5 Ways to Make Money Online

Making money online is something that is an ever green topic. Usually it might be referred to as “monetisation”. There are several interesting and fun projects online including Facebook where a relevant and pertinent question they face is “how do you make money?” It’s important to keep an open mind in your approach to making money online as the internet is a constantly evolving environment.

In the mean time, here are 5 practical ways to make money online

1. Sell Products Online  - E-Commerce

The simplest and most obvious one is to sell a product via an online store. You can set up a store on your website and sell from there. It sounds simple but it’s more difficult than meets the eye. You have to consider things like taking payments in different currencies, delivery, fulfilment of orders, warehousing, managing inventory, customer service and the list goes on. One way around some of these challenges is by selling what is called “info products” or software that can be downloaded online. This way you reduce the challenges of tracking inventory and warehousing. Info products include things like books, instructional videos or webinars.

The other obvious way of making money online is through advertising. Usually you would create a following of some kind via a publication or a mailing list and someone else would pay you to run their ad based on your audience. The primary difficulty here is in creating the kind of audience, that you can convince someone to pay for. Ad networks like Google Adsense and Adbrite also help you in acquiring ads where advertisers pay for who clicks.

3. Affiliate marketing

This is a popular but lesser known option for making money online. It might also be referred to as referral marketing. The concept here is that you get paid per referral you send in. This is actually a very profitable for some people. Essentially they spend their day finding ways to refer persons online to programs such as Amazon Affiliates and Click bank,

4. Offer your services professional in online market place

There are websites which create an online market place for professional services. You have people who want to hire and people who want to be hired in one place. Some of the interesting online marketplaces for services are Guru.com, Elance.com and 99designs.com.

This is actually pretty new to me, but I recently learnt of Amazon Mechanical Turks. It is also an online market place for services, however these services might not be professional. They can include simple things like filling out multiple choice surveys and even doing TV reviews. It’s a great way to get paid possibly for one of your hobbies like TV.