How can I make money online?

Question

How can I make money online?

Answer

There are dozens of ways to make online, below is a list of legitimate and effective services available online that can help make you money either for a supplemental income or as a full time job. We've tried to make this list as complete as possible with services that can be used by all types of people regardless of how good they are with computers.

Notice: Whenever trying to make money online be cautious of scammers and other fraudulent services. Keep the below warnings in mind.

• Don't pay any significant initial or upfront fee, deposit, or down payment. For example, a company or individual claiming special computer hardware or marketing material is needed.
• Avoid services asking to cash checks into your bank account.
• If the company is not on this list, look them up on the BBB.
• Be cautious when asked for personal information such as e-mail, phone numbers, social security, etc.
• Realize everything you do is going to require some work, there is no such thing as easy ways to make thousands.
• Finally, always keep the motto "If it sounds to be good to be true, it probably is." in the back of your mind.
• Full list of ways to stay safe online.

Arts and crafts

Etsy is a fantastic place for any artist or anyone who enjoys making unique handmade goods and is a great place to sell vintage goods. This vibrant community has over 15 million buyers that visit every day and anyone can create their own online shop and make it available to these visitors.

ArtFire is another great site to set up your own virtual store and sell to millions of people on the Internet. Also, if you're an Etsy member, it is also easy to import your Etsy data into ArtFire to sell your goods on both sites.

Fiverr

Fiverr is another great site that allows anyone to create pages that list services they're willing to do for $5.00. This could be anything from doing a voice over, creating an animation, giving a review, offering advice, or really anything that others may find useful. Although five dollars may not sound like a lot, tasks that may be easy for you to complete and if several of them can be completed in an hour it can be a good extra income.

Similar sites include peopleperhour, which allows anyone to do jobs that take one or a few hours to complete for any price they set.

Kickstarter

Kickstarter is a fantastic page for anyone who has an awesome idea or project but doesn't have the capital to fund the project. Using this site anyone can create a page explaining their project or idea and how much they need to fund their project. While creating the project, rewards can be created to help entice people to invest into your project. For example, a reward could be made that gives someone some original art if they donate $200.00 to the project.

Freelancing projects

There are dozens of online services that allow anyone from around the world to work at home and complete work for other individuals and companies. Jobs can be anything from writing reviews, designing logos, programming, proofreading, data entry, accounting, payroll, translating, and much more. All of these services allow you to list your qualifications and set your pay rate or browse though available job listings and make a request for hire. Below is a list of some of the popular contractor and freelancing related services.

• Elance
• Freelancer
• oDesk

In addition to the above services, there are dozens of resource hubs on the Internet that will pay anyone to write good quality content about anything and then pay royalties to the writers based off how frequent their pages are visited. Some good examples of these resource hubs include: Helium, HubPages, Squidoo, and Yahoo! Voices.

eBooks and other virtual goods

eBooks and virtual goods are a popular way to make money online because they often take a few hours, weeks, or months to make and then can be sold in unlimited quantity without requiring any inventory or infrastructure. A great online service for any aspiring author is Lulu that allows anyone can write a book or guide about any topic and publish their book in electronic form or create a hard copy, which can be used for book reviewers and other publishers. Other sites that help distribute and sell eBooks and other virtual goods include ClickBank, Createspace, E-Junkie, and Sellfy.

Photography and audio

If you enjoy taking pictures, creating illustrations, producing video, or producing audio there are a lot of sites that will pay you for the rights to sell your work to its visitors. One of the biggest online services is iStockphoto, which will give you up to a 45% royalty rate for every picture or work of art they sell. Other sites included Depositphotos, Dreamstime, Fotolia, and Shutterstock.

If music is more your scene, audiojungle is a site that allows you to upload loops, music, and sound effects to their sites and make royalties from how much music you sell.

Online Auctions

Online auction sites such as Amazon seller, eBay, uBid, and Craigslist are another great way to make income on the Internet. Finding and selling things around your house or visiting your local pawn shops and buying small items to resell on auction sites can make you a lot of money. If you're not sure what to sell or what is in demand do a search on eBay or other auction sites and sort by highest selling item. You'll be surprised by what people are selling and how much people are bidding.

Website, Blog, or online store

Making your own website or blog can be a great way to make money on the Internet and if a successful site can even be a full time job. However, creating a successful site or blog will take a lot of work, learning, and is not something that will start making a lot of money immediately. Before any site or blog can start making serious money, it needs to be getting a lot of visitors.

• How do I make money on my website?
• How do I promote my website?

If designing your own site or blog sounds like too much, but you have products you're interested in selling using a service to create your own online store may be your best option. Again, once a store has been created you will need a lot of visitors or a unique product to attract buyers. JumpSeller, Freewebstore, and Shopify are just a few of the hundreds of online services that allow you to create your own online store.

Design and sell T-shirts

Designing your own t-shirt designs can be a fun and rewarding way to make some money on the Internet. Below are a few of the services that allow you to design and make your own t-shirts that can be sold to anyone on the Internet. For each t-shirt sold with your designs, you make a percentage of the income. The sites Spreadshirt and Cafepress are two good examples of these sites.

Amazon Mechanical Turk

The Amazon.com Mechanical Turk is a service that allows you to complete easy Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) and get paid for the work. Often these tasks are simple tasks that almost any human should be able to complete such as identifying colors in an image, finding keywords in a sentence, comparing text, completing a survey, etc. Because of the difficulty level many of these tasks do not pay a lot but can be easily completed and can be a source of supplemental income.

Review and post on websites

Websites and companies need users of all types to review their websites and determine what is or isn't working on their sites. Sites like Whatusersdo and Analysia will pay people to help them review customer websites and give their review of the website.

There are also many websites and forums on the Internet that need the appearance of a stronger and more active community. There are services online that will pay you for your participation in these sites. Some examples include Postloop.

Additional information

• What jobs are available in the computer industry?