5 Simple Ways to Make Money Online

In today’s economy, you don’t need to have a 9-5 job to make real, good money. Thanks to the rapid expansion of the “gig” economy, there are now dozens, if not hundreds of ways to start making money online. You can either use skills you already have to supplement your current job, or make a full-time income. 

One of the biggest challenges, however, is knowing where to get started. With thousands of online jobs being posted every day and numerous additional ways to make money, it can be overwhelming to try to figure out the best ways to make money online. 

To help you out, I’ve put together a list of five ways you can start making money online almost immediately. 

1. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest and fastest ways to start making money online. Essentially, affiliate marketing involves promoting other people’s products or services. If someone buys the product or service because of your promotion, you get a cut of the profit. 

Depending on the price of the product or service, your cut could range anywhere from a few cents to hundreds of dollars. 

For example, one of the simplest affiliate programs to get started with is the Amazon Affiliates program. They give you specialized links for each of their products, which you can then share on social media or on your website. If someone clicks on your link and then buys ANY product from Amazon over the next 24 hours, you get a small percentage of the profits. 

Another easy program to get started with is CJ Affiliate. They have hundreds of large companies which you can promote and get an affiliate commission for every sale. They partner with large companies like Barnes & Noble, Lowes, J. Crew, etc. 

Many people have made significant sums of money through affiliate marketing, including people like Pat Flynn who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars every year doing it. 

2. Dropshipping

While slightly more involved than affiliate marketing, dropshipping is also a relatively simple way to make money online. It involves finding products that are being sold inexpensively and reselling those products for a profit. In essence, you’re “flipping” products. You’re buying low and selling higher. 

It’s important to note that with dropshipping, you never actually touch the products. They get sent directly from the seller to the buyer. You are acting as the middle man who facilitates the transaction. You simply find the best products to sell and then connect the seller to the customer. You keep whatever profits you make on the marked up products. 

For example, many dropshippers use the site AliExpress to find low priced products. 

Then they mark up the price of those products and list them on their ecommerce website. They promote the products in a variety of ways, such as through Facebook advertising, email marketing, and social media posting. 

If you want to get started with dropshipping, Oberlo makes it really easy to set up a dropshipping store on Shopify. If you don’t want to set up a full ecommerce shop, you can also use eBay to list products that you find on sites like AliExpress. Be careful about this, though. If you use eBay for dropshipping and fail to abide by their guidelines, such as providing tracking information and shipping orders on time, it could result in an account suspension.

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3. Freelance Writing

Freelance writing has a very low bar to entry, which makes it an outstanding way to make money online. At its most basic, it involves getting paid to write. This writing can take a thousand different forms, from writing blog posts to emails to Wikipedia pages to resumes. 

If you can write well and know how to effectively market yourself, there is the potential to make a significant amount of money in freelance writing. Some of the best freelance writers make over six-figures every year.  

Finding freelance writing jobs isn’t difficult. There are numerous job boards where hundreds, if not thousands of jobs are posted on a regular basis. These job boards include:

• Upwork
• Problogger
• Flexjobs
• Thumbtack
• Writers.work
• Fiverr
• And many others

If you’re not sure where to get started with freelance writing, consider taking one of the many courses on freelance writing courses that are available on Udemy. 

Or check out this post on the Top 24 Sites for Freelance Writing that will help you find jobs.

Or… as a close cousin alternative, you might consider being a freelance editor – 11 Best Work from Home Editor Job Sites for Freelance Editors

4. Marketing Services

If you’ve got a knack for marketing, there are many business that need significant help in the marketing department. Essentially, you use a variety of online tools to help promote a business’s products or services. 

Marketing services can take many forms, including:

• Email marketing
• Social media marketing
• Paid advertising
• Creating sales materials (sales pages, etc.)

Most of these forms of marketing require a specific set of skills. For example, paid advertising typically requires a knowledge of how to use the Facebook or Google advertising platform. Email marketing requires an understanding of how to write compelling emails and how to put them into an email marketing platform. 

If you have these skills, you can charge a premium price for them since most business owners are in the dark regarding online marketing. 

Online marketing services jobs can be found in many of the same places that freelance writing jobs can be found. Upwork, Thumbtack, and Fiverr, in particular, are probably the best places to get started finding marketing jobs. 

If you want to learn online marketing, there are literally dozens of courses available on Udemy. 

5. Bookkeeping Services

If you have bookkeeping skills, you can utilize them to make money online. There are hundreds of companies that outsource their bookkeeping to a third party, and you can get a slice of that pie if you know where to look. 

Bookkeeping responsibilities can include anything from keeping track of income and expenses to paying invoices to disbursing payroll. 

Some simple ways to get started selling your bookkeeping services are:

• Create a website
• Market yourself online using social media
• Call local businesses to offer your services
• Find online jobs at places like Upwork, Glassdoor, and LinkedIn

Start Making Money Online Today

There is literally nothing holding you back from getting started making money online today. There are thousands of jobs available, and many of them surely fit your skill set. So don’t wait any longer. Get out there and start making good money online.

“Nicholas Rubright is the digital marketing specialist at SaleFreaks – a dropshipping automation tool that helps dropshippers automatically place orders when they make a sale. He has a passion for writing, marketing, and entrepreneurship, and likes to bring these things together by creating awesome blog posts like this one.”

Thanks Nicholas – we appreciate your ideas. Shawn Kinkade Kansas City Business Coach