I want to take you on a journey before we begin learning how to make money online, so follow along.
Picture you’re at your cubicle.
You’re sitting down at 9:06 am (you’re always a few minutes late — why not, it’s not like you enjoy this job).
You open up SalesForce or some other CRM that lays out the onslaught of daily tasks you’re going to need to fumble through until lunch.
You see you have 3 meetings today with people who are going to talk about conceptual ideas that don’t help get anything done, rather than things the company, as well as you, can do to take action now.
You continue after lunch building up energy to cold call a bunch of prospects and sell a product or service you don’t believe in.
You keep staring at the clock, watching the second-hand tick and tock — each movement feeling like it’s mocking your existence at this job.
You head home, make some frozen dinner in the microwave, put on another rerun episode of Friends or some show you’ve watched completely through at least 7 times until the clock gets close to midnight.
You brush your teeth, change into your pajamas, and settle into bed.
Before you completely fall into a mediocre slumber, you stare at the ceiling above your head and reflect briefly on how tomorrow is going to be exactly the same until you finally fall asleep.
What I described above is an image familiar to too many individuals.
I know it was an existence that I lived for a handful of years after I graduated from college and started my first “Big Boy” job.
When things began,like most new adventures, things were great.
- I was learning a lot
- I was earning my first salary (a barely-enough-to-live-off $31,500)
- I felt a sense of purpose showing up to a cool, rehab’d warehouse that was now an office building
And then when things started to settle into a routine similar to the one I described above, a gloomy realization started to weigh on me.
Before I knew it — I was fired from my job.
The reason? Pretty much not giving enough of a shit.
And now looking back, I can honestly say it was one of the best moments of my life (cue cliché).
It was one of the best moments of my life because it helped catalyze my new adventure into the “Wild West” of making money online through various income streams.
In this article, I’ll go over exactly how I turned my life into making over $5,000 a month through my own efforts, all online.
I want to let you know:
- I’m not an online “celebrity”
- I don’t have tens of thousands of followers
- I don’t sell a monthly subscription SaaS product (at least yet…)
I’m just an Average Joe — just like you.
Let’s get into it…
How to Make Money Online
There are plenty of ways to make money online.
I make money online through 3 different income streams.
What will follow is a brief breakdown of each online income stream, an outlook of the industry, and how you can take action and start capitalizing on making money online with each income stream.
Income Stream 1: E-commerce and eLearning
There are a few reasons making money online is not only advantageous but something that should take focus. For one, the industries involved in making money online are all growing.
One of the ways in which I make money online is through e-commerce. E-commerce, also known as electronic commerce or internet commerce, refers to the buying and selling of goods or services using the internet, and the transfer of money and data to execute these transactions.
In 2019, retail e-commerce sales worldwide amounted to 3.53 trillion US dollars and is projected to grow to 6.54 trillion US dollars by 2022.People shop online.
I am involved in e-commerce through the creation and sale of information products and online courses.
Currently, I make a few hundred dollars a month with my information products and am growing steadily every month.
How can you start making money through e-commerce and eLearning?
You may not realize it, but chances are you are an expert or at least able to educate an audience in something.
I know, I know… Everyone and their mother says this but it’s true.
Now I’m not promising the world with this method, but if you were to design a course or create an ebook that can help and educate an audience to solve a problem, you’ll be well on your way to generating money online through e-commerce and eLearning.
You create a course > market it online through Medium, Linkedin, Quora, or Pinterest > capture sales.
The above strategy brings me to the next means of making money online.
Income Stream 2: Content Writing on Medium
It can come across as obvious, annoying, and insulting whenever you read about someone making money on Medium.
Shit, everyone talks about it.
Of course, it’s only obvious, annoying, and insulting until you’re the one who is making money via Medium.
According to SimilarWeb, Medium.com experienced over 210 million unique visitors on its platform in May 2020. This is almost a 400% increase from when VentureBeat recorded monthly unique users at 60 million in 2016.
The platform keeps growing.
Along with the unique monthly users, the platform keeps growing in terms of it’s actively paying users as well (with users paying $5 a month to read the stories “behind the metered paywall”). While the exact number of paying subscribers isn’t available, it’s estimated that the platform, as of 2019, experiences anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 active paying subscribers.
That’s $1,000,000 to 2,000,000 that will be redistributed to Medium writers every month!
I currently earn anywhere from $3,000 to $3,500 from my Medium stories on a monthly basis.
How you can make money online through Medium’s Partner Program
There are so many stories on the platform educating “Medium Regulars” on how to make money through the partnership program.
Many of the stories share commonalities in their strategy:
- Write “great” content
- Write regularly
- Write clearly — without grammatical errors, proper sentence structure etc.
- Write “behind the metered paywall”
- Write for publications within your niche
- Write stories that lead to curation
And, I have to say, all of those guidelines are spot on.
Of course if you don’t believe me, you can go straight to the source that outlines exactly what content both Medium as well as the Medium audience is looking for.
When you’re writing and publishing consistently, it can grow and leverage you into making money online through the third income stream I have for you in this article.
Income Stream 3: Freelancing for Agencies and Companies
When you’re consistently publishing on Medium (as well as Linkedin, Quora, and other content sites) you are setting yourself up for freelance content writing opportunities.
How so?
Well, consider that your Medium account is essentially forming a portfolio of your works for the world (i.e. potential employers) to see.
The freelancing industry (also known as the “Gig Economy”) keeps growing. According to a 2017 study, it’s estimated that by 2027 that the majority of the U.S. workforce will freelance. Currently, research indicates that approximately $1.7 trillion is contributed annually by freelance work in the United States economy.
With the increasing size of the ecommerce industry, businesses are looking to get content to their site and they’re looking for it right now.
They need to educate their online shoppers in order to capture sales.
This is where your content on Medium can be leveraged into freelance work.
How you can make money online via freelance content writing
I cannot tell you how many freelance clients I’ve secured by simply publishing content on Medium — really without expectation at first of securing work.
Okay… I can tell you — it’s 2 (with a third in the works as this article is being written).
Currently, I make anywhere from $2,000 to $2,500 a month freelance content writing for agencies and online companies.
Furthermore, even if you don’t have potential clients/agencies reaching out to you via your Medium portfolio, you can secure work via word of mouth.
How?
A recent 2020 survey notes that 38% of freelance work is searched for via word of mouth.
This could be through your own professional or personal network.
I actually secured two other clients from talking about (okay fine, it was bragging about) my work on Medium.
They actually came forward with the idea of me writing for their marketing team as a freelancer because they needed content for their business.
One of those word of mouth clients led to work being published on Forbes.com!
The days of heading to an office via your 35–45 minute commute in stop-and-go traffic are behind us.
More and more, workers are telecommuting and vying for alternative means of making a living.
The catalyzing engine that has allowed for these new means of building a personal enterprise is the internet.
With the internet, any “Average Joe” and his brother can take their mind and various expertises and produce content that the world not only wants and needs but will pay cold, hard cash for.
If you have been contemplating taking the plunge and putting content online in attempts to make money online, you’re too late.
Just kidding…
If you do feel like you’re too late, I tend to turn to this Chinese proverb,
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
It’s not out of reach.
In fact, it’s more within reach than any other time in history.
But you have to act.
You have to start creating.
You have to start taking chances.
Because what is the alternative? To keep staring at the ceiling of your white-walled bedroom hoping the next morning you’ll wake up in another life?
We know that’s not happening.
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