Nowadays, there seem to be plenty of ways to make extra money online.
This can be a side hustle in addition to your core offer or service, a part-time endeavor alongside your regular 9 to 5, or something you develop from scratch and becomes your main business activity.
How you make extra money online will depend on your skill set, talents, and offer—and whether there is a market for them.
With this in mind, here are 4 money-making ideas to consider:
1. Create an Online Course
One effective way to productize your offer is to package up your skills and teach others via an online course.
For example, if you are an artist, could you create a course teaching students the basics? There is no need to stop there; if it’s successful, you could then create a more advanced course, and so on. The great thing about online courses is that there are usually no limits to the number of people who can join—unless you stipulate it—and they are a great way of generating a passive income while promoting your personal brand.
Your online course could also be a lead magnet to attract your ideal clients to hire you – so it’s a win-win. Your personal involvement is up to you; for example, in addition to the course material, you could run weekly live sessions – or simply record a video course and let it run as an evergreen product.
You can sell your course on course platforms such as Udemy, hosted course platforms such as Thinkific and Teachable, or host it yourself.
If you are not a tech whiz, you can always hire someone to help create and manage it.
2. Offer Subscriptions and Paid Memberships
Similar to online courses, you could share your expertise by offering a paid membership to an online community. Typically, these require good management to keep the membership engaged and need to be kept up to date with relevant material so they provide value to the membership.
Alternatively, you could offer a paid subscription service—this could be access to your services at a fixed rate for a set number of deliverables each month or a subscription to a tangible product, such as supplements, a food box service, pet treats, etc.
With Invoice Ninja, fixed recurring invoice payments can be processed automatically, thanks to token billing. Token billing enables the payment system to capture your client’s credit card details and store them for billing at a future date.
Whatever the frequency and whatever the reason, token billing via Invoice Ninja provides the ultimate auto-billing solution for fixed recurring payments. Simply define the recurring invoice details, sit back, and let the token billing feature do the work for you.
Try Invoice Ninja for free here.
3. Join Affiliate Marketing/Referral Programs
If you use a product you love or know of one that would be helpful for your audience, consider signing up for affiliate or referral programs. Although both involve you promoting another company’s products and getting compensated for doing so, there are slight differences between the two. In short, affiliate programs pay a commission for promoting services or products, while referral programs reward existing customers for referring new business to them.
Referral programs use the existing user base to spread the word (i.e. customers refer others), whereas affiliate programs are open to a broader audience and are typically promoted by bloggers, influencers, content creators, and professional affiliate marketers.
Either way, it can be a nice way to top up your bank account.
The Invoice Ninja referral program pays a 50% commission for 3 years. This means that if you refer 100 Pro Plan users, you get a $6K recurring annual commission.
It’s simple to get started, too.
Find out more here.
4. Consider a Paid Email Newsletter
If you are giving away free, helpful, and valuable content in your email newsletter, consider introducing a paid tier for subscribers who want to access more exclusive information, special discounts, or gain direct access to you.
Email marketing can be lucrative, and the best thing is that you don’t necessarily need a massive audience to start making money—just an engaged audience of ideal clients who appreciate that your offer(s) provide a solution to their problems.
Many email service providers integrate with payment gateways to allow you to set up paid subscriber options.
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Of course, there are many other ways to make money online, ranging from collaborations with others to creating and selling apps to drop shipping, but we hope the above has given you some further food for thought.
Naturally, the content you create online to market your business (and implement any of the above ideas) will play a part in your success.
See our article here for more information about generating leads with your content.
