Making money online is not easy, and you probably will not make enough to quit your day job. But if you are diligent and do various tasks across the web, you can make significant extra income. The following are legitimate ways to make money online.
- Write Online Articles – Websites such as Associated Content allow writers to publish articles on various topics and get paid. If you write online articles for established websites like Associated Content and Helium, you will probably get more internet traffic than if you write on your own blog. This is because people are searching on established content websites for information, so you should be one with the big dogs. Pay rate depends on how your content performs. Helium pays for how high quality your articles are, which eventually rise up on the list to get more views. Associated Content offers both an upfront payment option for your articles and a performance payment option based on the views your article receives. Upfront payments range between $2 – $15, but they are typically on the lower end of the range. The performance payments are $1.50 per 1,000 views, which is probably higher than you would make on your own blog anyway, unless you have a huge following. On Associated Content, you are better off keeping the rights to your articles and earning performance payments instead trying to get the upfront payment. The upfront payment is very selective and takes time to be reviewed. You will probably earn pennies per month for every article when you start out, but the earnings add up the more articles you have.
- Build Your Own Blog or Website – Have you found a market niche that you can tap to make money. Chances are, if your website is competing with big businesses for internet traffic, you will not get any internet traffic. It is better to find a small niche that big businesses have not already tapped into. Blogs such as Blogger and WordPress are free, but websites with their own domain names will require paid web hosting. Once you build your website, you can set up advertising for free, and programs such as Google Adsense and Amazon Affiliates will run your advertising for you based on your content. When visitors click on your advertisements and buy their products, a referral fee is sent to you. A referral fee is a percentage of the purchase that your website visitor bought. For example, if you have a travel blog, and your visitor clicked on a backpack add and bought a $100 backpack, a $15 referral bonus might be sent your way. Your advertising performance will depend on how many visitors your website gets and how advertising blind your audience is.
- Amazon Mechanical Turk – Amazon Mechanic Turk is an online workplace that features human intelligence tasks (HITs). These tasks are too tedious for most employees to do, but are too complex for computers to manage. Mechanical Turk tasks range from tagging photos, creating keywords for products, grading search results, editing text, and writing articles. Pay is anywhere from pennies to dollars for each task, so you have to work fast and efficiently to make the pay worthwhile. The Amazon Mechanical Turk HITs are not something you can do full time, because Amazon limits the number of tasks you can do per day. But if spend some time after work or in your spare time, you might make an extra $5 to $10 per day.
- Invest in the Stock Market – This option is only viable if you have money to invest upfront. If you know how to pick stocks or day trade, you can make a lot of money in the stock market by taking advantage of frequent price swings. It is very easy to open an online brokerage account, so you can trade from your own home. Make sure you practice trading on paper, before you commit your hard earned money to the stock market. There are risks associated with investing, and it is not a fool proof money making strategy. If you want to make significant money, you will need to invest at least $1000 to $10,000 dollars. If you cannot commit that dollar amount, you can still make money by investing in small recurring amounts every month and get rich slowly. Some online brokers will save you on trading costs by allowing you to invest small recurring amounts frequently. But if you invest with too little money, trading fees will eat up any profits that you make. Avoid complex financial instruments with high risk that you do not understand such as ETFs and derivatives including stock options.
