There are lots of strategies for making money online. The barriers of entry to make money online is lower than ever but there’s always some competition. Obviously, the big money comes with the ability to scale or innovate but the ability to specialize and find a unique niche is always good too. Here’s a list of making money online (using a broad definition of that word as you’ll see).
Blogging
This is probably the most easiest way to enter. You just go to WordPress, register a blog and start typing away. If you have the expertise or drive to get your own domain you can be up and running in less than an hour too. Many blogging platforms have come and gone but WordPress is definitely here to stay. They’ve out done the competition while staying open-source and free. However, it’s backed by a profitable company with solid venture capital backing, Automattic, so you can be sure that they are here to stay. What’s more WordPress is such a monster content management system (CMS) that it’s been mangled to fit every use case possible. It’s also written in php, one of the most popular programming languages for websites (Facebook runs on php for example, even though they’re doing some strange things with it to scale now). No matter what hosting company you choose, you can almost guarantee that they support php, otherwise they’re not worth even considering. It’s a great language to be familiar with before you graduate to other stuff as well.
Even with a billion blogs out there, blogs are still the best gateway drug for doing anything online. Platforms like WordPress are highly optimized for SEO. It will give you an insight into what kind of content sells or brings in traffic. You will learn how to run a website, if you choose self-hosting, at the most basic level (it’s not scary at all, most hosting companies make it easy as clicking install on the control panel they provide, just make sure they give you shell access so you can peek under the hood).
Many large online media empires started off as blogs. TechCrunch, Huffington Post and Mashable just to name a few. In fact Mashable was started by Peter Cashmore, in his bedroom in Aberdeen, Scotland when he was 19 long after TechCrunch became the market leader in tech news. Now Mashable is a multimillion dollar enterprise that is completely bootstrapped. That’s the power of blogging, you can run a world class blog with millions of pageviews for handful of dollars. There are just as many minor success stories of people becoming financially independent. You just need to find a topic you are passionate about and can provide value over others. The best way is to find your niche.
Because the barrier of entry is low and costs minimal, even if you decide to make money in other ways, blogging is a must. You can even document how you plan to make money, what you’re doing to make money, or what information you’re consuming to make money.
The beauty of blogging is that it can be both a private outlet but visible to the public. You get to organize the information floating around in your head while giving yourself an incentive to stay accountable to what you say, even if it is to yourself.
Also, having a blog gives you additional opportunities to network and reach out to others online, especially people you’d like to learn from. Even if you remain anonymous, when you have a body of writing and a domain or URL associated with you, people will be less reluctant to communicate with you if they can get a feel for who you are.
In short, there’s nothing to lose from blogging. It can also lead to opportunities to branch out into other sources of revenue. Take a look at Nerd Fitness for example. This blog started off as one engineer’s record of how he got fit. Soon he was helping others like him and building a community of others like him, “so-called nerds who wanted to get fit”. The act of blogging held him accountable to his own goals, enabled him to quit his day job and pursue fitness full-time while traveling the world. Now he sells ebooks by him and others and even merchandise.
Another quick example is how a British lady named Poppey Dinsey made a blog posting pics of what she wore that day that became so popular, she turned it into a proper startup. The thing is you never know until you try.
In the future I’ll be covering these topics in no particular order (I’ll turn them into links as they go):
- Videos
- Forums
- Affiliate Marketing
- Smartphone Apps
- Website
- Web Service
- E-commerce
- Business with Online Component
- Digital publishing
- Digital music