5 Top Ways to Make Money Online

If you are looking for some of the top ways to make money online, your search should end here as this article will cover not one but five of them. By the end of this article, you will know how you can make money online using affiliate marketing, blogging, small niche websites, information products and finally your hobbies. If done correctly, these methods can help you create a successful and sustainable long term online business.
1. Earning Big Bucks with Affiliate Marketing
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Marketing other people's or other companies' products or services in exchange for a commission based on the sale value is called Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate marketing is a great way to get started for people who don't have a product or service of their own to sell. Unlike the companies' whose products the affiliate sells, the affiliate doesn't have any overhead like maintaining an inventory of products, dealing with the shipping of products or worrying about after sales service and refunds of products.
All the affiliate needs to do is attract and send traffic to the merchant's website. A certain percentage of the traffic you send to the merchant's website will end up buying products there for which you receive an instant commission. The percentage of traffic that makes a purchase (known as the conversion rate) would depend on the quality of the product and the website.
Most companies offer an affiliate program via a third party known as an Affiliate Network. The Affiliate network acts as the intermediary between the merchant and the affiliate to ensure that sales are properly tracked and that affiliates get paid on time.
How Can You Make Money with Affiliate Marketing?
If you already have a website that attracts regular traffic, you can look for products related to your website topics. If your website is about physical products, you might benefit from joining Amazon's or Ebay's affiliate program to promote their huge inventory of products. If your website is about informational topics, you might find a suitable product to promote at Clickbank which is the largest online market place for digital products.
However, if you don't have an established website, you might want to set one up to start affiliate marketing. An alternative to this would be to purchase advertisements on websites and Ad networks and send the traffic directly to the merchant's website.
2. Earning Money Online with Blogging
What Is Blogging?
Blogging is nothing but publishing information using a blogging setup like Wordpress, Blogspot or something similar. The beauty of blogging is that you don't need any technical or programming knowledge to be able to start doing it. If you have information or ideas that you think other would find interesting or helpful and if you'd like to share these ideas, you can use any free or paid blogging platform to start your blogging venture.
How Can You Make Money by Blogging?
Blogging is one of the top ways to make money online given the simplicity of the setup and low barrier to entry. You can start your own blog on a free platform like Wordpress or Blogspot or you could set your own blogging site up by purchasing a domain name and web hosting. Either way, once the setup is complete, you can start publishing your ideas and information right away.
Depending on the quality of the content you publish on your blog, you can attract an attractive amount of traffic which you can later monetize. The most common method for bloggers to earn money is by placing ads on their website. These ads can be from an ad network like Google Adsense or these could be ads for products that pay out an affiliate commission. Depending on the topic of your blog you might want to choose one of these methods or both methods to start making money.
3. Making it Big with Small Niche Websites
What are Small Niche Websites?
Small niche websites are websites whose content is tightly focused on a single topic and another one of the top ways to make money online. The intention with these websites is to become such a strong online authority on a single traffic that it attracts most of the free traffic from search engines like Google and Bing. The small niche websites can be focused on informational topics or around products in a particular niche. However, the key to a good and successful niche website is the focus of all the content on a single topic.
How Can You Make Money with Small Niche Websites?
Because small niche websites grow to become authoritative sites for the topic that they are focusing on, they attract a lot of free traffic from search engines like Google and Bing. There are many ways in which this free traffic can be monetized. Placing ads on the website, promoting products that pay out an affiliate commission or building an email list of your visitors are all solid and proven ways to monetize a small niche website.
4. Hit the Jackpot by Selling Information Products
What do You Mean by Selling Information Products?
It may sound clichéd but it is true that we are living in an information age. And information hasn't ever been available as easily as it has been since the advent of the Internet. It has become equally easy for anyone to put out any information out there without the need to verify its authenticity. This has created a situation where it is very difficult to judge whether a particular piece of information is good or bogus.
There are a lot of very specific topics for which good and reliable information isn't readily available. These are topics that people are willing to pay good money for. For example, if you can help people by sharing a home remedy for a common health problem, they'd gladly pay you money for alleviating their pain. If you have information that could help someone excel in their profession, they wouldn't mind shelling out large sums of money.
How Can You Make Money by Selling Information Products?
If you can create such an information product, then you can increase your odds of setting up a successful online business. In fact, selling information products is one of the top ways to make money online. You don't even have to know anything about the topic that you are selling the product on. You do, however, have to ensure that the information in the product is accurate and that it comes from a reliable source.
You can source the information for your product from a professional in that field to ensure its accuracy and effectiveness. You can make use of affiliate networks and affiliate programs to attract an army of affiliate who would be willing to promote your product in exchange for a commission. In fact, once you have the sales system and the product delivery mechanism set up, there is no other cost involved in the future apart from the domain name and hosting costs. This creates a business that pays for itself and keeps producing profits without any additional effort.
5. Monetize Your Hobbies
There are a couple of ways that you can make money using your hobbies. However, you need have realistic expectations while doing this. It would only be possible for you to make money doing what you like if you could put out interesting content related to your hobby and if there are enough people who would find this content and your hobby interesting.
However, if there are enough people with the same hobby as yours, then you stand an excellent chance of earning some decent money. You can publish a blog or create interesting videos that can help hobbyists learn something new or get better at their hobby. Because hobbyists tend to be very passionate about their hobbies, there is a good chance that you could attract a very loyal following.
Depending on your hobby, you could even start a consulting service which would allow people to benefit from your expertise by paying you a consultation fee. For instance, if you are passionate about building airplane models, you could help a lot of people with the same hobby get started. You could even help them save money by recommending the best and cheapest places to buy materials and parts from to build these models.
Regardless of which method you choose to start making money online, it is important that you stick with it long enough and with enough dedication and determination to let it show you results. After all, it doesn't matter which method you choose. If you are going to give up on it in a couple of days or a week, there isn't a lot of chance that it'll be successful. So be prepared to put in the hard word once you have decided on the method to help you make money online.