Editor’s note: This article was first published in January 2023. Much of the text dates from around 2013-2014: Google Helpouts (closed in 2015) is called a new service, Adf.ly the latest trend, and Fiverr jobs start at 5 dollars. Its earnings and pricing figures, such as affiliates earning up to 3,000 euros a month, are from that earlier period.
If you’re looking for ways to make money online, I have good news and bad news. It’s easy to generate income online, but if it’s easy it won’t be much money, and if you can make a lot of money, it won’t be easy or fast. But it can be done.
Anyone can make money online quickly and (relatively) easily if they know how and where to look. What’s more, we can do it with very little money or none at all, with practically no investment. But… what are the ways to do it and how do you go about it? Many people end up frustrated in the attempt, usually because they start out with the wrong ideas and the wrong expectations. The truth is that there are two ways to make money online: the fast way and the elaborate way.
The fast way gives us some extra money, almost immediately, if we have some kind of experience or talent we can offer. Then there’s the elaborate way, which is much more profitable than the first and can even grow over time into a small business or a large company, but it won’t give us immediate profits.
The problem is that many people want to make money online through the elaborate method but with the quick results of the fast one. And those are the people who usually end up frustrated.
See also: 38 ideas for making extra money from home
Ideas for making money online quickly and easily
It’s true that you can make a lot of money with a blog (1) and with a YouTube channel (2). If you’ve looked online for similar articles about the best ways to make money on the internet, you’ll notice that these two ideas are always there.
The problem is that it isn’t an easy way to do it, and many people who start a new blog do so without ideas of their own, without a clear strategy and even copying articles left, right and centre.
When you start a blog, just ask yourself whether you have something different to offer from what’s already out there. It doesn’t have to be a 100% original subject; you won’t find one of those any more. Simply offer a different point of view on something you understand well and are good at.
Affiliate programmes are still a good way to make money online
Building a niche website or blog where you compare products, or simply recommend them, is a fairly widespread way to make money. The process is simple. You sign up with one of the platforms that offer this option (one of the most popular is Amazon) and place links to the products you’re recommending or comparing. If the reader clicks the link and ends up buying, you get a small commission on that sale, plus on anything else that user buys within a certain period.
Some people earn a few euros with this system, while others manage to make up to 3,000 euros a month. What does it depend on? Above all, on the traffic you get to your site. That may be the hardest part, because it involves SEO knowledge and also depends on how much competition there is in that particular niche. Still, if you combine an affiliate marketing strategy with advertising income, it all adds up month after month. It’s a matter of doing good work. It has to be said that this isn’t a fast or easy way to make money, but if you pull it off, it can be quite profitable and give you that passive income everyone talks about.
As for YouTube channels, it’s true that some people have made 4 million dollars in a year, but with millions of subscribers and millions of views. Just think about what’s so wonderful about what you’re going to do on your channel that thousands or millions of people will end up subscribing.
You’ll also need to keep in mind what you can and can’t do on YouTube. To make money on YouTube, the first thing you need to know is that your content must be 100% original. If you make thousands of euros from a video, simply having a soundtrack in it can get you into copyright trouble.
3. Make money doing data entry, part-time or full-time
The millions of websites on the internet aren’t built with HTML alone. They often need a lot of content, so a data entry worker’s job, among other things, is usually to load data into forms and databases.
You can also offer your services to produce reports and documents and put them into any format. Clients usually look for people who can touch-type and write a very large number of words per minute. Pay is either by the hour or by the page. There are usually plenty of offers on freelance websites. Without doubt, a good way to make money online.
4. Make money online designing logos for companies
If you’re a creative person, the logo design market moves a lot of money these days. There are many sites where a company explains what it wants to achieve with a logo and designers compete to sell it theirs.
Where can you offer your services as a logo designer straight away? On 99designs, companies can order a logo, and designers can sign up via the link at the bottom of the page. There’s also Freelancer.com.
5. Design and build low-cost websites and blogs
Many small business owners and self-employed people still think that a small website could cost them 6,000 euros. If you have web design experience, you can offer your services to these small entrepreneurs. Also, given the need for corporate blogs, there may be an untapped market for you if you know how to approach it. More than a way to make extra money online, this would be an excellent business opportunity.
6. Make money online by finding work or offering your services on Fiverr
Fiverr is probably the largest freelance marketplace in the world, with requests for all kinds of services. Although most of the offers are in English, there’s growing demand for Spanish speakers. Jobs start at 5 dollars, and from there, depending on the job, you can find some interesting figures. It’s an ideal platform for advertising yourself as a professional, because when you do a job well, clients may come back to you for later work. It’s an ideal way to build up a client portfolio.
7. Make money editing videos
If imagery is your thing, these days you can find a profitable market in video editing. Picture the typical dull, boring wedding ceremony where the brother-in-law does the same thing every brother-in-law does. You can shoot the wedding or first communion video yourself (that’s already a business), or you can take all kinds of videos and add scenes, subtitles, credits, a soundtrack and some funny effects, as well as cut out whatever the client doesn’t want to appear.
8. Make money online by creating a digital product
By digital product we mean an e-book, a tutorial that solves a problem or a guide that makes something easier for someone. This can be a great business that, in the long run, gives us the passive income we like so much. Without doubt, patents and books can be the biggest assets, although they’ll need a lot of promotion on our part. The advantage is that today anyone can self-publish a book, or use an intermediary. Here’s a guide (in Spanish) on how to self-publish a book independently, and here’s one author’s experience of self-publishing on Amazon.
9. Make money translating texts
If languages are your thing, these services are increasingly in demand online. Many companies outsource them, for example when a US company wants to launch a website in Spain, or when they need a text translated accurately, without any literary or interpretive errors in the change of language. As before, you can find many of these offers on Fiverr.com or Freelancer.com.
10. Make money creating mobile apps
First it was websites and blogs, and now mobile apps are multiplying. You can build a basic version or a more complex one, which will cost the client more. There’s demand on Freelancer. You can also design your own app for a select market. (Read: 7 apps people pay up to 1,000 dollars to download)
11. Make physical products and sell them online
This is another option: you could make woollen goods, caricatures (if you’re good at drawing) or all kinds of products. Here are some product ideas you can make at home using photos from social media.
12. Create premium blog templates and sell them on sites like ThemeForest
This is another kind of asset. There are loads of free blog templates, but there are also more exclusive designs that can sell for anything from 3 euros to over 100 euros, although a very common price for a decent template is between 15 and 25 dollars. Every time someone downloads your template, you get paid. I’ve mentioned ThemeForest, but there are many more sites. This link lists 10 sites where you can sell your templates, for websites, blogs, Joomla and so on.
There are also affiliate programmes where you can sell the templates they host, or send visitors from your website, and if they buy a template you also earn money, although this route is less attractive “monetarily” speaking.
See also: 69% of US entrepreneurs start their business from home, according to a study
More ideas for making money online fast without investment
13. Make extra money online fast by writing articles
This is an excellent way to earn some extra money. You can offer your services on a subject you know well to sites that cover that subject, or you can sell yourself as a run-of-the-mill writer producing filler articles for some sites. That pays too. Here as well, you can offer your services on Fiverr and Freelancer.
14. Buy and sell on eBay and Amazon
These are the biggest sites where anyone can buy and sell anything. On the one hand, we can find a bargain in the street and put it up for sale on eBay. On the other, we can pick up a bargain on eBay that we already know someone in our city (a friend, a client) needs, and charge them the difference. You can make money in both directions of the sale. For some people, this idea has become an excellent small business that earns them quite a lot of money online.
15. Make money playing games
I don’t know what they pay, but some video game companies, before launching a product on the market, hire young gamers, who are the best people to tell them what they liked, what they didn’t like and, in short, how the game could be improved. As you can see, you can make money while having fun. And let’s not forget that video game developers are among the most profitable businesses.
16. Sell photos to stock image libraries
Some online image libraries pay you every time someone downloads or uses your photo. This way of making money online isn’t fast, but it’s one more option. One of the best-known image libraries is Getty Images. It takes a lot of patience, a lot of persistence and, above all, good professional work. It’s by no means a way to get rich. Just treat it as a way to earn some extra money, because few people hit the jackpot in this sector.
17. Dropshipping
Set up your own online shop selling products through dropshipping, which basically means selling products that never pass through our hands. The customer buys a product from a company through us, and once the purchase is made, the company itself ships the product to the customer’s home. We keep the difference or a commission. Tech products tend to work especially well.
This way of doing business has become one of the most popular when it comes to earning money online. But we have to say that it isn’t fast or easy either.
Here we explained how to do dropshipping with AliExpress.
18. Your own clothing shop, free and with no investment
There are different options. You can create your own designs easily, just by uploading your drawing, logo or brand, and the company prints it on a T-shirt. On the free plan, they handle shipping and billing. Then there are other, more professional options. We talked about how to create your own clothing shop with no investment here.
19. Private lessons
Thanks to Skype or Google Hangouts, today it’s easier than ever to teach any subject, especially languages. And thanks to the different services, you can teach one person or a group. Google itself has now created a service for this purpose. We explain how Google’s new Helpouts service works here, with the experience of a young woman who has already tried it.
20. Virtual assistant
There’s little more to say about this idea, which is gradually taking off and lets us work from home offering all kinds of services to companies: scheduling appointments, answering calls forwarded by the company or putting our accounting skills to use, as well as helping out when a department is temporarily overloaded.
21. Make money with link shorteners
This is the latest trend for making money. The best-known platform is Adf.ly. All you have to do is shorten a link to any content you choose. A screen appears with a 5-second countdown and a message saying “skip ad”. Adf.ly pays you every time someone visits the link.
Many people already use it on Twitter and Facebook to share the same pages they’ve always shared, but now making money from it. Is it annoying? A bit, but then nobody said making money was easy, though it might cost you the odd “friend”.
22. Make money with paid surveys
I’m told there are legitimate companies that really do pay you to fill in surveys, but the money may not make up for the time you have to spend filling in the survey, which people say tends to be quite long. I’ve heard that some surveys pay as much as 15 euros, but they take hours to complete.
So that you don’t fall into any traps, here are 3 companies we’ve checked that pay you to fill in surveys, although, as we said, it’s a lot of time for the little money you earn. In my personal opinion, you’d be better off spending that time on other ways of making money that pay off in the long term.
23. Services for bloggers
Those of us who run blogs sometimes wouldn’t mind paying for small design or template changes; even if we know how to do them, they take up very productive time. For a new blogger who’s just starting out, something as simple as adding a Facebook button can feel like climbing a mountain, so offering to install plugins or buttons or make template changes for between 1 and 5 euros could, I think, be a good way to earn some extra money. A while ago, I’d have happily paid to save myself the headaches. We talked about this in our article with 9 business ideas you can run from home.
And those are the proven ways of making money online that many entrepreneurs have tried, some of which have become these people’s main business.
If you’re looking for other kinds of moneymaking ideas, we shared 18 business ideas you can start with almost no money.
Featured image: Intel Free Press, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
