There are many online earning methods to choose from. Your choice of method will depend on your own particular circumstances. For example, when I first looked into online earning methods, I started with eBay. I didn’t have any cash to invest in franchises so I started with buying and selling. I opened an eBay profile and started selling stuff from my bedroom. From there I bought items from charity shops, pound shops and car boot sales and sold them for profit on the auction site.
It wasn’t until later that I discovered another eBay ‘hack’ which was much better..
Online Earning Methods – eBay
I found an eBook which claimed to teach an eBay business model. I bought it and downloaded it, which at the time seemed like the perfect business model to me. It was an automated, digital, downloadable product. It struck me as the perfect business idea for the online marketplace. Anyways, more on that later. For now let’s delve into the actual business idea I had bought!
The eBay business idea used a little ‘hack’ which found badly listed items. Using websites like misspellsearch.com and bargainchecker.com, I found items on eBay which were not getting the searches they should have. Badly listed items don’t get found.
When someone lists an item on eBay, they type in the details of that item and if the main title is miss spelled, it doesn’t get found. These little ‘gems’ are sitting on eBay and not getting bids just because people can’t see them. As such they tend to sell for much less than they’re worth.
You need to find items which are listed at a low starting bid. Wait until the last minute and then use a program called auctionsniper.com to bid on your item. That way you don’t push up the price and start a bidding war.
I used this little system for a while to make a little extra money on the side. It works if you do it right. See the full article on the first of my recommended online earning methods here: how to start a profitable ebay business.
Online Earning Methods – No.2 – Your Own (Digital) Products
After a while of using eBay to make money, I decided it really wasn’t the business model of the future. It worked but it was a time-heavy model. I was queueing at the post office, looking for bargains, re-listing and answering questions from customers. I was tied to the computer and wasn’t earning enough to make it worth my while. The model works and you can purchase increasingly higher valued items to make it work better. However, I was on a mission to find the best method of making money online!
My initial purchase of the eBook from eBay led me to think that this was the best model to use. I had bought a digital downloadable product from eBay. The whole process was automated. This, I thought was a much better model than mine. Create a product of your own, and then sell it again and again.
So I set about creating my own products and attempting to sell them online. Here’s my “online earning methods” number 2! Although I didn’t actually sell any of my own products, I later learned it was because I wasn’t getting anyone to my website. If you have a clever idea of your own, a business system or even a product which is an offshoot of your personal passion or profession, many top marketers suggest making your own product. Make a digital product and brand it as an eBook or video series. The sell it through a website.
This idea throws up a lot of problems:
- Generate traffic to your website – how?
- How to build a website in the first place?
- How to create your products?
You can access an online training and education platform which addresses all of these issues here.
Online Earning Methods – Number 3 – Affiliate Marketing
After a while of trying to sell my own products and no clue as to how to do it, I sought out some online training. This led me to a little business model which is where most of the online entrepreneurs are drifting towards.
This is a business model known as affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing lets anyone benefit from sales happening around the internet by allowing them to recommend various products and services. By referring customers around the web to other people’s products, anyone can earn commissions based on the sales of those products.
You don’t need your own product, only  a means to send people to products with your own personalised affiliate link. Your link is tracked and if the sale originated from your affiliate link, you are credited with the sale. Affiliates of digital products can earn up to 40%+ commissions too.
There are millions of affiliate products on the internet as well. The biggest affiliate company is Amazon. Anyone can join Amazon and earn affiliate commissions by sending them traffic. Affiliate marketing is probably one of the best online earning methods. However, you need to know what you’re doing, otherwise you can spend a long time working for nothing. Access a training and education platform here.
Online Earning Methods – Number 4 – Adverts On Your Content
Around the same time as finding out about affiliate marketing, I learned a simple strategy which anyone can use. This is by using Google’s Adsense program. Adsense, allows you to place some code on your website or blog and get paid when someone clicks on it! By regularly blogging and sharing your posts, your online presence will grow.
When you start getting a lot of visitors to your blog, the number of clicks on your adverts will increase. For each click on an advert, you will only receive a tiny amount – just a few cents (or pence). However, once you are receiving thousands of visits to your site daily, this adds up! Plus if you can get a good number of daily organic (not paid for) visits to your website, you’ll have a passive income from this.
Hubpages.com is a good place to start blogging from and it’s free. Open a Hubpages account and join it to an Adsense account and start blogging. Don’t expect miracles at first. You’ll need to write regularly and share your posts for a long time before you see even a tiny trickle of income.
I worked at this method for some time before eventually deciding to throw in the towel with it. It works but you’ll need to build a huge following or get a load of traffic for it to work. To do this you’ll need to either rank your content on Google or have a well shared number of posts on social media.
Online Earning Methods – Number 5 (YouTube)
YouTube is another way to monetize content and earn from Adsense. In fact you’ll probably have more luck with YouTube than with writing content and attempting to rank on Google. Google now owns YouTube so they are part of the same search results. But YouTube is much less competitive than Google is and is the second most searched website on the internet (source:Â https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/04/most-popular-websites-google-youtube-baidu/)
You can also use YouTube in conjunction with affiliate marketing. Basically you need to create popular and useful or entertaining videos and upload them to YouTube. Again, it’s a number game. As your search traffic increases you can monetize your videos either with Adsense adverts or by linking to various affiliate products around the internet. YouTube will even offer to pay you directly if you reach over a certain number of subscribers and views to your YouTube Channel. See earn money with YouTube.
To start with though, like anything, you should concentrate on building your skill and honing your ‘craft’. People won’t visit your channel unless you are offering some kind of value. If you lead with the intention of online making money, it soon becomes obvious to viewers and the look elsewhere. YouTube can also rank your videos based on how people perceive you. So make good videos first before thinking of monetization.
Online Earning Methods – Number 6 – High Ticket Items
After I had tried a number of ways to earn with affiliate marketing, I learned to get help! I was going it alone for ages and didn’t know what I didn’t know. I had tried generating website traffic and sending it to various products around the internet with sporadic and limited success. I needed some advice. The main problem with seeking advice from the internet is that of trust. It’s hard to trust someone from the internet, especially if there’s money involved.
My search for the best online earning methods led me to high ticket items. With high ticket items you can earn substantially more than you can by selling the average priced product over the internet. I had sold a number of products over the internet by the time I figured out what the top earners were doing. They were selling high ticket.
A product selling for $100 over the internet can make an affiliate marketer $40 if it’s a digital product. So you can sell someone else’s digital product over and over again from your website and make $40 at a time. However, a high ticket item selling for $1000 can earn you $400 for a single sale. Then there’s subscription products too. Subscription products allow affiliates to earn monthly commissions on sales made previously. Multi-tier sales allow affiliates to earn from their team of sales people. These are the tactics of the top earning affiliate marketers. Learn more here.