Do you want to make money online, but you don’t have money to invest in an online business? Well, you’re not alone, nor the first one to try to make money without investment.
You may not see it right away, but this is great news for you! It means you can learn from the mistakes others made and succeed where others failed. And I’m here to share my mistakes and prevent you from making them too.
Back in the early days of internet marketing, I had some attempts to make money online, but because I didn’t push through the challenges and wasn’t open to learning new skills, I failed miserably. The good news is that there are ways to make money without investing money, the not-so-good news is that you cannot do it without putting in time and work, and I learned that the hard way.
So, if you’re ready to take on a few challenges and learn new skills, you can successfully make money online, but only by investing time and work. Before I line up some of the ways to earn money online, there are a few things to sort out, namely the skills that you need to polish up on or acquire and some of the caveats of making money online.
Skills You Need to Succeed Online
Depending on which online money-making ideas you’re going to try, you’ll need some of the following skills: Online marketing and search engine optimization skills to efficiently advertise your services and drive traffic to your website, YouTube channel, etc.;
Social media marketing to build a group of loyal followers; Basic IT skills to create a blog or website; Video editing skills to create videos; Good writing skills. Some of these skills you can learn along the way, with others you’ll have to get a grip on before you take on a project.
Beware of Scams
The web is littered with sites that promise you all sorts of unrealistic ways to earn money while sitting around in your jammies all day, and some of these are straight-up scams.
Common scams and job ideas that don’t work include: Anything that asks you to pay upfront to get access to some “secret” way of making money or to buy a “starter package” is a scam and you shouldn’t bother; Ponzi scheme-like businesses (yeah, they’re online too!); Stuffing envelopes for cash; Email processing jobs; Paid survey jobs. And really anything that sounds too good to be true is probably a scam to trick you out of your money.
I can’t even begin to tell you how many websites and shady online businesses are preying on vulnerable people who are hoping to find a way to make some fast cash. Paid survey jobs and other similar jobs are honestly not worth your time since you won’t be making enough money to buy a half-decent meal. Now that we have all these out of the way, let’s see some of the things you can do to earn money online.
Money-Making Ideas That Work
Thankfully, there are plenty of genuine ways to earn money online. The ones I will be discussing below are legit ways to start an income stream without investment. Be advised that no investment does not equal zero investment. As I clarified at the beginning of this article, you’ll be investing quite a lot of time and effort.
Some genuine ways are- Blogging, Youtubing, Write Content for Others/Write eBooks, Make Money on Instagram, Freelancing etc. Some of the ideas do require a few dollars here and there (e.g. to buy web hosting to launch a website), but most of the ideas I’ll discuss can be done without any financial commitment. So, here they are, today we are gonna talk about blogging—-
Blogging
This is the only idea on my list that requires you to buy web hosting for your blog, but you can get a shared hosting plan for as low as $2.95/month from BlueHost. They’ll even throw in a free domain name, so you can save on that too! Now, on its generating content for your blog won’t get you paid in sweet internet money.
This is where your newly acquired internet marketing skills should come in to help you market your blog. The most common ways to monetize your blog include: Directly selling advertising space on your blog; Driving sales for a third party and getting a commission after each sale (affiliate marketing);
Creating leads for a third party and get paid for each lead (lead-generation); Running Google AdSense ads on your blog. Before you can get cracking on these monetization techniques, it’s time to do some research into what your blog is going to be about.
Specialize
You can’t just willy-nilly post content and hope that something will catch on. You’ll need a plan and a very good one at that! Because the blogosphere is rather saturated, you need something to stand out. I recommend specializing in a niche and building an audience around it.
You can make your blog about anything that you can build an audience around — a reviews website, a tutorial site, a consultancy site, a site about finance, weight loss, health, fitness, nutrition, you name it!
Do Your Research
Before you start writing content, make sure to check out the competition and do some keyword research. You can use Google Keyword Planner or other similar tools to see what searches are trending in your niche and how high is the competition for certain keywords.
Look up blogs or websites with a topic similar to your own. Look up as many similar websites as you can. This will give you an idea of what common problems people are facing, what they need solutions to, and what topics you should cover that hasn’t been covered at all or haven’t been covered well enough by the competition.
Get Cracking on SEO
At this point, you should delve into SEO to make sure you’re building up your blog in a way that makes it easy for search engine crawlers to feature you in search results. In the beginning, you’ll have to write a lot of content to get picked up by search engines. Make sure your content is great, easy to read, and interesting.
Write longer articles, use long-tail keywords, and play around with content to make it as varied and compelling as possible. Use images, videos, and infographics to stand out. The idea is to attract more and more traffic to your blog, which will help you earn money from your blogging.
Keep Trying
Remember that it takes some time for your blog to get traction before you can start earning money. It could be months of hard work before you’ll get enough traffic to even be considered by third-party marketers.
The key is not to give up and continue working on your blog with the same enthusiasm as on the first day you started. If you’re not sure which monetization technique would be most suitable, I recommend trying them all and seeing.