4 Ways to Up Your Income Online

More and more people are looking for ways to earn money online. Some are turning to side hustles to make a little extra money, while others are creating internet businesses that become their full-time job.

Let’s take a look at seven ways to make money online that can take up a little or a lot of your time. Think of these options as supplemental sources of income, most of which have the potential to be a whole lot more.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing can be a low-cost and relatively easy way to make money online. You don’t need to have any of your own products or services to sell; affiliate marketing gives you a chance to earn commissions from large companies.

You promote the products or services of a company on your website/blog or social media account, providing links to the company’s offerings. These affiliate tracking links ensure you get the credit for having delivered a paying customer to the company’s website, and you get a percentage of the sale as your reward.

The main work involved in affiliate marketing is giving people a reason to visit your website/blog—or Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or other social media account—and building up a large group of visitors and followers. To do that, you should provide content that is likely to attract people who are interested in purchasing the thing you’re trying to get people to buy. For example, you might write and make videos about consumer electronics products—how to use them and/or which ones are the best—in a way that’s optimized for search engines.

Start Your Own E-Commerce Website

A related way to make money online—but that perhaps requires a bit more work on your part—is with an e-commerce website. You would sell products from your website, either your own that you create or commercially available ones.

If you choose the latter route, the most common and hassle-free way to fulfill orders is via drop shipping. You get the customers and take their orders, but a third-party company warehouses and ships

If you make your own products, you might want to start out selling them on both an established platform, like Etsy, and your own site. After you build up a base of customers, you could ultimately cut out that middleman.

You can further monetize your e-commerce website by hosting ads, such as with Google AdSense.

Online Publishing

Regardless of your current occupation, publishing nonfiction e-books is a good way to help establish yourself as authority in your field while making passive income. Once you’ve written and published the book, you don’t have to actively do anything to take in revenue from it.

Alternatively, if you’ve written a novel that needs to be read—especially in a popular genre like romance, science fiction, fantasy, or mystery—publishing it as an e-book has the potential to get thousands of eyes on it.

Consumers of self-published e-books expect a quality experience that’s on par with the offerings of a traditional publisher. If you don’t have all the skills to ensure a polished final product, you might consider hiring a copy editor to fine-tune your writing and a designer to create an enticing cover. And if you’re having trouble transforming your ideas into paragraphs and chapters of prose, you could hire a developmental editor to help you with that beginning part of the process.

Take Online Surveys

Taking online surveys is an easy way to earn a little extra cash or prizes such as gift cards. Market research firms (MRFs) are behind many online survey sites, including American Consumer Opinion, which is owned by Decision Analyst. You can also sign up to take surveys using aggregators like IdeaShifters or Swagbucks, which partner with many different corporations and MRFs.

You shouldn’t expect to make more than a dollar or so per survey. And you will most likely have to provide a good deal of information about yourself before you can take the first one.

When looking for survey-taking opportunities, stick with companies that have a proven track record of paying for survey responses and that are not scams designed to get your personal info. You should also keep in mind that you may not be eligible to take certain surveys because you don’t match the demographics the company is looking for. You may be too old or too young, for example.