(This post contains affiliate links – see my disclosure policy in the footer.)
The ways that you can make money online seem to grow everyday.
The internet is the ultimate resource if you’re looking to earn a bit of extra cash on the side or if you want to go that step further and make a full time income.
Like all things, I’ve found out that you get out what you put in when earning money online.
Some methods will make a few dollars here and there with little effort and others require sheer hard work and dedication.
No matter what anyone tells you, there is no free lunch when it comes to earning money, whether that’s online or anywhere else.
Trust me, ignore the get rich quick schemes – they hardly ever exist as advertised!
The internet has, however, made life a lot easier, whether you’re just trying to supplement your income or whether you’re the budding entrepreneur looking to buy that lambo.
Anyway, here’s my favourite methods of making money online – from the odd dollar makers to the million dollar money spinners this guide covers all my favourites that will hopefully help you to understand how awesome the internet really is for making money:-
(P.S. I am always interested to hear new and unique ways of making money online so if you’ve got some ideas to share, just post them in the comments section below – no problem!)
before we start – want to make an extra $200 a month on the side? – check out these survey sites
1. Complete Online Surveys
It is quite surprising how much you can earn just by giving a few minutes of your time to answer online surveys.
Whilst this method isn’t going to make you a millionaire, it is very convenient and requires no specialist knowledge. You can literally make money on line whilst sitting on your sofa watching TV. It’s definitely an easy way to make extra cash online!
They don’t require much brain power either so you’re hardly going to be expending a ton of energy doing them, which means they’re great after a hard day at work.
I have personally leveraged survey sites for many years and I’ve made up to $500 a month by just signing up to 5-10 of the best survey companies and hand picking the best surveys!
Here are 5 of the best online survey sites I’ve used for you to get stuck in with:-
Survey Junkie : Average around $10 per hour but you can earn up to $75 if you partake in their focus groups – By far the best and most profitable ???
Inbox Dollars : $5 just for signing up (US residents)
Survey2Cash : Earn up to $100 on your first survey
Vindale Research : Up to $50 per survey
Pinecone Research : Earn around $5 per quick survey
I’ve done a full blog post on the best surveys in the world that you can check out here
2. Risk Free Matched Betting
(This method is largely a method to make money online in the UK but I see no reason why it can’t work across the world in theory, although it will probably be a bit harder without a company to find you the free bets as you’ll see below!)
Fast, tax-free and lucrative. Matched betting is probably the quickest way to make a few thousand pounds in a short space of time with hardly any specialist knowledge required.
Matched betting is a method of making money by using the free incentive bets that bookies give out to new customers joining them and to customers they are trying to retain.
The best thing about it is that it is risk free (unlike standard betting aptly called a “mug’s game”) as you use the free bets the bookies give you.
In simple terms it works by simultaneously placing a back bet (a bet on something winning) and a lay bet (a bet on something losing). As you are using a free bet as your back bet, you make money either way, whatever the outcome.
In 3 months I made around £5000 using this method spending around 2 hours a night and that’s why it’s my favourite method to make money online in the UK. (You can see how I did this here.)
There are a number of websites online to guide you through the process but the best website I have found by far is Profit Accumulator.
This website provides full support and guidance on how the method works and has some really excellent and knowledgeable support staff and a massive online community of thousands of members. They also have an excellent 5 star rating on Trust Pilot.
Profit Accumulator even provide a free trial so you can get used to how matched betting works and you make around £45.00 straight away for free.
There is a monthly charge for the more premium package but this opens up a whole host of other offers that are worth literally thousands of pounds and gives you access to all the support you will need and some very helpful tools.
I also love the story behind Profit Accumulator.
It was set up by young entrepreneur, Sam Stoffel, who started matched betting in his spare time as an undergraduate.
He had the idea to monetise matched betting and has made a truly awesome and very profitable company from something he originally did as a side earner. A stroke of genius and very inspiring as it is such an easy way to make extra cash online.
3. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a method of getting paid for marketing a business’s products or services. It works by rewarding you if you bring people to a business’s website and they buy something. You usually earn a percentage on the sale that your referral generates.
This method works best if you have a blog or website but even just sharing links on social media can generate referrals and sales. I have made several thousand pounds just by sharing affiliate links on Facebook after adding numerous people to my account with similar interests to me. Facebook allows you to add 5000 friends which is quite a lot of people to promote your products to and you can even go beyond this is if you have a business or fan page.
Amazon has its own affiliate marketing program, Amazon Associates, where you not only get a commission from people clicking on a link and buying a certain product but also if the customer buys other things whilst on Amazon.
Here are a few others worth checking out:-
See this inspiring story from affiliate marketer Robert Parker for what is possible with dedication.
4. Clinical Trials
Clinical trials are an excellent way of earning good money fairly quickly. You will attend a clinic and be required to test new drugs in a test setting with others in the group taking a placebo. Most trials pay in excess of £1000 per trial and often a lot more.
Obviously this is not risk free but the companies operating these trials are well regulated and, if you’re lucky, you’ll be the one taking the placebo. Most of these trials require you to be healthy and some require that you abstain from alcohol, nicotine and even sex whilst the trial is under way.
However, not only do you get paid a handsome sum for your services, you can be proud of the fact that by taking part you are advancing scientific research and helping to discover new treatments for mankind.
Whilst not strictly a web based method, there are now a number of companies operating websites advertising for people to take part in clinical trials across the country.
Covance Clinical Trials based in Leeds and Parexel and Trials4Us in London are worth looking at if you’re interested in doing your first clinical trial.
If you’re in the US then try Center Watch.
5. Online Drop Shipping Store
Why not make money online by opening up an online ecommerce store. It’s never been easier to set up an online store than it is today. The most convenient thing is that you do not even need to store inventory or stock. By setting up a store that uses drop shipping, the supplier (usually in China) will simply send the product purchased from your online store straight to the customer.
There are literally thousands of YouTube videos and blogs showing you how to set up such a business. I have found Jack Kitchener’s YouTube videos to be very helpful at showing you exactly how to kick start such a business and make it profitable.
One of the most popular methods for setting up an online drop shipping store is using Shopify to construct your store and then you ship your products direct from your supplier when you get a purchase. You can also set up a store on Amazon and use fulfilment by Amazon to deal with all your shipping and returns. This allows you to set up an online store quickly with very little capital needed up front.
6. Write Essays
Stressed and overworked students all around the country often turn to essay writing services to offer them guidance and help when completing their essays. If you’re educated to degree level, then why not apply to become a freelance essay writer in your specialist subject.
There are now a number of websites that you can sign up to in order to offer your writing services. For as little as 10 days work a month, writing 2000 words per day, you can earn well in excess of £1000 per month. Perhaps ideal if you’re a post graduate student looking for work but want some passive income in the meantime.
Here are a few websites that offer such services and they are always looking for new writers:-
7. Make Online Courses
If you have a special interest, skill set or professionalism in a topic, then you could make an online course.
The online learning platform Udemy now has over 100,000 courses and the top instructors or teachers are earning thousands of pounds selling their courses. It’s an excellent way to make money on line.
You can post courses on Udemy for free but if you want to sell your courses then it is necessary to become a premium user. As a premium user you can set the price of your course and then Udemy take a percentage of the sales you make.
A lesser known and upcoming online course provider is BitDegree. They operate in a similar way to Udemy but you can pay for the courses, or get paid if you’re an instructor, in crypto currencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum as well as normal currency.
8. Start a YouTube Channel
YouTube is an incredible place to make big sums of money if you can launch a popular channel. YouTube pays its content makers by how many viewers watch their videos. If you can create a popular channel and attract lots of subscribers, once you reach 1000 subscribers, you can then join YouTube’s partner program which allows you to run adverts on your videos and get paid for the amount of views you get.
YouTube pays out a few pounds for every 1000 views your videos get. Whilst this may sound like a small amount, if you can get, say, 100,000 views over 50 videos then it soon adds up to much larger sums. The popular YouTube content creator, Logan Paul, made $14.5 million in 2018 alone.
You will want to ensure you have a good camera to record on and preferably a tripod. You want to ensure you have a niche area to cover, but not too niche or you will struggle to create a big enough fan base to get the requisite views to make money. Consumer electricals, video games, nutrition and comedy/pranks are some of the biggest hitters.
9. Run and Monetize a Website or Blog
There are a number of companies now paying you to post adverts on your blog or website. The most well known is Google’s Adsense but there are numerous others as well.
You usually get paid for the amount of clicks people make on the ads on your page (PPC) or for every thousand views the ads receive (CPM).
You can also monetize your blog in other ways by doing the following:-
- Advertising affiliate products or services (see above);
- Selling courses you have made;
- Selling e-books;
- Sponsored posts where someone pays you to post about their product or services.
To succeed at this you do need to have a lot of traffic coming to your page which will generally mean you have a successful and regularly updated blog or website providing helpful content, but if you do there probably isn’t an easier way of earning money. You literally earn money as you sleep.
10. Invest in or Trade Crypto Currencies
It seems pretty clear that after the massive bull run of late 2017 and subsequent decline, Bitcoin and other crypto currencies are stubborn assets that are probably here to stay.
This is by no means a risk-free method of making money, but there is no question that those who got in early or who bought wisely during down markets, have made thousands of pounds. By way of example, if you had invested £1000 in Bitcoin in April 2011, your investment would be worth £6 million today. Not a bad return in 8 years.
There are two popular ways you can make money from crypto currencies. You either go long (HODL) and hope that your coin increases in value in the long run, or you trade them and try to make a profit due to their extreme volatility from day-to-day.
If you are going to buy any crypto currency, I would strongly advise that you do so only after thorough research on the currency you want to buy. There are literally thousands of scams out there. Even the ones that aren’t scams are very likely to fail in the long term. I would therefore concentrate on the well established currencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple and Binance Coin as all of these coins have a proper use case and are less likely to fail in the long run.
If you do buy these digital assets then you should never buy them at their all time highest prices. You should also take your profits out from time to time and try to recover your initial investment as soon as possible.
Coin Market Cap is the crypto currency investor’s best friend. It provides a full list of all the currencies and gives you real time price information as well as other useful information like the coin’s all time high/low, historical price data and information about where you can buy each currency.
I would recommend Coinbase to buy your main currencies and Binance to trade them or exchange them for lesser known currencies.
Please note that this should not be construed as financial advice. These assets are extremely volatile and there is a risk that you could lose some or even all of your money. Therefore never, ever invest more than you can afford to lose.
11. Enter Online Competitions
There are literally thousands of competitions posted online every year and while this is not a guaranteed way of making money, if you enter enough, the laws of probability mean you’re going to get lucky sooner or later.
The prizes come in all varieties too; from cars, to holidays, mobile phones, clothes and even free gas and electric.
If you’re going to have any chance of winning you will need to spend some time entering as many as you can and I would suggest at least 10 a day.
It’s important to first look at what you need to do to qualify because some competitions can only be entered after filling in long surveys or after doing reviews. There are plenty out there though that just require you to fill a form in and provide your contact details.
You should be cautious with entering any competitions organised by brands or companies you are unfamiliar with and, whilst it should go with out saying, never, ever hand over your debit or credit card details. You should also avoid any competitions that involve you paying cash to enter or after you win.
There are thousands of people who make money online doing this and even some who do it professionally and earn a full time living.
Here are some websites to get you started:-
12. Arbitrage Selling
Arbitrage selling is a way to make money by taking advantage of the price differences of products being sold at different retailers or on different platforms.
You basically find and purchase a product that’s selling cheap at one retailer and sell it at another where it’s selling for more money. As you’ve bought the product cheaper in the first place, you make a profit.
Most people make money by finding cheap products and then selling them on Amazon. You can set up an Amazon seller account here.
The best thing is that Amazon provide a free app, theAmazon seller scanner, which you can take into a store, scan the barcode of a product and it will bring up the price that item is selling for on Amazon. It also provides an estimate of profit you would make, after shipping costs, should you sell the item on Amazon. Cool!
When you have found a product or products you want to sell, you can either post them to your buyer yourself or use Amazon’s FBA (fulfilment by Amazon) program which allows you to send the products to Amazon warehouses and they then package and ship your item when you’ve made a sale.
You will need to spend some time trying to work out what you want to sell. If you find a niche area, this will help you build up better knowledge of where to source your cheap products from, and with time you will be able to identify products that have excellent resale value.
Here are a few ideas of where to source cheap products to sell:-
- Car boot sales
- Closing down sales
- End of season sales at big retailers
- Bargain bins at big retailers
- Ebay
- For sale forums on online message boards
- Department store clearance racks
- Second hand stores
- Charity shops
13. Selling Baby Clothes
Ok, so this one might be better if you’re a parent with a young family, but I think this is a great way to make money if you’ve got old, outgrown kids’ clothes lying around.
Children grow out of clothes very quickly, so if you’ve got children, chances are you’ve got all sorts of clothes sitting in a cupboard gathering dust. Even if you haven’t got children, chances are you know of someone who does and they’re probably dying to get rid of a load of unwanted clothes that are taking up space.
There is a massive online demand for children’s clothing as a lot of families either cannot afford to buy brand new clothes or don’t see the point given how quickly their children grow out of them.
If you have got a old clothes you don’t want, there are plenty of places you can sell them. Here’s a list of the blatantly obvious ones, to the not so well known places to get rid:-
14. Online Freelance Work
If you’ve got particular skills in things like web design, writing, e-marketing, legal drafting, sound engineering, or anything else, then why not put your expertise to good use and get paid for freelance services you can offer.
There are now a whole host of websites out there where you can market your services on a freelance basis and attract clients.
My favourite is Fiverr which has all manner of freelance workers offering out their talents. The subscription to Fiverr is free but they keep 20% of the sales you generate from working as a freelancer on their website.
Here’s a list of my favourite freelance sites:-
15. Sell Photographs Online
If you are a photographer, either professional or amateur, the internet is now a great marketplace to sell your snaps!
With the amount of people now blogging, making websites and designing, there’s a massive online demand for unique photographs for people to use in their projects.
There’s a huge demand for all sorts of photographs such as nature, people, food, travel, sports and everything in between.
Here are my top 5 places to sell your photographs online:-
16. Write Online Reviews
There are a whole bunch of websites out there offering money or free stuff if you review their products or services.
Businesses are eager to get feedback on the products and services they provide as it helps them to enhance their marketing strategies and to test products before release. If you can write fairly well and have the time to put finger to keyboard, you can make a tidy profit from these companies.
A lot of the review sites pay depending on the quality of the review you provide, so it is helpful if you take your time and provide an honest, well written and in depth review of whatever you are reviewing.
The most well known review site is probably Slice the Pie which provides an opportunity to review music, fashion lines and adverts.
Some other ones worth looking at are as follows:-
17. Get Paid for Searching the Web
There are now a few websites out there that will simply pay you to search the web or give you cash rewards when you buy something. What a carefree way to make money online!
My favourite of these is Qmee. Simply add the Google app to your browser and every time you search for something and click on one of Qmee’s product links, you will earn a small reward. The money is paid straight into Paypal and can be withdrawn any time.
Qmee also provide coupons and offers on certain items so you can make savings when you purchase things. They also allow you to make money by completing surveys.
There are also a bunch of others providing a similar thing:-
- Bing Rewards – Provides rewards when you browse and purchase certain items
- Ibotta – Provides cash back on purchases you make online
18. Make and Sell Arts and Crafts
The arts and crafts market is now enormous. In fact, in 2017, the value of the American market was said to be over 40 billion dollars.
If you have a talent for making arts and craft, there’s now a wide variety of places where you can sell your handy work to make money online.
There is a huge demand for hand made crafts for things like weddings, birthdays, Christmas and for home/garden decoration, so you’ll be happy to know there is a wide audience out there to buy your work.
The biggest arts and crafts shop to sell your goods on is Etsy. They are fairly cheap to sell on too, with a listing fee of £0.15 and then a 9% processing and transaction fee.
Some other worthy mentions are:-
19. Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is a method whereby companies can engage the services of a wide number of people on the internet to get a big job done.
This normally involves tasks like product testing, filling in surveys, translation, data entry, form filling and search engine optimization. When you’ve completed the task, you’ll be paid a fee direct into your Paypal account.
Most of the work you’ll be doing will be quite tedious, so it’s probably best to swerve this one if you like exercising the ol’ grey matter. However, if you are android-esque in your ability to concentrate, you’ll do just fine.
Here’s a list of my favourite crowdsourcing opportunities:-
20. Get Paid to Name Companies Online
The online company, Naming Force, actually pay you to create names for businesses. You submit your ideas and if your name is selected, they pay out around $50 – $250.
The process starts off by you and others putting forward your name ideas. The best picks are then narrowed down using a voting system that you can also participate in. When the best names are short listed, they then go to Naming Force’s clients who choose the one they want to use.
If the client chooses your name, you are named on the website’s “winner’s page” and you collect your reward.
If you’re creative with branding, this is definitely worth looking at!
21. Write Ebooks
If you’re half decent at writing then why not make extra cash on the web by writing e-books.Guides on how to do things are often a good start if you’re thinking of what to write about.
People using the internet are, most of the time, looking for information on how they can do something; whether that’s working out how to use their smart phone, learning how to fix their car or how to get their baby to sleep. Since the arrival of Kindle, ebooks are definitely worth trying to make extra doe on the side.
You can sell ebooks in a variety of places including:-
- Amazon;
- Your own website or blog;
- Blurb;
- Tradebit;
- Ebay.
⭐⭐BONUS SIDE HUSTLE⭐⭐
I often supplement my side income with surveys and even earned $500 in one month last Xmas!
Surveys are a great way of boosting your side income if you haven’t got much time to waste and want something care free and easy!
Doing surveys is all about joining up to the right survey sites so you can exchange your time for cash in the most profitable and effective way possible.
? Top Tip: Survey sites don’t always give you the best surveys everyday so you’re best to signing up to at least 5 quality sites so you can maximise your side income!
Here’s my favourite survey site!
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