Can You Make a Full Time Living Online?
Many people ask if they can make a full time income online. The answer is that many people can actually make a decent living, maybe even get rich online just as in the offline world. If you are considering your transition to the digital economy, consider these three methods of making a living online.
Become a Freelance Writer for Hire
Many people simply don’t have the skill or the time to write what they need written to support online efforts. They may be attempting to generate advertising revenue, or marketing some product or service. If you are a skilled writer there is a of work out there.
Sites like Demand Studios, Wisegeek and others will pay approved writers to produe articles starting with preselected titles. All the WiseGeek articles titles are in the form of a question, while Demand Studio’s has a stable of websites they produce content for. Both sites have a writer selection process. Expect to be paid between $4 and $15 per short article.
Constant Content is a better choice, though the rewards may not be as immediate because you submit articles and wait for buyers to purchase them. You set your pay rate which should be much more than than Demand Studios pays. For example I recently sold a 750 word article on a specialized topic for $150 at Constant Content. It was a topic I know all about, so zero research time went into that article. It did take a few months for the right buyer to arrive though. A nice little bonus is that authors who join based on your referral get 5% of your sales, out of the site’s site of the sale. I say little because with over 150 referred authors this has netted me just $38 so far. I obviously recommend Constant Content because I believe in it and I make money selling articles there, not because the referrals are very profitable.
Become a Professional Blogger
Blogging is not a get rich quick plan, but if you start, maintain and promote a focused blog after a while you will amass enough content, backlinks, pagerank and Alexa rank to get your blog noticed. Once your blog gets noticed opportunities will start coming your way and advertising starts to pay off.
Investigate good resources to help you build a better blog and monitize that blog. Innovative Passive Income is one resource (check out the resources page here for all kinds of ways to monetize a blog). Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income blog is another great resource of ideas and tools.
Become an Internet Marketer
Becoming an internet marketer is pretty straight forward, but pretty challenging at the same time. This post on 10 steps to make a living online details some key considerations as you embark on a quest to make money online as a marketer.
Can You Make a Living Online? 10 Steps
Many people ask “Can I make a living online?” The answer is… it depends. I know, not what you want to hear, but read on. Making a living online requires a few keys:
1. Making a living online is some combination of running your own business and freelancing. You need to understand some basic business concepts or you will never succeed (or if you find success through dumb luck, you will not be able to sustain it).
2. There is no boss online so you must be self motivated. If you need a time clock or someone to tell you what to do forget it – stick to a work for hire job.
3. Find something you love to do, a topic you care about. If you don’t believe in and love what you do life is drudgery. If you don’t love it, you will not stick with it. Also, lack of passion will show in your work and the monetary results.
Sure there are topics you could tackle that are not glamorous (marketing financial services anyone?) but every topic can be spun to be interesting somehow.
4. Be helpful. People don’t want to be sold, they want to be helped in the journey to buy. Provide great information and link to useful info, rather than pushing what you are selling. The benefits are many:
-others might link to or “like” your content helping out. There are SEO benefits to links and likes.
-visitors will feel more at ease.
-you deliver value to people and they than feel more comfortable buying from you. Blogger Pat Flynn exemplifies this principal as he delivers top quality informative content and only works in affiliate links to useful products he recommends, never hard selling them. Readers feel like rewarding Pat and he makes a very good living online.
-More quality informative content brings search engine traffic.
5. Think outside the box and don’t be afraid to jump into online business out of necessity. This blogger in Malaysia found that blogging pays more than engineering when he had trouble getting a job in a recession so he started a freebee site and than grow other web properties.
6. Learn about the tools to succeed online. Here are some places to start:
-There are many websites that share revenue and are great for building backlinks from.
-Autoresponders and mail programs are great for managing mailing lists
-Unique online content marketplaces like Constant Content are great for sourcing high quality content for your projects. Odesk is another great source for inexpensive help on your projects – no need to learn to build a website when you can have a nice website whipped up in India for $50 overnight.
7. If cash is needed faster, consider working for others freelancing as you develop your own passive income (from online properties) sources. Some places to start:
-(Constant Content is also a good place to earn money writing)
-Odesk is a fantastic freelance marketplace
-Demand Studios – I don’t recommend them, but many writers have some success here.
8. Find a good horse and ride it. This is what one of my early online inspirations WriterGig did, building up a very nice residual ehow income. When you find a good plan that works for you, wash, rinse and repeat – in her case hundreds of short ehow articles.
9. Never stop exploring new opportunities as you continue on a quest to earn a living online,. The online work is constantly changing and what works today might not work tomorrow. It might also work better tomorrow – you just never know. eHow died as an residual income opportunity, but WriterGig had already developed skills in niche sites and other areas she could make even more money from.
10. Have fun and always keep learning! Earning online is like a big puzzle, the scope of which keeps changing. Keep exploring and learning and you too will become an expert on earning online.
Tagged as: blog income, blogging, Smart Passive Income