Greetings entrepreneurs/Wanna be entrepreneurs!
Do you dream of becoming a self-sufficient independent person?
We all do.
In these times when creativity among individuals is rising like a forest fire, we all need an outlet to define ourselves. We all need someplace to express our creative selves where the money comes as a byproduct. While there is so much out there that you can do from the comfort of your home, being a good human being you need to be mindful of a few things.
For starters, our incomes need to be coming through the right/legal/lawful sources. In simple terms, your way of earning is fair, you are not cheating or deceiving your customers and no one is being suppressed or uplifted unjustly. A few important tips to keep in mind while looking for means to earn active/passive income should be:
- Provide true value to the customers
- Give your customers what you promise to deliver
- Don’t deceive people into buying cheap/useless/deceiving products from you
- If you are providing a service be clear on what value you are providing for their money
- Be clear on your terms and conditions
- Before going into a deal make sure both parties are aware of everything they need to know. Don’t burden your customers with unannounced changes to the deal.
Coming back to how you can earn an income online… one of the greatest benefits of earning online is that you can make your earnings passive.
What is Passive Income?
Passive earning is a means of income that needs effort once but when it starts selling you don’t have to do much after that. It’s just like putting in efforts to make a product that then sells on autopilot through a system you have set up for it.
Passive income is a great way of earning and the online world has a lot to offer on this subject.
Let’s delve into 10 ways you can start earning online the right way.
10 Legit Ways to Earn an Income Online
Our top 10 ways to earn income online are:
1. Sell Information Products
Sell an eBook. Sell information products.
Sell worksheets/workbooks.
eBooks are a great way of earning a passive online income. You have to put in the effort once and reap the results long after that. eBooks might not appear to be that lucrative when compared to other online means of earning but in the long run, they can be a pretty meaningful source of earning. There is not much to lose in creating ebooks. You can be done with writing in weeks, design it, and launch it. ebooks also don’t require you to keep updating the content every once in a while. Many people have generated money from ebooks they wrote years back.
Don’t think it’s for you?
You do not have to be an amazing writer to write amazing ebooks. We all have some knowledge about something. Just write everything you know about a subject and then organize it in a manner that will help a beginner.
2. Start a Self-Hosted Blog
Blogging can be adopted as a full-time career. Not only that, people have established their blogs as businesses and are earning good enough. You’ll see many examples of bloggers who are earning 6 figures through various earning streams via their blog alone.
What is a self-hosted blog?
There are many blogging solutions out there. Some are free others may cost you a buck or two per month. A self-hosted blog means that you have a domain name of your own like thewomanblogger.com as opposed to thewomanblogger.wordpress.com or thewomanblogger.blogspot.com
You can easily monetize your self-hosted blog and customize it as per your needs. The major problem is you need time to establish a blog website. Writing 30 articles that don’t instantly make money makes many people quit too soon. You need patience with a self-hosted blog. It can take anywhere from 8 months to 2 years for you to properly establish your website.
Keep working on it. There are plenty of avenues you can tap and succeed in. Remember, consistency is the key.
Blogs have a good earning potential especially if you can offer your services there as well. Some of the ways you can earn from a self-hosted blog are:
- Earn via Ad Networks
- Sell Services
- Sell Digital Products
- Do Affiliate Marketing
- Open an Online Shop
- Sell Print On Demand Merchandise
- Do Sponsored Posts
- Offer Coaching Services
Read More: How to make money with your Website/Blog?
3. Offer Freelance Services
Freelance has changed the way people thought about earning. It finally gave people a new window to earn from the comfort of their homes. Freelancing made remote jobs a possibility. It made it possible for you to work with companies and employers from other corners of the world.
There are a ton of freelance services you can offer as an individual. Depending upon your skill level you can go for:
- Freelance writing – copywriting, article writing, content writing, etc
- Web design – WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, etc
- Web development
- Social media management – Facebook Ads, Instagram, Pinterest
- Search engine optimization
- Graphic designing – posters, ebooks, flyers, social graphics
You can start with freelance giants like Upwork, Freelancer, Fiverr or PeoplePerHour or go search for job boards or job portals like FlexJobs. Another option is to take direct clients via your own site.
4. Start Teaching Online with Udemy
The Internet provides you access to the world. That means you can reach out to a good number of students from the vicinity of your home. I’m sure there is something you can definitely teach. There are many sites that offer you to create your courses online and sell them from the platform. Some popular examples are Udemy and Teachable.
If you are good at something consider drafting a course and then posting it on these sites. But the problem is when starting out you can easily get caught up in overwhelm because there are so many options out there. Some will suggest you go for your own site, others will suggest going to a Youtube channel or others still will want you to start podcasting. These are options and they are great as well. But if you are just starting out overwhelm will only stop you in your steps.
I’ve always emphasized on getting started quick before the information overload gets the best of you. Udemy is, therefore, an easy way to start selling your courses online.
Why go for Udemy?
You can earn while you are learning other things that selling courses online needs like marketing, promotion, videography, sales, and research.
You can start earning quickly after publishing your course.
Udemy has a strong base of around 30 million students and this number keeps going up by the day.
You don’t have to go on a hunt to find your students. On Udemy students find you.
There are plenty of success stories on Udemy.
I love this platform for taking online courses. You can usually find your favorite course on sale and they are pretty informative and well crafted. The sellers generate revenues by selling courses in huge numbers because of so many people looking for good courses on Udemy.
What do you need to start selling on Udemy?
Udemy offers you free courses to learn how to craft videos, organize them into courses, and start selling them on Udemy.
You can get paid via PayPal or Payoneer, whatever you like.
5. Start an eStore on Shopify
There are various ways to start an eStore. Woocommerce is a solution for online commerce that integrates with WordPress. Shopify is a great way to start quick and easy while you focus on sales when just starting out. You can open a shop with Shopify and once you are ready to expand you can look into upgrades on the same platform or move to other platforms.
Shopify is available on Android, iOS, and Web. It comes with built-in eCommerce solutions like shopping cart and payment gateways. There are numerous payment gateways available on Shopify besides third-party integrations.
How much Shopify Platform Costs you?
Shopify has a free 14-day trial and a lite plan that costs around $9/month. That is not much investment if you are just experimenting with eCommerce before you take a full plunge. Shopify basic plan costs around $29/month with 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. This means you get the plan for $29/month and then pay $0.30 per item sold in addition to a 2.9% commission.
6. Sell your Art and Crafts on Etsy
Are you good at arts and crafts? Jewelry making? Painting? Digital Art? Etsy is your place to open an online shop. Etsy is an online shopping hub for unique items. It can include anything from handmade, mousemade to professional crafts. Etsy doesn’t have a warehouse of its own. People open shops on Etsy and warehouse products on their own. Etsy is a huge marketplace for people who know what they are looking for. You can get traffic for free with Etsy. Additionally, you can promote your products on your own.
What will you need to sell on Etsy?
An Etsy account. It costs $0.20 per listing. The listing will last for 4 months or until the item is sold out. There is a 5% commission on the product price (including shipping) once it is sold.
What can you sell on Etsy?
- Home Decor, Furniture, Rugs, Bath and Beauty supplies
- Jewelry, Hair Accessories, Glasses, Scarves, Crocheted Products
- Men’s and Women’s clothing, Kid’s clothing, Shoes, and Bags
- Wedding, Party Decor, and Supplies
- Toys, Books, and Electronic Appliances
- Art, Paintings, and Collectibles
- Crafts, Supplies, and Tools
7. Design and Sell Graphics on Creative Market
Are you a Graphic Designer? A Web Designer? A Photographer?
Creative Market is a platform for you. If you are a designer or want to be one Creative Market is a great place to start selling your graphic designs. Creative Market is a platform for handcrafted and mouse-made designs from around the world. You just need to be a creative individual to sell your design elements, templates, fonts, pictures, and mock-ups on Creative Market.
You can also sell your photographs on Creative Market. It is one of the few platforms that allows users to purchase individual pictures for as low as $3. It’s great for other designers and creative content creators who don’t want to go through the hassle of buying monthly/yearly subscriptions just to get a few handfuls of photos for their projects.
Moreover, you can sell your WordPress themes, Squarespace themes as well as PSDs and HTML files for website themes.
What can you sell on Creative Market?
Commonly you can sell products in the following categories on Creative Market:
- Photos
- Graphics
- Web Themes
- Templates
- Fonts
8. Sell Custom Designed Products with 3rd Party Printing Companies
You can design and sell merchandise online without investing in heavy machinery for printing, collecting the base raw material, and looking into the hassle of shipping. There are many third-party companies out there that take your designs and print them on merchandise like t-shirts, mugs, etc. They take care of everything from raw material, printing, and shipping too.
You can put your designs on their platform by:
- designing them yourself
- getting designs from freelance graphic designers
- buying designs from websites like Creative Market and Etsy
What can you designs and sell with these third-party printing companies?
There are a lot of options. A few of them are:
- t-shirts, hoodies, scarves, tights, etc.
- mugs, bottles, tea coasters, etc.
- Canvases, posters, frames, wallpapers
- notebooks, bags, pouches, wallets
A few sites that help you sell your designed merchandise online are:
9. Create a Niche Site
Building your own informational website can become a potential source of earnings for you. Niche sites focus on a specific niche. Some examples of popular niches are health, beauty, tech, and photography. While niche sites are lucrative it’s important to realize that some niches are fairly saturated and it’s quite hard to rank on Google for them. It is advised you look into a niche that hasn’t been tapped into much and consider working a website around it.
Nice sites can also be built around a specific line of products like dog food, modest clothing, journaling, and planners. You can get creative here and look for something you are passionate about. You should at least be passionate about researching and learning about the niche you are trying to target via your website.
Something a lot of people don’t understand is that you can actually find your audience in a niche and that audience is more likely to purchase from you than from a website that is promoting literally everything out there. Niche sites give you the opportunity to build authority in your field. When you are talking about similar stuff on your website people tend to believe you have better knowledge than any other site that is generally talking about everything.
10. Start a Youtube Channel
Video content is a great way to earn online. If you have a website consider going for a Youtube channel as well. Even if you don’t have a website setting up a Youtube channel is easy and totally possible.
You can have an earning potential of $500 per month on an average channel. This is just about the ad revenue. Not to forget, you can promote your affiliate links on Youtube, as well as, do sponsored content for companies.
What do you need to start a Youtube Channel?
Select a niche. Niche works better than randomly posting videos about everything in general. There are no hard and fast rules though.
Next, start making videos. Initially just use your phone. You can get the professional gear later on. Phones work as good as cameras used to work once.
It’s important to get started.
You can make 30-40 good videos and then schedule them on Youtube, 1 every week. This will help you decide if Youtube is for you or not. But I’ve also seen channels that kept posting meaningful content for 2-3 years without much income and then boom all of a sudden they go viral. People start seeing their content and then there is no looking back.
For me, it’s more than just hard work. It’s the mindset with which you work on any of these strategies.
After how long will you see success?
Well, it depends on what you are posting about. How engaged is your audience and whether you are consistent?
At least wait for a year before you consider quitting. But this year should be filled with the best of your efforts.
Don’t get overwhelmed, just start!
These are just a few places to get started. You can explore hundreds of other options around the web and start generating your income from any meaningful option out there.
What’s important is you start with a plan and get started as soon as you can. If you are a mom who wants to work from home or you are planning on building a career online. These are a few of the best places to start.
Let me know if there are other options out there that you think can help one kick-start her online career as a successful entrepreneur in the making.
Peace!
