How To Make Money Online: The Definitive Guide

Nick Wharton Author Bio Picture

How to make money online is one of the most searched terms in Google, and it’s no surprise. Since the birth of the internet, it’s been many people’s dream to have the freedom to work from anywhere in the world, as long as there’s wifi.

When we first started trying to figure out how to make money online, we were dumbfounded by the options and overwhelmed by the amount of research that seemed to be needed in order to succeed.

Still, we quit our jobs and jumped in 100%.

We started Googling and watching countless YouTube videos. Surprisingly, it didn’t take that long. After just a year we were earning enough money to pay for a pretty nice lifestyle which included a LOT of travel.

Fast forward a few more years and we learned how to make money online… successfully. Through our various online jobs we’re able to earn much more than we did at our jobs in Canada, while only working around 15 hours per week.

☞ See Also: From Hobby to Career – The Evolution of Our Blog

become a digital nomad to make money online
You might be thinking that this all sounds too good to be true and it sounds like a get rich quick scheme. Let me tell you, for us, there was nothing quick about it.

We made a lot of mistakes along the way for sure and it took us over a year to even earn enough to cover our expenses. But we didn’t know what we were doing. We had to do all of that research and try to figure it out on our own. Today, it’s quite easy to figure out how to make money online within a month.

That’s not an over exaggeration and I have no reason to make this up. We’ve worked many different online jobs and we’ve interviewed dozens of people about how to make money online. We’ve gathered their knowledge and our own personal experiences to come up with this post.

My goal in this post is not to trick you into believing that there’s an easy way to become a millionaire. There are dozens of posts online that claim to teach you how to make money online, but they only really show you a bunch of remote jobs.

This post is your guide. It includes how you’ll get paid, where you’ll find work, what to expect from the jobs and how much you’ll make. I want to not only introduce you to all of the best ways to make money online, but also show you how we do it and how you can mimic our success. I hope to inspire and encourage you to learn how to make money online.

I’m assuming you’re reading this post because you currently work in an office and you want to have the freedom to work and live wherever you want, wake up when you want, spend time with those you care about and do what you want, when you want.

☞ See Also: Living, Moving and Working Abroad: Answering Your Top FAQ’s

Our Story

I think I should start this off by telling you a bit about why we decided to learn how to make money online. Dariece and I were living and working in Canada, where we are both from. We had this dream to travel, but our jobs only offered us 2 weeks holidays per year.

I was working in a packaging plant running heavy machinery, and Dariece was working as a legal assistant in a law firm. We were fortunate to have well-paying jobs. We owned a condominium and a car and we were reasonably comfortable financially.

But neither of us loved what we did. While we put up with our jobs, we were still looking at the clock every day, dying to go home and come Friday, we were ecstatic be away from work. You see, we lived the “normal life”.

how to make money from home. Our story. Walking down road in Iran

I’d arrive home at 7:00am after a graveyard shift – the same time Dariece was getting up to start her day at the office. When I wasn’t on graveyard shifts, I’d leave the house and then be stuck in traffic for 30 minutes to an hour only to spend 9 – 12 hours at a job that I didn’t love.

I’d then finish the shift, get caught in rush hour traffic, only to arrive back home completely exhausted. We’d have time to make dinner, eat and pass out on the couch watching TV before waking up and repeating the next day. This didn’t allow for much quality time together.

Reading this you might be thinking:

“Yeah, so. That’s what everyone does”.

And that’s what we thought too. Before we started thinking about how to make money online, we lived this life and figured it was the only way.

But one day, after a very difficult day of work, I was fed up. And that’s when the research began. At first it was just about how we could save money and travel, but that soon turned into learning how to make money online and after I went down that rabbit hole, the rest is history.

Today we live in the Caribbean in a beautiful house on the water and we travel whenever we feel like it.  We earn twice as much online than we ever did working our 50+ hour / week jobs in Canada.

☞ See Also: How Blogging Changed Our Lives: Our Journey To Financial Freedom

There’s no more gridlock traffic. No more exhaustion. No more alarm clocks. No more stress.

I’m here to tell you that with absolutely no previous experience, we were able to learn how to make money online, quit our jobs and change our lives forever.

I’m extremely confident that after reading this post, you’ll be able to do the same… if you really want to.

Do You Want To Make Money Online?

A lot of people will Google “how to make money online”, read a bunch of posts and then just store the information in the back of their brain to later be deleted and replaced with something less useful.

Do I want to learn how to make money from my laptop?

Am I ready to start working right away?

Do I want to quit my job to make money online?

Do I want a new life?

These are questions you have to honestly ask yourself. The most important thing about learning how to make money online, is being willing to take the plunge. Go for it. Believe that you can have a better, freedom filled life. Start today. Don’t keep putting it off.

Read this post, apply for some of these jobs, create your own online income streams and start down the path towards financial freedom and location independence through online work.

How To Make Money From Your Laptop & Get Paid

One thing that people always ask when they’re first figuring out how to make money online is:

“How will I get paid?”

This is a valid question. Most companies will pay you one of three ways:

  • Checks: These are far less common these days, but from time to time, a company will want to send you a check. If you work online and travel around the world like us, you can ask one of your friends or family to use their address as your “home address” and have your mail forwarded there. Services like USPS or ViaBox to do this.
  • PayPal: This is probably the most popular form of online payment. When you work with a company, oftentimes they will ask for your PayPal email and they’ll send money there. From PayPal you can easily transfer the funds to your bank for free.
  • Bank Transfer: A lot of companies will simply wire you money to your bank account. For this you’ll usually need to give the company your account number, IBAN or SWIFT code, transit number, institution number etc. Even if a company sends you money in a different currency, your bank will automatically convert it to your local currency.

Sailing inspiration. Payment services for making money online

There are other ways that companies pay when you start making money online, but these are the main three ways that likely make up 90% of all payments made.

☞ See Also: Get Paid To Travel: 11 Jobs That Pay You To Explore

How To Pay Tax When Making Money Online

The next biggest question people have when they finally figure out how to make money online is:

“Great! Do I have to pay tax?”

The short answer to this is yes. In most cases, no matter where you make the money from, you’ll have to pay tax to your government, even if you don’t live in your home country.

There are some exceptions to this rule and there are ways for some nationalities to apply for non-residency for tax-purposes. To apply for this, you’d need to have no primary ties to your home country (primary ties include real estate, dependents, cars, stored property) and very few secondary ties (secondary ties include bank account, passport, retirement funds, memberships).

You’d also likely need to reside outside of your home country for more than 180 days per year and in most cases you’ll have to relinquish your health insurance.

Because every country is different, and each person’s tax situation has so many factors to consider, before you learn how to make money online, you should contact your own government tax website, or hire a tax accountant, in order to establish your personal tax situation and your own tax liabilities.

How Much Money Can You Realistically Make Online?

This is going to sound a bit crazy, but to be 100% honest, there is not really a limit to how much money you can make online! There are people like Pat Flynn and Michelle Schroeder who are earning hundreds of thousands of dollars every month through blogging.

There are web-entrepreneurs like Neil Patel and Nathan Barry who have built multi-million dollar online businesses. And beyond that, there are the Mark Zuckerbergs and Jeff Bezos’ of the world who have become billionaires though the internet.

how to make money online and work remotely
Blogging from our guesthouse rooftop in Berat, Albania


You don’t need to reach as high as Mark Zuckerberg to earn a good living online though. You don’t need to be a genius like him, or be as controversial as him. If you want to learn how to make money online, you can start earning as much as $22 / hour today, and grow from there.

☞ See Also: How To Make Money From Home – 21 Lucrative Side Hustles

How Many Hours Will You Work?

This is really entirely up to you. Many of the jobs that I’m going to list are paid hourly, while some others are private businesses that will likely earn more, based on the amount of work you put in. If you’re currently working a full-time job, then starting out with 10-15 extra hours per week could be useful.

If you’re not working or are currently in between jobs, then you can dive right in and start working 40-50 hours per week if you like.

This is the main reason I believe that travel blogging is the best way to make money online. Once your blog is up and running and has some traffic, you can literally earn thousands of dollars per month without doing anything.

making money online while not doing anything
Relaxing in a hammock on Koh Phangan, Thailand

This is because of in-content ads. Once a blog has traffic, you can easily flick a switch and turn on ads and literally earn money while you’re sleeping. This blog currently earns upwards of $3,000 from the ads you see on these pages. That’s a lot of money for flicking a switch! More about earning money from blogging later in this post.

No matter what job you choose from the list below, you’ll be your own boss so you can choose your own hours. That’s probably the best part of learning how to make money online. Once you crack the code, you can work whenever you want, from wherever you want for as long as you want.

Diversification

This is an important thing to keep in mind when you’re learning how to make money online. You’ll want to try at least two or three of the online jobs in this post in order to really make good money. If your goal is to quit your job and make your living solely from online work, you’ll need to diversify.

Coupling two or three jobs together will bring your income up substantially.

For example, if you earn $2,000 / month from both teaching English online and from completing paid online surveys and while you’re doing that, you start building a blog that can one day earn you a few thousand dollars per month, then you’re more likely to have a sustainable income stream right off the bat.

Don’t be afraid to apply for multiple jobs from this list. If you don’t like some of them, you can always quit, or swap them for jobs that better suit you.

In the jobs I’m about to share with you, I’m going to teach you how to make money online right away, while also building something that can make A LOT of money online down the road. These aren’t gambles or high risk investments. I’m talking real online jobs that pay well. Jobs that you don’t need to be an expert to get. Jobs that can change your life.

So let’s get started.

How To Make Money Online: The Jobs

It’s time to get into the good stuff. I’m listing the jobs that I KNOW can make you money because I’ve either done them myself, researched them, or interviewed people who have made money in these fields.

make money online as a travel blogger
Us blogging away at a cafe in Buenos Aires

I’ll explain how much each job can earn, where to find the work and what to expect from the jobs. If you want to learn how to make money online today, then you’ve come to the right place.

Here are the best ways to make money online:

Teach English Online

  • Pay: $22 / hour
  • How Long To Get Paid: 2 weeks+
  • Difficulty: Easy
  • Requirements: Must be Canadian or American only, have recognized TEFL certificate, pass interview and be energetic.

Currently there are a few companies that you can make money and teach English online through. The number one company that we recommend is VIPKID. We’ve sent them thousands of new teachers and because their platform offers one-on-one online teaching to children in China, they’re always looking for new VIPKID teachers.

Make money online teaching english

VIPKID pays up to $22 / hour and while they prefer teachers that have previous experience, they don’t require it.

By clicking the button below, you’ll be able apply for the job (Canadians and Americans only) and within a week, you’ll have to join a video conference call to do a demo class. Once you pass the demo class, you’ll be able to choose your own hours and work from home (or anywhere with solid wifi), teaching adorable Chinese students one-on-one!

We taught English in China for a year and we loved the job. But since there is online teaching work available with VIPKID, we’d probably never teach in a traditional classroom again. VIPKID pays more, and gives teachers the freedom to live and work from anywhere in the world.

If you’re American or Canadian, make sure to read our post about how to get a job as a VIPKID teacher, then click the button below and apply!

Start making money Teaching online

Do Surveys Online

  • Pay: $200 – $1,000 / month
  • How Long To Get Paid: Instantly!
  • Difficulty: Very Easy
  • Requirements: No requirements.

That’s right, you actually don’t have to learn how to make money online at all, all you have to do is watch ads and complete surveys for companies and you can make money. This sounds ridiculous I know, but we know of people who are earning thousands of dollars per month by completing paid online surveys.

Not all online survey companies are the same. You have to be careful with these online survey companies as some of them have terrible reviews and aren’t legitimate. For the sake of this post and helping you to learn how to make money online through reputable sources only, I’m going to list the most used and trusted online survey companies.

make money online by completing surveys

You can use these sites to earn easy money by taking surveys, playing games, searching the web, redeeming grocery coupons, shopping online, and more. Did you ever think you’d learn how to make money online by shopping? Welcome to online reward sites.

Here are some trusted, legitimate online survey companies:

  • SwagBucks: So many people spend months learning how to make money online. With swag bucks, you can sign up and start earning instantly. In fact, if you click the button below, you’ll get $5 worth of “SwagBucks” (these can be converted into PayPal cash and gift cards). After signing up, you can literally start making money online instantly by cashing in your $5 and starting to complete tasks on the site.

Make Money Online With SwagBucks

  • InboxDollars: This is another one of the most reputable online survey companies with millions of current users. Again, by clicking the button below and signing up, you’ll get an instant $5 credit – making you money online right away.

Make Money Online With Inbox Dollars

  • American Consumer Opinion: This is the cream of the crop when it comes to online survey companies. They are reputable, they pay on time and you earn money by taking surveys online. It’s that simple. Sign-up, start completing surveys and you’ll be making money online in no time.

Make Money Online With A.C.O

A few other reputable survey companies

Because completing surveys, playing games and shopping online is such an easy way to learn how to make money online, these companies are sprouting up all over the place. Be careful though! I recommend either choosing one of the companies listed in this post, or researching online to make sure that the company you go with is reputable.

  • Survey Junkie: Be an influencer. Share your opinion to help brands deliver better products & services.
  • Branded Surveys: Start completing surveys and watching ads and you can win vacations, electronics, gift cards and other great prizes. New prizes and other special offers are available every day.
  • Prize Rebel: Another great survey site, Prize Rebel has a great reward scheme, allows you to “level up” as a consistent user and you can even payout in BitCoin.

Are You Learning New Ways To Make Money Online? Share The Love!

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Start a Blog

  • Pay: $0 – $100,000+ / month
  • How Long To Get Paid: 6 months+
  • Difficulty: Medium
  • Requirements: No requirements. Need to be knowledgable and passionate about a subject. Should have a reasonable understanding of a computer, but not 100% necessary

Starting a blog and making money from it isn’t going to be the quickest way to learn how to make money online that’s on this list, but it’s probably the most lucrative. No matter how many ways you decide how to make money online, you should still have a blog.

Everyone who’s passionate about something should start a blog and begin building it. Do you love parenting, DIY, technology, food, space, travel… anything? You can blog about it and make money.

Generally it takes quite some time to learn how to make money online through blogging, but we have a FREE course for anyone who starts a new blog. Really… the course is free. Once you purchase your domain and hosting through Bluehost, you’ll be able to start building your WordPress blog today.

Our course teaches you how to set up your blog from scratch, how to write blog posts, add photos, design a professional looking website and grow an audience so that you can earn money down the road.

making money online through blogging
One of the many blogging offices we’ve had

We have over 1000 students currently and many of them have started earning money or getting free travel after just a few months of blogging! This blog currently accounts for all of our online income and even though we only work on it 15 hours per week, we still earn enough to live very comfortably, travel when we want to, and have savings in the bank.

How do blogs make money online?

There are many ways that blogs earn money, but the key to really figuring out how to make money online through blogging is diversification. Apply as many of these methods to your blog as possible:

  1. Sponsored Content: Most blogs start this way. A company basically contacts you via email (or you reach out to them) and ask you to write a review about their product or brand. They pay for this review and the link to their site (between $200 – $750 USD / article).
  2. Affiliate Sales: Instead of getting paid for the link, a better way to arrange payment is via commission. Affiliate marketing is when you link to a product or service from your blog and when one of your readers makes a purchase through your link, the company tracks it and sends you a percentage of the sale.
  3. eBooks & Product Sales: Pretty self-explanatory. You write a book or create a product and sell it to your blog readers.
  4. Social Media & Blog Management: You take over a company’s social media or blog and get paid for it.
  5. In Content Advertising: Relevant ads are placed around your blog, when someone clicks or purchases, you get paid. MediaVine is a popular company to go through for travel bloggers.
  6. Twitter Chats: Once you have a lot of Twitter followers, brands will contact you to host their Twitter chat. These typically pay around $300 each and last 1 hour.
  7. Sponsored Social Sharing: A brand will contact you and ask you to share their brand or product on your social media. Depending on your numbers, these can be charged at around $200 / share.
  8. Brand Ambassadorships: A brand asks you to continuously use their product / service and write about it, and they pay you a monthly salary.
  9. Press Trips: A tourism board or tour company invites you to their country to write about your experiences. They do this because your blog has large numbers and they want to introduce your readers to their tour or destination. The deal typically includes flights, all transport, food, travel and entertainment for the duration of the press trip and you can charge for your services on top of this ($1,500+ / trip).
  10. Something that hasn’t been thought of yet: The key to being a successful blogger is to be creative. There are a ton of bloggers coming up with new income streams every day. Step out of the box and try something new.

To build a blog, you’ll have to build an audience and grow your traffic. In our course, we’ll teach you how to do that. Learning how to make money online through blogging is a formula that can be repeated. Many of our students are proof of this. Start today. Even if you only work on your blog 1 – 2 hours per day after you get home from work, if you do it right, you can grow it to make you money.

Start making money ONLINE BLOGGING

Affiliate Marketing

  • Pay: $0 – $100,000 / month
  • How Long To Get Paid: 3 months+
  • Difficulty: Medium
  • Requirements: You must own your domain / blog (free WordPress blogs aren’t possible for affiliate sites). Basic understanding of SEO

I know I already mentioned affiliate marketing as a way how to make money online under the blogging section above, but it’s such a great way to make easy cash that I had to list it by itself.

Basically, affiliate marketing is when you recommend a product or service that you love to your blog readers and social media followers. Instead of using a normal link, you use a special tracking link that the company gives you. If your readers and followers book through the link, you get a commission.

So why is this such an amazing way to make money online?

It’s not easy. But once you have affiliate marketing set up, you can earn money without doing anything at all. Earning money through affiliates definitely takes a lot of research and time, but when done right, it’s incredibly lucrative.

This blog currently earns around 70% of its income from affiliates alone. There’s nothing better than waking up in the morning and seeing you’ve earned $500 in your sleep, or getting home from having sunset with a bottle of wine on the beach and realising you’ve made a few hundred bucks.

make money online with affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money while you enjoy doing things you love – like spending time at the beach

It’s definitely one of our favourite ways how to make money online, but you need to know how to do it right.

In our Beginners Blogger Course, we give you the basic tools you need to start building your blog, ranking in Google and earning money through affiliate marketing. If you can get one post up to the top page of Google for a good key term (ie: “best travel cameras”), then you can start earning money every month.

That term is likely worth around $2,000 per month in affiliate sales! How good is that?

By recommending products and services on your blog that you already love, you can earn money. It’s a win-win because you’re helping your readers and earning some cash on the side.

☞ See Also: Affiliate Marketing 101 – How To Earn Thousands While You Sleep

Direct Ads

  • Pay: $0 – $100,000 / month
  • How Long To Get Paid: 6 months+
  • Difficulty: Medium
  • Requirements: You must own your domain / blog (you can’t place any ads on a free blog). Basic understanding of SEO. Consistent work for 6+ months.

Again, this is one I just had to have separate from the blogging category, even though it’s very much related to owning your own blog. With direct ads, you won’t earn money right away. You’ll have to write content, do proper SEO and grow your blog traffic to a certain level. But once you get a certain amount of traffic, you can literally flick a switch on your blog and start earning ad revenue.

How much money are ads worth?

Even though this blog doesn’t have all that many ads (compared to many other websites with ads in the sidebar, menu bar, header, etc.), we still earn around $3,000 / month, every month from our ads. This is all thanks to a new ad placement company known as MediaVine.

When we first started blogging, the only option was Google Adsense. But these days, MediaVine has exploded on the scene and helped boost everyone’s ad revenue, while helping the overall user experience by only showing people ads that may be relevant to them.

You’ll need to grow your blog traffic to 25,000 page views per month before you can flick that money-making switch, but it’s possible to get there in around 6 months if you follow the proper steps to success with your blog. With MediaVine, 25,000 page views per month is probably worth around $400 – $500 / month. Not bad.

Virtual Assistant

  • Pay: $200 – $2,000 / month
  • How Long To Get Paid: 2 Weeks+
  • Difficulty: Medium
  • Requirements: Understanding of social media, WordPress & the internet.

Virtual Assistants are a growing craze both for online businesses and people who are trying to figure out how to make money online. Companies (like this blog) are always looking for help completing tasks online. We currently pay numerous people to help with this blog, some of them earn upwards of $2,000 per month.

We trained all of them ourselves, so they weren’t pros and experts before starting, meaning that you might be able to find a job as a virtual assistant even if you have no previous experience.

The tasks that you’ll be asked to complete will usually be social media, content, public relations and communications related. You may be asked to reply to emails, manage social media or communicate with clients via online chat.

VA is a good way to make money online

These jobs typically pay around $5 – $25 / hour. You can easily sign up for websites like Upwork, Freelancer, and Fiverr and place your ad there to start getting business, or join Facebook groups and communities in a niche that you know a lot about. Also, search on LinkedIn.

If you love travel, try searching Facebook for “travel bloggers community” or “travel bloggers group”. Join the relevant groups and then ask in the group if any of the people need a virtual assistant.

Similarly if you’re a parent, a chef or a doctor. Run similar searches in Facebook, join multiple communities and see if you can help out.

Sell a Course Online

  • Pay: Up to $100,000 / month
  • How Long To Get Paid: 1 month+
  • Difficulty: Medium
  • Requirements: A lot of knowledge on a topic and a willingness to teach. That’s it.

Online courses are all the rage right now. There are literally thousands of people making millions of dollars selling courses online. Why is this such a popular way to learn how to make money online? Because you get to help people by teaching them what you already know.

That’s right. There’s something that you’re good at right now that you could teach other people. Are you a good cook? A good parent? A good mechanic? A good app developer? A good hockey player? A good person?

You can teach others and it’s a great way to make money online.

This way of making money online actually goes very well with creating your own blog, because once you have a loyal audience on your blog, it’s actually quite easy to sell them your knowledge, since you’ve already been sharing it through blog posts and they’re often eager to have all of your information in one place.

Selling courses online to make money

But you don’t have to have a blog in order to figure out how to make money online by selling courses. Thanks to online education programs like Teachable and Skillshare, you can start making money through selling courses in just a few minutes.

Online Freelance Writing

  • Pay: $500 – $5,000+ / month
  • How Long To Get Paid: 2 weeks+
  • Difficulty: Medium
  • Requirements: An understanding of the language you will write in. Decent writing ability.

When we first started to understand how to make money online, one of the first jobs we started with was freelance writing. As a person who loves to write, getting paid to write articles seemed like the ultimate job.

Freelance writing will require a decent understanding of your language and of writing. But if you love to write, then there’s no reason why you can learn how to make money online freelance writing.

Perhaps with little prior experience, it will be a little bit difficult to land writing gigs in print publications like magazines and newspapers, but you should have no problem getting paid to write for blogs and websites online.

make money online with freelance writing
Writing while overlooking a lake in Argentina

Almost every company has a blog these days, and if you’re an expert in a field, or have a passion on a specific topic, you can contact blogs and websites and pitch them article ideas. Click Here to see our epic list of 99 publications that will pay you to write online. The list includes how much each job pays, what the publications expect and even the contact email to pitch your story ideas.

Some of the writing jobs on that list pay upwards of $5,000 per article, so you could make a lot of money writing online!

When we were freelance writing we were earning over $3,000 / month writing for other blogs and websites. We had no prior experience and we learned how to write better content as we went.

You don’t have to be a master novelist or author in order to get paid to write online. In fact, blogs aren’t meant to be written with flowery language. They’re simple, to the point and as useful as possible using as few words as possible. Anyone with decent writing ability can write blog posts and get paid.

Get paid to write online WITH THESE 99 WEBSITES

Sell Ebooks

  • Pay: $100 – $5,000+ / month
  • How Long To Get Paid: 2 weeks+
  • Difficulty: Medium
  • Requirements: An understanding of the language you will write in. Decent writing ability.

This is another great way how to make money online selling what you already know. Do you know enough about a topic to write 10,000+ words about it? Why not create your own ebook. Thanks to free online tools like Canva, it’s actually very easy to create, design, download and sell ebooks online.

You can either sell your creations through the Canva online marketplace, or you can upload them to Amazon and sell them there. Actually, you can sell them in many different places online, including your own blog (have you started one yet? 😉).

Make money online by selling ebooks
Our ebook created with free Canva

Selling ebooks can be a very rewarding way to learn how to make money online. You’re sharing your knowledge on a topic and helping answer questions that people have and helping them overcome challenges through your writing.

I’ve written a few different ebooks so far, like our 101 Travel Jobs Ebook and our Beginner Blogger Ebook, but we mostly give our books away for free so we don’t earn very much from them. Maybe a couple hundred dollars per month.

But we know of people who are earning thousands of dollars selling their ebooks online and it’s a great way to make money online for sure.

Work as a Translator

  • Pay: $500 – $1,000+ / month
  • How Long To Get Paid: 2 weeks+
  • Difficulty: Medium
  • Requirements: An strong understanding of the languages you will translate

Do you know two different languages and are trying to figure out how to make money online? Then becoming a translator might be right for you. While it’s not necessarily the highest paid online job in this list, it is a great one for those from developing countries who speak English, but speak another language as their native tongue.

There are online jobs at the UN which will pay far more than the $1,000 / month that I listed above, but if you check out the companies below, you should be able to find work very quickly.

  • Aberdeen: This company primarily provides transcription and caption translation services but they also hire translators on a regular basis, either to work from home or from their office in Orange County, CA.
  • WorldLingo: This long-running company hires freelance translators, editors, journalists, proofreaders, desktop publishers, interpreters, & voice-over artists. They generally expect 5 years translation experience before considering hiring you.
  • WordExpressThis California-based company hires freelance translators in more than 100 different languages all around the world.

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Complete Micro-Tasks

  • Pay: $500 – $1,000+ / month
  • How Long To Get Paid: 1 week+
  • Difficulty: Easy
  • Requirements: None

Micro-jobs are a relatively new idea for most people, but they are a very popular income streams for those looking to make money online. The reason for this is that they are very easy to get started with and if you’re quick with your hands, you can actually earn a decent amount of extra money.

how to make money online as a travel brand consultant and travel the world

There are countless companies that offer pay for freelance micro-workers, but not all of them are legitimate or reliable. Here are a few that you’ll probably recognize that pay for micro-task completion:

  • Amazon Mechanical Turk: This was one of the first companies out of the gate to hire people for micro-job tasks. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has a massive list of human intelligence tasks (HITs) that remote workers can pick from and complete for a fee that’s set by the whoever loads the job into the system. Jobs in this list include verifying personal data, image and video processing, code cleanup, information gathering, data processing, and a whole lot more.
  • Field Agent: “Agents” on this program will need to download the mobile app, then pick a micro job that’s nearest to them. They’ll then need to complete it within two hours. Jobs might include mystery shopping, price and display checks of products at stores, verification of business locations, online data entry and surveys. Obviously not all jobs are online, but becoming a field agent is a good way to earn money through numerous micro-jobs.
  • Appen: This translation and language solutions firm offers remote micro jobs to many workers around the globe, which it labels “crowdsourcing.” Projects are all done using your own computer, so it can be done online and the jobs range from UE research to transcribing audio and evaluating content.
  • Clickworker: This company uses a crowdsourcing platform to distribute a multitude of tasks to remote freelance workers around the globe. Jobs may be completed from a computer, a tablet or mobile device, and include copy writing, copy editing, data categorization, proofreading, completing surveys online, web research and more.
  • ClixSense: A company that hires people who are assigned simple tasks to complete online, along with instructions. You might be asked to complete a series of Google searches, to categorize massive image libraries, and more.
  • GigwalkWorking for Gigwalk you’ll be known as a “Gigwalker”, which is pretty cool. You’ll need to download the mobile app and apply for micro jobs in your area that fit your skills and interest. Most gigs involve verifying the display prices and placement of products at retailers.
  • EasyShift: Another app-based micro-job board, EasyShift is an easy way to learn how to make money online through micro-jobs. Download the EasyShift app on your mobile device and complete home-based (online) or location-based (shift) jobs. Most of the shifts involve photography of brand placement in stores.
  • Figure Eight: Formerly CrowdFlower, Figure Eight hires remote contributors to choose projects from a frequently updated and populated “task wall”. Some examples of the tasks you’ll be asked to complete include categorizing social media posts, transcribing audio, translation and moderating content.
  • FiverrLong a leader in the micro-job world, sign up for Fiverr and post your gigs. Help people complete micro tasks ranging from web design to voiceovers and earn $5 – $100 / gig.
  • iDictate: All you have to do is transcribe audio files that are under five minutes in order to make money online through iDictate.

Make a Podcast

  • Pay: $0 – $30,000 / episode
  • How Long To Get Paid: 1 month+
  • Difficulty: Medium
  • Requirements: A decent microphone and webcam.

Podcasts are getting more and more popular every day and they’re one of the funnest ways to learn how to make money online. Most podcasts are set up in an interview format, where you – the host – interview different people in a specific niche. If you look at the most popular podcasts in the world, like the (awesome) Joe Rogan Experience podcast, those hosts are making upwards of $30,000 per episode! Joe Rogan does five episodes per week, so that’s a pretty great income.

How to make money online creating a podcast

But you don’t have to get millions of downloads in order to make a decent income from podcasting. Like with blogging, once you start growing a loyal audience, you’ll see your income slowly start to grow. Actually, podcasting makes for a great pairing with blogging because it gives you another outlet to share your knowledge. Many of the top bloggers like Pat Flynn and Neil Patel also have podcasts which help them to spread their message further.

To create a podcast, you can check out Pat Flynn’s course here. He even has a free 3 day mini-course which is really great for new podcasters. When you’re first starting out, you may not be interviewing people, but as you grow it’s a good idea to get into that format because it’s proven to work. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make a great podcast in your own format. The key is to be passionate about a topic and to just dive in and get started in podcasting.

Niche Sites

  • Pay: $0 – $30,000 / site / month
  • How Long To Get Paid: 1 month+
  • Difficulty: Medium
  • Requirements: Own each domain and pay for hosting (only $59 with this discount)

Niche sites are basically just mini-blogs on a very specific topic. Many people don’t want to spend a lot of time creating a massive blog that will one day earn them all of their income, so instead, they make numerous smaller sites that maybe only have a few pages, and make a bit of money from each. That’s not to say that a single niche site can’t make a lot of money. There are some niche sites that earn over $1 million per year.

But for the most part, you’d want to create numerous blogs under very specific topics and then design each of them and grow them to earn money. In our Beginner Blogger Course, we also cover how to easily design a professional looking site quickly using Thrive Architect. Once you have your blog set up and running, you can install this plugin and it will allow you to drag and drop your design.

Because niche sites only need a few pages, they typically don’t take very long to build. You could have one up in just a few hours. But you’ll want to make sure that you have a very specific focus, hence the name “niche site”. Instead of creating a blog about travel for instance, you’d create a blog about “hotels in Bangkok”, or “the best travel luggage” and you’d create some great content within the blog.

Even if you just create one blog post about the best travel luggage and you use SEO to help it rank in Google, you’ll be able to earn a significant amount of money through affiliate sales on sites like Amazon.

how to make money online through niche sites
Sailing and snorkelling while working in the Caribbean

Once that one starts earning a few hundred dollars per month, you start another one. The top niche site experts often have dozens of websites and the best of them earn thousands of dollars every month. Niche sites are definitely a lucrative way how to make money online, and if you enjoy design and writing, they’re a really fun way to earn a living.

I didn’t know anything about web design before starting this blog, but thanks to Thrive Architect, I can easily start niche sites and design them beautifully in just a few hours. Thrive makes it fun, particularly for creative people, because they open up the world of web design to those who don’t know the first thing about it. No coding needed. Just drag and drop.

User Testing

  • Pay: $10 / 20 minutes
  • How Long To Get Paid: Instantly
  • Difficulty: Easy
  • Requirements: None

Thanks to a relatively new service called UserTesting.com, you can easily make money online right now. All you have to do is sign-up, create an account and start completing tasks. The tasks are usually reviewing apps and websites for money and each review generally takes around 20 minutes, so the earnings can quickly add up. As UserTesting gets more and more websites onboard, the potential to make money online through reviews grows.

If you’re looking to make a quick few bucks for beers this weekend, then User Testing might just be the way to go!

Take Your Work Home

  • Pay: Depends on your current income
  • How Long To Get Paid: Instantly
  • Difficulty: Medium
  • Requirements: A boss with an open-mind

This is one method of making money online that so many people have the potential to do, but are simply scared to ask or feel that they already know the answer. We run a very engaged Facebook group for people who are interested in learning how to make money online, and people who already earn money from home and many of them have actually succeeded in ditching the office.

All they had to do was ask, then deliver on their promises.

If you have a desk job, you can almost certainly do it from home. Maybe not every single day, but you could be doing a lot of your daily tasks from the comfort of a home office. As kids, homework is dreaded. But once you’re an adult, there’s nothing better than waking up when you feel like it and sitting down in your pyjamas to earn a salary.

work from home a great way to make money online
Mornings never looked so good!

Some people in our group were skeptical about their bosses letting them work from home, or that they’d be able to accomplish the work without being in the office, but it turned out that not only did their bosses agree to a trial, but they were actually able to get a lot more done from their houses and thus, had more free time.

To try to take your work home with you, there are three main steps:

Step 1: Preparing

Draw up a pitch explaining what tasks you can do at home, when you’ll come in, how your team can get a hold of you and why you’ll be able to get more done (less time driving to and from work, more sleep, you work better in silence etc.).

Step 2: Pitching

Now that you have your pitch, you need to actually go in and ask your boss if you can make it happen. Sometimes it works best to request a trial day or week to start with. Give your boss plenty of reasons why it’s better for you to work from home and why you’ll be productive. Be honest, upbeat and convincing. Go into this meeting believing that you will get a yes.

Step 3: Delivering

Once you get the green light for the trial, you need to actually deliver… no… over-deliver on all of your promises. Focus on being more productive at home. Use luxuries that you don’t have in the office in order to work smarter, like eating at your desk, working when you’d normally be in the commute and taking advantage of the distraction-free environment by staying focused. Have your phone ringer on and sitting right next to you so that you can quickly answer any calls from your team.

The best way to look at this is what do you have to lose?

More and more people are working from home every day. Companies are starting to realise that a person can work more efficiently from home than in the office and by not taking advantage of technology, they can be hindering their staff and productivity levels. Go for it. Just ask. If you want to learn how to make money online, why not keep doing what you’re doing, but from your computer at home.

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To Summarize How To Make Money Online

This post was not just a list of different jobs that you can do from a computer. It is meant to be a guide, to show you the way towards learning how to make money online. The main thing you need to have is a positive attitude and a will to actually move to remote income-earning strategies.

Once you start making money online from exotic destinations, or simply making money from home, you’ll see that an office no longer has to be a specific place. The landscape of the workforce is rapidly changing and you should be taking advantage of it whenever you can. Jump on this wave of location independence and ride it.

Make money online, work from home, live a happier life. These are opportunities that weren’t offered to the internetless generations of your parents and grandparents. Don’t squander them. Allow technology to free your calendar, free your schedule and open up the freedom of working when you want, from wherever you want. Take the first steps today.

Looking for more ways to make money? Check out our list of Online Jobs and our guide to make money from home.

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Nick Wharton Author Bio Picture

Written by

Nick Wharton

Nick is the co-founder, editor and author of Goats On The Road. He contributes to numerous other media sites regularly and shares his expert knowledge of travel, online entrepreneurship and blogging with the world whenever he can. He has been travelling and working abroad since 2008 and has more than 10 years of experience in online business, finance, travel and entrepreneurship. Nick's advice has been featured on the Lonely Planet, CNN Money, Business Insider,  WiseBread and Forbes and he spoke at the World Tourism Forum in Istanbul about the business of travel blogging. Learn more about Nick Wharton on the Goats On The Road About Us Page.

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