10 Creative Ways To Make Money Online

If you’d claimed it was possible for the average guy on the street to make millions of dollars online just a decade ago, the chances are good you’d have heard nothing but laughter in response. Today, though, there are countless Internet millionaires who turned a great idea into obscene profit, used the power of the web to promote their offline business or simply worked their butt off to sell their skills online.

While it’s unlikely that you’ll ever earn enough to buy your own private island, there’s nothing to stop you from using your skills to make a comfortable living online. In fact, while the media would have you believe that online success stories are limited to just a few lucky, hard working people who stumbled on a great idea that went on to make millions, the reality is that there are tens of thousands of people who make a living exclusively online. Here are just ten ways you can join them.

How To Make Money Online

1. Sell Stock Photography

The Internet has caused an explosion in the demand for stock photography. As the number of media and commercial outlets has increased dramatically with the growth of online media there’s an enormous need for high quality stock photos.

Yuri Arcurs is the man everyone turns to for their stock photo needs. As the world’s top selling stock photographer he sells an image every 8 seconds, 24 hours a day (that works out to over 4 million images each year). Arcurs makes millions of dollars each year simply by being the best at what he does. There are lots of great photographers in the world and the barrier to entry is as low as ownership of a camera, but Arcurs has managed to build a reputation online for consistent, high quality and imaginative images.

If you’re a professional photographer (or even just a hobbyist) you should consider the possibilities of selling stock images online.

2. Tweet For Sponsors

SponsoredTweets.com is an online platform that allows you to make money on Twitter by charging sponsors for communicating their advertising messages to your followers. You set the amount you want to get paid for every tweet you make, choose a category and select keywords you want to work with. You then wait for advertisers to contact you and take you up on your offer, paying you the amount you specified for each tweet that you make.

All throughout the process, the tweeter has full control over his or her account, and may choose the wordings of the tweets, or may choose to reject the tweet altogether.

3. Blog for Ad Revenues

If, however, you already have a blog with a devoted following it should be easy for you to leverage your readers into hard cash. Ad networks such as Google AdSense pay big money to place their ads on your site, and you’ll receive a payment every time a reader clicks one. While it’s easy to go overboard and fill every spare pixel, if you place your ads well it’s possible to make a comfortable income from your site.

One of the most successful bloggers around today is John Chow, a Canadian blogger who makes more than $40,000 a month through ad sales and other revenue streams. Ironically, his blog is about ways to make money online.

4. Sell Affiliate Products

If you have a flair for sales copy you could try your hand at selling products for affiliates. While many people take the seedy route of selling diet pills and penis enlargement products, if you want to keep your conscience clear you’ll find that Amazon runs a very successful affiliate program that allows you to make money advertising any of the products for sale on their site. eBay also have a pretty good affiliate setup, with their top affiliates earning $1.3 Million a month, WOW!

5. Write an e Book

In recent years the self-publishing world has exploded online to the point at which you don’t even have to run your own site in order to promote a book. Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Kobo are just a few of the sites on which you could self-publish today, with commission rates of around 70% available on every sale.

The number of eBooks on Amazon reached 8 million last year, and Amazon stated that eBooks are outselling hard backs 2 to 1, 62% of ebook sales fell into the Thriller and Mystery genre, so if you feel that you could pull this style of genre off then you will be in for a good chance of sales.

26 year old self published author, Amanda Hocking from Minnesota makes more than $2 Million a year from her ebook sales. Amanda Hocking’s stories about, trolls, vampires and zombies and  ‘supernatural teen romances’ sell for $2.99 or for as little as $.99.

6. Become a Virtual Assistant

Every small businessman would love to hire a full time assistant to take care of the little things, but many simply can’t afford one. Thanks to the Internet, though, they can now hire part time assistants who work for a whole host of clients, and all at a much lower cost than a full time staff member.

If you work from home this may be a perfect opportunity to make a consistent income. Virtual assistants can earn $20 an hour in return for booking travel tickets, interacting with clients and dealing with the daily needs of small businesses.

7. Lease Your Skills

Most people have at least one skill that carries a market value, though until now that skill may have been impossible to monetize in the traditional job market.

Sites such as 99Designs, Elance, Freelancer and iWriter allow people to hire out their skills as writers, coders, designers, translators and lots more on a contract basis. Freelancing sites are a great way to boost your income in your free time, and with enough motivation and hard work you could find yourself earning a comfortable full time income from them.

8. Selling on eBay

eBay is a great way to turn your unwanted things into a little spending money, but it isn’t just a place to sell your old Star Wars action figures. In fact, eBay’s global marketplace can offer a great way for canny traders to buy and sell their way to profit. By buying wholesale you can sell anything with a mark up. Even better, if you have the skills to make things people want to buy you could start your own home-based craft business, selling to customers around the world.

Matt & Amanda Clarkson are a successful couple who so far have managed to make over $8 Million in eBay sales.

9. Become A Mobile App Tester

People that are rather uncertain of their application development potential can still make some money through the usage of iPhone apps.

People that have the time and desire to test iPhone apps and discover bugs can be rewarded payments for their efforts. uTest is one such application. Individuals that have signed up will also build some reputation on the basis of the testing they have done so far.

Better reputation signifies access to more profitable app testing opportunities.

10. Designing T-Shirts

Finally, if you have something of an artistic streak you could kick off the next viral sensation with your own range of funky, arty t-shirts. Sites such as CafePress allow users to upload their own t-shirt designs and sell them on their personal online store.

You can also contact distributors such as threadless.com or designbyhumans.com to release your t-shirt designs to the masses.

If your designs catch the eye you could be looking at enormous profits when they take off in a big way.

Checkout our article The Top 10 Tips On Starting Your Own Successful Clothing Line, this should give you an idea on how to kick things off.

Conclusion

As you can see, to make money online you don’t have to be particularly skilled with computers. You don’t need to be know how to build your own website from the ground up, and you don’t have to be a mogul with millions of dollars to invest in success. If you have any kind of artistic skills, creativity or business savvy you can turn it into profit.

In short, you should understand that the online world is just like real life. The same opportunities are there for the taking, but instead of drawing your customers from just your home town you can reach out with your great ideas to the far reaches of the earth.

So why not start today?

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Social Media To Become One Of The Biggest ROI In The Marketing Realm

There are still those who question the use of social media in an overall marketing campaign or general plan. To not even consider the use of social when planning a marketing strategy is behind the times, especially if a brand has a particular target audience for their idea or product. It’s not good enough to just think that a number of likes that a Facebook page has, or the number of followers that a Twitter account has, is the way to measure success. It depends who these people are that are willing to listen to what you are telling them. A measure of success on these platforms, like other forms of media is how much revenue they are bringing into the business.

There are many ways for a company to track how many customers invest in the business via different marketing options. By using trackable links in a tweet or a Facebook post, you’ll be able to tell how many people have witnessed a specific deal or product thanks to them connecting via that link. A huge number of likes and followers can mean nothing if they’re not interacting with your page.

Of course, a huge number can help cause a snowball effect in which more people will get involved and see what you’ve got to offer, and so on and so forth. The only way to build this number though is either by paying for it – which would mean losing out on the actual fans you want, or creating interesting and engaging content to draw in the people who will genuinely be interested in your brand.

Not only is social media a way of interacting with customers and potential customers to find out their interests and wants from a company (although that is a major advantage of it), it’s a way of pushing the brand in ways that other media communications can’t. Doing it the right way and not being overly pushy, social media can become the main way to promote a business in the future.

As I’m sure you’re aware, television adverts cost a lot of money, probably a lot more than you’re even thinking. Paying to have your advert feature in between the programmes that everyone is watching costs a ridiculous amount of money. There’s no doubt that there are many advantages to this form of marketing, but there are also many cheaper ways of reaching a similar amount of people.

Social media costs a lot less than that of a television advert, and can often reach more people with your message than that television advert. This will obviously mean that the less spent on the marketing, the bigger the potential ROI.

I’m not claiming that social media will replace television adverts, but a combination of the two makes for a perfect marketing campaign where an initial viewing can be seen on TV, and more information found online. Seems sensible.

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The 3 Secrets to Massive Online Marketing Success

If you’re trying to sell products and services online, you’re probably looking for that one magic key to make your business work.

You buy CDs and DVDs that will tell you the secret.

You subscribe to sites like Copyblogger to study the secret.

You look at mega-successful sites in your market and try to reverse engineer the secret.

After all of this searching, you may be tempted to believe there is no secret. But the secret is real.

Actually, there are three secrets that work together. To be blunt, these three magic success secrets separate the winners from the losers. Master them and you’ll start to move forward. Slowly at first, then you’ll pick up momentum and things will start to move amazingly quickly. No baloney, no tricks. These three secrets are . . .

Success secret #1: Take action

Every year, hopeful entrepreneurs buy millions of dollars’ worth of “how to succeed” or “how to start a business” products. The market isn’t limited to doing business online, but the idea of working at a computer making “six-figure incomes in our pajamas” is especially irresistible.

95% of the customers for these products will spend thousands of dollars, then turn around looking for the next magic pill before their credit card gets a chance to cool off. So are online marketing products all garbage? Are they just hype and spin?

There are some junky products out there, but the truth is that many of them are excellent. The “gurus,” as they’re (not always affectionately) called, have a lot of sound advice to give. Their advice can make you lots of money, if you know the success secret:

You actually have to do something with the advice.

Most customers for “business opportunity” products value the dream more than they do the result. They want to get out of the cubicle, out of their crummy apartment, out of credit card debt. They might even want it desperately. But they don’t take action.

I’m not saying this to be flippant or harsh. It’s not actually all that easy to go from advice to action. If you don’t have a good track record for that, if you’ve spent a lot of time or money on how-to products but never really done anything with it, you may believe you’ll never master it.

That’s BS.

Your new productivity methodology

Get a little notebook. This is your to-do list for your project.

If you’re a content marketer, most of your actions will revolve around creating content, creating products, or delivering services. Be sure and maintain a long list of content ideas, so you’re never at a loss when it’s time to knock out a post or a podcast.

Write down all the actions you must take to get you to the next step. Add more actions as you think of them. Cross them off when you’re done. When the list is a mess, rewrite it.

You don’t need an elaborate system that wastes more time than it frees up. Your system only needs to help you know what to do next.

Work every day (7 days a week, no exceptions), even if some days you only have 15 minutes. Working every day will increase your productivity by spurring your unconscious mind to come up with more ideas. This is helpful for entrepreneurs, and critical for content marketers.

Make a daily habit of one hour of action on your biggest goal. You’ll be astonished at how quickly you start to make progress. Ready, Fire, Aim author Michael Masterson recommends an hour of work on your dream goal every morning, as a way to start your day with a terrific rush of productivity. I’ve been doing just that for the past few months, and I’m starting to get used to the “whooshing” sound as the pieces fall into place. Not only does it work, it feels great too.

You can spend that hour all at once, or divide it into two or three pieces. Make it work for you. And once you develop the hour-a-day habit, you’ll actually find yourself making excuses to do more work on your project.

Success is built on lots of small steps. Start taking them. You’ve built this up in your head to be 1,000 times harder than it is. The fact that you have historically been terrible at getting stuff done is not relevant at all.

Just start taking action. It honestly is that simple.

Success secret #2: Have a plan

The down side of “just taking action” is that if you do a lot of random tasks, you tend to get a lot of random results.

You need to put together a simple, reasonably logical plan. If you want notoriety and attention for its own sake, put together a Paris Hilton sort of plan. If you want credibility and trust from your customers, make it more of a Copyblogger kind of plan.

There’s an old saying that when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem tends to look like a nail. Fight that kind of thinking as much as you can. Your plan may call for expertise you don’t have, or actions you aren’t very good at. So make some room in your plan to partner with someone else. If you’re great at connecting with customers but lousy at technology, find a partner whose strengths and weaknesses perfectly complement yours. Believe me, that person is out there and wants desperately to work with you.

Making too many plans can be the enemy of success secret #1. Be sure your plan has plenty of room for “actions I will take.”

For most of us, grandiose plans don’t get implemented. It’s great to have spectacular goals, if that inspires you. But put together plans for relatively simple, manageable projects. A dumb, simple little project that gets done is infinitely more valuable than an impressive one that gets 99% done.

The reason “back-of-the-napkin” project planning is a cliché is because simple, compact plans tend to get put into action, while 1,000-page strategies to create business empires tend to gather dust.

Keep your project plan in your little notebook. If your plan doesn’t fit into a small notebook, make a smaller plan.

If you want to make a million dollars online, start with a project to make $10. Figure that out, then scale it. It sounds simplistic and even silly, but it works.

Success secret #3: Your secret sauce is you

This is the one that’s going to take #1 and #2 to a completely new level. Success secrets #1 and #2 can make you a decent living. Add #3 to those and you’ll start to create an extraordinary business that supports a meaningful life.

As a content marketer, you’re going to need to create interesting, useful and compelling content pretty much every day you’re in this business. Your blog posts, free reports and email newsletters all contribute to one goal: to establish you as a trusted authority on your topic.

If you’re just going to regurgitate the usual stuff in a lame me-too blog, you’re not going to find too many customers. You’re betting off spending your time surfing or skateboarding — at least with those, you’ll get some exercise and you might meet somebody cute.

You have a unique view of your market’s problems. You have a unique set of techniques and approaches to solve those problems. You have a unique set of experiences to put the problems in a fresh light. Share those unique perspectives in your content.

If you need more expertise to establish yourself as a credible authority, get out and start asking questions. Be a reporter. Look for case studies. Look for real-life examples, even if they’re tiny. Look for lessons in your own life. Make connections no one’s made yet. Bring someone else’s expertise to light in a new way.

If you’re a Franciscan monk, write about the Franciscan monk’s guide to brewing better beer. If you’re a doting parent, write about the toddler’s guide to success. If you’re an indentured servant for a big corporation, write about how to avoid doing all the really dumb stuff your company does.

There will always be people — often thousands of people — who know more than you do. Acknowledge that so you stay humble and open. Then put it to one side and speak up anyway.

Keep whittling down your topic until you’re speaking with an authentic voice about something you genuinely know and care about. Stay curious and you’ll find the path that works for you and only for you.

The real secret

Nearly everyone will read this, feel inspired for about 45 seconds, then go off to hit Starbucks and check out what the hottie on the 2nd floor is wearing today.

But you’re going out at lunch today to pick up your small notebook. As soon as you get back, you’re going to scribble a simple plan and a good handful of actions that will make the plan happen. You’re going to put some thought into how you can execute this plan in your own inimitable way.

You’ll make 10 minutes and take an action today, even if it’s small. Tomorrow morning, you’ll start working for an hour every day, 7 days a week, toward your biggest goal. And just like that, you’ll be on your way to true, meaningful success, however you define it.

Send me a postcard when you’ve reached your dream. I’ll be very jazzed to hear from you.

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