My Top 10 Methods To Make Money Online

The following article details my personal top 10 methods to make money from the Internet.

What makes this list unique is it’s based entirely on the methods I have personally used, so I can reveal to you what I did and what my results were. Bear in mind these methods represent ten years of working online, so I do not do all of them presently. At one point in my career however they were an income stream, and are still viable options for you.

This is not an all inclusive list, which means there are plenty of other ways you can make money, no doubt many of which are potentially much more profitable or better choices for your own situation. As a result you shouldn’t base your decisions on what methods you use solely on this list. Do your research and include this article as one resource.

This list isn’t strictly ordered based on my preferences from top to bottom. What I’ve done is listed the different things I did in a chronology of time of when I did them. It’s no coincidence however that as we get closer to the present (the end of the list), the more I personally like the method, and hence still use it. Over the years I made changes to how I made money in order to get closer to what I really wanted from my business.

What Is My Ideal Way To Make Money Online?

To help you understand what I was striving for, here are my main criteria when deciding what methods I use to make money online with. Bear in mind certain options only became available as a result of previous experience. Some things you can only do once you’ve done other things because you build on what you have done before.

In a nutshell, this is the criteria I concluded are important to me –

Can you make a solid profit margin?

As you will see in a moment when I reveal my top ten methods, some income streams have very slim margins, which means you must push through a lot of volume in order to make significant income. While not always the case, in most situations to sell more requires more work, more resources and generally more of everything, which results in violation of my next rule…

Can you maintain the income with minimal labour and/or is it easy to outsource?

I look for income streams that do not require significant amounts of work to maintain. If I need to drastically increase the amount of product I sell or customers I attract to make good money, and that requires more of my own time to achieve, or cannot be easily outsourced to others (it often increases your labor just to organize outsourcers, so don’t assume outsourcing is a magic solution), that’s not the method for me.

Is there potential to scale?

As per the previous point, often the logistics of growth makes a method unappealing to me, however I do want the income streams I go after to have the potential to scale, and scale big. This means if you do discover something that makes you money, the possibility to grow it to a life changing amount of money is a reality, and you understand how this can happen.

Is there passive income potential?

In most cases I prefer something that is more potentially passive than potentially scalable. Obviously it’s great to have everything, but given the choice I prefer income streams that just work and can be automated so you can do other things. You have to be careful to manage your desire to scale something with your desire to make it passive. Sometimes less is more because less gives you freedom.

Can you create a sellable asset?

The final point is really important to me because I know that my interest tends to fluctuate. Every five years or so I feel like moving on to something new and leaving my main project. In the case of business, I want to ensure that there is a profitable exit strategy. The better you meet the previous criteria (profit margin, automated, scaleable and passive), the more money you can make when it is time to sell.

I Look For The “Holy Trinity” Income Method

I’ve written before about my quest for the holy trinity of a business model, one that delivers what I consider the three most important outcomes from a business –

1. You make significant PROFIT
2. The income can be made as close to PASSIVE as possible
3. You have PASSION about some aspect of the business

Or phrased another way, my business should enable the following –

1. Consistent Income
2. Free Time (thanks to income automation, business model simplicity or large capital gain)
3. Meaning and Purpose (development of your passion and reason for being on this planet)

So now you know my main criteria that has driven me to test different income streams over the past decade. Now let me introduce you to exactly what those income streams are…

My Top 10 Ways To Make Money Online

1. Sell On Ebay

During my pre-teen and early teenage years I went from playing with Transformers, GI-Joe and LEGO, to playing Nintendo, Sega and Gameboy. Eventually I added the card game Magic: The Gathering to the mix at about 16 years of age. All of these things were passions for me at various stages of growing up, but one thing remained consistent throughout each stage; I traded and sold toys and games I no longer wanted to make extra cash.

In Brisbane where I live, before the Internet there was a newspaper called theTrading Post that was published every two weeks. It was an aftermarket for pretty much everything. Whenever I grew tired of a game or a toy I’d sell it via the Trading Post, usually in an effort to make enough money to buy the new toy or game I had in my sights.

Eventually the Internet came along and the Trading Post no longer commanded the secondhand market like it once did (though it did successfully transition online). It quickly became clear that eBay was the winner when it came to secondhand commerce online. As a result my first experience making any money from the Internet was selling old games, toys and electronics on eBay.

EBay is still I believe the best way to gain experience making money from the Internet for two reasons –

1. You are pretty much guaranteed to make some kind of sale and thus experience a transaction
2. EBay has the traffic, so you don’t have to worry about marketing your product beyond creating a good listing, the eye-balls are already there

These two reasons make eBay a great first stop because you will learn how to list something for sale online, how to take money (possibly your first experience with PayPal) and about the importance of things like titles and copywriting, if you spend the time to study how to make your eBay listings convert better.

The best thing about eBay – the abundant traffic – is also the worst thing. Barriers to entry are low on eBay, meaning competition is fierce. When competition is fierce, profit margin is slim. Unless you can find some form of competitive advantage through your supply chain, how you create listings, or you have a means to increase volume, you’re not going retire rich thanks to eBay.

I spent quite a bit of time studying eBay, both as a business model and as a means to capture new customers because of how much buying traffic is there. There is no doubt that eBay is a fantastic website that represents a huge potential to make money, but in my case I wasn’t keen to build my business there, it didn’t match enough of my criteria.

However eBay is a fantastic way to make quick money, even just as a way to turn your old items into cash to start a new online venture. If you’re brand new to Internet marketing and you don’t know your PayPal’s from your Clickbanks, or your PPC from your SEO, eBay is definitely a great place to learn some basics.

2. Sell products in forums, bulletin boards, classifieds and other community type sites

The card game Magic: The Gathering was a big part of my life from the end of highschool to the beginning of university. Although initially I was just a casual player and then tournament player, I quickly became a card trader and really enjoyed the wheeling and dealing. Although my interest in playing the game wained, most of my early projects online were connected with the game.

Before having my own website, I spent time reading websites, newsgroups, bulletin boards and forums about the game, and eventually started trading online. Back before search engines were any good most of my time was spent in particular Magic newsgroups, some that talked strategy, and some that were focused specifically on trading and/or buying and selling cards.

I managed to make spare change selling my cards through these sites. The main reason I could make any money was because I would win cards in tournaments, hence I had a supply source that would result in a good profit margin. Of course this wasn’t sustainable unless I kept placing well in tournaments, nor was it really scalable unless I started buying in cards from other sources.

I stopped using this method once I started my own card game site (more on this below), however I still believe niche collectables, particularly in a market that you really love, is a fantastic starting point to gain experience making money online. Like eBay you can make money selling secondhand items in community sites if you can find a way to source product at cost or below. It’s not a model that has much margin so again the challenge is to scale if you want to make significant profit.

3. Sell products from your own website

My first successful website was about the card game Magic: The Gathering. At first the site was just a hobby with articles written by me and a few friends. Eventually as traffic grew I began making some money with the site.

Since I was already a card trader it made sense that my Magic site have a Magic card store. At first I stocked the website with my own cards, and eventually added retail “sealed” (unopened packs of cards) by buying product at wholesale from a company in Sydney.

It was a very simple card shop made up of text listings of the cards I had for sale, the quantity available and the cost per card or per pack. I maintained the inventory myself from my room, sorting and listing cards online by hand using plain text. I didn’t use any software and most of the payments I received back then was via check or money order in the mail. Some kids would even send money and even coins (!) in the mail to pay for their purchase.

My business did well enough, although the manual labor was intense. Maintaining inventory lists, packing cards into envelopes and daily trips to the post office was not always the most fun way to spend my time, though I did enjoy having my own little business while in university.

Unfortunately my store was hit by credit card fraud when I foolishly sold a significant amount of product to an unknown person in Thailand. This experience was enough for me to decide that I had had enough of running a Magic shop and it was time to move on. You can read about the credit card fraud experience here – Yaro Starak Timeline – Part 2

Selling Products Online Is A Big Opportunity

My first three experiences of making money from the Internet all involve some kind of physical product. Online commerce obviously represents a huge opportunity to make money online, and having your own product or a passion for a product that you can source can lead to big profits.

You can sell product from your own website store, via community sites and classifieds (like Craigslist) and of course eBay and collectively make good money. The challenge, like with any business, is defining what is your competitive advantage and can you come up with a model that meets your needs. For me selling physical product was a great proving ground, but I eventually learned that profiting from information was a preferable model if I wanted to meet my aforementioned business goals.

I’ll leave it in your hands to decide whether physical commerce is the way to go for your situation.

4. Sponsorship advertising on a content site

Once my card game site was successful I began researching how to make money from it. I sold cards initially because I already knew there was a market for that and I had the cards, but I was also aware that if I had an audience I could charge sponsors money to advertise to them.

Thus began my love affair with banner advertising.

Although challenging at times to find sponsors, I was quickly able to bring in several hundred dollars per month in advertising revenue by directly approaching online companies who I considered good targets for my readership. I emailed them and asked if they would like to pay a monthly fee to place a banner on my site. Most said no, but some said yes and eventually I had a couple of loyal sponsors.

Banner income would prove very reliable over time as long as I continued to do whatever I did to maintain and build a readership. This has continued today, where several sponsors pay a fee to advertise their products and services to you, the reader of this website.

Banner advertising, when set up using a system like I presently use, can be very hands off – in fact for me it’s entirely passive – assuming there is an audience that the sponsors benefit from advertising to. It’s difficult to make loads and loads of money just from banners unless you have significant traffic, but it is easy enough to make some money from it and once you do, it generally proves very reliable unless you stop updating your website.

I’d recommend this method to you if you have some kind of content based site or a community site that attracts enough traffic to make it worthwhile for sponsors. The best thing about banners is that they don’t have to replace any other income method you use, you can use this income stream in tandem with others.

5. Sell services you provide personally

At one stage early in my career when my online income wasn’t consistent, I was part of a business grant program run by the Australian government designed to assist entrepreneurs with money to pay for life’s necessities so you can focus on growing your business. The idea is that when your business is successful you will eventually hire people and pay taxes, thus the government reaps a return on the investment.

The grant ran for 12 months and I was under the assumption (incorrectly) that I had to show consistent income growth in order to maintain my qualification for the program. My income at the time always suffered a downturn around Christmas/Summer in Australia. To combat this problem I decided to teach English face-to-face with people in Brisbane to hopefully boost my reportable income.

To advertise my tutoring service I marketed using posters offline and eventually set up a website and marketed on classified sites as well. I charged $15 an hour and eventually had a few Korean clients. This idea eventually ballooned into a full on English school with a real world premises that I managed for eight months before closing down. It turned out to be an experiment that taught me I much preferred online business to bricks and mortar.

My English tutoring days were short lived, but that doesn’t mean selling some kind of service that you personally deliver isn’t still a viable option. The Internet is a fantastic place to market your services for free. Similar to what I talked about in the first three points, you can use online community sites, classified, forums and your own website to market your service.

The downside with this model is that you are still trading hours for dollars, which is a violation of my holy trinity concept. It’s not necessarily the worst option – and many people enjoy the life of a high-paid consultant very much – but it does have the inherent limitation that a service is not replicable unless you personally do it yourself or hire people to do it for you, both activities that take time and/or resources.

If you are good at something and enjoy helping/teaching/working on other people’s projects, selling what you do online is worth considering.

6. Sell services provided by other people

My next big success after my card game site was an online proofreading business. For this business I wanted to focus on selling something that did not require either my own labor or sourcing some kind of physical product.

The business began in very simple fashion. I created the website personally myself and advertised two services – English proofreading and language translation services. I knew how to find contract proofreaders and also had access to an online database of language translators. When a job came through I’d organize a quote, slap on a margin for myself and then return the quote to the client.

Over the years I heavily refined this business. I brought on an assistant, simplified the services, cemented a pricing model and learned what methods of marketing brought in the best type of client. The end result was a full time income for me and barely a few hours of work to maintain it.

This was the first time I found a business that met all my major criteria – except one – I really wasn’t that passionate about the industry. Initially I enjoyed being the entrepreneur, the thrill of making money and automating the business as much as I could, but after a few years my passion wained. I eventually sold the business, earning a nice payday in the process, making this one of my most personally gratifying projects.

Selling a service is a real option for making money online. The challenge is sourcing good people to do the work, learning what specific offer to make to the market, how to differentiate yourself so you earn good margins, how to market what you offer and how to automate the entire process so it becomes a passive income stream.

7. Paid reviews

For a brief period on my blog I invited people to submit their product, service or website for a paid review. This means they pay a fee (for my site it was $250) and I would write an article about whatever they submitted. I would not accept just anything for review, I had to see an angle that made for relevant content for my audience. Nor was a paid review a promise that I would write positively about the subject – I would highlight both good and bad points.

Initially I didn’t mind writing paid reviews as the income was pretty good in terms of how long it would take and how much I earned. I could make as much as $250 an hour, which was great at first, but as my motivation focused more on freedom and less on money, even this became a poor incentive. Plus I never did like that I was told what to write about rather than choosing subjects I enjoyed.

The challenge for you, if this method is relevant to your growth stage, is to create a website where you can command a price for paid reviews that makes it worth your time. Until your traffic is significant, charging more than $50 for a review is not realistic, so you need to build your website asset first.

8. Affiliate marketing

As my blog audience grew I began to test a method of making money I was very interested in – affiliate marketing. My first test proved positive, though initially I was disappointed that of my readership of 500 or so people (at the time), I could only sell one or two products, making $20 commission each. It wasn’t retirement money, but it was a start.

Affiliate income has gone on to become my second highest source of income in recent years, thanks in part to the increase in my audience reach. By combining my blog and email newsletter I can reach thousands of people with just one piece of content. By testing different products and recommending things I personally use myself, I’ve been able to earn as much as $50,000 in commissions selling just one product.

Affiliate marketing is possibly the single best way to make a living online because it is so hands off, can be automated easily enough and can deliver some incredible profit margins. It’s especially good when you can use affiliate marketing to recommend things in areas you are personally interested in – for example you can make money simply writing a review of a book you really wanted to read anyway and you get paid for doing what you love.

The challenge for you is figuring out what market(s) to enter, building an audience and maintaining relationships with your readers so they trust what you tell them. If you know something that other people want to know and you are prepared to share that information, you could be looking at a fairly lucrative affiliate opportunity.

9. Sell your own information products

The single most profitable income stream I have ever developed is selling my own information products. If you are a long time follower of my work you know I have created courses on how to make money with blogs and membership sites. I also have several reports, an ebook and new products on the way.

The profit margins on information products is significant, especially as you can earn money for content you created years ago. Technology makes selling information online relatively easy to automate, once you get through the learning curve. If you focus on areas you are passionate about you can build expertise and leverage that trust and credibility to make sales of your products. Best of all, all of this can happen while you sleep, once you have built the machine to do it for you.

I personally enjoy teaching, so creating my products like Blog Mastermindthough hard work, was an enjoyable process. Once the course was created I continued to sell it year after year to people new to the industry who want to learn how to make money with blogs.

Like with affiliate marketing, your potential to succeed selling information products rests on your ability to identify market needs, tap into audiences looking for this information and then give them what they want. There are plenty of subtleties and things to learn about, but thankfully there is plenty of guidance out there too. Digging into the archives of this blog you are reading now and downloading my free reports – The Blog Profits Blueprint andMembership Site Masterplan are fantastic starting points if you want more help.

10. High end private coaching

I’ll end this article with something I only recently did – offer high end coaching to a select group of clients who had to apply to work with me. My program cost between $5,000 and $10,000 and I turned away more people than I accepted. This was deliberate as I knew working one-on-one with people is not something I can do with many people or I will use up all my time. However I was keen to help certain people who were in the right position so I could learn more about the challenges they face.

Private coaching, like consulting, is another situation where you trade time for dollars, but in terms of your hourly pay rate it is hard to find a higher paying “job”. Of course you don’t have to start off charging thousands of dollars. Depending on your expertise and what kind of outcome you help people achieve, will determine how much you can charge. Offering coaching for $100 per session is not out of reach for most people, and that’s not a bad starting rate if you are looking to build up your experience through helping others closely.

Again the Internet is by far the easiest and most affordable tool to attract coaching clients. In many cases you can add private coaching to many of the other methods I listed above, including selling info products you create, affiliate products, sponsorship banners and physical products.

Combine What Works For You

In my case progressing through these various methods, figuring out what I actually want from a business and then combining different methods to maximize my income and personal satisfaction has worked the best.

I recommend you follow a similar path to build your own business. Figure out what you like using the options above and other resources online, begin testing to see what works and learn more about what you enjoy, and keep at it until you find what “floats your boat” and is incredibly profitable too.

Good luck!

Yaro Starak

Internet Entrepreneur

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An Easy Interface for the Internet of Things

Amid a wide range of new platforms to manage streams of data from the Internet of things, a simple version emerges that anyone can use.

With the advent of the Internet of things, potentially billions of devices will report data about themselves, making it possible to create new applications in areas as diverse as factory optimization, car maintenance, or simply keeping track of your stuff online. But doing this today requires at least some degree of programming knowledge. Now Bug Labs, a New York City company, is trying to make it as easy to create an Internet of things application as it is to put a file into Dropbox.

With a new service called Freeboard, Bug Labs is giving people a simple one-click way to publish data from a “thing” to its own Web page (Bug Labs calls this “dweeting”). To get a sense of this, visit Dweet.io with your computer or mobile phone, click “try it now,” and you’ll see raw data from your device itself: its GPS coordinates and even the position of your computer mouse. The data is now on a public Web page and available for analysis and aggregation; another click stops this sharing.

Freeboard, expected to be launched Tuesday, makes sense of such streams of data. A few more clicks create quick graphical displays of the shared information, such as location, temperature, motor speed, or simply whether a device is on or off. “We are trying to make the Internet of things far simpler, and far more accessible, to anybody,” says Peter Semmelhack, CEO of Bug Labs, a business that initially focused on the development of open-source modular hardware (see “Bug Labs Adds New Modules”), but which now develops software platforms.

Freeboard is not the most technically sophisticated Internet of things application platform. Many others are emerging, including Axeda, Etherios, and OpenRemote (see “Free Software Ties the Internet of Things Together”), with different business models and levels of complexity. Big companies like General Electric are developing factory-monitoring software platforms.

Yet Freeboard stands out among the various platforms because “it’s the easiest to use,” says Venkatesh Prasad, group and technical leader for vehicle design and infotronics at Ford Motor.

Prasad showed how Freeboard could quickly unlock the value of vehicle-generated data. He’s been experimenting with Freeboard using a car data interface called Open XC. Prasad took data on the on-off state of windshield wipers to come up with a prototype of a warning alert that could someday be dispatched to a car a few kilometers back to warn the driver of wet roads. “I set it up and did it in a matter of a few minutes—and I don’t code for a living,” he says.

In theory, anything could be connected: a bicycle or other object could get wired with the help of an emerging class of cheap gadgets that report GPS coӧrdinates to cellular networks (see “The Internet of Things, Unplugged and Untethered”) and easily be turned into a “dweet stream” of location or other data. Semmelhack showed off one application – a Freeboard dashboard of a whiskey still in Washington built by of one of his developers’ fathers. It showed real-time temperature and humidity and a video stream of the apparatus.

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Shape-Shifting Touch Screen Buttons Head to Market

An iPad accessory launching later this year will bring transparent morphing buttons to the device’s screen to aid touch-typing.

As they peck out text on the featureless glass surface of their phone or tablet, some people still mourn the passing of the physical keyboard. Now technology is heading to mass production that can offer the best of both worlds: a featureless surface for watching video and buttons that rise out of it when you need to type.

That technology was developed by startup Tactus Technology, which uses tiny fluid-filled channels and elastic blisters to make buttons rise up from a device’s screen and then disappear without trace when they’re no longer needed (see “Demo: A Shape-Shifting Smartphone Touch Screen”).

Electronics manufacturing giant Wistron has now modified equipment at one of its factories in China to produce touch-screen panels with the shape-shifting technology inside. Wistron is one of the world’s largest electronics manufacturers; it’s made devices for brands including BlackBerry, Apple, and Acer. The company also recently became an investor in Tactus.

The first fruit of the tie-up will go on sale later this year in the form of a protective case with Tactus technology inside for Apple’s iPad Mini. The design includes a transparent screen protector that covers the front of the device. However, sliding a mechanical control on the side of the case raises up a transparent set of buttons or guides on the screen protector, over the touch keyboard, to make typing easier. Sliding the control back will cause those buttons to melt away, leaving a clear, smooth pane of glass.

“Users will still type on the screens as they do today, but with better performance, confidence, and satisfaction,” says Tactus CEO Craig Ciesla.

Tactus won’t reveal the exact design of the case launching this year, or of a similar one slated to launch next year. Nor will it say which brands are behind them. But it did let MIT Technology Review try out an internal prototype case for the iPad Mini with the same basic design.

Sliding the control on the left pushed fluid into a set of guides that rose up between keys on the virtual keyboard. That they were ever there is discernable only by a close examination of the screen protector in the right light. But the panel feels noticeably less smooth to a finger swiping the surface.

The guides provide physical feedback when the fingers don’t directly hit a key, something that’s lacking on a typical touch screen. In a few minutes of testing, it seemed to help my fingers learn how to hit their targets better. Tactus says it has been testing different-shaped guides but won’t say which the first products will use.

The relationship with Wistron could lead morphing buttons to appear in tablets and other devices. Tactus has demonstrated both a prototype seven-inch tablet with its technology fully integrated into its display and an off-the-shelf tablet modified to include the technology. When the buttons are built into a device in that way, their movements are driven by a small electric pump. On the demonstration prototypes, the buttons automatically pop up when the keyboard appears.

“We are only at the beginning of what we expect to be a multiyear partnership, where the Tactus solution will be brought to multiple markets, starting with mobile computing,” says Ciesla. He says the two companies have begun working on the design of products and prototypes for carriers, electronics brands, and retailers. One project is a notebook-style device that has a second, morphing screen where the keyboard would usually be.

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Pocket Printer secures Kickstarter cash

An Israeli start-up plans to release a printer early next year that is small enough to fit inside its owner's pocket but works with any-sized paper.

Zuta Labs is proceeding with the project after raising over $435,000 (£260,000) via a crowdfunding site.

Rather than feeding paper through a machine, the project fits an ink cartridge to a small robot that crawls over a document to create it.

However, its relatively slow speed may limit its appeal.

The current prototype can only print about one page per minute in greyscale and offers a significantly lower resolution than traditional desktop inkjets.

But the Jerusalem-based engineers said they hoped to make improvements before the first devices shipped to backers of the Kickstarter campaign in January.

The current prototype uses a black ink Hewlett-Packard cartridge

"We can now order smaller and stronger engines to make it move faster," Tuvia Elbaum, the firm's chief marketing officer, told the BBC.

"The resolution is very low because we are using an old cartridge, but we are talking to several manufacturers to use smarter and newer versions of smaller cartridges."

Print and run

The Pocket Printer features several wheels in its base to let it turn and drive in different directions. The team says the final product will be controlled by a PC or smartphone via Bluetooth, but the current prototype still needs a wired connection.

The engineers plan to cover the internal mechanism with a smooth tear-shaped plastic skin, and said the device would be 10cm (3.9in) tall, 11.5cm (4.5in) wide, and weigh 300g (0.7lb).

"It's for someone who wants to print one, two or three pages on the go," added Mr Elbaum.

"A memo, a small contract, notes or even an e-ticket before a flight.

"Way further along the roadmap we want a colour version and we want it to print on different surfaces - people have asked for tiles, T-shirts and walls, which would require different types of ink."

He added that it was likely to cost $240 (£140) when it went on sale to the public in 2015.

Education opportunity

The Valiant Turtle, launched in 1983, was one of the first robot printers

One observer suggested the firm should rethink its business strategy, bearing in mind other manufacturers already offered portable colour printers at lower prices, albeit ones that were more bulky and limited to certain paper sizes.

"I personally can't see an effective use case that you would have above and beyond what is already available - boarding passes and stuff like that are moving to the phone," said Stuart Miles, founder of gadget review site Pocket-lint.

Economatics's BBC Buggy could be fitted with a pen to create drawings

"It reminds me of the turtle printers that were around for BBC Micro computers all those year ago, which you would program and off they'd go - and I think it would have more sense to target it at an education market."

Jason Fitzpatrick, director of the UK's Centre for Computing History, agreed with this analysis adding that schools were actively seeking modern equivalents to the Valiant Turtle and BBC Buggy to help them teach children how to use Raspberry Pi computers.

"When you can do a bit of programming and make it control something in the real world, everything sort of opens up," he said.

"Having another device that you could mess about with would be great.

"But you can already buy small printers that print things like business cards and labels, and there are other alternatives out there that fulfil mobile users' needs."

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