When you want to make money online, the obvious choice is to have a blog or website set up ready. These will be your portals to creating that income.

There are some tried and tested methods for creating income online; ideally, you use a combination of all of them to meet your monthly financial goals.

Online Courses

If you have any skills, be there writing graphic design editing photos and so on they are saleable. You can set up an online course Teachable, or you can create your online course through your own website, although this might take a little bit longer to set up.

Think about the skills you have and how they might help other people.

Books

Many people now self publish. You can complete the entire process of creative writing, editing, drafting, publishing, and marketing completely online, which cuts out a lot of the costs that you may associate with publishing a book.

You could opt to work with a website like Create Space, and people can purchase your book by Amazon.com, or you can create it purely in PDF form, and people can purchase it directly from your website. You could even set up your own online shop to sell your own books. Have a look at the pros and cons of Shopify, a web application that allows you to create your own online store and decide if it is the right tool for you.

When you are writing a book, try to think of topics that you can cover that will benefit readers.

Once the hard work of writing it is out of the way, this book will be continued to be sold for years to come, creating a very nice passive income stream.

Affiliate Marketing

If you’re in the middle of creating a website or a blog, you can look into affiliate marketing straightaway. Once you have decided on your niche, you will know the products best suited for your website or blog.

It is wise to check out affiliate marketing for beginners before you take this step. And just remember when you are creating content to build in the links and mentions for the products and services that you are trying to promote. You’ll make money every time someone buys a product through the link.

You will want to partner with an affiliate that matches your niche; this will give you the highest possibility of making those sales. After creating great content, bear in mind that it is now worth the money, so you should promote it well.

Advertisements

There are likely very few websites that you visit that do not have Google ads. Google, as it’s straightforward to set up on even the most basic of websites, and they can be quite lucrative once your site has a reasonable amount of months in traffic.

But Google AdSense is not your only option, there are many other ad providers. Just make sure that you read all of the terms and conditions to ensure that one is not competing with the other, and you are, in fact, allowed to have any of the advertisements on your website or blog. You can also offer advertising space on your website or blog to companies directly.

You can have them there for as many months or weeks as you like, and you have full control then all the ads, so you choose to show on your website or blog. This is usually not one of the highest Annas for any bloke or website owner, most people expect to have somewhere between a few hundred or less per month.

Consulting

Another way to make money online is to start a consulting business alongside your website. Build in a portfolio to your website so that people can see that you have the skills to consult on their projects.

People are typically willing to pay for counsel, information, and expertise they do not have for themselves. You might not feel like you have the skills to become a consultant, but actually, if you spend some time and look at everything that you know and have done, there are probably skills in there that you can teach others.

Podcasts

Podcasts are often mentioned as a way to make income online; however, it should be noted that your podcast should be of high quality and again talking to a niche. Your podcast is another way that companies can pay for advertising.

Once you have listeners, you can play an advertisement at the beginning, the middle, and the end of your podcast and charge a flat rate fee (if that’s what you want). However, you will want to charge more as your audience grows.

There are other ways to make money with your podcast to like recommending specific blog posts on your website that have advertising and affiliate links do you are driving traffic to your website for people to make purchases.

The key to getting ahead with the podcast is consistency problem solving interesting interviews and all speaking to the audience you already have. Your niche is everything.

Click here to read about Great Podcasts for Enreprenuers.

There are, of course, other ways to make money online that have not been mentioned here, but the ones above once the foundations are there, they become strong contenders with the ability to let people work from home full-time or supplement their income.