When it comes to earning online, most earning opportunities come with high levels of risk. They often also require large up-front investments – but we’re confident that it shouldn’t have to be this way! Indeed, the rise of the internet has opened up numerous excellent possibilities and opportunities for people to earn money online. It’s even possible to begin earning money online (and, maybe, even get rich) without needing any start-up capital or investments.
So, without further ado, today we’ll be summarizing some of the twelve best methods you could try to earn online. And, if you give any of these methods a try, please don’t forget to let us know, too!
Earning online shouldn’t be difficult, but these options can often require upfront investments (and may even be scams). As such, earning opportunities that don’t require investment are often both more appealing and potentially safer for your bank balance – and as such, we’ve picked out some of our top business ideas and online earning opportunities as follows to help you begin making money online!
#1 Start a Blog or Website
It might seem like a cliché recommendation, but starting your own blog is just as great an opportunity for many people looking to establish a new business online. Indeed, there are now numerous blog sites already published. Still, there are thousands of keywords online that have very low competition and IAAT scores. This should give your new blog efforts plenty of opportunities to grow and attract new viewers, too.
And, as with anything, many old and successful blogs have begun to die down with time. Therefore, there’s always plenty of potential for new bloggers to get involved with fresh new content.
So, if you have a passion and think that you could write about it, why not give blogging a try? It’s often a fun pastime. Plus, it offers excellent earning opportunities through ad revenue, sponsorships, affiliate marketing, and more. As such, if you have a passion, there’s surely room in the blogging world to get started and share your skills with other people!
Don’t Blogs Need Investment to Start?
At this point, you might be wondering whether or not starting a blog could really be the right opportunity for you. After all – don’t blogs usually need investment to start up?
Well, you can definitely spend money starting your new blog if you wish. However, this doesn’t need to be the case. In fact, you don’t need any investment in many cases to begin your own blog, so long as you do the work yourself!
Sites such as Canva often offer free trials for their users, allowing you to create visually stunning infographics and the like for your new blog site. Meanwhile, many publishing platforms offer a free plan or free trials while you establish your site. This can help you get started without requiring any investment. And, even for platforms that do require a subscription, the minimum monthly costs are often very low – maybe just a few dollars per month.
Budget Required to Start with– $100 (Domain Registration, Hosting, Educational Course)
Best Educational Resource–
Who is a Good Candidate? -You Enjoy writing and not very comfortable on camera.
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#2 Give YouTube or Twitch a Try!
Creating and sharing videos is becoming more and more popular. Still, it’s not only the fun that keeps attracting new content creators to these platforms. With this in mind, it’s also worth considering how YouTube or Twitch might be an option for you.
Indeed, you don’t necessarily need hugely fancy equipment to initially start your YouTube or Twitch channel. A decent webcam on your existing laptop may often be enough! And, as a further benefit, these platforms offer a host of different earning opportunities for their creators. These include ad marketing revenue, affiliate earning opportunities, content sponsorships, channel subscriptions from fans, and more.
So, if you’ve got a knack for creating fun and engaging videos, there could definitely be plenty of earning opportunities by giving YouTube or Twitch streaming and publishing a try! And, best of all, these platforms are completely free to sign up to!
Budget Required to Start with– $200 + A Good Mobile with Camera
Best Educational Resource: Professional Youtube Course by Experts
Who is a Good Candidate? -You are comfortable on Camera
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#3 Try Affiliate Marketing
We’ve briefly mentioned affiliate marketing in the previous two points– but to really outline the opportunities that this seemingly simple earning method can provide, we need to look a little more closely at what affiliate marketing is and how it works.
Content creators can earn a commission on sales through affiliate marketing resulting from their promotions. As such, most affiliate marketers structure their affiliate content as a product review (or similar); however, you’re entirely free to promote affiliate products in any manner you see fit.
The only catch here is that you need to make it clear to your readers that you will earn a commission on purchases made through your affiliate link. Fortunately, the majority of customers won’t worry about this – and so, most affiliate marketers usually provide a quick disclaimer at the top of each post to cover their backs and inform customers that the products being promoted are affiliate products.
Budget Required to Start with– $200+
Before You Start Affiliate Marketing
At this point, we’ve summarized some of the excellent earning opportunities affiliate marketing can provide – and the income potential is substantial. Indeed, if your content can result in just one sale of a $200 product per week, you’ll potentially be looking at over $1000 in income annually – completely passively!
However, there’s a catch here that we absolutely must mention. To provide effective, valuable affiliate content, you ideally want to be reviewing products you have personally used. While many affiliate marketers simply regurgitate information available on Amazon listing descriptions and the like, the value of this information will often be lower for potential buyers.
So, we recommend you start by reviewing products you’ve already tried personally – or, failing that, at least consider all of the product’s past customer ratings initially to ensure you’re giving a fair, thorough overview of the product in question.
What’s more, if you’ve had a bad experience with a product, make sure you make this clear. It’ll likely lead to fewer sales, but this can drastically boost your content’s reputation and reliability among readers overall. And, in turn, this may give your website a significant boost as such.
Best Educational Resource:
Who is a Good Candidate? -You are comfortable on Camera
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#4. Have a Creative Skill? Try Freelancing!
Did you know, there’s a lot of potential to earn a full-time income from home through freelancing. This doesn’t require any upfront investments on your part. So long as you have an Internet-enabled device and the necessary skills to offer services online, you can begin developing a fledgling online business without needing any investment initially.
To begin with, you may want to start by establishing your reputation on platforms such as Fiverr or Freelancer through lower-rate jobs. Once you’ve begun to get a following on these platforms, the potential for growth is high!
Growing your Freelance Business Online
Not only can you get paid for doing something that you love, but earning through freelancing platforms also offers you to develop and grow your new business venture. Once you’ve established your reputation, you could hire other freelancers to work for you. This would allow you to fulfil more orders and grow a thriving business overall.
However, if you do choose to go down the route of hiring other people, we have to give a word of warning. You should only ever hire people who will provide top-quality work. Sadly, in all too many cases, you can destroy the reputation you’ve worked so hard to establish if you hire anyone who’s less than a professional. If you’re at all unsure of a chosen freelancer’s skills, don’t hire them; you can earn much more online by providing top-quality content you’ve done yourself than hiring others and churning out low-quality results that the client may reject.
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#5 Don’t Overlook the Potential of Drop-shipping
Have you ever heard of drop-shipping? If not, then you’d likely be in the minority – and drop-shipping is rapidly growing as one of the most popular forms of online business models.
But what is drop-shipping? Dropshipping offers a unique opportunity for people who want to launch their own sales website but don’t have storage to hold stock. Instead, when customers place an order through a drop-shipping platform, you (the seller) forward the order to the manufacturer or warehousing team, who then handles all of the hassles and fiddly aspects of the ordering process.
What makes drop-shipping so popular? Well, not only does drop-shipping provide a very simple online earning opportunity for many small business owners, but it also doesn’t require significant expenses to start up a drop-shipping business. What’s more, there are drop-shipping options available for all manner of products, be it household utensils, clothing, equipment, and the like. So, whatever your passion might be, there could be a simple and effective drop-shipping solution for you to consider!
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#6. Offer Consulting Support
Let’s be real here: no matter what it might be, everyone has a specialty in something. Therefore, if you are experienced in a particular field – no matter how mainstream or niche it might be – you could try your hand at offering consulting support. This simple opportunity can provide potentially lucrative earning opportunities and doesn’t need any upfront investment; what’s more, it’s a great earning opportunity to try alongside running your own blog, too!
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#7 Become an Online Tutor or Teacher
If you have skills and think you should share these with other people, there’s undeniably a great deal of potential with becoming an online tutor or teacher. Indeed, a growing number of platforms are offering these opportunities for private remote tuition, and the income potential is often $20 or higher per hour (even for new starters).
As such, if you want a way to ensure that you are making as much money as possible through your online efforts, why not give tutoring a try. You’ll help make someone’s life a little easier. Plus, you’ll earn a generous income while doing so.
As an alternative to the generic tutoring structure, there are also platforms such as Udemy, which allow those with existing skills to create pre-recording tutoring sessions and courses, which customers can sign up for as and when they’re ready. These can potentially offer massive income potential, since the income in this sense is all passive once you’ve made the course. And, once again, it doesn’t necessarily require large investments to start. Your laptop’s inbuilt webcam or screen recording tools should be fine.
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#8 Become a Secret Shopper
In many cases, how shop staff or customer support teams behave may change with their environment. For example, if they know management teams are watching them, they may perform better (or worse!) than normal. With this in mind, more and more companies are turning to so-called “secret shoppers” to help them get a clear picture of their staff members’ skills and professionalism.
Becoming a secret shopper is easy. Plus, numerous platforms pay pretty generously for this form of earning opportunity. From posing as a potential customer to asking the customer support team for help and more, secret shoppers provide an invaluable service for businesses looking to optimize their staff management. What’s more, you also get paid generously for your time. Usually, payments are made as hard cash, although sometimes payments may be a free shop or the like. So, it’s worth considering if you’re looking for an online earning opportunity that doesn’t require investment.
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#9 Give Print-on-Demand Earning a Try
It’s somewhat similar to drop-shipping, since you don’t need to keep stock on-site to develop a successful business through print-on-demand services. And, while you’ll have to pay a little more per product for the lack of bulk-ordering, print-on-demand often eliminates a lot of the risk associated with developing products for many people. This makes it a versatile option to consider for your money-making efforts.
How does print-on-demand work? Well, it’s as simple as it sounds; you begin by creating a design, and then you reach out to a print-on-demand company to arrange the printing of this design on a myriad of products – be it cups, cushions, t-shirts, bags, or anything else you might think of! Then, all you need to do is wait for orders to begin rolling in. Each product is printed as and when it’s needed. So, you’ll only ever pay for the exact number you need.
Print-on-demand is undeniably an effective solution for many businesses. Targeting niches such as fandoms or current trends can also see potentially high returns from this business model.
If you’re not an artist yourself, that’s fine too. Some artists may be willing to create designs in exchange for a share of the profits. This can negate the need for initial investment. Alternatively, you could always commission an artist to make a bespoke design for your business (but this will naturally come with a cost).
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#10 Try Your Hand at Writing
Do you have a flair for creating stories and tales? Or perhaps you’ve got a particular area of expertise and want to help other people learn more? If this is the case for you, why not try your hand at writing a book or eBook?
In the past, writing a book would have come with massive publishing costs. Naturally, this expense would put a lot of people off the idea of book publishing. However, in this day and age, the creation of digital publishing opportunities has eliminated many associated costs. What’s more, as we’ve already mentioned, there are numerous excellent platforms such as Canva, which offer free trials in many cases for new users – so you can even create your very own cover design completely for free!
Of course, the income potential through publishing your own book cannot be overlooked. Even if you only charge $1 for a digital copy of the book and sell just a handful of books a day worldwide, you’d still be looking easily at over $1,000 passive income per year. That will only increase with a higher download price or more downloads. And that’s per book! There’s nothing stopping you from publishing more. This means you could potentially develop a full-time passive income solely through publishing books on a variety of niches in which you specialize.
What If Writing Isn’t my Forte?
If you’re not an adept writer yourself, you don’t need to miss out. You could alternatively provide all of the information to a freelance writer, who may be able to transform your dreams into a book (without the expense of asking them to conduct thorough research).
Of course, this option doesn’t come free, sadly. But, it does ensure that everyone, no matter their writing abilities, can give publishing a book a try if they so wish!
Final Thoughts
Earning money online shouldn’t be a minefield. We hope that today’s top twelve suggestions might be a good option for you to consider. Indeed, there are countless earning opportunities available online. And, while many of these require up-front investment, there are also numerous earning options you could consider that don’t require you to invest your hard-earned cash.
So, why not give some of our tips today a try; they might just change how you earn money, and could offer an excellent opportunity!
