This article is a down-to-earth introduction to earning money online. You’ll learn how to make a living, explore the benefits of freelancing and entrepreneurship, analysis of the realistic types of online money-making as well as ways to get started for beginners and ways to grow for intermediates.
Types of online revenue
All ways of making money online can be categorized into 3 gourps based on what you’re selling:
- your time
- a product or digital service
- attention
Let’s look at these three groups in detail and explain why everything you can do online to make money fits into one of these, which one you should start from, and where you should aim.
Selling your time
This is the most common type of income online. You are selling your time to someone who values it and can pay you in exchange. This is the easiest category to start from.
Some examples are working as a freelance developer, designer, writer, social media manager, and so on. The good thing is that all of these are skills that anyone could learn online, so literally, you can go get a course on copywriting and then start working and making a bit of money right away!
You can grow inside of this category, by improving your skills and reputation and therefore charging more per hour, however your earnings are limited by your time.
That’s why this category of online income is hardly better than a regular job, and it is only for beginners. The next categories are where the fun really happens, so if you start from here, your goal should be to eventually move on to the next categories of online income.
If you already have a day job, you might want to start from the next categories right away.
Selling your product or digital service
Selling a product is so much better than selling your time because your revenue limit is not your own time but rather how much product you can make, and that can be delegated.
The hardest part about selling products online is marketing, in other words, getting an audience for your product. You can spend on advertising but there is no guarantee that this will be profitable, and it will cut your earnings by a lot for sure.
Better even than a product is to sell a digital service, something that has 0 unit production cost. Why? Well because now you are really only limited by marketing, you can scale up infinitely.
Again, you can pay for ads, or you can join forces with some influencer to help you sell the product or service offer and then split the revenue.
Selling attention
Attention is the most valuable asset online. Every product and service in the world needs the consumer’s attention to have a chance at selling, and in a world so crowded as ours, attention is the most scarce resource of all.
This is what influencers do, they grab people’s attention, so that every now and then, they can direct it towards some product or service that they may like.
They can then get paid by the companies they advertise for. Or better yet, they may offer their own product or service to their audience, and get the whole pie for themselves.
This is the hardest yet most exciting game to play. Build an audience.
Here, the money you can make is only limited by how much attention you can get. And the amount of attention is not limited by your time or by your industrial production capacity.
As I briefly mentioned before, the killer combo is to build attention and using it to sell your own service.
What will you start from? Leave a comment and let me know!
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