Genius Ways How to Make Money Online Legitimately (on the Side) in 2020

You’re here because you want to learn how to make money online. And you’re in the right place.

If you’re looking for legitimate ways to make money online without having to first purchase an in-depth training course (which always seems to cost $97) about how to make money online, then welcome to the best free tutorial on the Internet when it comes to making money online.

This is my ultimate guide on how to make money online, and I’ve worked hard to keep it completely free.

There’s no catch, no tricks, and no up-sells here.

I’m sharing everything I’ve learned over the past decade, pulling from my own experience in earning a consistent $20,000/mo or more in side income (on the side of my day job) from online sources like affiliates, courses, freelancing, drop-shipping and other ways to make money online that we’re exploring in this guide.

Have questions? Check out my monthly blog income reports where I break down exactly how I’m making money online from my blog.

👋 And by now you probably already know… one of the best ways you can start making money online right now is launching a blog of your own. For that reason, I recently put together a free master guide that breaks down how to start a blog and I share the exact strategies I’ve used to turn my blog into a more than $40,000/mo business.

I'm here to tell you that you can too—you can (relatively quickly) learn how to make money online.

It won't always be easy, and you'll of course have to work hard, push through mistakes and failures along the way.

But here's the reality; the internet has opened up so many possibilities to people regardless of age, location, or background to build a sustainable, online business or side project that can make extra money online every single month.

And as I said, I've experienced this first-hand.

For the past several years, I’ve been on a mission to experiment with the best ways to create sustainable online income and chase my dreams of self-employment. And while I’ve seen my fair share of success, things haven’t always been easy either.

Along my journey, I’ve launched four separate online businesses. The first one lost me $6,537 in a matter of months, while I completely overestimated the audience size for the second. Both shut down very quickly.

But after my first two failures trying to make money online, I started to figure some important things out.

My next self-funded business hit $160,000 in revenue in its first year alone. After that first taste of self-made success, I’ve gone on to sign consulting contracts worth tens of thousands of dollars with startups like LinkedIn and Google, launch profitable online courses, and grow my blog to over 400,000 monthly readers and $50,000/mo in side income.

All these highs and lows have given me a clear understanding of what works (and what doesn’t) when it comes to making money online.

There’s no better time than now to build a business and make money online.

With over 3.2 billion peoplehttps://www.linkedin.com/in/graphicsdesignr/ now actively using the internet, we’re well into a massive transformation in how the world does business. We’re living in an age where there’s no longer limitations on what you can achieve based on geographic location or lack of financial resources.

If you have an internet connection and a few dollars in your bank account, there is little that can actually get in the way of you making some extra money online.

There are quite literally hundreds of clever ways to make money online. From taking online surveys, to renting or selling your old clothes, flipping your iPhone to someone in a different country, and even buying low-cost products locally, just to resell them for a higher price on Amazon. There’s truly no shortage of unique ways to make money online.

But don’t fall for the trap of “easy ways to make money online”

Sounds amazing, right? It is. But, before we dive in, I need to address the elephant in the room...

There’s no such thing as an online get-rich quick scheme.

Most of the "quick" and "easy" ways people talk about when it comes to making money online—are not true businesses.

Sure, some of them may be good for creating a few hundred or even thousand dollars in one-time revenue. But they’re not going to help you unlock financial freedom and achieve complete control of your lifestyle.

At best, they're shortcuts that don't last forever—and many of the "opportunities" like network marketing giants Herbalife and others offer, often pan out to either be a scam or at the very least, damaging to your personal relationships. And I would never advocate for that.

The Internet has opened up so many opportunities to entrepreneurs and forward-thinking workers to make money online. But it’s also opened up considerable competition.

Here's the hard truth: The only ways to make money online in any lasting manner, involve putting in real time, effort, blood, sweat and tears.

This isn’t to scare you off. I simply want you to know that this guide is going to focus solely on ways to make real, sustainable extra income online. Not just a few quick bucks. I want to share all the mistakes I've made that got me to where I am now so that you don’t have to go through them, and can build a successful online source of income for yourself.

Don’t get me wrong, there are still a lot of great opportunities to make money online today. It’s that the most common ideas have been picked through a lot more than they were a few years ago. To stand out you need to be smart, look for the best opportunities, and be unique in the ways you approach making money online. And I’m here to help.

Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission. Know that I only recommend products, tools and learning resources I've personally used and believe are genuinely helpful, not because of the small commissions I make if you decide to purchase them. Most of all, I would never advocate for buying something that you can't afford or that you're not yet ready to implement.

So, if you’re as excited as I am now, let’s dive right into the  best ways to make real, sustainable money online.

Looking instead for inspiration to make smaller amounts of quicker income online? Jump down to start at #11 for a list of less "long-term business ideas" and you'll get my advice for the safest (real) ways to make money online that involve less up-front work.

Genius Ways How to Make Money Online (on the Side) Today

We're going to start first with the top ten ways to make money online (with a long-term focus) and sustainable future.

If you’re looking to build a true online business, or start a side business idea that has the potential to truly change your life (and you're not afraid of investing months & years of work into the business), this where you should start.

Through my years of experience and research, I’ve consistently found the following ideas have the best potential to create a steady stream of recurring revenue. They’ll take a lot of effort. But if you’re willing to put in the work, they could change your life, like they have for me.

One last quick thing to note before we dive in: I’m going to be talking a lot about your niche for every way of making money online that we cover here. If you’re unfamiliar with this term, all it means is your unique topic, angle, market, audience, or voice that will make people stand up and notice your business.

It’s a competitive space online, and the more you can differentiate what you do from what’s out there already, the better chance you’ll have for success.

Disclosure: Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, I may earn a commission. When you purchase a product using my one of my affiliate links, the company compensates me, which helps me run this blog and keep things like my 25,000 word ultimate guide to starting a blog free of charge to you. Know that I also only recommend products I personally stand behind.

Alright, now with that out of the way, let’s get into my ultimate guide of how to make money online.

If there’s a niche you’re interested in and you can build a decent audience around it, starting a blog and using affiliate marketing to generate income is an incredible way to make money online.

I know first-hand that learning how to start a blog (let alone make money from it) can be a massive undertaking.

So, I put together a free master course for you to take that spreads out all of the work involved in starting a blog, into a series of action-packed lessons. My free course breaks the entire process of starting a blog down into an incredibly simple 7-day process for going from 0 to brainstorming the best blog post ideas, publishing (and promoting) your first blog post in just 1 week. We also cover beginner and advanced ways to learn how to make money blogging in the course. I can't recommend it enough.

Want my Free Course: How to Start a Profitable Blog in 7 Days?

Once you've gone through how to pick a niche to blog about, and have launched your blog (or niche website), the next step is figuring out which products and companies you can partner with as an affiliate to help facilitate sales of a related, helpful product for your audience of future readers.

In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is selling someone else’s product by referring customers to their online store. If you can create content (on a blog) or a resource so valuable to the people looking for a certain product and then send them to where they can actually buy it, you’ll receive a predetermined percentage of each sale.

It takes time and effort, but website owners like myself and Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income, have built life-changing careers through affiliate marketing. In fact, Pat even publishes his income reports online, showing how he made over $2 million in the past 12 months alone.

Let’s start with the basics of building your niche website and blog, then get into how affiliate marketing will work for you.

First, you need to research and validate a profitable affiliate niche. What this means is: Are there companies in your niche who will pay you to send customers their way?

You can check this in a number of ways:

• Become an Amazon Associate and then use Keyword planner to find an in-demand niche: With more than a million different products to choose from and up to 10% commission the sales you drive, Amazon’s affiliate program is a great place to get started. Browse their available products and see what connects with you. Or take it a step further and use Google’s Keyword Planner to quickly do some keyword research and check how many people are searching for a specific term. With affiliate marketing, the more relevant traffic you can pull in, the more you’ll make off your site.
• Sign up for a reputable affiliate network: Aside from Amazon, there are dozens of  or bloggers and even large reputable affiliate networks, such asthat specialize in connecting you with merchants who are looking for affiliates to sell their products. They charge relatively low commission fees for the privilege of connecting you with merchants, and the merchants on these sites tend to offer much higher commission percentages or set dollar amount payouts.
• Research individual companies in your desired niche: If possible, it’s always better to become an affiliate directly with a company (if they have an internal affiliate program), as no one else will be dipping into your commission rate. This is the preferred route for most of the prominent affiliate marketers, including Pat Flynn. Unfortunately, it’s also the most work, as you’ll have to do the research yourself to see who offers programs (they’re usually listed in the website footer).

Now that you know your niche and have signed up for relevant affiliate programs, it’s time to build out your blog and learn how to write a blog post that can drive traffic your way.

Start by learning how to name a blog and buying its domain name (such as www.myaffiliatesite.com) that works for your niche on a domain registrar like Bluehost, NameCheap or GoDaddy.

Bluehost even has a nifty domain name availability checker you can use right here to quickly find out whether or not your desired website URL is available (and if it's not, they'll give you suggestions on the next best idea).