How to earn money online?

In this article we will discuss various ways to earn money online. In most of them you won’t be requied to pay even a dime. Yes, you can also earn online without any investment whatsoever.

There’s a lot of different websites and YouTube channels, where you will find experts asking you to spend money on certain courses (for training and skill development sake), or spend money on certain products or services. While, a few of them are really genuine, but not all of us has the required money.

So, we will provide you enough options - those requiring some minimal investment, and also those that require no investment at all. Some of them require you to have some skills, technical or creative, while others can be done even by unskilled people.

Table of Contents

• Active Online Income Vs. Passive Online Income
• How to earn money online without paying anything?
• Online earning methods that require some initial investment

Let’s first of all get to know the two major categories of online income.

Active Online Income Vs. Passive Online Income

When it comes to earning online, you have two broad options:

• Active Income Sources - Here you will only get paid once for the work you do. If you do not work, you do not get money (hence the name “active income”). For example, writing an article for some website. The benefit is that the income is ensured and you will get paid as soon as you submit your work.

• Passive Income Sources - Here you will create online assets like websites or YouTube channels. They will keep on generating money for you forever, once you publish them (hence the name “passive income”). The downside is that there is no guarantee that you will make even a single buck. Your entire online project may fail. Even if it succeeds, you will have to wait a long time to see your first income. Also, you may have to do the marketing of your product yourself or pay someone for it.

Now, let’s start and have a look at the various options you have if you are interested in earning online bucks. The method that will be the best for you, will depend on your interest area and skillset.

We will start with the methods that need no investment on your part. Later on we will also have a look at some ways that do need you to invest some initial amount of money.

What do we mean by no investment?

By no investment, we mean no registration fee or subscription fee etc. We hope you understand that to work online you have to have a computer/laptop/mobile, an internet connection, some basic software like Microsoft Office etc.

How to earn money online without paying anything?

Data Entry

You can make money online by doing just basic tasks such as:

• taking surveys
• CAPTCHA filling jobs
• filling data in online software/website
• classification of objects, or images online.

It’s an active income source, i.e. you will get paid till you keep on working.

There are various websites that will pay you for such tasks. For example, you may search for Amazon Mechanical Turk in Google. Here you will find many such tasks. Not much skill is required for these tasks. You just need to be cautious and invest your time.

If you are interested in such tasks and want to read more, you may read our articles on online data entry jobs, and online CAPTCHA filling jobs.

Transcribing

You can watch videos or listen to audio files/podcasts and write what is being said, e.g. write their subtitles etc. It’s an active income source too.

To know more about such tasks, you may read our article on online Transcribing jobs.

Translation

If you know more than one language, then you may convert document written in one language into another, say from English to Hindi or from Spanish to English etc. It’s an active income source.

Translation jobs/tasks pay better than basic data entry or transcribing jobs. You may read more about online Translation opportunities, in this article of ours.

Sell your Service online

If you are good at providing some service online, then you may earn some good money. For example, you may take online classes or solve doubts of students.

There are various websites where you may sell your service:

• Takelessons - teach any skill online, e.g. singing, cooking, guitar, acting, algebra, spanish etc.
• Chegg India - here you may teach students, or solve doubts of students.

Online earning methods that require some initial investment

Blogging

It’s a great passive income source. Get a domain, and a hosting and start uploading your posts. You may earn a lot with time. But initially for few months you will hardly get any website traffic. So, you will have to be very patient.

These are the points that you should know, if you intend to generate a passive website/blog income source:

• Earnings depend a lot on the volume of searches in your niche (i.e. the topic area of your website) and the competition.
• Your website will not pick up traffic before 6 to 8 months. So, give it some time, atleast a year maybe.
• You need to have atleast 100 articles up on your website within 6 to 9 months. More the merrier. Anything over 1000 words is considered a good article length. Though it will vary a lot from one niche to another. But quality will matter more than quantity in the long run. In one of my website, there are a couple of articles that are around 600 words long and they still rank in the first page of Google Search Results.

You can earn money from a website via three main methods:

• Ads - E.g. Google AdSense Ads, Ezoic Ads etc.
• Affiliate Marketing - You may pitch for others' products on your website and if some consumer makes a purchase via your affiliate link, you will get some percentage of the sales as commission. The most common affiliate program is Amazon Associates programme, but there are many others that you may explore, for example ClickBank. Commissions paid by ClickBank are much higher than Amazon.
• Later on you may even sell your own information products or even tangible products.

If you want to learn more about blogging, various digital marketing aspects (like SEO etc.), you may visit our digital marketing website.

Note

You will have to invest some money to setup your website/blog, e.g. to purchase a domain, hosting service etc. If you just want to setup a simple information blog with articles, you may create a static website (rather than a Wordpress website) and host it on a platform like Netlify, which provides free hosting.

YouTuber

It’s a passive income source too. The videos you upload will keep on making money for you forever, without you needing to do anything.

But with new YouTube rules, there’s a high threshold before you can monetize your channel. Earnings will be very low in the beginning, but they will increase with time. Just as blogging, sky’s the limit, if you are making awesome content.

Make better and more videos, and you will not only get more views, but also more subscribers. More the subscribers, more the views in the future. This has a snowball effect. But unlike blogging, you will need to be much more consistent in uploading videos.

You can earn money not only through Google ads, but also through giving affiliate links in the description section or via sponsored ads. But you will get sponsored ads only once you get some subscribers, say atleast 10k or so. Also, you will need to check for YouTube terms and policies, as YouTube may not show ads on your video, if you have placed paid sponsored ads in them.

Note

As compared to blogging, YouTube channel is a bit less passive. You will have to keep on working on your YouTube channel somewhat, even after it becomes successful, or it will decline evnetually. I have some websites that are making money for me, even though I have not worked on them even a bit for years. I cannot do so with my YouTube channels.

To run a good quality YouTube channel, you may have to invest in:

• Good Video editing software, e.g. Camtasia, Adobe Premiere Pro etc. However, many free options are also available.
• A mic, headphone, pop filter etc.
• Maybe a camera (if you want to show your face or record some video), lights, green screen etc.

Sell E-books

You may make an e-book, say on English Grammar or some recepies etc. This is your product. Now, you just need to do some marketing and get paid for it forever.

There are various platforms where you can sell your e-book:

• You can upload it on your own website. But then you will have to handle all the money transactions and marketing yourself.
• You may upload your e-book to a third-party platform, e.g. Amazon Kindle Publishing. This way you need not worry about financial setup or marketing.

You can make your own e-book, or get it made by someone. You need not be an established author or run after established publishing houses to get your product to the customer and start earning.

Information/Training Courses

This is an awesome way to earn passive income. You will earn much more by selling information products, than you can ever earn via ads and affiliate marketing.

Just like e-books, you may sell video courses via two methods:

• Upload the videos on your own website/app. This way you will have full control over your video-content. You may decide whether people may download your content or not, how much they can see for free etc. But you will have to create your own Learning Management System (LMS), and financial transaction setup. If your website is in Wordpress then you will find some good LMS plugins.
• You may upload your video-course on some third-party platform, like Udemy.com, YouTube etc.

The only downside is that, making good quality video-course is very time consuming. So, most of the people initially start earning online via ads, affiliate marketing etc., and only later boost up their earnings by creating an information product.

Sell Online businesses

Some people are good at managing businesses, while others are good at creating and then selling businesses. Same is true for online businesses. It’s like selling an online product.

You may create an online business and then sell it on platforms like Flippa. For example, I do run some websites, I also sell a few on Flippa. If your site is earning say $1000 per month, then you may easily get 24 to 30 times that value when you sell it, i.e. $24,000 to $30,000.

Flippa is an auction site for digital products (like eBay). You can also sell other products like apps, domain names etc.

On the other hand, if you have some money to spare, you can also buy websites or apps that are already making money. Making a website from scratch, filling content in it and then to wait for it to gain some traffic is a time consuming business. Buying an already up and running website/app will save you a lot of time, and help you become a full-time blogger faster.

Sell Digital Products

You may also create and sell digital products, such as photos, videos, music, logos etc. If you are good at photography or in creating tunes, you may sell them at various online platforms.

There are various websites where you may buy or sell such digital products:

• Shutterstock - You will be paid some commission whenever someone will buy your images, music etc. Keep on uploading a lot of images/photographs to create a handsome passive income source.
• Adobe Stock

Dropshipping

In dropshipping you just sell someone else’s products and get some profit. So, here you will be a middleman. You won’t even be required to handle the products or deal with shipping.

You can make a Shopify or WooCommerce website in Wordpress. This will be like an online store where you can display products of some other wholesaler or manufacturer. For example, Oberlo is an app that integrates pretty well with Shopify and enables you to sell products online.

Once a customer makes a purchase on your online store, you will pay some money to the manufacturer and keep the rest as your profit. You may sell the products at any price of your choice, just like a retailer shop does in market. It all depends on how you market the products. The best part is that the shipping will be done by the manufacturer or wholesaler, not you. But the marketing and advertising part will be your responsibility, afterall it’s your store.

Winding Up

There are various types of sites that will provide you the opportunity to work online, and pay you for your skills and time. They all fall in the following broad categories:

• Dedicated websites for specific online work, e.g. for Transcription, for Translation etc. In most of them you will be tested, thereafter you will join a team of their freelancers and then they will start assigning you work. You will not deal directly with the clients.
• General websites for online tasks, where you will bid for the jobs posted by clients. So, here you will deal directly with clients. For example, UpWork, Fiverr etc.
• Specific Company website - You may also contact a particular company directly, if they offer assignments to freelancers.

The kind of work-arrangement and job-type you prefer will depend a lot on your skill-set and your personality. Ask yourself these questions:

• Do you like dealing with clients directly?
• Do you like constant flow of work, i.e. someone assigning you work, or do you prefer bidding to get an assignment?
• Are you looking to work as freelancer in long term, or are you planning to become an entrepreneur and get yourself a good set of clients that appreciate your work. To become an entrepreneur one day, you should focus more on dealing with clients directly, or building your own online assets (e.g. websites, YouTube channels etc.).

Even if you are working on more active online income sources right now, our suggestion will be to build up some long-term passive income sources too on the side, e.g. your own website, YouTube channel, podcast or some product that you can sell online. They will not pay you right off the bat, but they will provide you the real financial freedom in future.

We are moving more and more towards an online economy. The lockdown and work-from-home culture has given it a further boost. So, you cannot go wrong with online work. Such skills will always come handy. You may do it for some extra income, to work full-time from home, or to lay foundation of your future business. Just go for it!