How To Make Money Online | The Ultimate Guide

By the end of this year, I’ll have earned more money than I ever earned. All thanks to my little device here my laptop, and an internet connection. A couple of years ago, I was sitting down just like you are right now watching videos on YouTube, reading blog posts on how to make money online, and trying to figure out how I could change my life. Growing up, I always knew deep down inside that I wanted more out of life than just working a 9 – 5 job.

Clocking in clocking out, day in day out, using my time, my health, and my energy to make some big corporations richer. And while they continue to get richer, I’m struggling to make ends meet, and they don’t care because to them I’m just a number, a number that can easily be replaced. If something tragic were to happen to me tomorrow, they might send their condolences to my family. But then, they would proceed to quickly find my replacement as they should because after all, I’m just a little cog in their great big massive machine.

To that, I say Hell no! I believe we live in one of the greatest times in human history. Somebody with no formal education, no college degree, no previous experiences, no network or connections, can completely reshape and transform their life, thanks to the internet. In this article, I want to explore how exactly you can start making money online and changing your life using tools that you already have in your possession, such as your phone or laptop, and an internet connection. This is the ultimate guide on how to make money online.

What You Should Know

The next part of this article may possibly be the most important part of it, .try not to be distracted. Before you can begin making money online, it’s first going to be very important that you change the way you think about money and how it works. You see money is not just pieces of paper with the faces of important dead people, instead, start thinking of money as a medium of exchanging value.

Every single time that you spend your money, you’re spending it because you see value in what it is that you’re spending money on. Even if you’re giving money to a charity, yes you’re doing that out of the kindness of your heart, however, you’re only giving money to that charity because you see value in the causes that the charity supports. When you spend money on groceries you’re not buying those groceries because you need them to survive, because if you wanted to you could just go and grow your own food raise your own lifestyle milk, your own cows.

You’re buying groceries because you see value in those groceries, and the value comes in the form of convenience. It’s far more convenient for you to simply spend money on prepackaged food than it is to become a farmer and live off the land. And so you go to the grocery store, and in exchange for that store providing you with value in the form of convenience, you give it money. So that all makes sense right.

But here’s where things start to get even more important, we’ve established that money is a medium of exchanging value, however, It’s also critical that you understand that value is subjective. In other words, what you think is valuable may not be valuable to somebody else. You might be willing to spend money on a gym membership because you see value in fitness, but somebody else may not care about fitness. Therefore they don’t see value in spending money on a gym membership.

Diamonds

Take diamonds for example, diamonds are not valuable because they’re rare, in fact, compared to other gemstones diamonds are the most common stone in existence. The Tanzanite gemstone, which can only be found in one small mining location in Tanzania is actually technically the rarest gemstone on earth and yet it still sells for half the price compared to a diamond.

Why is this? Well, it’s because diamonds have perceived value. Large corporations and clever marketers have convinced the public that diamonds are rare, and therefore expensive even though they’re actually the least rare gemstone, and therefore should be the least expensive.

Money is a medium of exchanging value, and value is subjective and based on perception. And so, the easiest way for you to start making money online is to provide perceived value. So here’s how this article is going to be broken down, there are going to be three levels in total and each level will compound on the previous level. The higher up you go, the more money you can make online.

We’ll start at level one services, then move up to level two which is products, and then we’ll end at level three which is attention. This is the level where things all start to make sense, everything that we talked about in the previous two levels will all fall into place.

1. Services

So we’ll start first with services, let’s talk about this. Making money online selling services is very easy to get started with pretty much anybody can do it, and you can easily make enough money to quit your 9 to 5 job. Now when I say selling services, I’m basically just referring to you rendering services to somebody else who’s willing to pay you money for it.

The service could be you developing websites, doing graphic design, copywriting, translation services, marketing services, admin services, really anything that requires you to have a particular set of skills. Now, you’re probably thinking “yeah but Prince, I don’t have any skills”. And so that actually brings us to the first step of making money online selling services, which is to learn a new skill.

What to Learn

Now, obviously, it would be a good idea to learn something that you would actually enjoy doing. For example, if you despise writing, then you may not want to spend time learning to be a better copywriter because if this is something that you’ll be doing. A lot of you obviously want to get some joy out of doing it, but in addition to learning a new skill around something that interests you, you should also be very strategic and learn a new skill around something that will always be useful to you.

For example, I learned how to develop websites, yes I did enjoy doing them, but I also knew that my ability to create my own custom websites was always going to be useful for me. And lastly, be sure that that skill has a lot of perceived value. Remember earlier when we talked about how diamonds have perceived value, and that’s why they’re so expensive. Well, skills are the same exact way, there are certain skills such as coding, web design, copywriting, and marketing, these skills have a lot of perceived value in the marketplace.

That’s why many freelancers who learn these skills can easily earn six figures per year, no questions asked. Because the market believes that these skills are valuable, therefore people who have these skills deserve to be paid more and so they are. Compare that to something like data entry or logo designing which doesn’t pay a lot of money because those skills don’t have a lot of perceived value.

Freelance Site

If you don’t even know where to start looking to figure out what skill you want to learn in the first place, I’d recommend going to Upwork, hovering on find work, and then clicking on ways to earn, scroll down, click on browse more, and then click on see more. You’ll find a massive list of different services, but keep in mind some of the more popular services that likely will have more perceived value are going to be these top six.

This will give you a really good idea of the types of services that people are looking for that you can then go and learn how to do. Once you’ve found a service that you like, simply start doing as much research about it as you possibly can. Use Google and YouTube to find free tutorials and guides on learning that new skill, and just spend time putting in the work. This is exactly what I did when I learned how to build websites.

I took about two weeks of just grinding all day every day practicing, learning, and doing what I could to learn the basics. The basics were enough to get me started making money, and then once you’ve learned the skill, it’s now time to start finding people and companies who are willing to pay you for your services.

Believe it or not, this is actually the easiest part of the process because nowadays you’ve got sites like Upwork and Fiverr that businesses use to hire people who have a very particular set of skills. The website that I use personally to start making money online was Upwork after I learned all the basics of building websites, found some good pre-built templates that I could use to help me build websites for potential clients.

What I Did

I just began submitting as many job proposals as I possibly could because here’s a secret that nobody else will tell you, finding businesses and people who are willing to pay you money for your services is actually just a numbers game. Let’s just say for example, that you learn the skill of copywriting, and let’s say that there are 1,000 new copywriting jobs posted on Upwork, every single day.

Over the course of the next 10 days, you submit one job proposal per day for a total of 10 submitted proposals to 10 different job listings. Out of those 10, one of the clients liked your proposal and gave you the job. Now, we can roughly assume that it’ll take about 10 submitted proposals before you can get one job. And so with that, imagine now that instead of you only submitting one proposal per day that you submitted 10 proposals per day.

And now over the course of those same 10, days instead of only having submitted a total of 10 proposals you’ll have submitted 100. If we take that same ratio of getting one job per 10 jobs submitted this means roughly 10 jobs or one job per day.

This actually brings us to a very important point, and the reason selling services online is only a level one is because selling services is not scalable. The amount of money that you make will be completely contingent on how much time you’re willing to work. It’s just like your 9 to 5, job you get paid based on your efforts on the time that you put in.

While this is certainly fine, especially at the beginning because there will be work if you really want to start scaling your income higher and higher, then you’ll want to take a step up into level 2 of making money online which is

2. Selling products

The way I see it, there are three different ways that you can sell products online we’ll talk about all three in this article. But there are really only two that I believe you should focus most on if you want to scale and essentially make an infinite amount of money, and that are digital products and affiliate products.

The problem with physical products is that they’re actually very similar to selling services. Selling a service can be lucrative but it’s very difficult to scale because the amount of money that you make is limited to the amount of time that you have, which for all of us is just 24 hours. With most of those hours not even being spent working.

With physical products, you have to make the product and this costs time and money. Every time that product sells, you have to reproduce it again which means you’re spending more time and more money and of course, you have to distribute the product. This typically means paying for shipping, which once again can be both time-consuming and expensive.

I would personally prefer to sell something that’s a lot more passive, I would also love to not have to spend all of my time making the product over and over again every single time it sells because again, I want it to be passive. And so this is where the other two products come in, digital products and affiliate products. And we’ll start off talking about digital products.

Digital Products

When I say digital products, I’m specifically referring to things like ebooks, online courses, membership websites, website templates, design assets, printables, and things like that. Many of you have likely read some of my posts where I talk about this before, and I talk about it a lot because it works. The reason it works is that, unlike physical products, digital products are scalable.

You only have to make them once, and after you make them you can sell them an infinite amount of times without having to spend any time or money reproducing them. Likewise, the cost of distributing digital products is zero dollars because you don’t have to ship anything. So, what I want to do now is talk about the three main subcategories of selling digital products, as well as some real-life examples of each of them so that you could literally start doing it as soon as you finish reading this article.

Sub-Categories of Digital Products

The three subcategories of digital products are educational products, design assets, and digital assets.

Educational Products

Within this category of digital products, you’ve got things like ebooks, premium guides, online courses, membership websites, and the list goes on. The thing that I like about educational products is that even if you don’t think that you could teach somebody something else you know you can, and it’s really as simple as using websites like SkillShare or even YouTube to learn a new skill and then take in your newfound knowledge and teaching it to somebody else.

For example, I remember when I was first getting started with web development, I was about one month into having learned the skill, and one of the jobs that I got on Upwork was a consulting job. This consulting job was basically just a job to teach this small company how to update their website, their plugins, their themes, all very basic beginner stuff and so.

Even though I only had one month’s worth of experience doing this, I did not consider myself an expert by any means. I still took the job and I made some pretty decent money consulting this company for about two hours.

The same principles apply to educational products, if you have one month’s worth of experience in whatever it is that you’re doing well, guess what, you have one month’s worth of information more than somebody who has no experience and is a complete beginner. That means even if you are a beginner, you can still teach another beginner something valuable. It may not be valuable to you because you don’t perceive it to be valuable however, other people will perceive it to be valuable and therefore they’ll be willing to pay for it.

You should really consider diving into this world of educational products because it’s a really great way to make money online.

Digital Assets

Digital assets are things like stock photography, videos, music, software, art, or anything like that. Sometimes the hardest part of making money online is getting your product or service in front of other people, and one of the easiest ways to do this is by using existing websites with existing audiences. In other words, you’re not having to spend your time and money trying to build your own audience, you can just use an existing website’s audience.

This is a strategy that has not only been proven to work but one that can easily earn you six figures per year if you’re actually selling quality assets. The final way of making money selling digital products is with

Affiliate Marketing

This one can actually be combined with the other previous two. Affiliate marketing is the process by which an affiliate aka you, earns a commission for marketing another person or company’s product. For example, I have a website called elementormarket, and on this website, you can buy pre-built website templates for a WordPress page builder plugin called Elementor. However, at the top of the website, there’s a link that says get Elementor pro and when anybody clicks on that link and proceeds to buy the pro version of this plugin, I receive a commission.

Not only am I making money by selling digital assets with my website templates, but I’m also making money through affiliate marketing. This is literally just one tiny example of how you can use affiliate marketing to make money online. There are entire affiliate networks that you can join that have thousands of different companies in them that you can become affiliates for.

The biggest trick though, and how you can really start making a lot of money with affiliate marketing is by creating relevant products that provide a lot of value and including affiliate links inside of those products. So the website I used in the example, is just one example but another example of how you could do this is by creating free ebooks and including affiliate links inside of those books. Because you’re providing a lot of value for free, more people will buy the book, click on your links, and earn you affiliate income.

You could create a blog and include affiliate links inside of your articles, this is what I do personally with my blog. You could create a YouTube channel and add affiliate links inside of your video descriptions, but essentially, anytime you’re selling a digital product or you’re giving away information, there’s going to be a way that you can include affiliate marketing inside of that.

Related: Affiliate Marketing. A Crash Course on Making Money Online

Finally, the last level of making money online is level three

3. Gaining Attention

Every single person that you watch or listen to online today whether it’s on YouTube, Tik Tok, Instagram, Twitch, or a podcast, every single person that you watch that has an audience started from zero. They had to work their way up slowly building an audience and gaining people’s attention in order for them to get to where they are today. But once they arrive, once they have hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers online, what they do with all of that attention it depends on their goals.

Influencers

Casey Neistat used his attention and influence to start 368, a creative space for YouTube. Another creator Graham Stefan used his attention and influence to start bankroll coffee, a podcast, two other YouTube channels, and a few courses. Peter McKinnon used his attention to sell high-quality merch lut packs, and other things. Mr. Beast used his attention to start a fast food chain, a food company, and multiple other YouTube channels and has his hands on several other projects.

Are you noticing a trend here, all these people have used their influence to create more value for more people. I mean the reason they were able to grow their audience and grow their income and start making a lot of money online in the first place was that they provided value. Value in the form of education value, in the form of entertainment, value in the form of utility, and then once they were able to grow their audience and gain attention, they continued providing value in new ways.

Making more money online becomes exponentially easier once you learn how to gain attention, whether you become a YouTuber, a Streamer, a Tik Toker, or a Podcaster. Whatever your ability to win other people’s attention will be a direct reflection of your ability to earn significantly more money.

What You Should Know

Earlier in this article in level two, we talked about education products and how you can sell these to make really good money online. And yes, you can certainly still sell these things without having an audience. But it is so much easier to sell an ebook, or a course, or access to a membership website, or any of that if you have an audience of people who will give you their attention.

Am I saying that you should use and abuse people’s attention? Of course not, if you are going to sell a course make sure that the course is actually providing massive value. If you’re going to sell a product make sure that the product is actually high quality, unique, and worth the price. Always provide value and always give back.

Do you want to know what the secret is to growing and gaining an audience online, aside from the number one ingredient which is consistency the other most important thing is this right here W-I-I-F-M, what’s in it for me?

When I was writing this article, or when I write any articles that matter, the first thing I do is, I put myself into your shoes, and I ask myself this question, what’s in it for me if I spend my time reading this article? What’s in it for me, what am I going to gain from this? And if you can answer that question with every single piece of content that you make, and you can keep making content consistently over a long period of time, then you will gain people’s attention.

You will grow an audience, and then you can continue providing more value to your audience by coming out with new content, new books, new courses, new products, and new things that are going to continue to add more value to someone else’s life. From there, how much you earn is up to you. I mean honestly, the sky is the limit.

And hey! if you want to know more ways that you can make money online in less than 24 hours, then I would highly recommend that you go through this article. You guys are amazing and as always, Peace and Happy Hustling!