Editor’s note: This article was first published in November 2017. The figures it cites are from 2017: sponsored posts paying 30-250 euros, affiliates earning over 10,000 euros a month, and commissions of 10-20 euros per electronics sale. The Amazon commission claim reflects 2017 affiliate terms.
Over time we’ve shared countless ideas for making money from home or online. But the more options we have, the more decision paralysis we get, and many of our readers keep asking how they could earn extra money part-time or generate an income “the easy way” by doing something at weekends.
So today I’m going to boil the complexity down to the basics. Let me warn you up front: if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to earn extra income, you won’t find it here. If it’s easy, it won’t be quick, and if it’s quick, it won’t be easy. Otherwise everyone would be rolling in money.
Whether you’re a student, unemployed, or have a job but want other sources of income, the ideas below are for you, whether you live in Spain or in a developing country (with an internet connection). What’s more, they require no investment, although they do take a fair amount of dedication.
What are the easy ways to make money online?
Today we’re going to skip the nonsense and leave out the usual ideas: filling in surveys, getting paid for reviews, clicking on ads (which means taking part in fraud against advertisers), and watching videos that pay a few cents for every so many views.
We won’t talk about them because I think they are far too pointless as ways to make money and don’t meet our goals, and on top of that they demand more time than they’re worth for very little financial reward.
The easiest ways to generate extra income, and in fact probably the only ones that exist, are:
- Selling your own products or services.
- Selling other people’s products or services.
- Not selling any product or service at all.
That’s how simple the options become.
1. How to make money offering your own products or services
It may sound like a cliché, but the first thing you need to work out is what you’re good at, what comes naturally to you, and why people should pay for it. In this case, rather than a way of generating extra income, we’re really talking about creating a small business.
If you’re good at sewing or knitting, you can make your own woollen garments (hats, gloves, jumpers, scarves…) and sell them online.
If you’re good at crafts, or you’re a good painter or sculptor, you can sell your creations.
If you’re good at web design or managing social media, you can offer your services.
Luckily, these days there are Facebook groups and a huge community on Instagram where you can show millions of people how good you are at what you do, among them entrepreneurs who are just starting out and business owners whose companies are already up and running.
But if you don’t want to make your own products, we’ve already explained how you can sell other companies’ products without the goods ever passing through your hands. We even explained how to start your own business selling clothes on Amazon without any investment.
The first thing you need to do is focus on a specific niche. Remember that if your product is aimed at everyone from the start, chances are nobody will buy it.
You can sell practically any product by going straight to the manufacturer and using dropshipping as your business model. Basically, you sell products in your online shop and the manufacturer ships them to the customer’s address, so you never have to store the goods yourself. Of course, over time, if the business works, you’d end up holding stock to get better prices and faster delivery times.
Here are some tips from Tim Ferriss for doubling your sales and growing your business (recommended reading for entrepreneurs who want to start a business online).
Finally, if you have a technical or creative profile, or you’re an electronics engineer, you can build your own devices and start selling them. If the business takes off and orders grow, it’s just a matter of outsourcing production to a factory. As a rule, though, there are easier ways to make a lot of money with fewer complications. At least at first.
So these are the ways to make money selling our own products, which we can sell in our own online shop, on Amazon, or directly through our Facebook page. That’s how the young mother we wrote about started making money from home. She did it by making personalised wooden silhouettes for babies. Today her orders have taken off.
2. Making money selling other people’s products
We could bring up dropshipping again, but we can actually fall back on something even more basic.
Think for a moment about the buying habits of people who browse the internet. Millions of products are sold every day. What products are sold? What do people buy? Where do they buy them? How can I benefit from that?
Let’s say people tend to buy online:
- Mobile phones
- Computers
- TVs
- Books
- Cameras
- Clothes
- And all kinds of other products…
Businesses, on the other hand, tend to buy other kinds of products and services:
- Office supplies
- Software
- Editing programs (in the world of photography)
- Domain names
- Web hosting
- Cloud storage
- SEO services (getting their pages ranked in search engines)
- And much more…
Where do people buy these products, and how can I earn an income from their buying habits?
Amazon, eBay, AliExpress and thousands of online shops are where people choose to do their shopping. And most companies today understand the importance of giving you a share of the revenue if you bring them more customers or help them increase their sales.
To do this, these companies run programmes in which you earn a commission on every purchase a user makes. In the case of Amazon and similar sites, you don’t only earn money on that purchase, but also on the other products that person buys after coming through your link.
This is known as “affiliate marketing”, but the term has been so abused that when you mention it to someone who doesn’t know much about online business, they feel you’re wasting their time.
Well, it isn’t a waste of time if it’s done well. In fact, plenty of people earn more than a salary by promoting certain products on these platforms. Some even make more than €10,000 a month from their affiliate campaigns.
Bear in mind that you can earn anything from a few cents for selling a book, to around €10 or €20 for each electronic device sold, to hundreds of euros per sale for other products or services, such as some banking products.
How do I sell these products to earn money on commission?
As we said at the start, you need to find a niche and focus on it. For example, if you have a Facebook page with thousands of followers about yoga, an affiliate programme for savings and investment accounts probably won’t appeal much to your readers.
The mechanics are very simple to explain. When you want to promote a product, you’re given a link, and anyone who makes a purchase through that link earns you a commission. You can put these links on a blog, on Facebook, on Instagram, or even send them over WhatsApp.
However, if you start pestering people with affiliate links, it won’t be long before you’re thrown out of everywhere. People don’t much like spam. Your friends even less so.
That’s why the best approach is to first create valuable content for users and then offer a product related to that content.
The other option is to treat it as a professional job or business and build carefully planned campaigns, even investing in social media advertising with very precise interest targeting.
The options are endless, and so are the strategies you can apply. It’s all about testing. As I said, it won’t be quick or easy, but if you hit on the right formula, it will certainly be very profitable.
Now let’s move on to the last way of making money, the key piece that makes everything fit together much better.
3. Making money by creating your own blog and monetising it (without selling anything)
A blog lets you generate money in many different ways, but let’s be realistic. To make money with a blog, you need traffic. The more traffic you generate, the more income you receive, whatever the method.
So first of all you’ll need original content that draws users to you ahead of the huge amount of competition already out there.
How can you make money with a blog?
1. First of all…
We can use our blog for either of the two ideas above: selling other people’s products and selling our own.
2. Advertising
How profitable any advertising system is will depend on how many visits our blog gets. Types of advertising:
- CPC (cost per click), where you’re paid according to the people who see your ad.
- CPM (cost per thousand views), where you’re paid a fixed amount for every 1,000 page views. For example, you might have a CPM of €1, which means that if you get 10,000 visits, you’ll have earned €10. There are higher and lower CPMs. A good strategy is often to combine CPM and CPC advertising.
- CPA (cost per action). In this case, to earn a commission the user has to take an action. Sometimes it’s signing up for a newsletter or handing over their details to receive information. It’s also the model used by affiliate programmes, where the action is buying the product we earn a commission on.
One of the most widely used platforms for monetising a blog’s traffic is Google AdSense. In fact, it’s the most widely used.
3. Sponsored posts
On my own blog I turn down 90% of sponsored posts, and the other 10% I accept to help some agency that’s just starting out and needs to get moving. I have to say that if I took every sponsored post I’m offered, without exaggerating, I could publish four or five a week. And you can’t have more sponsored posts than content.
How much do sponsored posts pay? It depends on the blog’s traffic. Anywhere from €30 to €250. On occasion I’ve even been offered a bit more because they also wanted a bit more.
4. Renting out space on your blog
Although fewer and fewer companies rent a space on your blog to place a banner, it’s still something that gets offered. In the past a fixed weekly or monthly price was agreed for having that banner on your blog; these days they’d rather pay per click or per action. That way, companies make sure they pay for results.
The other benefit of having your own blog
Having your own space on the internet is like having a shop window where millions of people can see you, so you can show what you know, what you’re worth and what you offer. Let’s say it can help you build a personal brand and a reputation, which in the long run translates into sales of the services you offer or into business opportunities.
What’s more, if you manage to build a site with lots of traffic, you can create other kinds of websites or services and send traffic their way. In other words, every time you start a new project, you won’t be starting from scratch, because you already have your readers.
Still, remember what we always say: if the only thing that drives you to write a blog is making money, you probably won’t succeed, because when you enjoy what you do, others notice quickly. And when you don’t, they notice even faster.
Featured image: Victuallers, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
