Have you been wondering how some people make money online? Or are you thinking of ways you can start making extra cash online? In this post, I’m going to share with you 4 ways to start making money online. In this era, almost everyone goes online for either socializing, purchasing stuff, searching, reading articles or watching videos. This makes the Internet a growing market and an opportunity for some people.
Before I dive into the ways you can start making money online, I would like to talk about the most important aspect. No matter what route you take, building an online audience is the very first step.
If you have an audience that pays attention to you, you can make money. More audience means more reach outs, more traffic and that leads to more money. It may sound easy but it’s way more than that and I am going to walk you through. You may have, for example, 5,000 followers on Facebook or Twitter, and if you’re not using strategies to use those number of followers, you’re definitely missing out. Start using the hours you spend online valuable.
Your online income takes time to grow, so, you need to be willing to dedicate the time and energy required to get your idea off the ground.
Now, let’s get started learning ways to start making money online.
Become a Freelancer
Perhaps you love writing, managing Facebook pages, designing websites or you have skills in graphics. You can simply turn these skills into something valuable and earn extra cash. A lot of people are making decent money by just freelancing. With freelancing, you can work from anywhere, and you’re not dedicated to just one client. You will need an Internet connection to connect with clients and work at your own time and pace. I have been doing freelance website design and graphics jobs for some time now, and I do communicate and provide support online via email or WhatsApp. And this is helping me earn extra cash while I still have a full-time teaching job.
Monetizing a Blog
Another way to start making extra cash online is by running a blog and placing advertisements on it. If you have a popular blog you can easily attract advertisers by selling spaces on your blog just like newspaper companies. You may also use online advertisement programs to run ads on your blog and get paid. There are lots of advertisement networks out there where you can register and run ads for them and get paid depending on how people interact with those ads. The most popular advertisement network is Google AdSense.
Google uses their service called Google AdWords now changed to Google Ads to advertise for businesses who want to appear on Google search results or on blogs based on keywords and things they offer. Google will then charge those advertisers only when their ads are clicked or a call is made. When you search for things online you’ll likely see that some results at the top contain a green box with the word Ad in it. This tells you that those results are advertisements.
For Google to get more hits and generate more revenue, they share the ads with content creators like bloggers who wish to run ads on their content.
You can use your Google AdSense on different blogs and websites as you wish to help you generate more income from ads. The more people interact with the ads from your blog the more you get paid. But caution, this doesn’t mean you have to tell people to click on the ads or you click on the ads. This could make Google block or terminate the ad service on your blog. You may want to read the Google AdSense terms & conditions to get a clear picture. Google uses CPC (Cost per Click) or CPM (Cost per Thousand Impression) on the ads they run on your blog content. With CPC targeting, earnings are based on clicks while CPM earnings are not only based on per view/impression but on a larger scale.
At this moment you’re wondering how you’re going to get paid by Google? Google AdSense’s policy is to reach a payment threshold of €70 or $100 or £60 before they start paying you. You can download and install the Google AdSense app on your phone to keep track of how ads are doing on your blog and how much money the ads are generating.
To get started, an interested blogger should register for an AdSense account, and upon approval, Google will provide a JavaScript code that you need to place on the header of your blog. There are actually some criteria that your blog needs to meet before you get Google’s approval.
- You must have a custom domain name, for example, faalictacademy.com.
- Your blog should be live and not in maintenance mode.
- You will need to have legal pages like About, Contact, Privacy Policy.
- Use a clean design with good navigation.
- Have at least 10 well-written (non-plagiarized) blogs posts.
- Make sure you avoid using copyright images, videos or text.
- Make sure you work on getting good traffic by sharing your blog posts on social media to get more page views.
To know more about being an eligible Google AdSense participant or Adsense program policies follow the links below:
https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/9724
https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/48182
If you don’t have a blog and you want to get started you can read my post Thinking of Starting Blog and then later read Blogging Best Practices to get more ideas about running a successful blog and start attracting readers.
If you need a professional looking blog, we can make one for you. We provide blog/website packages + hosting and custom domain registration for new bloggers and small businesses. For more info, you can check our website at https://faalen.com. If you’re planning to build the blog for yourself and host it, I recommend hosting with iFastNet.com for beginners with low-budget. They offer affordable and reliable web hosting services with excellent support. This blog is hosted with them, and I have been using them for more than 2 years and I’m happy with their services.
As a Faal ICT Academy subscriber or visitor, you can use our referral link below to get the best offer in premium hosting for as low as $3.99/month and you can upgrade at any time when you start expanding.
Referral Link
Affiliate Marketing
Another way to start making money online is to start affiliate marketing. This is a way of recommending a product or service to your followers on your website or blog and when they click on your referral link and pay to buy a product or service you get a commission.
In the previous section, you should notice that I have recommended a hosting company called IfastNet with a referral link because I’m doing affiliate marketing for them after feeling good about their services. Now, whenever someone clicks on that link from my website and make a payment to the hosting company, which I wish for, I will get a commission for recommending their services.
Bloggers can also use this to help them generate more income online. Let’s say for example you blog about fashion, you can recommend your audience or visitors to an online store that deals with fashion and has an affiliate marketing program.
To get started with affiliate marketing you can check for online service providers or stores that are using affiliate marketing on their website and then sign up. You may find this mostly at the bottom/footer section of their website. You’ll be given a unique referral link or coupon code to use when recommending their service or product.
Amazon and eBay are among the top online stores that provide affiliate marketing. Godaddy, a leading and popular hosting company also provide affiliate marketing.
Join the YouTube Partner Program
By running an active YouTube channel you can start making extra cash by allowing ads on your videos. Do you normally see a 5 seconds video playing right before the video you clicked? Every number of seconds it plays on a video, the channel owner gets something. If you’re already approved by Google AdSense for running ads on your blog, you can use that account to advertise on your YouTube channel too because YouTube is also a product of Google.
To get started with a YouTube channel all you need is a Gmail account, and then go to youtube.com sign in and create a channel and set it up. Just having a YouTube channel up and running doesn’t make you legible to monetize your videos.
Note: Monetization is not available in all countries. If you’re in The Gambia for example, you won’t be able to monetize your videos unless if you change your location.
To be legible to run ads on your videos you must:
- Have 4,000 watch hours in the previous 12 months.
- Make it to 1,000 subscribers.
What they mean by 4000 watch hours is, the number of time people spend watching your videos. Any second or minute watched is counted. And for subscription, is the number of people who clicked on the red subscribe button below your videos or channel homepage. This is one of the reasons why every YouTuber is asking for people to view and subscribe. So, always try to subscribe, that’s the least you can do to support content creators like us who spend a lot of time creating these videos to continue.
To subscribe to my channel you can click on the subscribe button below and don’t forget to also click on the notification button to get notified of new videos.
Final Thoughts
Making money online is not easy at the beginning, but let’s just look at it as a long-term investment. Because if you do it well it should pay off later.
Thanks for reading and I hope this post helped. Subscribe so that you won’t miss the next post.
Ousman Faal [Digital Vigilante] is a Tech Entrepreneur & Digital Skills Trainer who teaches both in the classroom and online. He has experience in various technologies and likes sharing it with others. Ousman has published 149 articles on this blog. He is the CEO of Faalen Technologies and Skills.gm.
