In this day and age of the internet and working from home, there are dozens of new ways to make money online popping up everyday. For the creative people, there are ways of leveraging, or even selling their creative works online. You can even make a full-time living doing it, if your content is good enough and you have the skills to do so. In this article I’m going to talk about 10 of the best ways to make money online by creating content.
I’m specifically talking about digital media of some type that is uploaded to the internet and used to generate an income stream. This can be just about anything including written text, images, and videos. This content can be monetized in various ways.
Below we’ll have a look at some of the most common and legitimate ways that content creators are making money online today. In addition, none of the items on this list require any special skills to get started.
Like anything else though, they’ll all take plenty of hard work and dedication in order to be successful.
With that being said, let’s have a look!
10 ways to make money online by creating content
There are probably hundreds of ways that content creators can make money online. I’m a blogger, I use affiliate marketing and display ads to generate an income from my content.
As someone who is immersed in the world of blogging and content marketing, the following are some of the more common ways to make money online with content that came to mind.
1. Affiliate marketing
One of the most common ways you’ll see to make money online is affiliate marketing. This is where you forma relationship with the seller of a product. When you generate sales for this seller with your marketing efforts, you’re given a commission. These commissions can range from almost nothing to hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
In a nutshell, you drive traffic to your content with either SEO or paid ads. This content is carefully crafted and has affiliate links on it. The affiliate links are what tell the seller how many sales you’re bringing in. That’s the whole business model.
The barrier to entry for affiliate marketing is very low, pretty much anyone can dip their toes in the water as long as they have about $100 and the ability to follow some tutorials.
Just be warned, there are many predatory “affiliate marketing experts” who’s entire business model is based around taking a naive beginner’s money. So anyone new to affiliate marketing has to watch out for the self-proclaimed gurus.
With that disclaimer, it is possible to make exorbitant amounts of money with affiliate marketing. Like with anything else though, it requires skill and either a significant investment of capital or time.
2. Youtube channel
Everyone seems to be starting a Youtube channel nowadays. I have one for this site, but it’s been neglected lately. Google makes the process of creating the actual channel easy and free. Past that, it’s up to you as the creator to film and edit the videos.
After you’ve been consistently making at least some decent videos for months, possibly a year or more, you’ll hopefully reach the minimum requirements need to monetize your channel with Adsense.
That minimum at the time of writing this is 1000 subscribers and 4000 watch hours. That may not sound like a lot when you see other Youtubers having hundreds of millions of subscribers. Trust me though, 1k subscribers is an achievement that most never reach.
In addition to display ads, you can also utilize affiliate marketing on a Youtube channel. Putting your affiliate links in the descriptions of your videos can generate sales, and you can do it before you reach 1k subs!
3. Online course
If you have any specific skills that are sought after, then you may be able to create an online course and sell it. This income can be fairly passive. Creating a good course can be a lot of work. As far as the work that goes into it, I can only go by what I can see on the surface.
There will be a lot of market research and preparation involved in creating a course. You have to structure your modules and either create a website for your course or use a popular platform for Udemy.com.
Let’s say you create a video course that has 8 hours of watchable content. It may not sound like a ton of work to create an 8 hour video course, 8 hours is just a typical workday. But you have to consider that each of those hours probably required 2-3 hours of editing, accompanying text content to be created. So imagine a more in-depth course that’s 40 hours of content.
If your course is on a subscription model and has a community feature where participants in the course can chat, then it can be a lot of work maintaining a popular course.
If you’re ok with the work, a well made course that does a good job of teaching about the topic can be highly lucrative. You may have to update your content occasionally, but the original course material you make can keep generating sales indefinitely.
4. Freelance writer
If you’re a good writer, you can use platforms like fiverr.com and Upwork.com to create content for website owners and business owners. You may have to start out charging a lower amount per word or not having many clients, but once you build up your client base you can easily make a full-time living.
For most of my blogs I just pay writers to research the topics and write the content, then I edit and publish it. This allows me to publish a higher volume of articles each month than if I were to write all of it myself. With that said I generally still write at least one article per day myself. The one you’re reading now is my article for Sunday.
There are tens of thousands of smaller publishers out there just like me, and we’ve always got our eyes out for talented writers. This young woman makes $378k/year writing e-books for a thousand dollars a piece for her clients on fiverr.com
5. Publish an e-book
The CNBC article I linked to above was an example of someone who creates e-books for someone else. What if you published your own e-books, sold them yourself, and kept all the profits? If you’ve got the writing chops and the knowledge of the topic, then writing and publishing an e-book is certainly one way to make money online by creating your own content.
Using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform, aka KDP, you can publish your own e-books and sell them on Amazon to kindle users. You can start making from your book almost instantly. Here’s a detailed guide on how to make money using Amazon KDP.
6. Display ads
By display ads I mean selling ad space to various companies on your website or blog. This is how I primarily make my money online. I’m partnered with a few different ad companies that broker deals with advertisers for me and help me monetize my web traffic with display ads.
The business model of ranking simple, informational websites with SEO and turning on ads has become very popular in recent years. At one point not too long ago, display ads were just an afterthought. Unless someone had massive amounts of traffic, they didn’t expect to make much from ads.
This is no longer the case. You can make more money online from display ads than you can with affiliate marketing in many cases. I shifted focus to monetizing info content over highly competitive affiliate content over a year ago and haven’t looked back.
Now I enjoy seeing earnings like this everyday, from several different sites.
It basically goes like this:
- Choose informational topics, not purely affiliate but a mix is ok
- Stick to low-competition keywords in the beginning of a site
- Write good, SEO optimized content that solves the query
- Generate organic traffic after enough time has gone by
- Collect income from display ads
7. Stock images
I don’t know much about this one. I do know though that if you are a photographer, this can be a supplemental source of income. You basically take creative and unique images of things that people are looking for, and upload them to stock photo sites. You get a certain amount of earnings each time one of your photos sells a license.
I’m not sure how much you can expect to make doing this, even with a large library of images. If you are pro level possible a few grand a month, most probably don’t make much. But it would be a totally passive income stream which is always nice.
8. Create a podcast
A lot of people have jumped on the podcast bandwagon in recent years, I feel like it’s maybe dying down a bit though. Or maybe I just don’t listen to enough podcasts. Regardless, this is definitely a legitimate way to make money with online content.
Some of the common ways to monetize a podcast is to sell sponsorships, have ads, accept donations, affiliate marketing (might be tricky), sell premium episodes, and upload your episodes to YouTube where you can earn from ad revenue.
9. Become a blogger
This is kind of a catch-all for several of the methods on this list. If you own a blog, then you have a platform for affiliate marketing, display ads, to promote and sell a course, e-books, and other potential money making methods.
Out of the ways to make money online by creating content that I’ve mentioned on this list, simply starting a blog the most benefits in my eyes. You can do so much with a blog and you have so many opportunities. You can easily start an accompanying Youtube channel for your blog.
With all of the available methods to make money from a blog coupled with the fact that it costs next to nothing to get started, it’s really a no brainer for me. If you want to start making money online, start a blog.
10. Dropshipping
I’ve attempted drop-shipping, and I found out it wasn’t my cup of tea. Just because I couldn’t find my groove though, doesn’t mean you won’t. Dropshipping is just e-commerce with a twist, the dropshipper is actually a middleman.
As the dropshipper you would create a Shopify store or web store of some type that you can drive traffic to. You’ll sell products to this traffic, have the manufacturer of the products ship directly to the purchaser, and you’ll take a cut for your efforts. How much that cut is depends on how you priced the products.
The consumer only sees your store and the content that you created. They will likely never even know that you are doing is called retail arbitrage and you never even touch the products.
A lot of money can be made with dropshipping, but it isn’t as easy as it looks. I found this out. Simply creating a nice looking website and high converting landing page isn’t enough like I found out. You also need to be able to choose the right products, learn how to use Facebook ads, and create working relationships with social media influencers.
On top of that, there are just as many scammers and fake gurus in this space lately as there are in the affiliate marketing space.
Summary
This is just a sampling of some of the most popular ways to make money online by creating content. In most cases you’ll want to target a U.S. audience, so you’ll need a good grasp on the English language. You’ll need to be familiar with the internet and know your way around a computer. Most importantly, you need to be able to learn. Other than that, just about anyone at any skill level can start one of these methods.