Five Easy Ways to Make Money Online From Home

It is a fact that billions of dollars are transacted each year online.  So why is it so hard to sit down in front of your computer at home and make easy money online?  Personally, I think the real reason is because of the lack of transparency.  For example, if you get a job at Target the manager will train you and you can watch other people work so that you can learn exactly how to do your job and make money.  However, if you are trying to find ways to make money online from home, there is no one to teach you the ropes.  Instead, you are left doing endless searches on the Internet to try to find money making ideas.  The problem is that nearly all of the sites you visit are recommending different ways to make money and most of them are trying to sell you something that doesn’t work.  After enough searching and confusion, the average person gives up on their money making endeavors.  If you are interested in finding some easy ways to make money and you are willing to learn some new skills, then there are jobs out there for you.  How much you make depends on the skills you provide and the amount of time, effort and creativity that you put into your project.  After all, the web is filled with stories of people that have made a great living this way.  I read a story about such a person named Charlo Barbosa the other day that helped inspire me.

How Much Money Can You Expect to Make Online?

Before you get started with any online endeavor, you should make some realistic expectations.  First of all, you won’t be getting rich overnight, or for at least a few years.  When starting out online, there is a big learning curve where you must learn new skills.  On top of this, whatever service or product you are selling, you’ll need to build up your clientele over time.  If you start a website it can take years to get enough traffic to make realy money.  If you are providing a service, it can take a few months or longer to build your reputation so that people trust you and give you repeat business and referrals.  With that said, you should be able to make a few dollars per hour when you first get started.  As you build your skills and workflow, you can continually increase that figure.  For example, I’ve seen people selling website logos that have a 60 day backlog.  They offer their customers express delivery and can make as much as $40 per logo for only about fifteen minutes of work.  However, for people starting out with the same service, it can take weeks before you convince someone to select you as their logo provider.  Basically, the amount of money you make will depend on the quality and type of service you provide.

Where to Look For Online Jobs

If you want to get a job in real life, you have to look at job listings or classifieds to help you locate the jobs.  In the online world, looking at classifieds would be a mistake.  Online job postings are almost all advertisements.  Instead of offering legitimate jobs, they offer get rich quick schemes that often require payment and never deliver any money.  To make money online you have to find the jobs by visiting websites that specialize in such jobs.  The best way to learn where to find these websites is through word of mouth, but because most of your friends won’t know where to look, you’ll have to ask people online.  Visit some forums or other resources and you may wander across some decent sites.  Or, keep reading and we’ll let you know about some of the sites that we’ve used to hire people online.

Some Online Ways to Make Money from Home

If you’ve got your expectations in line and are ready to get started, here are some of the ideas that you can use to find money making ideas online.  Use the list below and be creative.  Try to find new ways to do things or find some way to differentiate yourself from others.  No matter what you do, you should build a website or make a free blog that showcases some of your work.  That way, you can show people your skills and provide some testamonials to help build trust in your services.  Most people will pay more if they find someone they can trust and rely on.

Sell Gigs on Fiverr

One of the best ways to get started is to go to fiverr.com and spend a few hours browsing through the categories and looking at the services that others offer.  Fiverr is a site that you can sell any service, which they call a “gig”, for five dollars.  Because of the five dollar price point, there are lots of people that are willing to pay for these services.  Services on this site include almost anything you can think of, but some of the more common include logo design, social network marketing and website building.  Once you open an account and get your first customers, make sure that you provide excellent service so that you get good feedback.  Not only will it help you get future gigs, but people will be able to contact you directly and negotiate bigger deals that can lead to longer term money making opportunities.

As is the case with any business, if you want to optimize the amount of money you can make, you have to find a service that you can sell a lot of, and that doesn’t take you very long.  For example, some people can create a logo in less than five minutes.  If that was the case, you could theoretically make $60 an hour doing this type of work.  Choosing something that takes 30 minutes or more to complete would limit you to about $10 an hour, but if you are offering it as an incentive for further business then it also makes sense.

Write Articles for Other People’s Blogs

There are literally millions of blogs in existence.  Hundreds of thousands of these blogs are willing to pay money for unique and interesting articles.  If you are a good writer or have an expertise in an area that you can write about, then this is a way to make some money online and from home.  Writing articles is just like any other business.  You have to start slow and try to build some clients so that you can sell more and more articles.  Selling your first few articles are the most difficult.  Here are some ways to do it.

If you want to sell your articles, you can take three different approaches.  The first approach is to find websites that write and sell articles and apply for an online job.  A simple search on your favortie search engine for a term like “buy articles” or “article writing service” can yield hundreds of sites that are in the business of writing and selling blog articles.  Visit some of the more popular sites and find out how they pay their writers.  By using a high volume site you will be able to sell more articles, but you should check competing sites to see who will pay you the most per article.  Some sites pay based on words, some pay you based on the subject.

A second approach to make money writing articles is to go to a freelance website and bid on jobs.  Sites like elance.com bring buyers and sellers together and allow service providers to bid on posted jobs.  For example, a blog may post an job on the site that requires five 1,000 word articles about a specific subject.  Article writers will be able to bid on the job by giving a price estimate and some other facts such as experience or testamonials that help the employer choose them.  The more work you get here, the better your reputation and the easier it will be to find more work.

The third way to get work by writing articles is to contact the blogs yourself.  Start by doing a search for any term that you’d like to write about.  For example, if you really like video games, then search around and visit hundreds of video game related blogs.  Find their contact form and send them an email offering to write an article for their blog.  Be creative with the emails you send because blog owners are used to getting lots of spam and inquiries for “guest posts”.  Offer something personal about yourself and mention something specific about their site, as well as give them a link to your linkedin profile so that they know you are a real person and not just spamming their site.  Sometimes, the blog will post your article with your name and a link to your profile.  This will help other people find you if they also need help writing articles.

While a job writing articles can net you a decent amount of money, it is probably not enough to make a living.  That’s because your income will be limited by your time, and writing articles doesn’t pay a lot unless you can write quickly and sell a lot of articles.

Make Money Selling Photos Online

If you enjoy photography or are very good at editing pictures for effect, then you could make some money selling your photos.  Think about it, there are millions of blogs out there and each blog has dozens or even thousands of photos on their site.  This means that there are hundreds of millions of pictures being used by all of these websites.  While most pictures are just copied and posted on blogs for free, there are still millions of pictures that blog owners pay for each year.  If this is something that interests you, then your first step should be to set up accounts at a few of the premier photo selling websites.  After you set up an account, you can upload your photos and wait for people to buy them.  You can get paid a one time fee or you can collect royalties from continued use, depending on where and how you set up your account.  Also, you should look through the popular categories and determine what kind of pictures you want to create in order to sell more photos.

There are really two approaches you can take to selling your photos.  You can try to become an expert in a niche, or you can try to create photos for the most popular categories.  Both strategies make sense.  If you become an expert in your niche, you will gain repeat customers and people will turn to you when they need new photos.  If you take the other approach to make money online with your photos, you will be going after large volume, but you may not make as much per picture.  Try one or both methods until you see what works for you.

Make Money Online With Social Network Marketing

If you are really into social networking, then you could use your skills to make money from home online.  That’s because nearly every website, company or blog could use help with their social networking.  Blog owners have to worry about writing content, promoting their blog, designing, hosting and advertising, which doesn’t leave a lot of time to promote themselves with social networks like facebook, twitter, digg and google plus.  If you are good at finding unique things to post on social networks and can help drive new fans and followers to a website, then you could be in high demand.  If this is something you’re interested in, there are three ways to find some business.

The first way is to go to a place where people are looking for this service.  Check out the plethora of freelance sites and look for people that need this service.  While there will always be jobs of this nature, it will be somewhat difficult to bid against the other service providers and may take a while to build your reputation.  The second way to find social networking jobs is to contact the blog owners yourself.  Visit sites and blogs that you really like or that you find interesting and contact them through their website.  Work on a creative and bold sales pitch so that you can persuade them to outsource their social networking.  It’s best if you can offer them real life examples of the type of work you can do.  The final way to make money this way is to contact the search engine optimization (SEO) companies and offer your services to them.  Ultimately, you should look for companies that don’t already offer that service and set up a partnership with them.  They could easily cross sell this service to their existing client base and you could split the money made with the SEO company.  Finding the right niche like this could be a big money maker.

Make Money Online by Blogging

All of the ways to make money online from home that we mentioned above are decent sources of income, but they all require a specific amount of time for each dollar you make.  For example, writing articles or selling gigs can make you between $5 and $20 per hour, but the amount of income you are limited to is based on the amount of time you spend working and finding customers each week.  If you are interested in a way to make money that has not set limit, and that can make money for you while you are asleep, or even if you neglect it for years, you can create a website or blog.  Here are the pros, cons and some insight into whether or not this is an option for you.

First, creating a blog or a website is not difficult at all.  The difficult part of making money this way is getting visitors to your site.  And the only way you get visitors to your site is through hours and hours of hard work.  If you’re thinking about starting a blog to make money anytime soon, you’d best think again.  A blog is a long term way to make money that requires years of commitment and dedication.  If you’re not scared yet, then here’s how you can start.

Think long and hard about a topic that interests you, that you are knowledgable about, and that is somewhat unique and more specific than other blogs out there.  I say somewhat unique because every single topic you can think of is already covered by thousands or even hundreds of thousands of sites already.  Finding a niche that you will stay interested in and motivated to stick with is the only way to approach this.

Once you know what you are interested in, you’ll need to find a domain name that you like.  This in itself can take days of research, as again, every name you can think of is probably already taken.  Once you have a domain you can build your website.  While there are free hosts such as blogspot and wordpress.org out there, its best to set up your domain on a private host and then build your website using WordPress or, if you prefer, static html pages.  While all of this sounds hard, this is really the easy part.

The next step is to start generating content for your blog.  The better you can write and the longer your posts are, the more people that will be interested in your site.  You’ll need to set a schedule and add new articles to your site at least once a week and hopefully more often in the beginning.  Once you have a dozen or more posts, its time that you start marketing your site.  You’ll need to find ways to get other blogs and sites to link to your site.  You’ll need to set up social networking capabilities to help promote your site.  Doing these projects are as important as writing the articles themselves.  Without other sites and blogs referencing your site, it will be difficult to be found in the search engines.

The frustrating part is that it will take months and even years before you reach enough visitors per day to actually make decent money.  And many days will be doing mundane tasks like fixing broken links and researching what to write about next.  However, if you stick with it and keep your content fresh, eventually you’ll start getting visitors.  The more interesting your site, the faster your visits will grow, and eventually you’ll be making money.  If you stay dedicated and active on your site, you will have a good chance of succeeding.  I’m guessing that over 95% of blogs are abandoned after a few weeks or months because their owners get frustrated and don’t make any initial returns.

If you have some money to invest, you can buy a blog that already has some traction.  Go to sites like flippa and search for something in the space you want.  It could take months to find a site that is what you are looking for and that is being offered at a reasonable price.

The Takeaway

These are five ways that you can make money online and at home.  There are thousands of other ways but, in my opinion, these are the best ways to earn a little extra income, and the easiest ways to get started.  If you found something that works well for you that isn’t listed above, please leave us a comment with your thoughts.

Tagged as: make money from home, make money online