The Internet offers us a huge platform to open our own online business with an investment of $500 or less.
Start a blog
More and more of us are going freelance with our own blogs. A blog can be a great way to earn money online, while still being an enjoyable activity. You can choose your topic and, if you do something you like, it won’t be hard work at all. Gardening, celebrity gossip, shopping, shoes, holidays, food – whatever your area of interest, you can publish blog articles that can turn into income, part time or full time. There are a number of ways to make money from blogging, think the folks at Income.com. You can simply place ads alongside your blog’s thematic content. Services like adsense.com make this simple and offer nice money for placing ads on your blog.
You can also make money on your blog by recommending certain services or products alongside your content such as VIS To PHP conversion. Thus, you can take commissions or fees.
Create a website about a topic that interests you
Creating a website is the most preferred way to do business online. If you plan to start an online business, you need to have a presentation interface, and a website is essential. With a website, you can earn money by advertising, product recommendations, direct sales or selling your services.
You can also make money, very well, by creating websites and then, once they are set up, by selling (or flipping) them to other owners or investors. Sites like flippa.com have made this much easier in recent years.
However, when you have a site, you should always provide valuable information. People are looking for solutions on the internet, so if you can provide solutions for your readers, you will be rewarded with more traffic and more money. As traffic increases, so does the value of your website.
Go freelance
There are many websites that become a meeting place for freelancers and clients. If you have skills in web design, coding, app development, graphic design, get back to writing what you want, because there are people who will be happy to pay you to help them.
You can sign up on sites like elance.com and Freelancer.com to showcase your specialisations. Clients will hire you for different projects relevant to your area of specialization.
Writing content for other businesses
If you are passionate about writing, producing content for various websites can be a profitable way to earn some money. Millions of people earn full and part time income from writing articles, books and web content for online businesses.
Those who write in English have thousands of websites that offer them the opportunity to earn money from writing general content and SEO (search engine optimisation) for different companies. You can even become a so-called ghost writer – a “ghost writer” – who maintains anonymity.
Sites like iwriter.com have helped some aspiring writers get started. You can register there and start writing and, if your writing is of decent quality, you can make good money from it.
Become a video blogger on YouTube
Video blogging or vlogging has become a successful way to earn substantial amounts of money. And Youtube.com offers the best platform for this. You can make videos about something that interests you, and post them on Youtube to start getting noticed.
Once you make yourself known and popular in the eyes of Youtube users, you can make money in a lot of ways:
- Simply by creating popular videos or opening a Youtube channel you can earn a percentage of the advertising revenue that YouTube generates from your videos.
- Create a video clip to provide information on a specific product or topic. Finally, offer the viewer options to buy the products or ask for more information.
- You can place ads or promote other companies’ products through an affiliate link at the end of the video.
- You can find sponsors who would like to place their ads on the videos.
- Get sponsorships from companies that want to target your viewers.
Create and sell gigs on Fiverr
A “gig” is a live recital by a singer or any other such performance (it can also be a motivational speech, a monologue, etc.) in front of a “casual” audience.
Such “gigs” are published on Fiverr. This online platform is a marketplace that allows anyone to upload and sell their services for as little as $5. Service can mean anything from creating a logo, recording a voice over (commentary over some images), to a video review or product review. If you’re interested, it’s worth spending some time browsing other people’s gigs on Fiverr to see which ones are for sale. Then you can create your own offer that reflects what you have to sell.
Plenty of people have used Fiverr to make thousands of dollars a month to round out their income, and some have turned their business into a full-time one.
Import cheap products and sell them on Amazon
Sites like amazon.com and ebay.com offer the perfect platform for your own buy-sell business.
From China you can buy the most sought after products at lower prices and then resell them, more expensively, on these sites. This business can easily be done from home and requires very little initial investment.
Amazon even has a storage service for you, so you don’t even have to worry about it. Just buy the product, ship it, in bulk, directly to Amazon, then market and sell it, and they’ll take care of the rest.
Some make hundreds of thousands of dollars a month from this, Income.com claims.
Become a freelance photographer
Another way to earn money on the Internet is by selling your photos. If you’re a freelance photographer or even an amateur photographer, you can sell your images on various stock photo selling sites. Companies all over the world need pictures of everything imaginable: road signs, landscapes, doors, balls, grass, trees, beaches and so on. People need them and gladly pay for them.
Take a look at istockphoto.com and bigstockphoto.com to learn more about selling photos.
- Make an income as an Affiliate Marketing specialist (no website needed)
As we showed in point 5, you can earn money by becoming an affiliate marketer, a type of marketing in which a (large) company pays affiliates for every customer they bring in through their own independent efforts. You can take advantage of online social networks and video streaming sites, press releases and other web 2.0 sites. Then once you make some money, make your own website or blog. There are all sorts of sites that offer you the opportunity to become an affiliate member and earn money by marketing their products and services.
Print-on-demand and Facebook
A creative way to do business is to create t-shirts and sell them on teespring.com.
Start by designing a t-shirt from your own ideas and post pictures of it on Facebook. Once you have gathered enough likes and people become interested, teespring.com will make the product and start selling it for you. Then every time one of your t-shirts sells, you’ll earn a percentage of the profit, without having to invest a single dollar. There are people making tens of thousands of dollars a month from this business. All you have to do is come up with ideas and slogans and see what people like and don’t like.
