If you have the time to spare, you can get paid for advertising online, even without your own website.
You’ll need to create and share content to do this but you don’t need anything other than a laptop and internet connection.
Firstly, you will need to set up an account on a site called Hubpages. Hubpages lets you build content by writing a blog (web log). If you create enough quality content you can earn from it by monetising your content through a program called Adsense. Adsense is Google’s monetisation process which lets bloggers place adverts on their content and earn from the clicks generated by their visitors.
Although you’ll need a fair amount of visitors to start generating revenue from your blogs, it’s one of the ways to monetise your writing, without even having your own website.
Using YouTube To Generate Revenue Online
Another free strategy is to use YouTube to upload your own videos. By connecting your YouTube account to your Adsense account, you can earn small amounts from people clicking on the adverts shown on your videos.
Again this strategy does takes some time. You’ll need to spend a good few months uploading content and sharing it, in order to start generating some regular commissions from your adverts. See how to generate free traffic from YouTube.
Generating Free Traffic
Generating free traffic takes time and effort but it’s a good strategy if you’re time rich. If you don’t have the time, see my article on How To Escape The Time For Money Trap for another strategy of generating income from your laptop.
Free traffic (visits to your content) can be generated in a number of different ways. Hubpages is a good starter platform if you’ve never done any work online before. However, it’s not such a great site to get your content ranked on Google for your major keywords (in your titles). If you want to do this, you’ll ideally need to build your own website. See Create Website And Earn Money to learn about building your own website.
See also ready made websites for sale for more on this and also this article on generating free traffic.
Using Paid Strategies To Make Money Online
If time isn’t on your side, or you don’t fancy spending months building content; paid marketing is the way to go. But unfortunately you can’t make money by sending paid visitors to click on your adverts. It will cost at least as much to pay for your visits as you’ll get from a click on one of your adverts. Instead of using advertising revenue, you’ll need to use another strategy.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a business model which lets you use other people’s products on the internet to earn commissions. You simply need to send your visitors to these products and make sales to generate revenue. Some affiliate products pay more than others.
For example, physical products pay typically 3-10% commissions on a sale compared to digital products which pay 30-50% commissions. So, you can see that digital products are more lucrative, assuming the same amount of sales and for the same, or a similar price.
Subscription Products & Other Considerations For Affiliates
One of the best affiliate marketing business models is to use both digital products but also subscription products. Subscription affiliate programs pay you not only for the sale, but also for the ongoing commissions based on a membership or software subscription service.
Subscription products let affiliate marketers earn continual commissions, even years after they have made the initial sale. For this reason, subscription products give a greater return on investment – so they’re better suited to paid marketing strategies. In addition to subscription affiliate products you can also choose products which pay you later for any up-sells closed by the company.
Most affiliate programs only pay you once. This means any residual income generated from that customer in the future is retained by the product owners and not you; the affiliate who referred the sale. With a good program, you can earn residual commissions based on your initial referral sale; even if your customer up grades their product years later.
High commission affiliate programs are also a big factor for affiliate marketers using paid marketing strategies. High commission programs let their affiliates earn larger than average commissions on high ticket affiliate products.
Which Strategy To Choose?
So, there’s a few different ways to make money from your laptop. Both paid and free strategies have their own individual difficulties. Paid strategies are ideal if you purchase a high ticket sales funnel.
Free strategies work well with both Adsense (placing adverts on your content) and affiliate marketing. If you’re going to build content though and build up your monetisation with Google’s Adsense program, don’t expect it to happen very fast. Ideally get your own website if you want to do this properly. Hubpages does help you get going but it limits your traffic from outside of Hubpages itself.
If you’re time rich, or have time to spare, consider taking the free route of building content either on YouTube, Hubpages or your own website. See buy ready made affiliate websites. If you’re working, you could build a business using paid marketing strategies and scale it up once you see a positive result. If you’re looking for fast results from an online business, I’d definitely recommend the paid marketing route.
If you want further assistance, drop a comment below or subscribe to my email list on this website. Best wishes, Tim