is not the same thing as buying domains at auction. On Flippa, the websites you can buy and sell are entire businesses. Typically, these are e-commerce websites. You’re buying the entire business, product line, revenue, and so on.
If you have capital to invest, you can always flip these websites. When you have marketing or sales knowledge that can improve the site’s ability to make money, it makes this strategy even more powerful. It’s a similar concept to business. When you can buy a business and increase the income of the business, its value increases.
Another way to increase the value of a website that you purchase is to increase its traffic. When you can use search engine optimization to improve that site and increase its traffic, it will naturally result in more leads and sales. And an increase in leads and sales will increase the revenue. That creates a higher valuation for the website.
Flipping websites for a profit does require some knowledge and understanding of how websites work. If you have experience in e-commerce then this is a viable way to make money. If you don’t have experience with e-commerce, you can still flip websites by finding good deals. This is somewhat similar to the real estate market, except that these are digital properties.
5—Sell Stuff Online
There are so many ways to make money online by selling stuff that your options are virtually limitless. You can sell anything online today. But most people start with what they have in their homes. If you took a weekend to organize and go through all of the so-called “junk” in your home, you would find so many treasures that people are willing to pay for.
Let’s just say that you have so many clothes that you no longer wear. Why not sell them on a site like PoshMark or ThredUp? These sites, amongst many others, allow you to sell clothes and other apparel and accessories that are not being used. With PoshMark, you post the photos directly to the site to sell the items. With ThredUp you simply send your items directly to them and they take care of the entire process.
You can also use sites like eBay and Facebook Marketplace to sell things from around your home. Just clean them up and take nice pictures. You can also sell handmade items that you create on sites like Etsy or Handmade. This includes digital items that you create. If you’re good at design, you can create all types of digital goodies and sell them on these sites.
You can also go a step further and create an e-commerce store using Shopify or create a private-label brand and sell directly on Amazon FBA. There are so many ways to make money by selling things online you simply have to pick one. Some require capital and some marketing knowledge. Others simply require your time.
6—Rideshare
Everyone knows about rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft. They exist everywhere in the world. And where they don’t exist or are banned, there are other services available. For example, in some European countries like Hungary, Uber was banned. In its place, a rideshare company called Bolt.eu entered the space. And in some Asian countries, there are far more popular rideshare apps than Uber such as Grab.
The point is that rideshare is everywhere. You can find it nearly all corners of the earth. Especially here in North America, rideshare is ubiquitous with travel. Meaning, that it’s almost second nature to us to request a rideshare rather than hail a taxi. With rideshares, you know exactly what you’re getting and there is far more transparency in the interaction.
If you have a vehicle, consider doing rideshare to make some money. You can turn the app on and off at will and get paid as you work. Most rideshare apps pay out weekly, allowing you to earn extra money as a side hustle. This is ideal when you have a full-time job and you can’t work typical hours during the day. With rideshare, you set your schedule and you can work at will.
If you do have a vehicle, you can also do deliveries. For example, you can do rideshare for Uber and deliver for Uber Eats. You can also use apps like DoorDash, Postmates, Instacart and many others to do deliveries.
7—Host Webinars
Webinars are one of the best ways to make money online because you can sell high-ticket products and services much easier through a webinar. Webinars are presentations that are typically 90 minutes or longer. During that presentation, you build rapport with the prospect and break false beliefs that are holding them back from the sale.
Everyone harbors beliefs about things. Beliefs form throughout life as a natural thing that occurs through success and failure. You can’t help but form these beliefs as you have experiences throughout life. But many of these beliefs inhibit and stop a sale from occurring. That’s because prospects equate past beliefs with future results. Meaning that if they had a bad experience in the past, they will have a bad experience in the future.
Webinars are designed to eliminate these false beliefs. That includes eliminating false beliefs about the vehicle (product or service), internal beliefs (what they’re capable of), and external beliefs (things like time and money). These must be done through the power of storytelling. This is not as complicated as it sounds and you can get a full breakdown of how this works here.
There are many ways that you can make money through webinars. Once you learn how to create webinars, you can charge other people to create them. You can also build webinars for any product or service that you’re selling.
8—Narrate Audiobooks
Audiobooks are becoming increasingly common today. Everyone likes to consume content differently. However, audiobooks are one of the easiest ways to do that because they require no free time. You can consume audiobooks on the way to work during your commute, while at the gym, grocery shopping, and in so many other situations.
Most people don’t know that you can make money by narrating audiobooks. Meaning that you don’t need to write your own book to make money from audiobooks. You can narrate them for other authors. All you have to do is find a willing author to do the narration for. And there are two different ways that you can make money through this on a platform called ACX. ACX is owned by Amazon and it delivers audiobooks to Audible, the world’s largest audiobook platform.
The first way is to do audiobook narrations as a pay-per-finished-hour deal. Most authors will set a rate they’re willing to pay. For example $200 per finished hour. That means that if the audiobook narration is 4 hours you will get paid $800. But since this is per finished hour, there is more work than just four hours that goes into it. Audiobook narration is time-consuming and requires some skilled editing to put together a finished product according to ACX’s rules.
The other way to make money with audiobook narration is to do a royalty deal with an author. Most authors who are established are unwilling to do royalty deals. That’s because they have to split the proceeds of the sales with you. But you could get lucky and find an author willing to do this. You’ll need to search high and low to discover this but it could create a lot of passive income for you.
9—Vacation Rentals
Most people know what vacation rentals are at this point. It started out very innocently when VRBO first launched onto the scene many years ago. VRBO was the leader for a long time until Airbnb came along and stole the show. Airbnb is now used synonymously with vacation rentals. Instead of saying you’ll rent your place, people say they’ll Airbnb their place.
There are many ways that you can make money online with vacation rentals. And it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to own multiple properties to make a good chunk of cash. Sure, if you do own a property in a vacation destination that’s a great start. If you live close to a beach or in the center of a busy metropolis, you can easily rent out your place on Airbnb and other websites.
However, one of the more popular ways to make money is to manage vacation rentals for others. Most people don’t realize that a large number of properties that appear on vacation rental sites like Airbnb, VRBO, FlipKey and others are actually managed by other people. And vacation rental management is a big business.
You can expect to make anywhere between twenty and forty percent for managing rentals based on the gross rental rate. This all depends on the area, whether the property is exclusive to you, and other factors as well. As a manager, you’ll be responsible for listing the property, finding the renters, managing the bookings, turning over the properties after checkout, and so on. It’s a lot of work but well worth the effort you put in.
10—Affiliate Marketing
Last but not least for the best ways to make money online is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is an absolute gold mine of a money-making opportunity. If you’ve never heard of affiliate marketing, then here’s the rundown. An affiliate is someone who acts as an official associate of the company to promote the brand, its products or its services.
As an affiliate, you get paid based on performance. Meaning that if you can’t deliver results you won’t make money. But if you can deliver results, there is the potential for a lot of money. To succeed as an affiliate you’ll need an audience of some kind. That could be an email list, a YouTube audience, a social media following, and so on.
If you don’t have an audience you can still succeed, but you’ll need to leverage capital. If you have the capital, you can run ads to affiliate offers. You should use a bridge page so that you can capture the prospect’s details before sending them to the affiliate offer. A bridge page is just a link that generates a lead before pushing the prospect to the affiliate link. This way, the prospect joins your list and they’re not just lost into the abyss.
You can find affiliate offers on platforms like ClickBank, Rakuten, Impact, and Shareasale just to name a few. There are many good affiliate programs out there so all you need to do is pick the one you like best. Of course, you should consider being an affiliate for ClickFunnels. The company has paid out well over $140 million to affiliates over the years and is a great way to make money as an affiliate.