Top 10 Ways to Make Money Online

It’s no big secret that there are many great ways to make money online, and the list of options just keeps growing every year. However, some of the options are clearly better than others from the start, and a lot of the time it really depends on your personal preferences, training, work ethic, time you have available, dedication, and whether or not you are able to take the extra time and effort to learn new skills, and more.

You can opt to work on building income streams from several different methods at once, or stick with just one until you have mastered it. The choice is yours but when you are first getting started, I highly recommend sticking with only one or two things until you have more experience, knowledge, and resources to continue branching out.

Anyway, without further ado, here are the top 10 ways to make money online, in no particular order:

1. Start Your Own Website

There’s no doubt that one of the best ways to make money online is to start your own websites so you can earn an income from any of the various ways to earn money on the internet via your own site. These include affiliate sales, paid advertising, Adsense and other CPC service, CPA programs, selling your own information products, and several other methods.

There are many different types of websites you can create and it really depends on your own preference as well as what you have planned for the site. However, one of the easiest and most popular types of websites you can do is to start a blog. There are quite a few really good blogging platforms that you can use to quickly and easily start your blog. The most important thing to do before starting your website is to research and find a good niche that will be profitable. Just throwing up a site about any old topic is not a good idea at all.

After you have found a good potentially profitable niche and started your website it’s time to get it ranked highly in the search engines. That is the best way to make money online with your own website because the traffic from search engines is highly targeted and keeps coming in every day with very little extra work from you after the initial work has been done. You’ll get your site ranked highly by implementing search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. Mainly this just means you need to fill your site with high quality content and get lots of keyword anchored backlinks.

2. Affiliate Marketing

You can promote products or services and earn money whenever someone you refer purchases from your unique affiliate link. There are affiliate programs for just about every industry and niche you can think of and most of them are free to join. Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular and potentially profitable ways to make money online. It’s also one of the easiest and cheapest ways to get started.

The amount of money you can earn as an affiliate marketer is incredible and if you learn how to do it correctly, you can certainly make a very good living doing it. There are numerous affiliate marketplaces where you can find all kinds of different products and services to promote. There are also thousands of individual websites who run their own affiliate program. The options available for you to make money with affiliate marketing are virtually endless.

3. Your Own Products

You can create your own products and sell them for big profit. Information products such as ebooks are very popular and they are relatively easy to create and sell. You can also start a membership site, create website templates, blog themes, sell photos you take, sell PLR article, and much more. There are many different products or services you can create and sell that can be great ways to make money online.

One of the best parts about doing this is that you can typically just create the product once and sell it over and over again without any extra work other than marketing. That’s a lot less work and hassle than creating and selling a product offline where you have to keep inventory, package, ship, and all that other stuff. Selling digital products online makes things a lot easier.

4. Online Business Opportunities

There are a ton of online business opportunities that you can join and use their system to start your own business and make money online. In fact, there are so many that it can be very difficult to choose one. Some are better than others but it’s hard to say which are the “best” because it depends on so many individual factors. What one person thinks is the best online business opportunity another person will not.

The most important thing to remember is to do a lot of research before you join a business opportunity. You need to know the ins and outs of what the program is all about and definitely be sure that it’s not a scam. Don’t just believe what they say on their website because they are obviously only going to say good things. Search several forums, blogs, websites, and wherever else to get a lot of information and various opinions before you make a decision. Also remember that every online business opportunity will have some people calling it a scam and other people saying how great it is. You need to take all information into consideration and make an informed decision.

Another thing to remember is that no matter what internet home business opportunity you choose, you will have to do work if you want to make money! Many people would like you to think that you can just join a program and then sit back while the money rolls in. That is not how it works. If it were that easy then we would all be rich.

5. Freelance Work

There are tons of website owners, bloggers, internet marketers, developers, companies, and just regular people who need various things done for them and are willing to pay someone to do it. If you have a certain skill then you can get paid to do this freelance work for other people. A few examples of freelance work you can do is content writing, article writing, customer support, programming, coding, web design, data entry, translation, marketing, and much more. The opportunities for a freelancer are plentiful.

Some popular sites where you can post your freelance services include elance.com, guru.com, allfreelance.com, and many others. Just do a search on Google and you will find all the sites you will ever need to offer your services for hire. You can also go to forums such as the warrior forum, digitalpoint forum, and sitepoint forum to find a lot of people who are looking to hire freelance workers to do tasks for them.

6. Website Flipping and Domain Flipping

Similar to house flipping, which is done in the real world, buying and selling websites or domains can be a very lucrative internet business model and is one of the best ways to make money online. You can also build websites to sell from scratch or register new domains just so you can sell them later. It’s basically the same thing as buying them with the intent to resell and it’s often referred to as “flipping” them. Both website flipping and domain flipping can earn you a very good living.

You can take a look at flippa.com or another marketplace for buying and selling websites and domains to see just how much money can be made doing it. The profits vary greatly depending on how popular the website is and how much money it currently earns, as well as many other factors. Also with domains there are several factors that go into determining how much money you can make from a sale.

As with most ways to make money on the internet, there are some things that need to be learned before you can jump in and start making money from site flipping or domain flipping, but it certainly can be done. There are a lot of websites, blogs, forums, and ebooks with all the information you need to learn how to get started with this internet business model.

7. Paid Surveys and “Get Paid To” (GPT) Websites

I’m sure by now in your quest to learn how to make money on the internet; you’ve seen at least one paid online survey website or GPT site. They are all over the place so it’s not very difficult to find one. You can get paid to shop, get paid to click ads, get paid to take surveys, get paid to complete free offers, get paid to post in forums, or get paid to do all sorts of other tasks.

One of the best parts of this way to earn money online is that it’s typically very easy to do and you don’t need a website or any special skills, and you can usually start earning money quickly. The bad thing about this is that you usually make very little amounts of money for each task you do so it takes a long time to see any significant earnings. And there are a lot of GPT scams out there so you have to be very careful when choosing to sign up with one.

8. Real Online Work at Home Jobs

A lot of the time when people think about ways of making money on the internet they only think about running their own online home business or doing something strictly for themselves as their own boss such as the other methods listed in this top ten. However, finding a real online work at home job can also be one of the best ways to make money online. There are many places who hire people for work from home jobs and many companies are now letting employees telecommute. Plus more are starting to do it as it’s becoming the norm.

Although it should be noted that these online jobs can often be very difficult to get because of all the competition for them and the fact that there are still relatively few of them available. You might land one right away but don’t expect that to happen. You certainly can get one but it will probably require some patience and persistence. And one final thing to remember is that you should never pay for a work at home job. These are different than business opportunities and other things like that, they are “jobs” so you don’t pay them, they pay you.

9. Make Money on eBay and Other Similar Sites

Auction sites such as eBay, uBid, eBid, and others as well as online classified sites such as Craigslist and Kijiji can be great ways to make money online. This is no secret at all as just about everyone knows of this method and it’s one of the most popular ways that people use to try their luck at making money online when they are first getting started. Some people make a fortune off these sites while many others earn a decent living, but most of the time you can just expect to make some extra spending money.

If you actually have a product to sell you can use these sites to sell it, or if you have a lot of stuff in storage that you no longer need you can sell it for some extra cash. Drop shipping is a very popular way to earn money using these marketplaces although your profit margin will be much less that way, but you don’t assume much risk of loss either.

I actually made a lot of money on eBay several years ago by selling telescopic steel batons from a company that would drop ship them to the buyer. I never actually had them on hand but I was earning hundreds of dollars per week from them. Then eBay stopped allowing those to be sold so I lost that income stream. But the point is that it worked and still does today if you find the right product and a reliable drop shipping company.

10. Make Money Blogging

This is very similar to #1 above but they can be a bit different, and many people consider them to be two completely different things. If you are making money from your own websites that you have researched and created around specific niches then you will most likely be called an internet marketer. If you make money blogging about a certain topic then you will most likely be called a pro blogger. Some people use these terms interchangeably, and often they are right, but it is not necessarily the case. Just because you are an internet marketer does not necessarily mean you are a blogger, and vice versa. Yes, you can be both, and many people are, but many people also are not.

Confused yet? It’s really not as complicated as it may seem and there’s actually not much of a difference. Internet marketers tend to focus more on niche research, search engine rankings, and building many websites. Bloggers tend to focus more on one topic with one blog, updating very frequently with new posts, building relationships with readers, and getting repeat social traffic. There are no set rules to it all and you can make money blogging many different ways. You can be a “blogger” or “internet marketer” — or both. Basically it just comes down to what you prefer and what skills you have or want to learn, and it really doesn’t matter either way as long as you have your own website(s) and you earn money from it.

Well, there you have it, the top 10 best ways to make money online. I normally like to write a couple paragraphs to conclude a post but if you have made it this far then I will assume you are tired of reading and don’t really care about a conclusion. So I will just end by telling you to get out there and start earning money online right now!