We’re now well into the new year and you might be asking yourself: What is the best way to make money online in 2017?
With so many options online and so many people offering up different ideas on what you can do, all I can really do in this post is tell you what has been making money online for me. Other people make money in different ways, but I have my fingers in a few pies, and all these different sources of multiple income streams all add up.
Here are the 4 things I currently do to make money online:
- Freelance writing
- Music licensing
- Selling eBooks
- Affiliate marketing
I’m always looking for new sources of income. Why? Because having multiple sources of money coming in is more secure. If one dries up for whatever reason, I still have others going that generate revenue. Secondly, you just never know when something is suddenly going to take off in a big way. It can look like not a lot is happening, then bam! Something suddenly skyrockets. I’ve seen it happen with book sales and I’ve experienced it with affiliate marketing as well.
Freelance Writing
There are many areas where you can freelance remotely by taking advantage of the internet and email resources. I chose writing because that’s what I mostly do and can do remotely as a freelancer. I have clients all across the globe.
The good part about this is I can work from anywhere, and getting clients is often just a matter of searching for possible candidates in Google and them emailing them about freelance work.
I totally steer clear of the content mills such as Freelancer and Upwork. Everyone just tries to outbid each other with the cheapest price. Plus, it’s time consuming looking through all the ads and writing proposals. It really isn’t worth it to me, and I consider my writing to be of much higher value than what people are willing to pay on freelancer sites.
The downside to freelancing is you have to work for every dollar you make. No work, no money. There is nothing passive about it and there is really no opportunity for residual income.
Still, it’s a good sideline to have to keep the cash flow going while working on other projects, waiting for projects to start flourishing, or spending time looking for a new source of income. And like I said, I have the freedom to work from anywhere.
Some other freelancing ideas besides writing:
- Photography
- Web design
- Graphic design
- Computer programming
- Consulting
- Life coach
- Creating videos
- Music production
- And many more….
Music Licensing
This is not an easy field to make money in as there is a hell of a lot of competition. Plus, you have to be musically minded, have some gear and also be pretty adept at music production via a program such as the one I use – FL Studio.
However, if you are in a band, are a songwriter, composer or producer, then it is a good sideline to make some extra cash by putting your music up for sync licensing. This generally means that people buy the rights to use your music in a project, such as a film, video, presentation etc.. You still hold onto all rights. People purchase a sync license so they can legally use your music for that particular project only.
Music licensing can lead to creating a great source of residual income, because essentially you are creating the music track once and selling it over and over. Those tracks can also be sold as downloads on sites such as iTunes without it affecting your ability to sync license your music as well (which is where the real money is). Whereas a track on iTunes might only make you 50 cents, you could potentially license that track for an advertising project for more than $10k! Big difference.
I license my music on Songtradr.
Selling eBooks
I’ve been writing books and other material since the 1980s, but the internet really opened the doors to my fiction writing career back in 2010. Subsequently 2011 was a huge year for me with eBook sales, and I also wrote a lot of material during that time.
The eBook market quickly got flooded with new authors and millions of freebies, which pretty much killed off a lot of the sales. That being said, I still make residual income from books I wrote years ago, so it really is a passive income source.
Some writers out there – especially those in the romance genre – make a really good living from novel writing and short story writing.
That’s one of the beauties of eBooks, they can be as long or as short as you like. Just so long as you price them appropriately. I don’t limit myself to selling on Amazon only, though it is the major source of book sales.
Even an eBook or two as a supplement to something else you are doing can sell well, along with helping to promote your other online businesses.
As an example, this website is dedicated to helping people make money online, so I could write an eBook about that, make some sales and promote my website business in the process.
You can check out my author profile and catalogue of eBooks on Amazon here.
Affiliate Marketing
This is one of the very best ways to make money online in 2017 and beyond. Affiliate marketing has been a goldmine for some and a regular source of fulltime or part-time income for others ever since the internet began.
Click here for an explanation of what affiliate marketing entails.
To put if briefly, it’s all about promoting the products of other companies and receiving a commission when someone makes a purchase via your unique affiliate link. The beauty of affiliate marketing is it costs very little to set up and start an online business in this area. In fact, I can tell you about a way where you can literally “earn as you learn” while building out your affiliate marketing business.
You can have one website or 10. It’s up to you. It’s really best to start off just focusing on the one site to begin with and building it out into a profitable business before branching off into other areas.
Affiliate marketing is really based on this:
- Choosing an interest
- Building a website
- Attracting visitor traffic to your website
- Earning commissions
It sounds simplistic, and it is really; once you are shown exactly how to do it the right way in a step-by-step manner.
There are some good training platforms out there to learn this business, but the one I use – the one I can truly vouch for – is Wealthy Affiliate.
At Wealthy Affiliate you truly can earn while you learn as you go through their very easy to follow, understand and implement training program. Anyone, no matter what age or background, can do this. You don’t need tech skills, you just need to be able to follow the training a step at a time.
As you learn you are building out your business and monetising it so you can start to earn some income.
If you would like to check out Wealthy Affiliate and see what it’s all about, just click on the banner below. It’s free to get started and see if it’s for you. After that, to continue on and complete all of the training so you can fully build out your business, it’s a simple as one monthly payment each month to upgrade to a Premium Membership. Certainly well worth doing. I can personally guarantee that.
The Takeaway
The internet really is an endless source of money making opportunities. It’s just a matter of looking for them and knowing your own strengths and interests and learning how you can apply those to the internet space.
If you are not sure what you can do, definitely check out affiliate marketing. Like I said, anyone can do it. All you need is just one thing you have a passion for or are interested in and you can make money from that interest. I’ve done it and so have millions of others.
Darren Burton
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Freelance writing seems like the one that would suit me, I have not had any previous experience in the other fields hence leaving freelance writing.
I guess there is a lot of competition in this field as well, how do I choose a field within freelance writing where there is relatively less competition.
Unfortunately competition is pretty high with just about everything online, as the entire world has access to the internet. Freelance writing works so long as you chase up your own clients directly rather than trying to get work from a freelance site. They are a waste of time in my opinion.
Well written article on the best way to make money online in 2017.
Freelance writing and music licensing sounds to me that a lot of talent is involved to get to the top. As you mentioned, eBooks are highly competitive and the market is flooded.
Another area that I have tried is drop shipping but that too is highly competitive, and hard to break into from a quality supplier point of view. You have to have a proven sales track record to get a drop shipping agreement in place with the best manufacturers or wholesalers. So how do you get sales unless you already have a drop shipping agreement in place?
Affiliate marketing is much easier from that point of view, although it does take a lot of work. However, once established, the passive income starts to build and the workload decreases.
Thanks,
Ed
Thanks for reading Ed. There are definitely many ways to make money online, but just about all of them are growing more and more competitive every day. The internet is a great place, but also a very saturated one. That’s why I’m a firm believer in having a few things on the go, because you just never know which area of online business is going to “get lucky” so to speak and take off for you. Affiliate marketing is still one of the best because everyone loves shopping for things and you can promote just about anything.