5 Synergistic Methods To Make Money Online (Going into 2021)
Are you looking for feasible ways to supplement your income? Or perhaps you want to quickly earn starting capital to start your own business? In this article (and video), I discuss five different ways you can earn money online and also when you’re just going about your daily life. Some of these methods even build off each other or can be combined to greater effect!
Counting down from number 5, we have completing tasks and freelancing online. The amount that you get paid for doing these is a direct tradeoff of the number of jobs or services you complete, with trivial tasks like taking surveys and watching videos paying the least but requiring the least amount of skill and freelancing gigs paying more for more in-demand jobs.
Starting with the easiest and lowest, yet consistently paying gigs, we have a website called Amazon Mechanical Turk. It is a crowdsourcing marketplace run by the Amazon that we all know, that matches outsource requests for almost any sort of trivial task, referred to by them as Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITS, from describing images to transcribing speech to finding website URLs of restaurants. The money you make from doing each task is usually only a few cents, so this is definitely not a source of sustainable primary income, but considering its accessibility, it could be a good choice for one to pump out a bit of pocket change when they have nothing better to do anyway. What’s more is that the more tasks you do, the more you’ll have access to higher-paying tasks. Thus, if a person’s “leveled up” and is able to plow through these more advanced tasks quickly, they could earn a few dollars or even more per hour.
Next, if you have a knack for writing, there are also websites that pay you to write, such as Medium itself! Textbroker is a commonly used starting point as they are relatively easy to start with and offer many articles to write, although the pay is generally lower than many of the alternatives, starting at 0.7cents per word, which you’ll be able to work your way up from if you become a more reputable writer. The highest rate one could get paid is 5 cents per word, but the article would have to be of professional quality. Other popular sites that pay you for writing include iWriter, which pays out $15 dollars per post and offers many topics, FundsforWriters, which pays $50 dollars per post between 500–600 words, and UXbooth, which pays $100 dollars per post of 1200–1800 words. There are also sites for which you need to create lists (considering the fact that top 5s, top 10s and so on often go viral), starting with the site TopTenz which pays $50 per accepted post at a 1500 word minimum, Listverse which pays out $100 dollars per 1500-word minimum accepted post, and A list Apart which pays $200 dollars per accepted list post of 1500 words or more, although they have fewer offerings. Finally, writing on Medium itself is much less restrictive than any of the aforementioned websites because you can potentially earn from writing about nearly anything!
Now, if you have some sort of technical expertise, for example, if you’re proficient in more than one language, are an artist, a programmer, a musician, or just an expert at anything, you can start a gig on Fiverr, on which you can get reviews and grow your reputation as a freelancer. You get paid at least 5 dollars per assignment, though Fiverr and Paypal do each take a cut, so it ends up at around 3.5 dollars per assignment, but you can command higher prices depending on the task you do and even offer add-ons and customization to your original gig such as faster delivery time or extra assets. To earn 100 dollars a day on Fiverr, you would have to complete about 29 orders at the lowest 5$ tier, taking into account the Fiverr commission and Paypal fees, which is actually quite feasible if you can complete say, an easy graphic design task in 10–15 minutes and attract enough clients. As you start building up that reputation, you can even fill your downtime by doing Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Next up, at number four, we have promoting Amazon affiliate products. While this doesn’t intuitively seem like a way to make money on demand, it could very well be, and if anything, if you set it up properly, it can become an easy way to earn some passive income in addition to what you are already doing. First, you want to sign up for the Amazon Associates program. Then, you can recommend literally any product listed on Amazon, and you will earn a commission anytime someone buys something through your link. You can even earn commissions from purchases made even if a person doesn’t buy the specific product you’re promoting; as long as they stay on amazon.com using your link and buy something, all of the items bought during that session count. You not only can recommend products to friends, family, and acquaintances, but especially if you’re an expert in something, you can go and answer questions on quora.com, forums, Facebook groups, etc in your field of expertise or interest, and by providing free value to people by giving your expert advice and by including in your advice a specific product and affiliate link, you could get some sales that way. The great thing about affiliate marketing is that once you post your links out on the Internet, you don’t really have to maintain them in any way while they continue generating passive income for you, and again, that’s on top of a job or gig you are already doing.
At number three is service arbitrage. In this case, instead of doing the work yourself, you’re outsourcing higher paying gigs to websites that can readily do it at a decent standard and at a lower price. For instance, you find a request for a certain gig on Craigslist, for which the person is willing to pay 20 dollars for a service. If you manage to find someone who can do it for 5 dollars or even slightly more on Fiverr, you can very well make the difference in profit. Sometimes clients may ask for samples of your work, which means you might have to invest a little at first to get a couple of samples from your Fiverr seller. This arbitrage works especially well if you’ve familiarized yourself with the relative quality and prices people are charging for specific services both on Fiverr and other platforms such as craigslist. While you might not want to start with these at first, bigger tasks such as building a website might offer you larger profit margins to work with! You may even be able to expand this by looking up local businesses and offering SEO, graphics design, web design, social media growth, or a combination of many things to them, if you’re confident in and experienced with these respective services provided on Fiverr!
Next, coming to number two, we’re moving to mobile devices, which are quickly becoming another powerful tool for earning money. Prior to the prevalence of smartphones, taking public transportation, waiting for a restaurant to serve food, or just anytime you’re outside and waiting for anything in general, were considered “downtime” during which you couldn’t really do anything productive. Nowadays, people can play games, watch videos, chat with their friends on social media using their phones, and just spend a significantly larger chunk of their daily lives on their phones. And they can also make money. One way to do this by using one or several of a plethora of money-making apps, such as Swagbucks, which pays you for doing surveys, free trials, watching videos, playing games, and the like. Another noteworthy feature of Swagbucks itself and of other apps such as Ibotta is that they offer cashback rebates for shopping through their links. You’ll be able to shop on most of the popular retailers all the same through these apps. Although any income you garner through smartphone apps generally don’t hold a candle to all of the methods I’ve mentioned so far, they allow you to earn a little bit extra while you don’t have access to a computer or only have a few minutes to spare, on the go which doesn’t actually interfere with your regular job or gigs.
Finally, at number one, we actually have investing. It might sound intimidating and risky to some, but there are actually ways to invest outside of keeping money in the bank that are relatively easy and low-maintenance, and offer significantly higher returns. Now, this may not get you more money immediately, but it allows you to grow the income you earn from all of the aforementioned methods, if you don’t need to spend that money urgently and have nothing better to do with it anyway. In this way it offers synergy with all of the other money-making methods I’ve already talked about by allowing you to grow all of that money even further. Many successful and wealthy individuals advocate investing a significant portion of your income as early as possible to take advantage of compound interest, which is the phenomenon that the same sum of money grows exponentially large if you keep reinvesting your interest. One way to easily invest is to use the Acorns app on your smartphone, through which you can set up automatic investments of spare change into diversified assets of your choice. Alternatively, you can use the popular Robinhood or Webull investing apps (these are referral links), which grants you the ability to trade stocks and ETFs with zero commissions. In case you didn’t already know, ETFs, or exchange-traded funds, can be bought and sold like any regular stock, but each essentially represents a specific industry or stock index. For example, there are some that tracks and thus appreciates and depreciates with the S&P 500 index, which is a stock market index based on the market capitalizations of the 500 largest U.S. publicly traded companies. Buying an S&P 500 ETF not only offers you diversification, its average annual return since its inception is about 10 percent. Keep in mind that this is the average, and that there are years during which its value has dropped. Nonetheless, even Warren Buffet himself has recommended specifically the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF as a relatively stable investment.
Just like the previous method of using task apps, since both Acorns and Robinhood are apps, you might as well “invest” some of your time spent outside managing your investments and perusing your options! Just remember to do your due diligence and proper research before investing in anything, to never invest based on emotions, and to always keep an emergency cash fund. One relatively simple yet very effective method of investing is called dollar-cost averaging. This just means you invest the same amount of money each month, or a specific time frame of your choice, for instance, if you were to keep allocating 500 dollars of your monthly income into an investment. The reason it is so effective is that it allows you to buy more of a stock or ETF when the prices are cheaper, and buy fewer when prices are more expensive, all without you having to put much extra thought into when and how much you should actually invest, which is very unpredictable anyway. For instance, if a stock is currently 100 dollars, with this month’s 500 I’ve set aside from my salary I can buy 5 shares of that stock. The following month, its price goes down to 80 dollars, which allows me to buy 6 stocks. With this, I am able to pick up more shares when they are likely at a discount while never going all in case it falls further. The month after that, let’s say its price appreciates to 120 dollars, and with my 500 dollars, I can buy 4 shares, which essentially lessens my risk of purchasing shares at a more expensive price. Now, By combining buying an ETF such as the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF and using dollar-cost averaging, you have a simple and low maintenance, yet effective and diversified investment strategy.
Here’s a referral link to download Robinhood — you get a free stock valued up to $200 if you use my link!
And you can pick up yet one more FREE stock from Webull valued up to $1600 when you sign up and deposit $100!
You can also check out my video (below) in which I cover how to get into investing as a hobby and sustain it as part of your lifestyle!
And those were five synergistic methods to make money online. Do you have any other helpful tips or methods that you’d like to share? Which of the methods I mentioned are you most excited to try out? Let me know!
