I once heard someone say, “Building an online business is a marathon, not a sprint.” That was certainly true for me: I spent nine months working on my first online business, a niche website called RVinspiration.com, full time before I got my first paycheck from Amazon Associates for about $30.
But what do you do if working full time for months is not feasible for you? It’s certainly tough to grow an online business while working a regular day job, so the sooner you can replace that with a side hustle or supplemental income, the better.
Below are some ways digital entreprneuers I’ve personally known started earning paychecks while simultaneously growing their businesses. These ways to make money online may be able to help you quit your day job sooner rather than later.
1. Freelance Writing
Several bloggers / niche website owners I know wrote paid articles for other websites before their own websites started bringing in enough income that they no longer felt freelance writing was a good use of their time. If this is something you’re interested in, I would recommend that you not look for jobs on generic freelancing websites like Upwork.com, because there you’ll be competing with people who can afford to work for very little per hour.
Instead, search out the major websites and print publications in your niche and contact their marketing department to find out if they pay for articles (look for a link on their website that says “work with us” or “write for us”, and try Googling “{your niche} write for us”). Some may have their own team of content writers, but you may also find some who accept freelance submissions.
As an added bonus, if you write a freelance article for a website that allows you to include a link to your own website in your author bio, you’ll be building quality backlinks, which are one of the most important factors for SEO that will help your own website later on. (Take this into consideration when negotiating your price, as a link from a well-established can be considered a form of payment!)
2. VA Work
Many of the skills you learn as an online entrepreneur make you qualified to do tasks other online business owners are willing to pay a VA (virtual assistant) for. For example, do you design graphics for promoting content on Pinterest or social media? If so, you know how time-consuming that can be, and you’ll understand how much value you can offer to other online business owners who would like to outsource this important marketing task!
Other tasks that digital entrepreneurs frequently pay VA’s to do using skills you probably already have or can easily develop include email inbox management, social media post scheduling, Facebook group moderation, and blog post formatting.
Read my article “How to Become a Virtual Assistant” to learn more about getting started in this type of work.
3. Speaking Gigs
Look for conventions, meet-ups, conferences, and virtual summits in your niche that feature speakers, and find out if they are hiring for future events. Be prepared with a few ideas to pitch them, and don’t be discouraged if you hear “no” a few times before you get a “yes”!
An RV blogger friend of mine did this when her blog was fairly new; she reached out to the organizers of RV shows (by visiting their websites and looking for contact information) until finally one of them agreed to sign a contract with her! Even though she didn’t have many visitors to her site at that time, the organizers of the RV show were impressed by their content and the fact that they were published authors (i.e. had written an e-book which they were selling on Amazon!). Since then my friend’s blogging business has grown a lot, but paid speaking gigs are still her best source of revenue.
If you can’t find any events to speak at, why not create your own? You could hold a workshop in your local community (perhaps at a library or community center) and advertise it in local Facebook groups, Meetup.com, the Nextdoor app, and with flyers on community bulletin boards. If you don’t think the topic you blog about would be of interest to very many people in your community, you could even offer a workshop about how how set up a blog!
4. Create Custom Ads
Premium ad networks like Ezoic, AdSense, and Mediavine usually require a minimum of 25k-30k website visitors per month, and this is usually about the number (in my opinion) where it starts making financial sense to consider putting ugly ads on your website.
However, you don’t have to wait that long to put ads on your site, because you can create your own ads by designing graphics on Canva to advertise affiliate products you feel comfortable promoting (especially ones which offer high affiliate commissions). Then add these graphics to your sidebar or in between paragraphs of your most popular blog posts hyperlinked with your affiliate links.
To get ideas for ad design, try doing a Google image search for “banner ads”.
I’ll confess, this is a strategy I tried out early on that didn’t work very well for me, but I figured at least it couldn’t hurt. One thing I didn’t do that I would definitely do now if I were to try this again is to add a Facebook retargeting pixel to my website and run some Facebook ads for the products I was promoting that would show specifically to people who had clicked the images on my website, since I know now that people are more likely to buy the second or third time they hear about a product.
5. Partner with Other business Owners
A mistake new entrepreneurs often make (a mistake I made!) is to think of other business owners in their niche as competition. Instead, think of them of as colleagues, potential co-workers, or even future friends! By getting to know and partner with other people who are targeting the same audience you are, you can multiply your reach while sharing the work load.
An example: Four RV bloggers I know decided to form a mastermind group when they were all just starting out, and one idea they came up with was to host a virtual summit about RVing. They all worked together on the project, and as a result, they all drastically grew their audiences and authority in their niche and eventually sold the virtual summit as its own business, resulting in a nice payout for all for all of them!
Don’t think you can only partner with other new business owners, either. Even if you don’t have a huge audience yet, if you can bring another skill to the partnership such as graphic design, video editing, a great product idea, leadership and organizational skills, or even just your time, with effort, creativity, and a willingness to provide as much value you receive, you can find mutually beneficial ways to work with whoever you want.
It Still Takes Time.
Hopefully I’ve given you some ideas here that can help you start earning some money while you’re working on the slow process of creating and marketing content, building an audience, and figuring out how to monetize your audience.
Even these ideas will likely take time to implement and gather steam, so it might still be a few months before any of them will deliver a paycheck, and even longer before you’re seeing the kind of money you would like to be making. But what I want to convey is that there are ways you can make money online other than directly through your business, and the more you can diversify your streams of income, the more stable your finanicial situation will be, and less dependant on a single factor such as the Google search algorithm or whether the U.S. government decides to ban a particular social media platform (#TikTokBan).
What ways have you made money online? And what advice would you share with others looking to do the same? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!
