The Internet is a treasure trove of income opportunities. Though people might encounter scams from time to time, there are still plenty of legitimate ways to earn decent money on the Web. Here are six of the most common online money-making methods:
1. Get paid to do mundane tasks in your spare time.
Amazon MTurk is a crowdsourcing website where contractors hire online workers to do simple and minute tasks. Though most of these tasks are simple enough to do without much thinking, like classifying images into categories, spotting grammatical errors or collecting website links, slightly more complex tasks such as transcribing audio files and writing short articles can also be accessed after earning the required qualifications. Other websites that are similar to MTurk include cloudcrowd.com (a Facebook account is needed for sign-up), microtask.com and minuteworkers.com
2. Sell old and used stuff on eBay.
Ebay is a great online marketplace to sell things. It’s amazing how much people are willing to pay for used stuff, so if you have old items that you don’t use, and are of excellent quality, go ahead and put them up for sale. Old books, branded clothes, consumer electronics, toys and other collectibles often sell the best.
3. Sell other people’s products through affiliate marketing.
People earn money through affiliate marketing by promoting a particular merchant’s products or services through advertisements, blog posts, reviews and other media. Sales revenue is then shared between the parties involved. For website owners with a steady stream of web traffic, affiliate marketing is a great way to earn a passive income.
4. Start a blog.
It might take some time to create a high-quality and well-visited blog, but once it reaches a competitive place in search engine rankings, the effort will surely pay off. Companies will be paying to place ads on your blog or have you write a post about them. The best thing about blogs is that it’s easy to create one, and a lot of blogging platforms, like Blogger and WordPress, offer blog hosting and templates for free.
5. Become a freelancer.
Being a freelancer is no easy task. Work is usually project-based (which means that you have to scrounge around and bid for your next assignment) and you have to personally handle all your taxes. But still, more and more people are ditching the stiff corporate world by going freelance. Two great websites that provide job listings for freelancers are oDesk and Elance. These two websites are online job marketplaces where people can post their portfolios and bid on jobs that interest them.
6. Market your knowledge.
Got any interesting ideas about freelancing, social media, internet marketing, or any of the millions of niche topics out there? Then write an e-book about the subject which you can sell on your blog. Or you can be an online consultant for whatever it is that you specialize in. The important thing is to identify any marketable skill or knowledge that you have and make the best use of it by sharing it with other people who might need your insights.
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