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How To Make Money Online? 3 Levels

Legitimate ways, not surveys or testing websites

By MarcusPublished 2 years ago 6 min read
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Photo by 金 运 on Unsplash

Making money online. Growing up, I've always wanted to do it but I never really knew if that was possible. Is it a scam? I've heard many people can do it, but not anyone I knew personally.

While I was in University I decided to give it a try and do it. After all, it's either I sink or swim, right?

  • If it's a whole big scam, worst case scenario I lose some money, but at least I would have found out for myself that it doesn't work.
  • If this making money online is legitimate I would have gained some money. I would be able to know for sure that making money online is not a scam if I tried it for myself.

Either way, I decided to just go for it. When you are young time is on your side, and I believe the biggest failure isn't failing at something, but rather not trying and wondering "what if" your entire life?

Money is such a major source of so many people's lives and we trade more than 80,000 hours of our lives for it. A huge portion of our lives involves going to work to make money so that we have money to live. Hence, I think it's foolish to say making money is not important given how much time we spend earning it.

Making money online is pretty cool. If we have a great job then happy days, we have some spare cash to go on holidays, but if we are not in a job that we are entirely happy with then we have the option of working part-time or taking another job that pays less but we enjoy more or even to stop working entirely.

Photo by Dziana Hasanbekava from Pexels

The process of making money online takes a lot of time, it isn't an overnight thing to reach a point it can replace our entire day job, but I think anyone reading this wouldn't say no to an extra few hundred dollars a month. The process of getting there isn't as mysterious as it sounds.

There are only 3 legitimate ways of making money online:

Level 1: Sell your services.

Level 2: Sell your products.

Level 3: Selling your attention.

Level 1: Sell your services

Photo by Jopwell from Pexels

This is probably one of the easiest ways of making money online.

It has the least barrier to entry and anyone can start today. It is what I recommend to most people and how most people usually get started.

So how do you go about this?

Step 1: Develop a skillset others are willing to pay for.

  • If you are thinking I don't have any skills, that is alright you have got the internet and you can learn.
  • You can teach yourself about video editing, copywriting, blogging, coding, creating apps, graphic design, dropshipping, etc. The list is endless.

Step 2: Market that skillset

You can provide and market those services on websites like Fiverr and other similar websites.

You can then charge people based on the work that you will do at a marketable rate.

Level 2: Sell your products

Photo by Math from Pexels

There are various ways to do this. But we will focus on the 3 below:

  • Dropshipping
  • Amazon FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) 
  • Website or app

Dropshipping

Source: Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine

With drop shipping, it is you having a website, and when someone comes to your website you then order off your supplier to have the item shipped directly to your customer.

Hence, you don't own any inventories since you only order the item from your supplier when a customer buys it off your website.

Amazon FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon)

For Amazon FBA you are selling products on the Amazon platform be it generic products or your private label products.

Because Amazon is a global marketplace that has built up a good reputation and trust, you can get customers to view and purchase your product much easier on this platform compared to your website.

Website or app

Photo by Daria Shevtsova from Pexels

You could make a website or an app and sell access to that.

This could mean that people have access to your service when they pay a subscription or service for it. It could even be for eg an online course that you have on Udemy or Teachable that you sell to other people.

Source: Medium

Source: MediumNext, if you enjoy writing and blogging it could even be joining the Medium paid partnership program and earning money when paid Medium members read your articles.

In the case of online courses, for eg Ali Abdaal's "Productivity course", Kevin David's "Amazon FBA course" or Stephen James' "Project Life Mastery" course, they have done the work up front and they generate an income passively since the same course can be sold over and over again unlike a physical product. This is something that you can consider doing as well.

Level 3: Selling your attention

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko from Pexels

At this level, it would be to supercharge your money-making powers with attention.

If your think I'm no expert at anything you're not alone. You can learn anything online and teach it to other beginners online as well.

And as long as the output that you are producing is of value people will pay attention and be willing to part with their hard earn money for what you are selling them.

You could try:

  • Running Facebook and Instagram advertisements
  • Knocking on doors
  • Cold calling
  • Sending tons of emails

However, the easiest way of selling anything online is by using attention. This is the attention of people that know, love, and trust you.

The way to get people to know, like, and trust you is by providing valuable content on the internet completely free of charge. This could be anything that you're passionate about and interested in eg fitness, finance, sports, fashion, vlogs, cooking, food review, product reviews, editing, etc.

Overtime if you do this consistently and provide tremendous amounts of value, do remember there are no shortcuts to making money online it's about providing huge amounts of value for free on the internet, and then hopefully in 3 years you can then have 1,000 subscribers/ followers that know, like and trust you from the value that you have given them for free for an extended period. Now they are more likely to be more interested in the product that you are promoting (products that you are interested in).

Conclusion

In the end day, it's important to remember that nobody wants to hear about your credentials, your testimonial, or your methodology. What they want to know is "what's in it for me?". That is what they want to know.

It's not just what you do, but what you create and market which is the essence of marketing and building money online.

"If it is up to be it is up to me", that's the great virtue of self-reliance.

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About the Creator

Marcus

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