1. Build an Affiliate Website (E.g. Amazon)
The principles of creating a successful blog can be used to build a profitable affiliate website. This includes creating engaging content, marketing your website and adhering to search engine ranking guidelines.
In contrast to blogs, with an affiliate website you are gearing everything towards specific products. This is why most affiliate websites contain product reviews.
People who are searching for a review of a particular product are more likely to purchase it after reading an informative review, therefore the odds of making a referral commission are greatly increased.
Whilst it does help to know a product firsthand, you can write good product reviews by either hiring others to write for you or summarizing what others have wrote.
There are millions of products being sold online so the opportunities to make money from an affiliate website are limitless.
Companies list partnership opportunities for their products on affiliate networks or through their own in-house affiliate program.
Hundreds of thousands of affiliate programs are available online, but a good starting point is the Amazon Associates Program. Whilst Amazon’s commission rate is low compared to other affiliate programs, their store tend to convert better due to brand loyalty.
Without doubt, affiliate websites are one of the most effective ways of making money online.
2. Launch an Online Shop
According to Digital Commerce 360, eCommerce spending was around $3.5 trillion in 2019 and is expected to grow further in the next few years.
It is a massive market and one which you should consider tapping into.
As you would expect, building a successful online shop requires a lot of hard work, therefore it may be several months before you start making a healthy monthly profit.
Prepare yourself by looking at how others have built successful shops and research what products to sell, who your competitors are and who your target audience is.
There are many great eCommerce shopping platforms available, but two I recommend looking further into are Shopify and WooCommerce.
Shopify is a hosted online shopping solution that retails from $29 per month. The service handles everything for shop owners and has a great selection of themes for online stores.
WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin that has grown to become the most popular eCommerce solution online. The plugin is free to download, however you will have to host your online store and possibly purchase additional plugins to extend functionality.
Like Shopify, there are a huge variety of WooCommerce themes on the market to help you market your products effectively.
Check out our Shopify vs. WordPress article to see which platform is right for you.
3. Sell Products on Amazon, eBay, Etsy, & More
When you launch an online shop, you have to spend time administrating the store, however in order to find customers, you also have to market your store and its products.
This can be difficult unless you have a large budget for an advertising campaign or a platform to promote your products such as a blog or a social media account with a loyal following.
If you want to start earning money quicker, you may want to instead consider selling products on an eCommerce marketplace such as Amazon, eBay, and Etsy.
Shopping marketplaces and auction websites are competitive, however there are few barriers to get started.
On a website such as eBay, you can get going by selling old things around the house that you do not need. Alternatively, you can search your local area for products that are on sale and then sell them nationwide at a higher price.
More established sellers tend to use dropshipping. There are thousands of sellers on Alibaba that help you do this. Once someone purchases something from you, you buy the product from China and ship it to them. The customer will never know that you did not ship it directly as your branding and marketing material can be included with the package.
To reduce delivery times, many sellers choose to buy items in bulk and send it directly to Amazon’s warehouses using the Amazon FBA program. It’s an attractive setup as you can build up a large successful store on Amazon without ever having to store the items yourself.
4. Create a Job Board
What’s the best type of website to build to make money online?
If you had to ask an experienced internet marketer this question, my guess is that “Job Board” would be bottom of the list, yet there is a lot of money to be made with job boards.
The most difficult part of launching a job board is attracting companies to post jobs and then establishing an audience. In the beginning, you may want to duplicate job listings from other websites. After all, no one is going to visit a job board that has no job listings.
Job boards are an attractive long-term project as once the job website is established, it requires very little maintenance to keep it running and earning money.
There are many job board products available online, such as Smart Job Board and JobBoard.io, that help you launch your own job board website. A number of job board WordPress plugins are also available.
5. Create a Discussion Forum
Up until the mid to late 2000s, discussion forums were one of the most common places for internet users to hang out and communicate with each other. I launched my first discussion forum in 2000 and launched a dozen more over the years.
Forums are less common today due to the popularity of social media, yet they can still be hugely profitable.
Many large discussion forums continue to be monetized by banner ads and sponsored ads from partners, but over the last 10 years we have also seen more private discussion forums arrive. Private discussion forums charge members a monthly or yearly fee to gain access to the forum.
Obviously, you cannot just install forum software and expect money to start rolling in. You need entice people to sign up to your private discussion forum by offering something they cannot find elsewhere. This could be an extensive online course or simply direct access to yourself or others who can provide support.
There are dozens of great forum applications available online.
Good free solutions include Vanilla Forums (Open Source Version), PHPbb, and MyBB. If you are looking for a premium solution, check out Invision Community, vBulletin, and XenForo.
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