18 Legit Ways to Make Money From Home (Best Online Jobs)

From playing online poker to getting paid for watching Youtube videos, there are many ways you can make quick money with the Internet. But do they work? Yes and No. You can make a quick buck out of them, but you will earn far more by pursuing your 9-5 job.

The truth is there are real jobs that can help you make money from the comfort of your home. These can be a side gig to earn an extra commission, or you can turn them into a legit full-time business. With the work from home culture gaining popularity in the last few years, making money from home has become a reality.

Millions of people are trying out and making money from their homes every day. From being a high-paid freelancer to providing insightful user feedback, there are plenty of business ideas that you can try out at home. All you need is a laptop and a stable internet connection.

What are the Best Ways to Make Money From Home?

In the era of the internet and digitization, making money from home has become easier than it used to be. With the help of a laptop and a stable internet connection, you can connect to the other part of the world and take up an hourly job for them.

To earn money successfully from the comfort of your home, you need to be the kind of person for whom the benefits of freedom outweigh all the drawbacks. This depends on your personality. People who enjoy working on their own and have an independent streak are more likely to succeed.

While making money from home is a fascinating deal, a few other criteria may also affect your success.

• Skills: Different jobs or businesses require different skills. For instance, if you want to launch a blog, you should be fluent in a language, understand the target audience, and know-how to market yourself. On the other hand, for designing a t-shirt, you need to be creative in your thoughts and ideas. So, you should choose the approach which matches your skillset.
• Capital Investment: While you can start some businesses with zero investment, others might take a few hundred dollars. For instance, you can join as a freelancer on popular platforms without paying any fees. Whereas on the other hand, you will need investment if you are thinking of launching your online eCommerce store. You will need to order products and check their quality and features before marketing them to your audience.
• Market Size: Different money-making approaches have different market sizes and demands. For instance, there is a high demand for programming freelancers and marketing professionals. Whereas printables have a comparatively smaller market. However, you should also consider the amount of competition in an approach when you are studying market size. Approaches with high market size and demand also have increased competition, making it difficult for newbies. It would help if you explored different strategies, the market demands, and the existing competition before you jump into the industry.
• Revenue Potential: Depending on your approach, your revenue potential will vary. For instance, a Youtube or Instagram influencer has a better chance of earning a high monthly income than filling online surveys. You need to analyze whether you want a part-time side business or work remotely full-time. Based on these criteria, you need to study all the different approaches and the revenue they can generate over the years and then select the one that makes the most sense for you.

This guide will look into the eighteen different ways you can start your online business and work from home, earning anywhere between $20 and $20,000 every month.

1. Become a High Paid Freelancer

With the world shifting to an online mode of work, skilled professionals can make as much money as they want to while freelancing. As a freelancer, you will have the ability to decide your mode of work, income, and the number of hours you want to put in.

With a greater work-life balance, you can now make freelancing a full-time gig, offering more control over the jobs you take on. According to Upwork’s recent freelancing research study, more than one-third of the US workforce works as freelancers in some capacity.

Companies both small and large are becoming more and more comfortable hiring freelancers online. More than 59 million Americans freelanced in 2020, and the trend continues to grow as more than 50% of Gen Z are opting for freelancing as their career option.

Number of freelance workers in the United States from 2014 to 2020 (in millions)

If you are worried that your freelancing gig will not make you enough money, then maybe you should think again. An average American freelancer earns around $20 every hour, going up to $28 for skilled professionals. In the pandemic year alone, American freelancers earned around $234 billion, making up to 1.1% of the country’s total GDP.

All these statistics indicate that freelancing is one of the best ways to make money from home. Now the question arises, how to become a high-paid freelancer and grow your business?

You can start making money by following a few simple steps, even if you have no experience.

Layout Your Goals for Freelancing

Starting your freelancing career without goals is just like driving without a destination. It is essential to determine your destination before deciding on taking any direction. Laying out your goals provides the destination for starting your freelancing business.

Understanding why you want to start freelancing would help you set your goals. You need to wake up every day, find a suitable set of clients, and work hard to keep them happy. To motivate yourself to follow this routine every day, you will need to be clear about your reasons for becoming a freelancer.

There can be two reasons to choose freelancing as your career.

• To replace your full-time job and earn an income to sustain yourself.
• To earn extra income and pursue freelancing as a side business.

Additionally, it would help to analyze how much you want to earn from your gig.

Once you are clear with your goals, it would be easier to pick up your niche, polish your skills, and start making money quickly from home. Your goals will be your north star for whether you are successful or not.

Choose Your Skills and Pick a Niche

To become a high-paid freelancer, you need to identify your skills and pick a niche accordingly. Working in multiple categories at once would not specialize in a skillset.

Your skills are your greatest asset. To choose the right niche as a high-paid freelancer, you need to identify your skills. The easiest way is to create a simple spreadsheet listing the skills you have learned over the years.

Of all these skills, you should pick those with lower competition and higher demand. It can be anything from content writing to customer service. You can also recall other skills you have used in the past to get a part-time or a full-time job. If someone pays to utilize your talent, you are good at it.

Starting your freelance career would be easier if you work on the skills you already have an idea about and then polish them on the way. Your skillset can also include some self-taught skills or a hobby that you love to pursue when free.

For instance, if you love collecting stamps from different regions, you are probably great at researching and staying organized. You can use these skills and become a master content writer.

Once you have narrowed down your list of skills to the skills you are good at, you should do a little research on a few freelance platforms like Upwork or Fiverr. While you might find the competition in almost any industry you think of, you should choose one with slightly less competition.

Once you have decided on the skills you want to use, you can pick a relevant niche accordingly. When you choose the right niche and put some effort into polishing your skills, you can easily brand yourself as an expert and stand out from the crowd.

Define Your Ideal Target Clients

After identifying your skills and selecting a niche, you need to define your ideal client type and look for clients who can pay you for your services.

Most beginners settle for less money and work outside their niche to earn. While this might not sound like a disaster right now, it can affect your future clients. If you want to scale up to become a high-paid freelancer, you must decide your ideal client and the type of jobs you want to take.

For figuring out your ideal client set, you will first need to assess your service and the problem you can solve for your clients with your skills. For instance, if you are a digital marketer, your ideal client can be a business owner who is not getting enough clients due to digitization.

With a clear idea about the prospects you will be targeting, you can easily plan out your portfolio and pricing accordingly.

Find a Freelancing Platform to Make Money from Home Quickly

The next step in becoming a successful freelancer is to find a freelancing platform that allows you to find good clients and make money from home quickly.

Different platforms have unique workflows, ranking algorithms, and payment systems. You need to look at all the options available to you and then choose a freelance platform that meets your criteria.

• Upwork: Upwork is undoubtedly the leading freelance platform in the industry. You can easily find good and honest clients willing to pay a high price for good quality work regardless of your niche. They have an endless feed of job postings that is updated every minute. The platform does have a bit of a learning curve, but it offers potential for significant returns once you have established yourself on Upwork.
• PeoplePerHour: PeoplePerHour is a popular freelance marketplace in Europe, and is making its name worldwide, with its unique incorporation of artificial intelligence. When clients submit their project scope, the platform algorithm analyzes the details and the skills required and matches the project with qualified freelancers. Freelancers can then submit their proposals, terms of work and set their price range. PeoplePerHour aims to bring clients and freelancers together in a more streamlined manner.
• Fiverr: Fiverr is a great place to start as a beginner. While you might not find as many high-paying clients as other platforms offer, you can learn and polish your skills while getting paid simultaneously. The platform allows you to post your skills as gigs, set your starting prices, and offer add ons to your clients. The payment system is built right into the platform, so you don’t have to worry about invoicing.
• Toptal: Toptal is designed for experienced, high-paid freelancers. The platform boasts itself as a place to find the top 3% of freelance talent. They have a rigorous screening process and accept only a few freelancers every month. While it might seem intimidating at first but if you manage to get selected, you will have a chance to work with some of the top companies, including Airbnb and Shopify. However, the platform only accepts freelancers from the technical field like UI/UX Designing or Software Development.

Create a Portfolio to Showcase Your Skills

All relationships between a client and a freelancer are built on trust. The best way to build trust is to showcase your skills with a completed project sample. It would be best if you always had a few work samples available to share with your new clients, helping them trust your skills.

Your portfolio should showcase your expertise, highlight relevant past experiences, and show your client who you are. Creating a stellar portfolio can help you out, even if you do not have much work experience.

If you do not have enough work samples, then it is time that you start building some. You can do something for yourself or take up a pro-bono project for a friend.

Before starting a new project, it is essential to outline your portfolio and make it look more professional. The purpose of creating a portfolio is to spark interest, educate, and convince your clients that you are the best fit for their technical needs.

Determine Your Pricing

Deciding on a justified price for your freelance offering is quite essential to your service. Some beginner freelancers make a mistake by quoting their prices too low to lure clients to their service. While this may work sometimes, you will have to complete many projects to build your reputation on a platform and become a high-paid freelancer.

The price you will charge for your service will be the perceived value of your skill. Make sure that you charge enough money to make a sustainable, comfortable living. As long as you deliver consistent value to your clients, they won’t mind paying you a few extra dollars.

Before you publish your portfolio to one of the freelance platforms, you should do a little competitor research and study how other freelancers are charging their clients. It is best to look for new freelancers with few clients and some experts in the field. This will give you an idea about the price range to fit your service into.

While determining the pricing of your freelance service, you should consider the actual value you would be creating for your potential clients and make sure that you are not leaving any money on the table.

Start Freelancing as a Side Gig

While freelancing sounds like an exciting career choice, you should always try it as a side hustle first. The truth about this industry is, you might take up a little time to establish yourself.

Creating a high-quality portfolio, polishing your skills, and building yourself as a brand naturally take a few months. It is a good idea to have a few steady clients with a long-term work opportunity before you quit your day job. Additionally, you will have a little less pressure to generate income immediately, and you will be able to focus more on developing your skills.

Building trusting relationships with your client is the first step to becoming a high-paid freelancer. And establishing these relationships will take up time. Additionally, when you learn to manage a tight schedule and deliver your clients quality projects with a limited time resource, you learn to run your own business and be self-dependent.

2. Launch a High-End Blog

Blogging is an evergreen industry that can quickly help you make money from home. You can earn anywhere from $15 to $15 million, depending upon how you run your blogs. While blogging has become a little more competitive than before, it is still a thriving industry.

A blog is a web page that contains informal, diary-style entries with a personal tone that helps it connect more deeply with the audience. WordPress users create around 70 million new blog posts every month. These posts get more than 500 million page views every month. Since so many people are blogging and putting out their views and opinions every day, it is essential to know the correct way to launch a high-end blog and earn money.

While you may think only large organizations like Huffington Post can gather enough content to make a decent living out of blogging, tons of individual creators will prove you wrong. Bloggers like Tim Sykes, Chiara Ferragni, and Melyssa Griffin make thousands of dollars every month from their blogs.

For launching a high-end blog, you need to strategize a well-defined plan and follow it to the end.

Pick a Niche For Your Blog

Millions of blogs are posted on the internet every day. It might seem a little difficult to stand out when so many people are competing. However, your niche can make you different from the crowd. Picking a niche is a key factor in determining the success of your website.

Most popular blog content formats according to bloggers worldwide as of Sep 2019

While you need to be passionate about the topic you are writing about, you also need to be profitable. Finding a combination of passion, profit, and experience is essential while building your blog.

To select the right niche for your blog, you first have to identify the topics you are passionate about. You can create a simple spreadsheet and list all the topics you like and the level of experience or knowledge you have in them. It could be related to your work, a hobby, or a topic you discussed with your friend. If something has stayed in your mind for a long time, you will love researching and writing about it.

Now it’s time to do a little market research before finalizing our niche. This will help us understand which are more profitable than others. You need to evaluate your competition and how many people are interested in your niche. The idol match would have low competition and a high number of viewers.

You can use Google Trends to search different topics. The graph will show you whether the interest in your selected topic is stable, growing, or declining over time. For instance, cat care is a great topic to blog about. In the past five years, the interest in this topic has been stable and has been growing recently.

Once you have studied the interest in your selected topics and have narrowed down the list, you should now ensure that they are profitable as well. An easy way to test this is to search your topic on google. It is a good niche if you see a brand advertisement at the top or bottom of the page.

Choosing A Blogging Platform

After deciding your niche, the next step is to pick a blogging platform that will suit your needs. You can self-host your website or use platforms like Blogger or Medium to post your content instantly.

When choosing a blogging platform, it is crucial to consider how you plan to make money with it in the future. Depending upon your needs and goals, you can select a suitable platform.

While a few bloggers prefer starting up on medium, it is not the best choice if you want to monetize your writing and launch a high-end blog. Although these free hosted platforms offer a dedicated reader base to their authors, they do not pay you well.

Self-hosted platforms might take up a little effort to set up and design, but they will be most profitable in the future. You will not only make money through affiliate links but also on-site advertising.

Once you have picked out your platform, you must select a domain name for your website. It would be best to choose a catchy, easy-to-type, niche-related domain that is not taken already.

It is not recommended to use your name as the domain unless you plan on creating a personal brand. It is easier to build a brand that sticks in the mind of people if it has a catchy name that justifies its content. Selecting the perfect domain name is another key factor in building a high-end blog website.

When you finalize the domain name, select a minimal theme for your website and set it up with the help of a web designer. Make sure you don’t spend too much time choosing a domain and theme for your website.

Strategizing Your Blog Outline For Growth

If you want to launch a high-end blog and focus on monetizing it from the very starting, you need to strategize and outline your articles before publishing. Creating a concrete and repeatable distribution strategy within your publication process will enable you to build up your momentum quickly.

Here are a few ways to plan for growth while creating your blogs and get the most out of them.

Use Keyword Research to Create Your Blogs

Every content plan should include SEO keyword research. It is an excellent measure to ensure that your blogs are inspiring, topical, and are ranking on search engines. Keyword research helps you get a good idea about the search volume for a selected topic. The more the search volume, the better is your chance to grab more visitors to your website.

There are multiple keyword search tools available to assess the demand for a topic. Writing about in-demand topics will keep your blogs evergreen. All you have to do is to update them once in a while.

Ubersuggest and Google Keyword Planner are great tools to use for your research. You can enter multiple search terms and review what your target audience is searching and talking about.

Another great way to do keyword research organically is to use forums like Quora. The platform has a dedicated audience who discuss topics and questions. It is a great place to pick up questions your audience is talking about and write a detailed article about that.

Collecting Emails From Your Readers

No matter which blogging platform or niche you choose for your blog, building up an email list should be your priority from day one. Email marketing is the best way to connect with your customers than social media marketing. Emails are 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

Placing sign-up forms strategically on your website would help you capture more emails from your readers. You can also create pop-up surveys for your visitors or post about your email newsletters on social media accounts.

Email lists offer personalized communication solutions, which is impossible for other marketing forms. You are six times more likely to get a higher click-through rate than social media platforms like Twitter or Instagram.

Every time a reader subscribes to your newsletter via their email, it is a sign that you’re publishing the right content to reach your target audience. In the future, if you decide to move to another platform or start another website, your email list will always belong to you. You can inform your readers directly and redirect them to the new platform.

Start Monetizing Your Blog From the First Day

When you have done enough research about your target audience, selected the correct niche, and prepared a bullet-proof strategy to scale up your blog, you should monetize your blog from the first day.

Most beginners mistake waiting too long to start monetizing their blogs. Even if you have just 100 visitors every month, there are a few ways you can make money from your writing. Additionally, when you start your blog to make it successful, you will quickly strive to achieve your goals.

Using Affiliate Links

Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to generate a passive income from your blogs. In simple words, it involves recommending physical products, services, and digital products of other companies in exchange for a commission.

Affiliate links work for years and make you money as long as readers visit your website and click on your recommended products. However, you should make sure to give full disclosure to your readers that you are using affiliate links for a product. This helps you build up trust with your readers.

Selling eBooks

Several bloggers have turned their blogs into an eBook for easy access to their customers. It is pretty easy to create and is priced reasonably for your visitors to buy. You can use your email list to promote your eBooks and even offer discounts to your loyal readers.

eBooks are also a good way to test whether your audience is interested in reading these topics and how you can improve them.

Selling Online Courses

If you have chosen a technical niche, selling your online courses is the best way to make money from your blogs. Your readers have already checked your website and know about your skills. Marketing your online courses through your blogs is a great way to persuade visitors into buying them.

For instance, if you have a health-related blog and are a certified nutritionist, you can sell your online fitness course, teaching people how to live a healthy and balanced life.

Offering a Paid Membership Plan

Today’s economy is better referred to as the subscription economy. All the popular websites have switched to a membership plan, which offers exclusive content for their most loyal customers. Switching to a paid membership plan will provide your readers with a community where they can connect with people of similar interests.

You can always find a few people to build a community, no matter your blogging niche. For instance, people reading fitness blogs are looking to change their lives. Offering them a paid plan would allow them to connect to a community of fitness enthusiasts, allowing them to achieve their goals.

Advertisements

Setting up banner ads is another way to earn passive income through your website. When you have just started your blog, you can subscribe to Google ads. It takes some time for advertisement income to become significant.

Once your blog is up and running and you have a few thousand visitors every month, you can switch to other private advertising agencies like Monumetric. They offer a good amount of money as compared to Google.

However, you should place your ads strategically and ensure that it does not interfere with your core website experience. Your readers should always be your priority.

3. Create and Sell Online Courses

Education has been a top priority for both old and young learners. Online courses help fill in the gaps of knowledge. The e-learning market has seen a sudden boom in the past decade. People spend a lot to learn new skills and stay ahead of the crowd.

People depend on the internet to get access to more information and instructions. It has created an opportunity for professionals to get paid for their knowledge. Online courses offer flexible hours and can be taken up by the comfort of their homes. What can be better than this for the internet generation?

The e-learning market is expected to exceed $300 billion by 2025. And this is the perfect time to enter this growing industry. Whether you are selling a $50 or a $500 course, readers always appreciate quality content.

For creating and selling an online course as a side business, it is crucial to understand your target audience and analyze your competitors. Your approach will only succeed if you offer knowledge that no one is aware of.

Analyze the Market and Choose A Topic

Studying the market and analyzing your competition is critical to choosing your course topic. You do not want to create a course that no one will buy. Before you record a single lesson, you need to find out your target audience.

Listing out all your professional skills is an excellent way to start. You can use a spreadsheet and enter your skills to create a course around them. Now, it’s time to search for the perfect market that will buy your online course.

There are a few factors to consider here.

• Firstly you need to analyze your competition and the number of courses available in the market. If you are a yoga instructor and are thinking of creating a course on How to Perform Yoga at home, there is only a slight chance that you will be successful. Many people are selling the same course and have a good reputation. As a beginner, it is easier to be lost in the crowd. However, if you sell a course on how to write a Yoga novel, then there is a good chance that you might shine.
• Secondly, you should consider whether your target audience is willing to pay for your course. You might find a lot of people who want to learn new things. But there are very few of them who are serious enough to pay you for it.
• Thirdly, if your target audience does pay for such online courses, what is the average price. Selling your courses at a competitive price is necessary to stand out in the market.

Based on all these factors, you need to narrow down your list and find a topic to provide new and interesting information.

Prepare an Outline For Your Course

Your readers will only invest in your course if they think it’s worth it, and you have to prove it to them. Creating a strategic outline for your course is the best way to entice your readers to buy it.

Unlike blog posts that skim a particular topic, an online course aims to a deeper study of the subject. It should cover all the essential aspects and offer your customer a new perspective or knowledge about that particular topic.

Along with creating an outline, it is also essential to list all the benefits of your course. If your customers will have no idea about how the course will help them, there is a good chance they won’t enroll in the course. Online courses act as a vehicle of reality for your students, taking them from their present reality to the desired future.

To link their future with their current reliability, you need to layout goals and objectives for a course. Additionally, it will help you formulate your course effectively without deviating from the main objective.

Your objectives should answer the following questions.

• What new knowledge will your student obtain?
• What skills will they be able to demonstrate after learning the course?
• What feelings will they move away from or move towards?

Setting a clear outline and objective will help the individuals understand the course better before enrolling.

Choose The Most Effective Way to Deliver Your Lessons

There are a variety of ways to teach your students. You can record an audio podcast, a detailed video, or a textual method with images and infographics. The most effective way to deliver your lessons would depend upon your topic.

For instance, if you teach a course about machine learning, an audio podcast would be sufficient. However, if you teach your student how to knit a pattern, a descriptive video will be your best course of action.

To provide an optimum learning experience, you should ensure that your course balances audio, visual, and practical methodologies. You can also host a live session with your learning community to make your course more engaging.

While you are selecting the most optimum learning method for your students, it is also necessary for you to analyze the time duration of the course. This depends on the course type, but the most profitable course length is between 10 and 25 hours. If it’s just an introductory session course, you can also wrap it up in 8 hours or less.

Market Your Course to the Target Audience

Making an online course is easy, but the real deal is to market it to the right audience for the right price. It would help if you created some hype about your course so that your students are excited to be a part of it. There are several ways you can market your online course and enroll more students.

Treat Your Course as a Product

When you treat your online course as a product launch, you will be able to hype up the market. Creating a coming soon page for your course and talking about it while preparing the course is important.

When your students anticipate a launch, they start saving and get ready for your course. A coming soon page will also give you an insight into the range of people who would be interested in your course.

Post About it on Social Media

If you have a decent social media following, selling your online course would not be too difficult. Your followers already trust and believe in your skills and would be eager to enroll in your course.

However, if you're a beginner, you might need to run a few rounds of social media advertisements to reach out to more people. Ads are a perfect way to spread awareness and, at the same time, analyze your target audience. These insights would be helpful for you to understand how well your product will perform in the market.

Guest Post on Blogs or Podcasts

Taking advantage of an already existing community of learners would be a great start to sell your online course and make money from home. You can create informational articles for guest posting websites and then email them to be published as a guest post. This informative article should also talk about your course with an external link to register at your website.

For this, you need to find a few competitors in your category and approach them to know if they need some help for free. It is a win-win situation for both parties. While the other person gets access to free information, you can talk about your course and promote it to their viewers.

4. Fill Out Paid Online Surveys

Making money by filling out paid online surveys as a side business is a great idea. Large corporations take the help of survey companies whenever they need insight into their product. This is done before the product hits the market to analyze the market potential.

These survey companies, in turn, pay their subscribers to give them valuable feedback. This is a good way to engage their audience and spread brand awareness.

The best part about paid online surveys is their ease of use. Anyone can fill out these surveys, give their feedback, and get a few dollars in return. All you need is a mobile phone and a stable internet connection.

Popular Sites To Take Paid Surveys

Taking an online survey is a piece of cake, but finding the right website can be quite challenging. You should sign up with the websites that fit your demographics and availability. Here are a few popular paid survey websites that are verified and offer great deals.

• Swagbucks: Swagbucks has been in business for almost 15 years and has an A rating with BBB. This makes the website trustworthy and assures that you will be paid for taking a survey. Depending upon your demographic, you will be offered a list of available surveys. Every completed survey will pay you between 1 and 350 Swagbucks. For every 100 Swagbucks, you will earn $1. This money can either be redeemed as a gift card or through PayPal.
• Branded Surveys: Branded Surveys has been conducting market research since 2012. This trusted company offers a $1 sign-up bonus to their subscribers once they have filled out their entire profile. After you create your account, you can immediately start taking up surveys. Each survey can earn you up to $5. However, you can only cash out your earnings once you reach 1000 points or $10. This can be cashed out in your local currency, including USD, GBP, or CAD.
• InboxDollars: InboxDollars has been in the market research business for the past 15 years and has paid its members more than $59 million. Unlike other platforms that offer a point system, InboxDollars offers you real cash every time you complete an online survey. They also offer a signing bonus of $5, which will be credited once you activate your account and fill in all the details.
• Pinecone Research: Pinecone Research is one of the highest-rated paid survey sites in the United States. It has been a part of the industry for more than 21 years and holds an A+ rating with BBB. Every time you complete a survey, your account is credited with 300 points, equal to $3. The platform also allows you to test new products and write a short report. They will pay you between $3 and $5 for each report, along with the option to keep the product once the study is complete.

Tips For Earning the Most Money Out of Paid Online Surveys

While taking an online survey is a pretty straightforward task, you can follow a few expert tips to make the most money out of these paid surveys.

• Fill Out Your Complete Details: You should fill out all your details every time you sign up for a new survey website. This would help the websites match you with surveys that suit your lifestyle and demographic.
• Sign Up On a Few Trusted Websites: While signing up on 50 websites might sound great for earning more money, this will cause chaos in your email inbox. There is a good chance that you can miss out on high-paying surveys. So to make the most money out of paid surveys is to stick to a few trusted websites.
• Answer Consistently: Survey websites pay their subscribers for their honest customer feedback. You need to read each question carefully and answer honestly. Usually, survey websites compare user responses across multiple sites and can disqualify users for inconsistency.
• Take the Highest-Paying Surveys First: After registering with a few websites, you might get notifications regarding a few surveys at once. Take time to analyze each one of them. First, complete the ones that pay you more and then move on to the rest of them.

5. Start Your Niche Online Store and Make Money Through eCommerce

eCommerce has become quite popular in the past decade. While there is no guarantee that you’ll make money through the store, there is also no limit to the amount of money you can make if you plan out your store before publishing.

The number of Americans shopping through an eCommerce store has increased by over 10 percent in the past five years. More than 230.5 million Americans shopped online in 2021, which will grow every year.

Retail eCommerce revenue in the United States from 2017 to 2025 (in million U.S. dollars)

While online shopping is on the rise, so is the competition. However, nowadays, anyone with a few hundred dollars and an okay-ish product enters the market, reducing the success of eCommerce stores. If you plan out your store well and provide a top-quality product to your customers, there is no limit to your earnings.

Creating your niche online store as a part of your overall business growth strategy, along with a high-end blog, would scale up both your businesses. A successful store comprises three factors, perfect product, the right price, and the right platform.

Pick a Perfect Product to Sell

Before you decide on a product to sell on your eCommerce store, you must analyze your competitors' market and target audience. You need to sell a product that your audience wants and not what you like.

While some prefer adding 10 or 20 products to their website at once, it is always recommended to start with a single product. It helps you research well and market the product effectively.

Once you have a product idea, you should check if it is viable. For this, you should analyze your target audience and track your competitors. The ideal match would be low competition and high demand.

An easier way to find the perfect product for your store is to analyze what your competitors are selling. Their best-selling products have a market. If you offer a better quality product with excellent customer service, there is a good chance you can outrank them.

You can also analyze this data from major eCommerce platforms, including Amazon's Best Sellers, eBay's Trending products, and Alibaba's new products.

Determine the Price and the Shipping Cost of Your Product

Setting the correct price point for your customers while booking your profit is crucial to the success of your store. If you set the price too low, you might end up losing money, and if you keep it too high, your customers will start looking for alternate sellers.

To determine the cost of your product, you should analyze a few aspects.

• Cost of materials to make your product
• Web hosting and domain charges
• Shipping costs
• Percentage of payment processing services
• Marketing and advertising cost
• Taxes

You need to add up all these costs and then add your profit percentage to determine the final price of your product.

You can also search for competitors selling similar products online and analyze their pricing. Your product price should be either similar or lower than them if you want to make a stand in this industry.

Most businesses decide to forward the shipping charges to their customers. However, this leads to almost 44% of shoppers opting out of the store due to high shipping costs. Instead, you can include the cost in the product's price and offer your customers a free shipping option.

Choosing the Best eCommerce Software to Sell Your Product

When you decide to start your niche online store, you can set up your website and handle the entire product processing yourself or opt for an eCommerce marketplace. If you are looking to make good money out of your store, setting up your own would be your best bet. Here are a few software that ensures a great eCommerce experience

• Wix: Wix is a popular website builder that also offers eCommerce functionality. It provides multiple templates for you to choose from and build your store. It’s an easy-to-use platform that you can customize according to your brand.
• Shopify: Shopify is one of the best eCommerce store builders in the market. It has an intuitive inventory system, impressive sales features, and affordable plans for any business. You can quickly scale up your business as you grow and add more services to your store.
• BigCommerce: BigCommerce is another scalable platform used by small businesses and large enterprises. The built-in applications and features offer you advanced functionalities to grow your business. You can set up your store for success with advanced SEO tools.
• Weebly: Weebly is one of the most affordable options available in the market. It allows you to create beautiful websites and integrate your eCommerce stores. You can also blog through this platform. You can set up your eCommerce site in a few hours and start marketing your product.

6. Become a Youtube or Instagram Influencer

Social media channels like Youtube and Instagram are an entertainment source and a great way to quickly earn money from your home. Over the past few years, these social media channels have evolved as powerful tools for marketing and are being utilized by big players in the industry.

The influencer marketing industry in 2021 was valued at a record high of $13.8 billion. It has grown by 711% in the past five years. With more people investing in this form of marketing, there is a good chance that you can enter the industry and make a name for yourself.

In today’s competitive scenario, major brands are now focussing their marketing techniques towards social media and are collaborating with influences more firmly than ever. In a bid to reach a large audience, influencer market spending in the United States was at an all-time high of $3.7 billion.

More than 59% of companies have a standalone budget for content marketing. Among these, almost 75% of companies set up a dedicated budget for influencer marketing through Instagram or Youtube.

Social media websites are set to grow every year, with around 4.2 billion active social media users at the start of 2021. More than 80% of the United States population is active on Instagram or Youtube. Tapping into this growing industry is an excellent way to make extra money from home.

To make money as an Instagram influencer, you need a suitable business model and strategize it to fit the ever-changing scenario. You can charge anywhere between $75 and $3,000 for a single brand collaboration with the right marketing strategy.

How to Become a Social Media Influencer

To become a successful influencer on Instagram or Youtube, you need to build your community. The only tip you need to grow your audience is producing high-quality content and consistently engaging with your audience.

Pick a Niche You’re Passionate About

To start your influencer journey, firstly, you need to find a category you are passionate about and then its growth potential. Finding a profitable niche is crucial and will decide how much you will earn over the years.

You can open a spreadsheet and note down all the topics you like to read and have knowledge about them or the categories your Instagram is filled with. If you have been following fashion influencers for some time, you are more likely to be passionate about styling clothes or even creating some.

Doing proper market research is another crucial aspect. You need to analyze whether your niche can help you make enough money and the competition you need to battle to make a name in the industry. For instance, the tech niche is far more profitable than the food niche but is also more competitive.

It would be best to find a less competitive and reasonably profitable category. To become successful on a social media platform, you must post regularly. So you should make sure that you have enough knowledge about the category to create engaging content every day.

Sharing Your Story

One thing that the audience values more than anything is honesty and an emotional connection. People like to read about others who had a tough childhood and yet became one of the richest people in their society or how you manage your everyday life as a content creator. People love to read stories and engage with their influencers.

To create a loyal community, you need to share your true story with your followers. It helps them to understand your idea and build a strong emotional connection. When your audience is connected with you, there is no way they will not engage with your posts.

Telling a story about how you battle with a health condition while working as a travel influencer would engage your audience more than a photo of you on a beach. Your stories make other people relate to you and view you as one of their friends, rather than an unreachable celebrity.

Give your audience a reason now and then to trust, follow, and engage with you.

Post Content Consistently and Market it the Right Way

If you want to become a popular social media influencer, you need to interact with your audience every day and post high-quality content consistently. There is no other way to earn people's trust than to be present on the platform at all times.

An average person spends almost 3 to 6 hours a day scrolling social media. Posting content daily or once every two days would allow you to get enough screen time from your audience. The more content you post on social media channels, the better are your chances of success.

However, it is necessary to strategize a plan before you start posting. You need to plan out your posts for the entire week and create a realistic posting schedule. Posting every day and working a day job can become stressful for you. When you plan out your schedule and post accordingly, your audience will know when they will see you next.

Irregular or unscheduled posting would leave your followers confused. Additionally, you can also use scheduling applications like Buffer or Preview.

Market your Posts the Right Way

Using the correct hashtags on your post is as important as posting consistently. Hashtags allow other people to find you on a social media platform. You can add up to 30 hashtags per post, but it looks spammy. An average of 15 hashtags would be your best bet.

When choosing hashtags for your posts, it is recommended to avoid popular hashtags. While these hashtags have a large audience following them, they also have high competition. There is a very bleak chance that you will win a slot in somebody’s feed with these hashtags.

Instead, you should choose ones with a decent search volume to maximize your chance of appearing in the top posts. A hashtag with a search volume between 10,000 and 1 million would be a great way to start.

You can find these hashtags using an AI-powered tool HashtagsForLikes.

7. Start Your Podcast Show

As podcasts are becoming more popular every day, more and more people are jumping the train and creating new shows every day. Researchers estimate that by 2024, there will be around 100 million active podcast listeners in the United States.

There are over 2 million podcast channels and more than 48 million episodes people stream every day. Interestingly, 50% of all US households are fans of listening to podcasts while doing their daily tasks. Today more than 33% of the US population is hooked to this audio industry.

Making podcasts as a side business is a great way to earn a few extra dollars. However, it would be best if you devised a proper strategy to record, publish, and market your podcasts effectively. Your channel might get lost in the crowd without an appropriate model of business.

Podcasts help you engage with your audience and connect with them more personally. While it is a long and tedious process, when done the correct way, you can make anywhere between $10 per episode and $500,000 per episode.

Choosing the Correct Podcast Hosting Platform

You need a podcast platform to host and store media files for your podcast. To simplify your experience, you should choose a host that will offer you the best features in the most affordable price range.

Storage and bandwidth limit should be your priority while choosing a host. This will affect how many episodes you can post every week, how much access your audience has to old content, and eventually how you can monetize it.

Another factor crucial for your podcast is a powerful analytics tool. These insights can help you make major decisions about the success of your program and evaluate your future strategies.

Additionally, all the features a podcast hosting platform offers would be useless if the interface is too complicated. You should always look for an easy-to-use hosting site that allows you to manage your podcast and other media files better.

Monetizing Your Podcast the Right Way

Podcasts have become a popular way for businesses to boost their exposure and newbies to market their brands. While making a podcast is certainly challenging, marketing it the right way is more technical.

Like all the other products, podcasts too have a dedicated audience. It would help if you choose a profitable niche with slightly less competition. Strategizing your episodes and channel for growth will help you monetize your podcast the right way.

Sponsorships

Advertising products or services of your sponsors is one of the most popular ways to make money with your podcast. You might have heard your favorite speakers collaborating with their advertisers once every few episodes.

The money you can make through brand partnerships and sponsorships depends upon the popularity of your channel. As more people download your episodes, your earning also increases. A podcast can earn between $18 and $50 per thousand downloads on average.

As the popularity of your podcast increases, so does your CPM. Popular podcasters like Joe Rogan make up to $800,000 per episode.

Strategically placing your sponsored ads throughout the length of your episode is necessary to make the most out of them. Pre-roll and post-roll ads are a little less valuable than mid-roll ads.

While starting your podcast, you can pitch $20 for a mid-roll ad and $15 for pre and post-roll advertisements.

Affiliate Sales

Affiliate sales are pretty similar to sponsorships, and you sell a product or a service for your partner. Unlike sponsorship paid for every thousand downloads, you earn via an affiliate link when one of your customers purchases with the recommended company. The company pays you a commission for every sale you help them make.

Just like blogs, podcasts are also evergreen content that you can use to generate a passive income over the years. It means you will make money with your links as long as your podcast stays relevant to your audience.

Affiliate sales work the best for technical podcasts, where you often suggest multiple products and services. When monetizing through affiliate sales, make sure that the company offers you a link that is easy to speak and remember.

For instance, www.sponsor.come/your-name is an excellent affiliate link structure, which will stay in your listener’s minds. But, www.sponsor.com/Gh2eop87ugh is quite difficult to speak and remember.

Selling Audiobooks

As a podcaster, you spend hours generating content for your clients, and you give it up for free. Your audience respects that and builds up trust in you over time. Once you have a few thousand loyal listeners that wait for your upcoming episodes, you can also generate an income selling audiobooks.

Popular podcaster Jon Nastor repurposed parts of the content he generated over the years and combined it into a book that people pay for. To create an audiobook, all you need to do is incorporate your entire podcast journey into a few hundred pages.

While this may sound a little overwhelming at the moment, planning your podcast for growth from the beginning would allow you to achieve this quickly. When you have a scheduled plan and a list of topics to talk about, it will become easy to combine them into a book and sell it to your loyal audience.

8. Test Websites and Applications to Provide Insightful User Feedback

Testing out websites and applications is one of the most underrated methods of making money from home quickly. In simple words, website testing is when individuals spend their time accessing and analyzing a website to provide feedback on its functionality and ease of use.

Today, websites and applications play an essential role in deciding a company's credibility. It is easier to bring in new customers and retain your existing ones with an interactive website and user experience.

An average user spends only 45 seconds scrolling a website and deciding whether they like it or not. An appealing website with an easy-to-use dashboard is necessary to keep users hooked to your platform.

Optimizing your website according to your customers is necessary to drive more traffic and profit to your organization. Large enterprises pay website testers for the valuable feedback they provide.

On average, most website testing platforms will pay you $10 for every test. The testing session typically lasts between 10 and 20 minutes. It is a great way to earn a side income with minimal effort.

Best Platform To Make Money Quickly by Testing Websites

Tons of websites are now offering website testing services for big enterprises. However, not all of them are worth signing up for. While looking for a platform to make money quickly by testing websites, you should make sure that they pay you instant money, either in the form of cash or points.

Here are a few noteworthy platforms where you can sign-up as a tester.

• TryMyUI: TryMyUI is a great platform for easily testing out websites for money. After you've signed up to the platform and completed your details, the platform will email you every time a testing opportunity arises. You can expect to get a few chances every week. It pays you $10 for a 20-minute testing session and requires you to record yourself via a video and audio, along with a short wrap-up survey of the website. All the payments are sent out every Friday via PayPal.
• UserTesting: UserTesting is one of the most popular websites that pay users to test out applications and other websites. The platform requires you to take a practice test and get familiar with the process. Once the practice test is approved, you will receive paid tests directly on your dashboard. You might have to take a short screener test to ensure that you fit the ideal customer base. Every test pays you $10, approved within seven days via PayPal.
• WhatUsersDo: WhatUsersDo has a simple sign-up process where you need to download a screen recorder for your mobile or laptop and take a practice test. Once your test is approved, you will be eligible to take paid tests. You'll receive 3 to 5 tests every month. Each test you take will pay you $5, which will be paid via PayPal every month.
• Enroll: Enroll is slightly different from other websites and application testing platforms. It does not require a webcam or a microphone to record your voice. Instead, it contains simple tasks like comparing two websites or clicking somewhere on a webpage to test functionality. These tests are simple but pay you a little less than other platforms. Their pay range is between $0.10 and $1.50.

9. Run Paid or Free Webinars

Whether free or paid, hosting a webinar is a great way to market your service, product, or online course. Almost 95% of marketers view webinars as an essential part of their digital marketing strategy. Out of these, 61% of marketers use webinars as a content marketing tactic for their company.

A webinar is a 30 or 45-minute video presentation conducted live. You try to put your best foot forward and discuss things you know or are passionate about.

The industry is crowded with people trying to sell their products with a low-quality webinar. To stand out from the crowd, you need to deliver your experiences and knowledge in a way that won’t put your listeners to sleep.

Different people can have different approaches towards conducting webinars. While 60% of people aim at generating leads through their free webinar sessions, more than 75% of people conduct it to increase their sales and improve engagement with their community.

To make money out of your knowledge, you must outline your webinar strategically. You should talk about a problem from your audience’s perspective and then discuss a solution for them.

To run a successful webinar, you should first understand why you want to run a webinar in the first place. This will help you set your goals for the future. Here are a few tips that’ll help you build a successful strategy for either a paid or a free webinar.

Know Your Audience

Before preparing for your webinar, you need to do some market research and figure out your target audience. Getting the right audience on board will significantly increase your chances of success.

Make sure that you have a good idea about what questions your audience is searching for. When your webinar answers those exact questions, you will be able to keep your audience hooked. The true essence of delivering a successful webinar lies in reaching the right person at the right time.

Once you have an idea about your target audience, you can now look for questions they are searching for or the content they are looking for. You can access community forums like Quora or People Also Ask section on Google and search relevant queries.

Personalize your Content

As a creator, you need to understand the value of personalization. Nobody likes a salesman who talks to them for their benefit. To create a successful webinar, you need to keep your audience first and create content that solves their issues.

While conducting a webinar, you need to connect with your attendees personally. The whole point of your webinar should be to help your audience before you can propose to them to buy your service, product, or online course.

Formulate your content so that your attendees feel that you are talking directly to them. It is also essential to know your story and who you are. A mutual connection will ensure that they understand where you are coming from and how you can help them.

Segment Your Webinar to Strategically Place Question Times

Some trainers prefer to complete the entire webinar before talking to their attendees and engaging with them. However, this might bore your audience, and there is a good chance that you will lose their interest.

Instead, you should pause clearly and specifically at specific points during your webinar to engage with your audience and clear their doubts. This approach enables you to carve out slices of content, helps to sustain your audience’s attention, and keeps your attendees engaged.

Furthermore, you should not entirely depend upon your audience to ask you questions. It would help if you had a few ‘seed’ questions prepared beforehand that you can address during your webinar.

Craft an Offer Your Attendees Can’t Resist

The trickiest and most crucial segment of your webinar is its ending. The end is one of the main parts that will stay in your attendees' heads, and you need to make the most out of it.

Make sure that you summarize your entire webinar at the end so your audience remembers the key takeaways. Once you have answered all their queries and successfully achieved the objectives of your lesson, it is now time to craft an offer for your attendees.

While creating an offer, you need to keep your learners in mind. Put yourself in their shoes and ask questions from their perspective. Your offer should be the answer to all of these questions. By personalizing the offer, you make your audience feel valued and exclusive.

You can also offer an exclusive discount offer for your attendees, which is available for a few minutes after the webinar has ended. You need first to establish the value of your service before revealing its price.

Choose the Best Software to Host Your Webinar

Webinars have become a key marketing strategy for industrial businesses and consumer brands. Before conducting a webinar, you need a platform to host, broadcast, and manage your webinar. Here are a few options you can consider.

• Livestorm: Livestorm not only allows you to host your webinar but also offers a wide range of marketing tools. You can conduct virtual meetings and demos for your team and design a great user experience for your attendees. You can also automate your webinars to play at certain times during the day. You also get access to a detailed insight into the performance of your webinar strategy.
• EverWebinar: EverWebinar is one of the best platforms for hosting and automating webinars for your customers. This software aims to recreate the live experience for its users. You can also offer on-spot sign-ups for new customers. EverWebinar also provides training to your employees, so you efficiently understand all the features and host webinars.
• WebinarJam: WebinarJam is more focused on conducting live sessions with your audience. They do not have scheduling or an automation feature but offer live streaming services for Youtube or Facebook. A password protects your webinar rooms, so only the attendees that have the information can join your lesson. With the help of detailed analytics, you can analyze your webinar's engagement and performance.

10. Teach English From Home

Online education has always been a good way to make money from home quickly. The e-learning industry has seen a 900% growth globally since its inception and is forecasted to grow by another 200% in the next five years. By 2025 the e-learning industry will be worth around $325 billion.

Size of the global e-learning market in 2019 and 2026, by segment (in million U.S. dollars)

More than 60% of internet users prefer learning skills online rather than traveling and sitting in a class. If you want to significantly boost your side income by leveraging your knowledge and skills, teaching English is one of the best options.

More than 1.35 billion people speak English, making it one of the most popular languages worldwide. You can always find companies looking for teachers to join their programs. The best part about being an ESL teacher is working for a company while sitting in an entirely different country.

e-Learning companies offer a lot of flexibility to their teachers. You can create your schedule and work as many hours as you like. This will enable you to make as much money as you want by teaching English from home. On average, most companies pay between $12 and $25 per hour, based on your experience.

Best Online Teaching Companies to Work For

Leading ESL companies would offer you higher pay and more flexible working hours than smaller companies that have fewer teachers and are on a budget. Before you decide which company you choose, you should make sure that you verify their background and how they treat their educators.

Here are a few leading online teaching companies that you can work for.

• VIPKID: If you live in the United States or Canada and want to teach English as a side business, VIPKID can be a great place to start. The platform offers flexible working hours and allows you to create your schedule. Depending on your interview, demo class, and experience, you can make anywhere between $14 and $22 per hour. You also get access to incentives and bonus opportunities.
• Skooli: Skooli is a leading online tutoring platform with students from all over the world. Based on your knowledge and proficiency, you can teach English to students at the middle school, high school, or university level. It is a good platform for retired or working teachers looking to make an extra income from the comfort of their homes.
• DaDa: If you are fluent in English and have a bachelor’s degree, you can easily enroll in DaDa’s teaching program. It is one of the highest-paying teaching companies in the industry, paying around $25 to its educators every hour. The platform is open to teachers from all around the world. However, you do need to pass their interview and should be available for a minimum of 2 hours for two days every week.
• iTutorGroup: iTutorGroup hires fluent English-speaking applicants with a bachelor’s degree and a TESOL certification. The platform pays you pretty well for teaching English to both Taiwanese children and adults. Depending upon your experience, you can make up to $24 every hour. While they offer flexible schedules to their tutors, you need to teach at least 10 hours every week. Out of these 10 hours, at least 4 hours should be during the weekend.

11. Write and Publish eBooks

Today the book trade has changed quite a bit. A decade ago, getting a hard copy published was all that mattered to become a successful writer and earn money. But in this digital era, writers' dreams have shifted from glossy paper cover to set up their eBooks for launch online and watch sales rolling in through their screens.

More than 191 million eBooks were sold in the United States in the past year and saw a growth of 22%. People are now switching to eBook reading devices and tablet computers, and 1/5th of the total American population has read an eBook in the past year.

With climate change and its effects growing each year, the rise of eBooks is inevitable. In January 2021, US readers spent more than $80 million on eBooks. With this genre on the rise, writing and publishing an eBook can be a challenge.

With a proper structure & objectives, you can write and market an eBook to generate quick money online. It is an excellent way of generating passive income.

Identify Your Expertise and Choose a Topic

Before you decide on which topics to cover, it is necessary to identify your expertise and analyze the market accordingly. You should first make a list of topics you already know about and then research the market, looking for your competitors.

Writing a recipe book might not be the best choice because you love cooking. The market is too competitive for a beginner. Instead, you can create an ebook about the story of the emergence of each recipe. Such eBooks would connect with your audience on a personal level.

It is also necessary to analyze whether you have a good market for your book or not. Writing on a topic with just 100 readers will be a waste of your time. You can use keyword research applications like Ubersuggest and SEMrush to look for keywords people are searching for.

You can also create a survey form and send it to your email list and analyze what people prefer reading about. Your loyal readers would give you their honest feedback. They can also help you come up with new, innovative ideas.

Develop an Outline for Your eBook

Planning out an outline for your eBook is one of the best ways to set it for success. After deciding on the topic you want to pursue, you should clearly define your goals and objectives. Depending upon these, you should create a rough outline for your eBook.

Creating an outline makes it easier for you to create content and helps you organize and construct your ideas sequentially. A book outline can also help you better structure your emotions, so you do not get carried away.

Your outline should contain the title of each chapter. You do not need to focus too much on wordings at this point. You should just lay out your ideas and organize them.

Try dividing your book into multiple short chapters if you are working on a broader topic. It helps grab your audience's attention and keeps them engaged with your content.

Once you have the titles ready, you now need to divide these titles into subheadings, along with a list of points each section should cover.

You can either create a linear outline or use a mind map to create a visual one.

Package Your eBook With the Perfect Cover

First impressions always matter, especially when you are talking about eBooks. To grab your audience's attention instantly, you need an eye-grabbing cover that defines your eBook. It is the first and the best marketing asset.

Most beginners put their heart and soul into their eBook and then hastily choose a generic image as their book cover. It is the very first mistake that can cost your book its success.

If you want to give a raw aesthetic to your book, then you can scribble down a cover that defines the key takeaways from your book. Raw covers have become quite common nowadays. People also connect to these covers more as compared to a copyright-free image.

You can also hire a professional designer to design your book cover. You need to explain the gist of your book and the central idea behind it, and then you will get on to work. A design created by a professional is much more enhanced and covers all the little details that connect the cover with your book.

No matter which option you choose, make sure that the book cover is personalized to your target audience and somehow defines what the eBook is all about.

Choose Your Publishing Platform

Self-published books now account for 30% to 40% of all eBook sales. Your publishing platform will impact your marketing strategy. Hence, it is essential to choose a platform that is easy to use and offers advanced features for marketing.

Here are a few publishing platforms you can choose from.

• Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing: Amazon Kindle is one of the most popular publishing platforms and hosts thousands of ebooks. The platform offers you advertising tools and higher royalties at every sale. However, your ebook will be exclusive to Amazon and not be on other platforms.
• Kitaboo: Kitaboo is a cloud-based ebook hosting platform that allows you to publish and market multimedia-rich, mobile-friendly ebooks. This white-labeled app offers advanced user analytics enabling you to evaluate the performance of your book after launch.
• Smashwords: Smashwords is another popular ebook publishing platform. It allows you to get your ebook out to some of the biggest online stores, including Barnes and Noble and Apple Books. Additionally, the store offers you 80% royalties on every sale, which is 20% higher than other retailers.

12. Start a Social Media Marketing Agency

You use social media daily for entertainment, sharing your life events, socialization, and getting updated on all the latest happenings. More than 53% of the world’s population is active on social media. So, starting a social media marketing agency can be a great way to earn money online.

As of 2021, more than 4.55 billion people are active on social media, which will see a rise every year. Most businesses target popular platforms like Instagram, Youtube, and Snapchat to reach out to their target audience.

Starting a social media marketing agency today is easier than a decade ago. You not only have access to talented individuals but clients as well. Small and large enterprises are always actively seeking help to boost their digital presence.

To start making money with a social media marketing agency, you need to outline a strong business strategy.

Selecting a Niche to Specialize

Earlier social media agencies were open for the entire market. But, with the growing competition, it is recommended to choose a field to specialize in and grow your audience accordingly. When you select a niche, you target a smaller crowd, making it easier for you to stand out.

Furthermore, when you specialize in a niche, you can understand the target audience and plan your marketing campaigns. This makes your marketing strategies much more effective and engaging.

Before selecting a niche for your social media marketing agency, you need to analyze the industry. You should look for an interesting industry to work in and offer sufficient opportunities. To find a profitable niche, you need to find a sweet spot between these two factors.

The closer you are to a specific industry, the better you can understand the target audience and create powerful strategies. Selecting a niche is the best way of portraying your brand as a thought leader in the industry.

Selecting The Services You’ll Offer

Once you have finalized your niche, it is now time to outline all services you will offer with your social media marketing agency. There are many ways to market a brand, and selecting ones that you understand are necessary for the success of your agency.

Here are a few services that marketing agencies typically offer.

• Content Writing: Writing blog posts and creating content for social media is an essential service that most agencies offer. Creative copywriting is necessary to lure new customers and engage with the existing ones.
• Paid Advertisements: Social media marketing includes creating ad campaigns for companies on multiple platforms, including Youtube, Facebook, and Instagram. You need experts in your team who understand the industry and select the perfect target audience.
• Graphic Designing: Create attractive designs for social media posts, infographics for websites or a hero image for applications are some graphic designing services offered by marketing teams.
• Social Media Management: Social Media Management is a broad term that includes almost all services like managing social platforms, creating content, running advertisements, creating designs, and managing the community by keeping them engaged. Large agencies hire multiple expert professionals as a part of their team to provide varied services.

Prepare a Marketing Strategy

Before launching your agency, you need to create a bulletproof plan to market yourself. This marketing strategy will be the building block of your company and will help you scale your business in the future.

While creating a marketing strategy, you need to focus on a few essential areas.

• Competitor Analysis: Studying your competitors is always the best way to start your research. It would help if you looked into what other agencies are offering to their clients and the price they charge. This will help you develop a competitive pricing plan for your marketing agency.
• Writing Down a Pitch: To establish yourself in the market, you will need to approach different clients and discuss their marketing needs. You should have a basic pitch written down, which you can personalize depending upon your client's company.
• Define Your Brand: As a marketing agency, it is important to establish your brand's identity. You need to define your mission and your clients' services. You also need to grow your own social media channel and have a dedicated audience. As a social media agency, your clients will expect you to shine on your social media. It acts as a work sample for your new clients.

13. Buy and Sell Domain Names

Acquiring the right domains and selling them for a profit can make you thousands of dollars every month. Buying a domain name as cheaply as possible and then selling it to an interested party for more than you originally paid is known as domain flipping.

In July 2020, more than 5.1 million domains were registered worldwide. Out of these, 1.57 million domain names were registered in the US alone. And this industry will continue to grow with the growth of digitization all over the world.

Domain names are extremely valuable pieces of digital assets, and you can sell an in-demand domain name for thousands of dollars. The most expensive domain name ever sold was cars.com, which sold for $872 million. The previous owner bought it for just a few bucks during the rise of the internet.

Domain flipping is a profitable side business when you know how to find a cheap yet relevant domain that can make you money in the future. If you are at the right time at the right place and choose a domain name with future potential, then you can make a handsome profit out of it.

How To Find the Perfect Domain to Flip

While it is true that finding a great domain name does require a bit of luck, it also needs hours of research and an occasional brainstorming session with yourself. Once you are familiar with the process, you can use a few hacks to grab a good domain name.

Keep an Eye on Expired Domains

An expired domain name is where the company or the person who registered the domain stopped paying for it. Once the domain expires, they are then moved for auction, and you can purchase them by bidding a price.

When you keep an eye on expired domains, there is a good chance that you can find high-value domain names that people forgot to renew. Another reason for buying expired domain names is their domain authority.

Just because a domain has expired does not mean that the links pointing to that domain disappears. These links can significantly increase the SEO value of your domain.

There are multiple websites where you can check the domain authority of an expired name before purchasing it. Tools like Moz and Ahrefs offer scores associated with the domain to analyze its SEO value. Domain authority of 20 or higher can be a good candidate to buy and sell for a good profit.

Look for Short Domains

Shorter domain names are worth more than longer names. This is because one or two-word domain names are easier to type and remember. You should always keep an eye for short domain names and grab them whenever you have a chance.

Shorter domain names are a little more expensive than longer ones. So make sure that you have a good market for your domain before buying it. Almost all single-word domains with a .com extension have already been booked. But with the new extensions gaining popularity, you have a good opportunity to grab a one-letter domain name.

Find Untapped Domains

When you have a little idea about what future trends can get popular, then you can buy an untapped domain name before the hype starts. For instance, crypto coins were in the market for almost two decades and got popular very recently.

People who bought the domain while the crypto hype was starting, might have made a huge profit selling them in the current market. Your purchased domain might not have a good current value, but if you save them for a few years, you can make a good profit out of them.

How to Sell Your Domain Name for Good Profit

Once you have purchased either a new or an expired domain name and registered it with a website, you now need to wait for the correct time to sell it. As a domain flipper, you want your domain to be seen by potential clients.

To sell your domain, you can either choose to park it with a ‘for sale’ landing page or list it on an auction website. If you think your domain does not have a good current value, then you can part with it for a few months and keep a check on the latest trends.

However, if you can find a gem, you should instantly list it on a domain marketplace. Your potential buyers keep an eye on these marketplaces and buy rare domain names whenever they appear in the market.

Here are a few popular domain marketplaces to list your domain and book a profit.

• Flippa: Flippa is one of the most popular domain buying and selling markets. You can list your domain for free. Buyers on Flippa are always on the lookout for premium domains. If you want to sell your domain immediately or want the website to auction it, you have to pay a small fee to the platform. Besides domains, you can also list websites and applications on the platform.
• GoDaddy Auction: GoDaddy is one of the most popular domain registrars globally, with over 72 million registered domains on its platform. The company also allows you to list your domain for auction for an affordable price of $4.99 per year.
• Sedo: Sedo is another popular marketplace for domain flipping. Thousands of domains are listed and sold every month on this platform. You can also list your websites for sale on this platform. If you do not want to auction the domain right now, you can use Sedo to park your domain and earn a few bucks with their Sedo Parking Program.
• Afternic: Afternic offers a premium marketplace for selling your domain names at a substantial profit. The platform has over 12 million registered domains, and millions are sold every month.

14. Design and Sell T-Shirts and Greeting Cards

Selling T-shirts or greeting cards is a popular business choice to generate a good side income. The business does not require significant investment and can be started from the comfort of your house. Creating and selling designs allow artists to spread their message to their audience.

T-Shirts are not just a piece of casual clothing anymore. They often reflect our personalities, interests, and identities. The business is an evergreen one due to the sheer amount of audience.

People like promoting new artists and their ideas. The audience is ever-changing, and new perspectives are always welcomed in this industry. With the eCommerce market on the boom, you can sell your t-shirts or greeting cards without setting up a physical store. This not only saves your money but also allows you to make a good profit every time you make a sale.

Revenue from eCommerce in the United States amounted to almost $431.6 billion in 2020. It is expected to grow by 30% in the next few years and reach $563.4 billion by 2025.

Retail e-commerce revenue in the United States from 2017 to 2025 (in million U.S. dollars)

To make a hit T-shirt design, you need to add a background story about the inspiration. Copying designs and printing them on a plain t-shirt or a greeting card will not make your business a brand. It would help if you always focused on branding your items and selling them for higher gains. Focussing on quality rather than quantity would push you ahead of your competitors.

How to Create a Design

T-shirts are one of the most popular apparel items that are gender-neutral. Since this is a competitive domain, you need to ensure that your designs are unique and tell your story. It helps your consumers connect to your design and purchase from your store.

Find the Inspiration For Your Designs

For connecting your designs to a story or your experience, you must first jot down ideas, themes, and beliefs. You need to sideline everything mainstream and look for topics that speak more about you. Another way to make your designs stand out is to link them to cultural backgrounds.

While looking for inspiration, you can also try out different design elements like illustrations, photographs, and typography. You can also take up someone's work you like and add a twist with your personalized ideas.

While planning out the design, it is also necessary to select a color palette. The color of your design and the base color of the t-shirt or the greeting card will affect how your audience views the final product. Learning the basics of color theory can come in handy when making these decisions.

Creating the Final Design

Once you are clear with your ideas and have planned out the basic details of your designs, you are now ready to create one. You can either hire a graphic designer to create a design on your behalf or fire up your laptop and start doodling independently.

As raw designs are becoming more popular with the new generation, creating designs on your own will allow your customers to have a deeper connection with you. You can use open-source vector graphic editors to create a printable design for your t-shirt.

• Canva: Canva is a popular tool used to create social media posts and infographics for their websites. You can also use this platform to create designs for your items. The platform has a simple drag and drop editor and gives you access to more than 8,000 free templates.
• GIMP: GIMP is an open-source editor which you can download on your laptop and use for free. The platform is very similar to Adobe Photoshop and lets you create free-form drawings or add different elements together. You can also retouch your designs with this platform.
• Inkscape: Inkscape is a great tool for creating or editing vector images. You can easily work with lines, illustrations or give a new outlook to a painting with the help of this platform. However, it can be overwhelming for beginners and has a slight learning curve.

How to Start Selling Your T-Shirts and Greeting Cards

Starting your store can sound like a fascinating idea. But, it requires a lot of market research before you can jump into the industry. With hundreds of companies launching every month, you need to ensure that your brand stands out from the crowd. Your designs should be unique, and so should be your marketing strategy.

Find an Audience that Relates to Your Beliefs

To make your designs popular and your business a success, it is important to find the right target audience. Your customers should believe and relate to your ideas. Only then would they be able to understand the value behind your brand.

If you are thinking of going mainstream and selling your t-shirts or cards with a random quote, there is a less than 50% chance that your brand will reach out to the customers. It would help if you created designs that are unique and inspired by your experience.

Once you know your niche, it is easy to find the target audience. You can use social media websites such as Instagram or Facebook and get an idea about the size of the market. You can also take inspiration from social media and redesign them with a twist.

You will also need to set up an online store to sell your products directly to your audience.

Market Your Products the Right Way to Get Your First Sale

Getting the design ready and setting up your online store is just the first step towards building your store. The next step is to make your first sale. Here are a few things you can do to find your first customer faster.

• Social Media Marketing: For an eCommerce store running Instagram and Facebook ads is the best way to create brand awareness. You will find most of your target audience on these platforms. You can direct the users to your website and get your first sale by running personalized targeted and retargeted advertisements.
• Creating a Social Media Presence: As a new store owner, creating a social media presence is necessary to connect with your audience. By engaging with your audience, participating in conversations, and reacting to hot trends, you can make your brand voice stand out.
• Social Media Influencers: Another popular form of social media marketing is collaborating with influencers. You need to find social media influencers in your field who cater to your target audience and already have a loyal following. Collaborating with them will help boost your brand's reach and get you your first sale.

15. Create and Sell Printables

Printables are a great way to generate passive income. In simple words, printables are pieces of artwork, drawings, or graphic designs that your customers can download online and print themselves.

While selling printables, you do not need to maintain an inventory, and there is little to no overhead. All you need to do is create a design that matches your aesthetic and list it online, either on your website or a third-party application.

When customers like your design, they can pay for it and download the high-quality design. They can then print this design in the size they want.

Making a Printable That Will Sell

For making a successful printable, you need to understand the audience you will target for your design. For instance, if you are a graphic designer and create modern aesthetic art, you can sell your most liked post as a printable design.

If your targeted audience is educators and marketers, you need to think of a more innovative way to serve them. Selling designs will do them no good. Instead, you can create a project binder and sell that as a printable. That will help your audience and make much more sense for them.

Targeting a specific bunch of people for a particular printable design is a sensible option from a business perspective. It is easier to make a small bunch of people with similar preferences happy and recommend you to their friends. If you target a broad, vague audience, you’ll be lost somewhere in the crowd.

There are tons of applications in the market that you can use for creating digital products. Depending on your project, you can use Canva, Illustrator, or Google Sheets.

When designing a printable, you need to make sure that your design is original. Copying someone else’s idea and selling it to your readers is unethical and would violate their trust. You should also triple-check for any spelling errors or mistakes.

The color palette plays a crucial role in grabbing your customer’s attention. Make sure that your design has attractive and complementing colors.

Launching Your Printable

Whether you plan to list your printable, creating a sales page and preparing it for launch is a good business strategy. A sales page is similar to an extended conversation with your potential customers. Here you can answer their questions about the product and offer a sneak preview of your service.

Once your sales page is ready, you should notify your followers about the product. You can email them or post about it on your blogs or social media accounts if you already have an established audience.

As a beginner, you can also run advertisements on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook. This advertisement will increase the reach of your product and improve the chances of getting your first sale. It is also crucial to attach your sales page while advertising.

Once you are ready for the launch, all you need is a platform to list. Here are a few ways you can publish your printable for your customers.

• Using Your Website: If you already have a dedicated set of readers to your website or blog post, you can launch your printable on your website. This way, you will not have to pay any royalties to third-party applications. You can use WooCommerce or a Shopify store to streamline your sales.
• Etsy: Etsy is quite a popular marketplace for selling art-related printables. If you are a graphic designer, you can sell your high-quality art on this platform. When you sell on Etsy, you get the advantage of being seen by millions of people who visit this website every month.
• Sellfy: Sellfy is another popular marketplace to sell your printables and other digital artwork. The platform allows you to create an online store for your brand and manage all your products easily. It offers you all the necessary tools for the success of your printable, including email marketing options, payment flexibility, and discount codes.
• Gumroad: Gumroad is a popular self-publishing digital marketplace platform where you can sell your printable quickly. This interactive and easy-to-use platform allows customers worldwide to buy items in their preferred currency mode. Once you have listed your printable on the platform, your customer can pay for the product and download it from the given link.

16. Join a Remote Startup for an Online Job

With the boom in digitization, companies hire professionals to work for them remotely. When you search for a better work-life balance and evaluate new career opportunities, applying for an online job in a remote startup will help you earn a great side income.

More than 55% of companies worldwide offer some remote working opportunities. In the past two years, the demand for remote working employees increased by more than 44% in the United States.

Around 4.3 million people in the USA work from home for at least four days a week. Since 2005, the percentage of people working from home has increased by more than 140%.

Why Should You Join a Remote Startup?

Joining a remote startup helps you earn money from home quickly by pursuing an online job. Here are a few reasons that might convince you to work remotely.

• Cost Savings: Remote Working helps you to cut down a lot of extra expenses like travel costs, parking, lunch, colleague presents, and the money you spend for buying clothes for work. When you work remotely, you can sit in the comfort of your house, eating homemade food and working in your joggers.
• Flexibility of Location: The best part of a remote job is the flexibility to work from anywhere. You can go for a month-long vacation and work from the beaches of Maldives. Or shift back to your native city, close to your family. You will no longer be bound to a town that does not meet your preferences.
• Maintain Work-Life Balance: Remote startups offer their employees the freedom to create their schedules. As long as you give your company the promised number of hours, they won’t mind whether you work at 2 in the afternoon or at night. As a remote worker, you get more family time, and you can take a break whenever you need one.

Best Platforms To Find Remote Jobs

With the changing job trends, more and more companies are emerging to help you find an online job with a remote startup easily. However, not all of them are worth your time and would not get you the job you deserve.

Additionally, managing all the profiles gets a little challenging when you sign up on many platforms at once. You might miss out on some good opportunities just because you ignored the email.

To make your task more accessible, we have a list of the best platforms to help you find remote jobs.

• FlexJobs: FlexJobs is one of the best sites to find an online job and make money from home quickly. The platform updates its listings every hour and has over 36,000 active job postings from 4,000 companies. This easy-to-use platform has a well-sectioned dashboard where you can find both full-time and freelance job opportunities. Unlike other freelancing platforms, FlexJobs does not charge you 20% every time you complete a job. Instead, you have to pay a small fee to use the platform and grab as many opportunities as you like.
• We Work Remotely: We Work Remotely connects you to companies and startups from all over the world. All the users posting jobs on the platform are verified, and fishy companies are blocked instantly. You can find a wide variety of jobs listed on the platform, including customer support, design, programming, business and executive management, and marketing.
• Virtual Vocations: Virtual Vocations has the most extensive database for remote working jobs, with over 10,000 active jobs listed on their platform. All users registered on the platform, including employers and employees, must verify their identity through a rigid screening process. The most popular job categories on this platform are social media management, copywriting, and designing.
• Outsourcely: Outsourcely caters to remote workers looking for jobs on a full-time basis. The platform offers a stable, fluid workforce for employers and startups, ensuring the success of both the company and the employees. Outsourcely also offers direct video and chat messaging, along with a real-time customer support service. Some of the popular job listings on the platform include sales and marketing, copywriting, and designing.
• Guru: Guru is much more than a job listing marketplace. The platform offers a rich selection of remote working positions from different parts of the world. They have an interactive and visual platform that allows you to view whether an employer has verified their payment status or not. The jobs listed on the platform can be filtered by category, location, and budget.

17. Sell Your Artworks or Handicrafts

A decade ago, it was very challenging to make enough money as an artist. People usually pursued their passion at home and worked hard to earn a living in a job that didn’t match their preferences.

In today’s vibrant digital age and the popularity of social media platforms, making money as an artist has become more effortless. Now it’s possible to do something you love and make money simultaneously.

However, with the growth in popularity, the platform and the industry have also become competitive. While being talented is necessary to succeed as an artist, it’s just not enough. You need to work hard, be patient, and develop the right strategy to get discovered by your prospective clients.

It’s easy to get lost in the crowd, which is why there are very few artists who have become successful.

When you want to make money as an artist, you need to think like a business owner. You will need to learn the basics of running a business as an artist and devise a solid plan to scale it up.

Here is how you should set up your business before making money.

Find Your Speciality

It’s prevalent for artists to be passionate about more than one art form. You might love to do digital illustration and create water-color-based landscapes. However, when setting up your business, you need to select one category and polish your skills to perfection.

While selecting a category, you should also make sure that you have a pretty good market to sell. For instance, digital illustrations have a more extensive, less competitive market than water-color landscapes. Additionally, it is easier selling a digital caricature than shipping a physical painting.

You need to try a few different art forms and market them to your audience before you can analyze what works better for your prospective customers.

Choose Your Niche

Similarly, choosing a niche is just as necessary as selecting an art form. As a business owner and an artist, you need to analyze what the market wants and select a niche accordingly.

Doing market research and competitor analysis is your best way forward. By doing this, you can understand what your competitors are creating, how successful they are, and whether the audience responds positively to their business strategy.

You can either follow the same path or create artwork that is in demand. This may include digital caricatures and illustrations or sketched artwork. You can also choose to go the other way and do something innovative and out of the crowd.

While the first option is a little easier, there is a good chance that you won’t be noticed or recognized. By going in a different direction, you will be able to curate the art form you like in your own unique way.

However, you will need to work hard, in the beginning, to attract clients and create content on social media consistently.

Determine Your Pricing

Determining the right price for your artwork might sound a little challenging at first. You need to analyze the market and your audience, figure out how much they will be willing to pay, and then decide a price that will leave you in profit.

However, the amount of information available on the internet can act as a major benefit for you. You can analyze your competitors and their target market to have a rough idea about the pricing structure.

Nevertheless, you will have to change your prices several times before you and your audience are satisfied. Additionally, as your business grows, so will your pricing. An interesting fact about the art community is that people buy the artist and not just their artwork.

So, it would help if you focused on building your business and your name in the industry, and you could earn thousands of dollars every month.

Best Ways to Sell Your Artwork or Handcrafts

Selling your product or service is an art that you get better at with consistent practice. You need to devise a proper marketing strategy and have to find the correct set of audiences who are willing to buy your creation. There are a few different ways to earn money by selling your artwork.

Selling Your Original Pieces Through Instagram

Instagram is the most popular social media platform for art lovers and artists. By building a community of people who appreciate your artwork, you will be able to grow as an artist and eventually make money. You can also connect to buyers across the globe who are willing to pay your price and buy your artwork.

For selling your art pieces on Instagram, you need to have an engaged community of audience. The more popular your Instagram account gets, the higher is the demand for your artwork.

When selling your artwork through Instagram, make sure that you post high-quality images, choose a clean background with sufficient lighting, write creative captions, and use relevant hashtags to rank your post on the explore page.

Selling Vector Designs

If you have a knack for graphic designing, you have limitless opportunities to make money. You can design logos for companies, create interactive and appealing templates, and form illustrations.

Vector designs are an effortless and effective way to make your digital artwork available for sale. You can easily generate a steady passive income stream by offering different, unique designs and uploading new products regularly.

Selling Printables

Selling your artwork in the form of a printable is another interesting way to make money from your art. As an artist, you can create a digital design and list it on either your own website or one of the e-commerce marketplaces. Your customers can log in to the marketplace, pay for your design and download it through the link.

This effortless way does not require you to manage any inventory or handle shipping issues. All you have to do is to list your art on a website.

While third-party applications do charge a small commission rate every time you make a sale, they do manage the entire process by themselves. Additionally, they offer you their native traffic, and there is a 30% more chance that you’ll make a better profit by selling designs on an external platform.

18. Make Money From Home by Selling Stock Photos

As a photographer, selling your captured photos as a stock image is a good idea to make money from home. The idea of someone else marketing and selling your photos for you is quite intriguing.

Photographers capture thousands of photos each month in search of one perfect shot. Selling all your unused photos that have been lying in your hard drive for years in exchange for cash is a good deal.

In simpler terms, a stock photo is a general term used for images that buyers use for adding visual content to their blogs, web pages, news stories, and promotional campaigns.

Thousands of Americans visit multiple stock image websites every day, searching for copyright-free images. As a professional photographer, you can sell stock images anywhere between $0.30 and $99.50 per sale. Different agencies will pay you a different commission rate, depending upon your experience.

Clicking images for stock photography in your spare time is quite alluring. You can easily earn money by uploading high-quality pictures on the website, you do not need a strong portfolio, and you have full creative control over what you do.

What To Shoot For Stock Photos

When you scroll through multiple stock image websites, you will notice that there is not a single type of image that sells. There are many images, and each has its own dedicated audience.

While you may have many options to shoot, you must remember that the trend's demand for stock images changes. For instance, 2019 saw a sudden spike in technology and climate crisis, and everyone around and the people on the internet started talking about it. So, the most sold stock photos of 2019 were related to personal technology, vibrant colors, and social causes.

With the amount of information available on the internet, it is easier to predict future trends. There are big organizations that do the work for you and list out the trends beforehand. All you have to do is work on those or similar categories to make sure your work is always trending.

If you are just starting, then you might be confused about what your niche should be. You'll have your camera roll full of sunset and beach images and might be looking to sell them as stock images. Unfortunately, these are pretty common and less in-demand images on stock platforms.

Instead, you should choose a broader niche to cover different aspects of daily life. Here are a few popular stock categories you can choose from as a beginner.

• Lifestyle: Lifestyle is one of the most popular and evergreen categories for stock image platforms. Whether it is a family having dinner, kids playing by the fireplace, or a person signing a contract, lifestyle images will always make you money. The challenging part is, you might need to hire models and actors to shoot your pictures.
• Business and Industry: Images related to businesses and industries also sell well on stock image platforms. These can include an image of an office, people sitting in meetings, a conference room, people discussing ideas, or employees using their computers. Such images are always in demand and can generate a good passive income.
• Travel Images: Travel images are one of the most popular stock photos, and most of them start selling out as soon as you post them. So, if you are a traveler who likes clicking high-quality images, then you can fit right into this niche. You can earn hundreds of dollars a month by posting travel stock images consistently on your preferred platform.

Choosing The Best Stock Photography Website

Dozens of websites are available in the market today that offer you the opportunity to upload stock photos on their platform. Once you have listed your photograph, it becomes exclusive to that website. So, it is crucial to choose a platform with enough visitors and who pay their photographers a good amount.

Here are a few stock photography websites that you can choose from.

• Shutterstock: Shutterstock is one of the most popular websites for stock images. They have clients from multiple genres, including startups and large enterprises. Most companies use Shutterstock regularly to add pictures to their websites. The platform serves over 150 countries and has an extensive database for photos and videos. Shutterstock pays you around $0.25 per photo.
• iStock: iStock is another popular stock photography website that you can use to upload your photographs. Now known as Getty images, the platform has a lot of buyers, and you will get a sale once you have listed your photo. The website pays you anywhere between $0.20 and $0.50 depending upon the category your image falls in.
• Alamy: Alamy is a comparatively new website and is not as popular as Shutterstock or iStock. While they do not have millions of visitors on their website every month, they offer a reasonable price to their photographers. With a 50% royalty for each sale, you can make $50 per image. The platform is easier to use and has a modern interface.
• Adobe Stock: Adobe Stock was previously known as Fotolia. It works similar to Shutterstock but with higher pay to its photographers. You can easily submit your photos to this platform directly from Lightroom. The platform does not have a stringent submission process. It is really easy to submit your photographs, and easier for customers to buy them.

How to Check a Work From Home Business or Online Job is Legit or a SCAM?

As you search for ways to make money from the comfort of your home, you must verify all your options before deciding to pursue them. With cyber-attacks at their peak, there is a good chance that your online job might turn out to be a scam.

By being careful about where you apply, you can protect your identity, financials, and well-being.

Work from home business scams is carried out by deceitful individuals, especially hackers who create fake job listings or pose as a buyer on multiple platforms. They use this means to steal your personal and financial information and later sell it on the dark web.

How to Tell if an Online Job is a Scam?

No matter how hard you try to avoid it, there might be a few circumstances where you cannot trust your buyer. Always remember that an online job is built on trust between two parties. If your buyer does not seem trustworthy, you should drop the job and move forward.

Here are a few ways to tell if an online job is legit or a scam.

1. There Is Very Little Information About the Company

You should never forget that all legit online companies try to put out as much information as possible about their company and business model. It builds trust among their employees and consumers and extends brand awareness. All major companies have a website and social media presence.

So, if the approached company has too little information about them and you cannot find them anywhere online, they are probably conducting a scam. If you find a website with no information about their business model, then the company can be a sham too.

2. The Job is Too Good to be True

You should know your value in terms of your skills and your experience. This will help you determine if an offer is too good to be true. If a company is offering you a much higher salary than you should deserve, then the company is probably a scam.

You should always trust your intuition when looking for a job posting on a website. If your gut says that the offer is too good to be true, then maybe it probably is, and the company is perhaps fooling into giving them your details.

3. Search For Warnings Online

When a company approaches you with a decent offer, you should search about them on the web and look a little deeper into google reviews or Trustpilot reviews. You might find a few people who have already experienced a scam working with the company.

Do not accept any offer without doing proper background research for a company.

4. The Employer Communicates Poorly

Most of the scammy websites are made by hackers from third-world countries. So, if your employer does not sound professional or is making basic grammatical errors, you should look into the company’s background.

Legit employers are high-ranking officials, and they know how to conduct a business and speak with their employees. You can also check their email addresses and compare them with others to ensure they are legit or fraudulent.

5. The Employer is Eager to Hire Instantly

Legit companies screen their candidates well before they hire them. They make them familiar with the company’s environment and conduct a round of interviews to analyze whether you are a good fit for the role or not.

If a company is too eager to hire you immediately without any background information or interviews, then they are most probably a scam. If a company is pressuring you to take up a job or requires minimal credentials for high-level work, it would be best to do a background check before enrolling as they are likely conducting scams.

6. Finding More Contacts For a Company on LinkedIn or Other Similar Platforms

Most legitimate companies have a LinkedIn profile and have real employees attached to the company. Try scrolling the platform and look for the company’s profile or any other employee that works for that company. If you cannot find one, the company is probably a scam.

7. You Have to Pay to Work

One of the most common scams and the biggest red flag for a company is when they ask you to invest in getting a job. Always remember that the employers should be the ones paying you, and not the other way round.

Checking whether a company is legitimate or a scam might be exhausting. Therefore, it is necessary to keep your information secure. It would be best if you always looked for remote jobs on trusted websites like FlexJobs or Upwork, as they confirm and verify their clients' identities before allowing them to post any job on the platform.

Make Money From Home FAQ

Ready to Start Your Home Based Business Idea and Earn Money with Online Jobs?

Which online business you should pursue will depend upon your skills and whether you want to take up a full-time or a part-time job.

If you have completed a professional degree, you are eligible for various high-paid freelance jobs. You can teach English from home, join a professional remote job online, or create your online course and sell it to a target audience.

If you are looking for a more creative role, you can choose to sell stock images, build your eCommerce store, or sell your artwork and printables online.

If you are more interested in putting your marketing skills to use, then you can build your t-shirt brand, flip domains for profit, run webinars, or start a social media marketing agency.

If you are looking for a part-time side business job that does not require a lot of skill or effort, you can fill surveys for large organizations, test out websites or applications, or become a Youtube or Instagram influencer.

If you have the consistency and effort to write regular blogs and market them effectively, then a high-end blog website would be a good source of income and can make you thousands of dollars every month.

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