How To Make Money Online At Home

How To Make Money Online At Home

Working from home is something that a lot of people have been interested in for many years. There is so much information out there that it is difficult to figure out which methods would work. Below, I have created a list of 12 ways you can make money in the comfort of your home.

1. Blogging

How To Make Money Online At Home

Creating a blog is an extremely easy task you can complete at home. You basically will write articles on a topic that you enjoy, make sure it helps your visitors resolve a problem they are seeking an answer to and then monetize your site. Here is what you will need to get started:

  • A Domain Name (the name of your site)
  • A Webhosting Platform (a place that will display the contents of your site)
  • A CMS (Content Management System i.e., WordPress)

Once you have these three items, you can start writing your blog articles. As you come up with topics to post, you will need to start building your email list. An email list holds the email of people who have subscribed to your blog. Your goal is to turn them into paying customers.

The best way to build your list is to provide a free product that will interest them. It could be:

  • An eBook
  • A video series or
  • A training course

Providing something of value will make someone give you access to their email. Once your email list starts to grow, you can market your products to them and start monetizing your blog.

Utilizing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in your articles will bring in the traffic you need for your email list. How it works is that you include specific keywords in your headers and sub-headers of your articles. People who are interested in your content will be searching for these specific keywords.

Google Keyword Planner is a free service that helps you find the right keywords for your specific niche. You will want to search for as many keywords and/or phrases to have enough words to include in your posts.

Now that you have your site built, it is time to monetize it. There are a few options of monetization to include within your blog. Let us look at some.

Google AdSense

Many new bloggers will use Google AdSense to help earn some income as they grow their brand. When your readers see the ad and click on it, you will receive payment from the business who created the ad. How much you make depends on how many visitors and clicks you receive daily.

The ads you include between your paragraphs should match the niche of the blog. There are many advertisers in various categories that want their ads on your site. To get started, you must have a Google account (it is free) to get access to this feature.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is the process of selling someone else’s digital and/or physical product and they will give you a percentage of that sale. There are numerous affiliate networks and individual companies that provide the necessary information needed to help you make money from their product.

Each business has a different set of steps to complete this process, but they are generally the same. Here is what to expect:

  • Find an affiliate network, such as CJ.com (Commission Junction), Clickbank.com or Amazon.com and sign up as an affiliate.
  • Once approved, you will receive a unique link that you can utilize on your site.
  • If offered, you can copy and paste a “sales pitch” or banner and post them to your site or include them in your email to your subscribers.

The range of how much you will make can be anywhere between 50% - 75% (or higher) of the price of the product. Some affiliate networks and businesses may give you more or less than this range. Make sure to check out their content to see if it is something you want to promote.

Like Google AdSense, the more people you can get to buy the product, the more you will make. However, you want to make sure it is something that is of value to your audience and not pester them to buy it in every post. Build trust with them and they will appreciate the offers you send them.

Creating Your Own Product

How To Make Money Online At Home

Combining the two options above, you can also create your own product and sell it yourself. You will have to do some research to figure out what your audience wants and build something that will help them achieve their goals. This product could be:

  • A book (physical, digital and/or audio)
  • An Online Course
  • Merchandise (hats, shirts, mugs, etc.)
  • Services (one-on-one coaching; live sessions; consulting)

There are some advantages for building your own product. They include:

  • Keeping all the profits
  • Deciding how much to charge
  • Expanding your own brand

You can structure the online course to have:

  • Videos
  • Downloadable Audio
  • Downloadable Transcripts
  • PDFs of any assignments and/or checklists
  • Weekly Live Calls

A lot of time and planning will be needed to build your own online course. Take some weeks and/or months to make sure you have done proper research on what to present to your audience.

2. YouTube Channel

How To Make Money Online At Home

Kids, senior citizens and everyone in-between seem to have a YouTube Channel. Lots of people want to share what they know by posting a video demonstrating their skills, techniques and knowledge. There are many topics you can cover, including:

  • Cooking
  • Unboxing Kid Toys
  • News
  • Stock Market
  • Gaming
  • Beauty
  • Technology
  • Movie Reviews
  • Finance and more

Making money from your channel will depend on two methods:

  • YouTube Invitation
  • Products and/or Services you have for sale

YouTube Invitation

Since YouTube is owned by Google, they offer to place ads either before, during or after your videos. When people watch and click on these ads, you will get paid (like the ads placed on your blog). In order to be invited by YouTube, you must meet four qualifications:

  • Follow the channels policies and guidelines
  • Setup a two-step verification access in your Google Account
  • Have at least 1,000 subscribers
  • Have 4,000 views

Success does not happen over night but if you provide helpful content that people are interested in, then you will be able to earn a decent income.

Products and/or Services

Posting consistently and providing helpful and high-quality content videos will build your authority with your viewers. Eventually, you will be able to create products and services that people will want. Take the content you have been posting and either develop:

  • An online course
  • A book (digital, print and/or audio)
  • Merchandise
  • A service that people will need

As you can tell, creating a blog and a YouTube Channel have some similarities. Most creators will have both in order to expand their income.

3. Write a Book

How To Make Money Online At Home

I briefly touched on this topic in the earlier sections, but I will go in-depth here. The time it takes to write one can range from a couple of weeks to 90 days or longer. Once you figure out a topic to write about, do some research on it and see how others created their books.

If you want to brush up on your writing skills, signing up for an online course might help. Some writers hire someone to write their book (they are called ghost writers) after giving them an outline to follow.

When your book is complete, you will need an eye-catching book cover to attract viewers’ attention. Using a site like Fiverr will help if you do not feel comfortable utilizing Photoshop or some other photo editing program.

After getting your book written and designed, you will need to get it out for people to buy. You can publish it either in:

  • Print (hard or soft cover)
  • Digital (usually Kindle) or
  • Audio

Presenting it in all three formats will help you make more sale as some people prefer one option over the others.

A good place to publish your book in print and in digital format is on Amazon. They have a KDP or Kindle Direct Publishing program to help you get your book out to readers all over the world. Your audiobook can also be published through Amazon but through a section called Audible.

Now that your book is ready to be read, you must market it so people will buy it. Here are some tactics to help get the sales you want:

Write a Blog

As I mentioned in the first section above, writing a blog will help you bring in more subscribers once you build up an email list.

Social Media

Same as building a blog, you can use social media to market your book. This will require you to post helpful content to your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and any other social media platform where you have subscribers.

Webinar

If your book teaches people how to complete certain tasks, then you may want to do a live webinar demonstrating how to do some of those tasks. You can offer access to a one-hour free webinar and show people how to do a couple of tricks. Once they have a taste of what it offers, they will be more likely to purchase the book.

Festival

Another method you can do is take a few of your books to a festival. If there is an event going on in your city, you can advertise that you will be there and bring a few for people to buy. As an incentive, you can offer a special gift or discount to the first 10 or so people to get more interest.

4. Shopify

How To Make Money Online At Home

Shopify is an ecommerce platform where you can easily attach an online shopping store to your website. They have three levels you can purchase:

  • Basic
  • Shopify
  • Advanced Shopify

Basic costs $29/month where the credit card fees are 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. Shopify is $79/month and charges 2.6% + $0.30 for each credit card transaction. And Advanced Shopify will cost you $299/month with a lower cost of 2.4% + $0.30 per credit card swipe.

You can always take advantage of the seven-day free trial to decide which option best fits your business.

Here are some common items people sell in their stores:

  • Hats
  • Coffee Mugs
  • Shirts/Hoodies
  • Arts & Crafts
  • Jewelry
  • Carrying Bags and more

Shopify has templates, videos, podcasts and articles that will help you organize your ecommerce page. Adding images and descriptions to your shop, as well as utilizing SEO will help drive traffic to your site and increase your sales.

If you have a physical place or enjoy attending festivals, Shopify has POS (Point Of Sale) equipment you can buy and use to take people’s credit and/or debit cards. They make the process of making money as seamless as possible.

Besides selling physical products, you can also sell services such as:

  • One-On-One Sessions
  • Webinars
  • Training
  • Consulting

The one-on-one and consulting can be done via Zoom or Skype since people may want to interact with you live. The other options can be recorded ahead of time and have a set price. Most people who offer webinars and training give their customers lifetime access once purchased.

There are two other ways to make money using Shopify: Dropshipping and their Affiliate Program.

Dropshipping

Dropshipping is the process of selling a product you do not possess, helping not only the customer get what they want but help make money for you and the company that sells the product. Here are the steps:

  • Post an item you want to sell in your store
  • A customer selects the item and purchases it
  • When you receive the notification, spend the money you received from the customer and buy the item they want from the business that sells the product
  • Make sure you use the address of the customer when you have the item shipped

The way you make money from this is by charging a few dollars more than what the item costs. If the item is listed as $5, for example, you can add another $3 making the item worth $8. You pocket the $3 and send the $5 to the company for their product.

This is a method that many people utilize to get the ball rolling for making money online.

Shopify’s Affiliate Program

The steps I mentioned earlier under the Affiliate Marketing section will work with Shopify’s program. After building an audience from your site, share your affiliate link. When people sign up for a paid plan after clicking on it, you will receive payment.

5. Photography

How To Make Money Online At Home

Whether you are an amateur or professional photographer, you can make money by selling your pictures. Many sites such as Getty Images and Shutterstock look for photos to sell on their platform. There are various genres you can choose to focus on. They include:

  • Nature
  • Food
  • Technology
  • People
  • Buildings
  • Animals
  • Signage and more

Check out the sites I mentioned to see what type of photos are popular and create your own portfolio of work. If you want to keep the full price of your sales, you can sell the photos by using some of the examples mentioned in the previous sections.

Here are the tools you will need to take your photos:

  • A camera
  • Tripod
  • Proper lighting
  • A photo editing program

Smartphones are equipped with professional lenses so there is no need to spend thousands of dollars on a camera unless that interests you. Tripods will keep your camera or cellphone steady. You can tilt and rotate it to take interesting, angled shots.

Regarding lighting, the subject being photographed will need to have the light facing it. A shadow will cast in front of them, making it difficult to see as the light is placed behind them.

There are a lot of editing programs out there but here is a short list of some popular ones:

  • Adobe Photoshop
  • Canva
  • PicMonkey

Whichever program you use, there are plenty of resources online you can view that will help improve your photography skills.

6. Design T-Shirts

How To Make Money Online At Home

If you have a knack for creating funny sayings or have an eye for design, you can create your own t-shirt business. There are a lot of programs to help with your creations. Here is a short list:

  • Adobe Illustrator
  • Adobe Photoshop
  • CorelDraw
  • InkSpace
  • Graffix Pro

Regardless of which software you use, make sure to set the appropriate size of your design so it can fit on a t-shirt correctly. After completing your drawing, you can use a variety of places to add it to your shirts:

  • Teespring
  • CustomInk
  • Threadless

Shopify, as mentioned earlier, will be helpful in making sales for your site. Teespring requires you to set a goal on the number of items you want to sell. If you reach that goal, you will be paid.

At CustomInk and VistaPrint you can upload your design or use their long list of features to create something unique. Afterwards, they will ship your shirts to you. Any orders that come in, you will then package and ship them out.

Threadless will place your designs on display and people can order from there. You can also have the shirts sent to you directly.

7. Customer Service

How To Make Money Online At Home

Many companies have resorted to having their workers stay home to perform their duties. If you like helping people with their problems, you can work as a customer service representative. The cool thing about this job is that most companies will provide you with the equipment to handle your job.

These businesses will also pay you as you are being trained, allowing you to learn in the comfort of your home. You can be paid hourly, work part or full time and you may end up working on the weekend.

Speaking on the phone and entering information on the computer or laptop is not the only qualifications needed. You will also have to type up report, do presentations and send emails. Some programs and skills you may have to learn include:

  • Microsoft Office
  • Adobe Acrobat Pro
  • Emailing
  • Basic Computer Skills
  • Mailing off packages

Being able to read and write English well is also a requirement. The skillset and software knowledge may vary but rest are essential.

8. Language Translator

How To Make Money Online At Home

If you are bilingual or multilingual, you can make a good income as a translator. You can work as an ESL Tutor (English as a Second Language), perform customer service duties or be a translator for hospitals and law offices, just to name a few.

GoFluent, Cambly and NiceTalk are a few places you can seek employment.

Another idea is to create multiple online courses for the different languages you speak. Depending on the in-depth knowledge you have, you can take one language and brake it up into three or more levels and have a different price for each one.

Companies like Rosetta Stone hire native speakers to help non-speakers understand their language. They are always in need of people to tutor live with their customers. If you are very fluent, you could pass as a native person and make a living.

You can also write a series of books that can be a guide to learning a specific language and utilize webinars and social media to advertise them.

9. Virtual Assistant

How To Make Money Online At Home

Many small businesses have a need for an assistant. Some of the requirements include:

  • Accounting
  • Scheduling
  • Writing up reports
  • Making phone calls
  • Moderating a call or online event
  • Posting on social media
  • Responding to emails
  • Faxing
  • Scanning
  • Photocopying
  • Mailing off packages

If you can find a good client that is organized and pays well, you may only need to work with one company. Some of the skills needed for this position includes:

  • Typing
  • Microsoft Office Suite
  • Accounting
  • An understanding of SEO
  • Social Media Marketing

Fancy Hands and Lifebushido are places you can find work. You can also check out Indeed for other specific skillsets needed for this type of job.

10. Videographer

How To Make Money Online At Home

As a videographer, you can package up your talents and offer your services to those who need it. There are a few areas of focus you can set your business up as:

  • Weddings
  • Music Videos
  • Independent Films
  • Movie Studios
  • Marketing
  • Film Editor

You will have to set your business up to showcase that you are comfortable working in these environments. Here are the tools you will need:

  • Film editing software
  • Video camera
  • Lighting
  • Tripod, if necessary
  • Microphone and other sound equipment
  • Green/Blue Screens

The blue and green screens are used when you want to add a separate background to the scene you are shooting. This is utilized a lot in the film industry and even in the commercial you see daily. They use more advanced settings to do this, but you can mimic this with a 10’x10’ screen.

The kind of editing software you use will decide how much effects and editing you can do. Some are free and others cost in the thousands. Here is a short list of some you can get that will help you increase your editing skills:

  • Movie Maker
  • iMovie
  • Adobe After Effects
  • Adobe Premiere
  • Final Cut

Each one of these will help you do simple transitions, add text and overlay music. Adobe and Final Cut have more advanced features like 3D camera views where you can add different angles of the shots you have filmed.

Being a videographer, you can also create your own content and sell it either on your website or on other platforms. Here is a short list of places you can make money with your video talents:

  • Vimeo
  • Udemy
  • Videohive
  • Amazon Video Direct

The main idea behind some of these areas is that you create content that will help people. So, you could create tutorials in the following areas:

  • How to play the piano
  • How to be a real estate agent
  • Learn how to advertise using Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/etc.
  • How to use Microsoft Office
  • How to perform Wholesaling and more

When you make videos for some of the examples above, you can either film yourself or hire people to act out a script you have written. The more creative you can be, the higher the chances you have of getting people to purchase your work.

As mentioned in the earlier sections, you can expand your business by setting up a blog or Shopify store and create stock videos for people to purchase. You will simply need to show people that your work is worth spending their money on.

11. Stock Market

How To Make Money Online At Home

Investing in the stock market can make you some money but it will take some research and patience on your part. When it comes to researching a stock, here is what you want to think about:

  • How are the financials of the company?
  • Are there any upcoming mergers?
  • Will there be any dilution of the stock?
  • What news have recently come out?
  • What is the overall outlook regarding the field this stock is in?

Always do your due diligence before investing into any company. You want to be sure the pros outweigh the cons and that you feel comfortable holding on to it if the price goes down at some point.

There is a long list of brokerages you can use from your phone to get started but here are the ones that I know of:

  • WeBull
  • Robinhood
  • Charles Swab
  • Fidelity
  • ETrade
  • TDAmeritrade

Many of these platforms will give you a free stock as an incentive to join them. And they will give you more if you enlist others to join using your referral link.

The great thing about these free stocks is that once they settle, you can take the money and either use it to buy shares, options or take it out and spend it on whatever you want.

One thing to understand is that every time you take money out of your brokerage, you will be charged with Capital Gains tax for the following year. So, plan on how to spend your money, as well as a savings for your future taxes.

There two ways you can earn a profit: shares and options.

Shares

Every company that is part of the stock market have a certain number of shares they offer to the public. Based on how much money you are willing to invest, you can buy as many shares as possible of a stock and wait for it to grow.

There are some sub-sections of making money by buying shares that you will need to know.

Day Trading

Day Traders buy and hold stocks for a short period of time before selling them for a profit. They can do this multiple times a day during the week if they have $25,000 in their brokerage account.

If you buy and sell the same stock three times within a five-day period and do not have $25,000 in your account, you will be flagged as a PDT (Pattern Day Trader) and will not be able to trade for 90 days.

Swing Trading

Swing trading requires you to buy a stock, hold for a few days, take your profits and invest in another stock and repeat the process.

Options

Options gives you the right but not the obligation to purchase or sale at least one contract that contains 100 shares. The difference between buying a share and an option is that the option has an expiration date. When you buy it, you are hoping to make a profit before it expires.

The expiration date can be either every other day (Monday, Wednesday or Friday), weekly or monthly.

There are numerous methods for profiting with options but the basic two are a Call Option and a Put Option.

A call option means you believe the price of a stock is going to go up. If you believe that it will, you can purchase one or more contracts at a premium price. That price could be listed as $1.50 but you do not pay that amount. You will take that price and multiply it by 100 (the number of shares in the contract).

A put option is the opposite in that you are hoping that the price of the stock goes down. To buy a contract is the same as buying a call.

Once you understand the basic calls and puts, you can branch out and perform more advanced options, such as:

  • Selling a Call/Put
  • Debit Call/Put Spread
  • Credit Call/Put Spread
  • Iron Condor
  • Butterfly Condor

The stock market is very fickle, and you must have some patience and understand the psychology that is involved. But with time and practice, you will be able to make an income from it.

12. Build Websites

How To Make Money Online At Home

Building a website is different than blogging. When you build a website, you are demonstrating your web coding abilities. There are three basic coding languages you will have to learn:

HTML (HyperText Markup Language)

This is the foundation to building a website. It is comprised of one-word commands placed inside of the less than and greater than signs. There is always an open and closed version of the command with content in-between: < p>This is a one sentence paragraph.</p>

CSS (Cascading StyleSheet)

When you see color, borderlines around images and other designs on a website, some form of CSS has been used. Here are few things you can do:

  • Change the font
  • Change the color of a background
  • Add spacing around an image, table, paragraph, etc.
  • Change the color of a link that has been interacted
  • Add a borderline and more

JavaScript

JavaScript has more programming like attributes than the first two. When you come to a page and a new window pops up, JavaScript was used to perform that task. You can have certain sections on your page interact with the user when they move their cursor over it by utilizing some code.

These three coding practices are called front-end programming. They comprise what you see when you view a website:

  • Background
  • Words
  • Images
  • Videos
  • Color
  • Links

You can code and design a website knowing these three languages by using software such as Adobe Dreamweaver. It can help you function as a coder or a person who is centered on design.

Once you learn these three web coding techniques, you can learn back-end coding like PHP. It stands for ‘PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor’ and it can generate code within HTML. It is a powerful language that is the basis of WordPress.

By learning all four of these web coding skills, you can move yourself up to creating WordPress designs. A Theme in WordPress is the design and functionality of a website. There are many free and paid themes you can choose from, either directly from WordPress or other sites that offer them.

Plugins are small sections of code that gives you the ability to add content in certain areas on your WordPress site. If you want to add a subscribe button to the right side of your page, you can simply drag and drop it with ease.

Selling your services on your website will be the best way to earn an income because you can set your prices and work when you want. If you want to test the waters first, you can sign up to sites like Upwork and Guru to showcase your talents. Businesses are always hiring web programmers to build their sites.

There are plenty of free and paid tutorials on the web that will train you in these coding practices. Take the time necessary to expand on your skillset.

Conclusion

I hope this list of 12 topics will give you some ideas on how to make money at home. Once you have invested the time and money into improving your skills, you can market yourself through various platforms to drive in the traffic you need.

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