Sometimes you just need to make a little extra cash. You’ve got extra bills to pay. Maybe a kid is going to college and you need tuition money. Maybe you want to take your family on a special vacation.

Whatever the reason, you want to make a few extra dollars.

But it’s not quite that simple, right?

Do you pick up a part-time job? That’s pretty tough to do if you’re already working full-time.

Do you sell some of your possessions? I suppose that’s an option, but probably not the best one.

Do you enter the lottery and hope for a great stroke of luck? Probably not.

So what are you to do

Thankfully, the internet has fundamentally changed how we make money.

Now, there are dozens of ways to make extra cash through a variety of online techniques.

We’re no longer forced to take traditional jobs in order to make money.

If you can imagine a way to make money, you can probably do it online.

But frankly, it can be intimidating to think about trying to make money online, especially if you’ve never done it before. The internet is huge and trying to sort through all the options can feel terrifying.

If this describes you, then this article will help.  Within this article, you’ll find 12 effective ways to make money online.

Some of these methods will be more lucrative than others.

Some will require more work than others.

Some of these money-making methods can even turn into full-time jobs.  But they all are proven, sound ways to make money online.

One thing that’s important to note before we get started:

None of the methods that follow are get-rich-quick schemes.  These are real, sustainable ways to make money. All of them require actual effort and investment of time.

There are no shortcuts.

No hacks to make you ridiculous sums of money every day.

These are all real jobs that pay real money.

Ryan Robinson puts it this way when he talks about making money online:

There’s no such thing as an online get-rich-quick scheme. Most of the quick ways people talk about when it comes to making money online are not true businesses.

Sure, some of them may be good for creating a few hundred or even thousand dollars in one-time revenue. But they’re not going to help you unlock financial freedom and achieve complete control of your lifestyle.

That’s really good advice. Don’t fall for get-rich-quick online schemes. They almost never pan out.

Instead, go for the proven, sustainable ways of making an online income. 

Method #1: Affiliate Marketing 

Affiliate marketing is an outstanding way to get started making money online. The bar to entry is relatively low and you can get started with it right away.  Essentially, affiliate marketing works like this:

• You promote an online product or service created by someone else.
• If some purchases a product or service through your promotion, you get a commission, or portion of the sale.

Typically, you promote the online product through a special link that is connected to you. That way the company knows that the sale came through your promotion.

Method #2: Sell Products Online

There are numerous ways to sell products online (even if you don’t manufacture one yourself).

Before you can sell products online, you’ll need a website on which to sell them. If you don’t want to set up your own ecommerce store, you can easily sell products on:

• eBay
• Amazon
• Etsy
• Poshmark
• Craigslist
• And many others

If you want to sell products on your own website, you’ll need to go one step further and create an ecommerce website on which you can list your products and accept payments.

Thankfully, companies like Shopify make it incredibly easy to set up an ecommerce store. In a relatively short time, you can have an online store up and running, ready to sell products and get paid for them.

Method #3: Sell Your Services on a Freelance Basis

There’s a good chance that you have certain skills that you can sell online on a freelance basis.  For example, are you a…

• Designer
• Writer
• Translator
• Assistant
• Bookkeeper
• SEO Expert
• Voiceover Artist
• Audio Engineer
• And more

If so, then you can sell your services online. There are literally hundreds of thousands of businesses that need these services and you can make good money working for them.  Depending on your skill set and your ability to pitch new clients, you can make a full-time living as a freelancer. Some freelancers even make six-figures every year.

Method #4: Become an Online Coach

This is somewhat similar to freelancing but with a bit of a different flavor.   If you have significant knowledge in a particular industry or area of expertise, you can package your knowledge and sell it. In other words, you’re selling your expertise as opposed to a product or service.

What sort of coach could you become? The options are endless. You could be a:

• Health coach
• Life coach
• Music/vocal coach
• Finances coach
• Executive coach
• Sales coach
• And so much more

In order to be a coach, you simply need to be able to add a high amount of value to your clients. You need to be able to help them become consistently better at what they do. You need to be able to help them improve their craft in ways that they couldn’t if you weren’t there to help them.  There are also a number of ways to package coaching services. You can offer:

• 1-on-1 coaching
• Group coaching
• A course with accompanying coaching support
• Or other formats that would work for your field

Method #5: Create Online Courses

Online courses are a fantastic way to monetize knowledge that you already have. And unlike coaching, which requires regular meetings with a small number of clients, you can sell your course to hundreds, if not thousands of people.

The good news is that you can create a course around almost any subject and find people to purchase it.  For example, you can find courses in many topics, such as:

• Losing weight
• Learning to play the piano
• Painting
• Singing
• Creating a budget
• Investing in stocks
• Running
• Tennis

The list goes on and on. In order to create a course, you need a platform to distribute it.  There are many ways to create and distribute a course:

• You can create an email course in which all the lessons are delivered via email.

   

• You can build a course that’s primarily text-based and involves more reading.

   

• You can create a video course where you film yourself teaching.

   

• You can create a hybrid text/video course that features a variety of resources.

You simply need a method for getting your lessons into the hands of your eager students.

There are a number of platforms which make it very easy to create courses, enroll students, and accept payments, such as:

• Teachable
• Thinkific
• Kajabi
• TalentLMS

All of these platforms allow you to upload a variety of materials, including video, audio, and text.

One way to get a great feel for what a course should look like is to take a few courses yourself. Udemy offers thousands of courses for relatively low prices. Consider taking a few courses in your niche for ideas about what to include in your own course.

Method #6: Create YouTube Videos

Believe it or not, YouTube is actually a relatively good way to make money online. It takes work and time to build up your subscriber base, but once you do, you can monetize it effectively.

How do you make money through YouTube videos? The simplest way is by implementing their advertising program.

If you have over 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of view time over the past 12 months, you can have YouTube show ads before your videos. For every 1,000 views a video gets, you’ll make on average somewhere between $2-$4.

Granted, this may not seem like a lot, but YouTube is a numbers game.

For example, let’s say that you have 100 videos and each video gets 5,000 views per month. That works out to somewhere between $1,000 – $2,000 per month. Imagine if your videos started going viral and getting millions of views!

When creating YouTube videos, your content will probably fall into one of two categories:

1. These videos educate viewers in some way. Maybe you offer a tutorial on how to solve a commonly-encountered problem. Maybe you educate people on an important subject. Your goal is simply to provide valuable, insightful information to your viewers.
2. These videos are much more lighthearted and are intended to bring a smile to the face of your viewers. There are endless ways to entertain people, and if you can come up with a particularly good one, you may be able to rack up thousands of views on a video.

Once you start producing YouTube videos, you need to work on consistently growing your channel (you need to break that 1,000-subscriber mark).

In many ways, growing a YouTube channel is like growing a blog. It takes time and consistency.

Method #7: Write and Sell a Book

Another highly effective way to monetize your knowledge is to write and sell a book. In addition to making money with every sale, writing a book has a number of other specific benefits:

• It establishes you as a thought leader in your industry.
• It provides you with a resource to give to clients.
• It allows you to attract new clients who wouldn’t have heard of you otherwise.

Method #8: Start a Blog

If you have a knack for writing, blogging can be an effective way to make money online.  To be clear, blogging in and of itself doesn’t pay (unless you’re doing it for someone else on a freelance basis). However, there are numerous ways to monetize a blog. In other words, there are a variety of ways you can turn your blog into a money-making machine.

Method #9: Become a Virtual Assistant