How To Genuinely Earn Money Online | Guide By a Digital Marketing Expert

If you are looking to make fast cash or making money without any investment this article is not for you. This article is for only those people who are really serious in earning money online. Making money online requires little investment, your time and lot of patience, if you have these please read ahead.

My name is Manan Mushtaq. I am founder of this site on which you are reading this article.  I have spent a major part of my life trying new things online and finding ways to make money online.  The first earning  which I received in my life was through a 100$ cheque which was sent to me by Google.  This was around in 2001. I had earned this amount by placing Google ads on my small blog.  On this blog I used to post reviews about softwares and provide a link to download them. 

Fast forwarding to now, after making many websites for myself and for others and researching for all these years about online space, I thought I can share my little knowledge with others so that it can help people like you to go about making money online. The amount of cash that you can make depends on how much time you will spend online, how creative you are, what skills you have and how much patience you have. Here are some genuine ways in which you can make money online.

1. Freelancing Online

To become freelancer online you basically need 2 things. One is that you should have have at-least one skill for which you think someone will be ready to pay you for. Second is you that should be able to convince that someone that you can do it. 

It is not necessary that the needed skill should have a certification or should be some skill acquired by doing some course or acquiring some degree.  You can freelance almost anything. If you can draw, you will be able to find people who would pay you to draw something for them, if you are good say be in Hindi and English, there are many jobs which require people to  translate from English to Hindi. So just think what you are good at then go for it accordingly. 

Here are some popular sites on which you can register yourself for freelancing.

https://www.freelancer.in
https://www.upwork.com
https://www.fiverr.com
https://www.guru.com
https://www.peopleperhour.com

After you register yourself on these freelancing sites, you will realize the competition out there is too much for even small freelance jobs. This is were you will have to market yourself by making tempting profiles, showcasing some previous works or sending nice proposals to prospects. Initially you will have tough time to find jobs, but as soon you get few jobs and good reviews your popularity will increase and it would be easy to find works.

2. Blogging

Blogging in simple words is writing content/articles on your blogging platform. Example see our blog https://www.gyawun.com/category/blog/

How to start a blog

There are two ways to start a blog.  One is you can register on either WordPress or Blogger and start your blog. You will get url such as yourblog.wordpress.com and start a blog. There are some limitations to this way of blogging as your blog is hosted on some other website. But the plus point is you have not to pay anything to start here or maintain it. It is free.

Other way is you buy a domain like www.yourblog.com and buy a hosting and install WordPress software on it.  This is even how our website https://www.gyawun.com/ is running. In this way  blog remains with you and you can do unlimited customizations on it and can increase its capacity as it gets popular.  The domain will cost you between 150 INR to 1000 INR annually .IN domains are cheapest and .com domain are expensive.  You have to pay every year for a domain.  Hosting cost also vary from 200 to many thousands. A decent hosting to run a wordpress blog will cost you around 300-400 Rs/month. WordPress software is free to use, no charge to install it on your hosting. 

How to earn from a blog

Adsense: One of the most popular ways to earn from a blog is by running Google Adsense ads on it. You can apply to google adsense after you have sufficient content on your blog.  After you place their ads on your blog, you will earn on every click that visitors make on the ad  and also on number of times the ad is displayed ( called ad impression).  How much you will earn from it will depend on how may visitors you have on your blog and also where are they from. If your visitors are from western countries you will earn a lot per click and per 1000 visitors as compared to visitors from India or other developing or 3rd world countries.  Below is the actually snapshot of one of our India based accounts.  This shows that we earned around 1$  for traffic of 1500 visitors from India who made 20 clicks on our blog.

Other types of ads that you can run on your blog are https://www.media.net/, https://www.taboola.com/

Sponsored Posts:  Suppose you run a blog about food reviews in Srinagar and it gets popular, you can then get in touch with a some restaurants in Srinagar and tell them you get this many people on your blog who are interested in food. You can tell them you will do a review about their restaurant on your blog  and this will cost them xyz amount. So whatever blog you are running you can pitch your blog to the relevant businesses. In case your blog gets very popular then people will come to you to get themselves featured on it. Sponsored posts can start from anywhere between 4000 INR to lakhs of rupees.

Affiliate Marketing:  In this your blog acts like a broker between a customer and a seller.   You help seller generate sales and customer find relevant products. Carrying forward our above example of food review website in Srinagar. Suppose their are few restaurants who sell online or deliver online, you can discuss with them and negotiate how much commission you will get if a person comes to your blog and you divert him to restaurant website to make him place an order.

Almost all major brands like amazon, flipkart, aliexpress, Bookmyshow, Easymytrip etc offer this to bloggers or websites. You can get people to purchase on their website through blog and they will pay you.  

We primarily use two websites to earn from affiliate marketing. These have tie ups with all websites who offer this way of earning. One is Admitad  and other is Cuelinks.

Example. Check this article of ours Top 10 Hotels in Srinagar we have placed admitad links it with every hotel listing. If someone clicks it and books a hotel we will earn some commission.

The amount that you can earn from affiliate marketing varies as per campaign. For example Cleartrip.com pays 285₹ per hotel booking.

Donations: You can also ask people for donations to your blog or website. This just involves putting a link or banner on your website which takes people to payment gateways. If you are thinking why would anyone donate to your blog or website, trust me people do.

3. Youtube

On YouTube to start with you create a channel here, then start posting videos on it and starting  working to get views and subscribers. After you have got 1000 subscribers and 4000 watch hours in last 12 month you can apply for Youtube monetisation feature to be enabled on your channel. Youtube monetisation is nothing but connecting Adsense account ( mentioned above) to your YouTube account or creating new adsense account and connecting to Youtube if you already don’t have one.

Below is the screeenshot of one of Youtube channels which shows stats for last 28 days. Your earning will depend upon numbers of views that your videos get and number of clicks ads receive ad on them. More the views more is your earning. 

4. Ecommerce

Everyone is aware about eCommerce these days as most of us do some kind of shopping online. Ecommerce is  a very good way to earn money and that too big money.

If you always wanted to start an eCommerce store but couldn’t as you didn’t know where to start and how to go about, well dont worry as this happens with most of us.

Making a website to run a small eCommerce  store is not a big thing, most of IT developers can do it for you in few thousand bucks.  You can check out my store here. I have build this myself. The main part of ecommerce is to decide what will you sell. You may have a fancy eCommerce website and app but if people don’t like your products then there is no point of it. So choose wisely what you want to sell and who you want to sell it to.

Here is a step by step guide to setup an eCommerce store.

1. Register your business as proprietorship or Private Limited. To start with go for proprietorship, as this relatively easy to get setup and maintain. In private limited you would have to keep a CA aswell to follow all MCA compliance. Business registration is necessary as you would need GST number to tie up with other businesses.
2. Buy a domain like www.yourstore.com. Will cost anything between 200-1500 INR
3. Purchase hosting for your website. This is like place where you will store website files and database. This will cost  you somewhere 300-1000 INR per month. You can also make payment for full year and get it on discounted prices. We were previously using godaddy as our hosting, but then it became pathetic so we shifted to Amazon Lightsail for which we pay 5$ a month and it is very good.
4. Install WordPress on your hosting. After installing wordpress install woocomerce plugin on it. (Free)
5. Then you will have to integrate a payment gateway to your website. This is tool through which you can accept payments. To take domestic payments you can use Razorpay, Instamojo , CCavenue or Paypal. (Free)To take international payments you can use Stripe (Free)
6. Add products to your store and start promoting it
7. To start shipping your orders you can use service of Shiprocket  or Shipkaro . They will charges you around 50-60 Rs for half kg and 100 Rs for 1 Kg prepaid orders. If its a COD order you will have to pay 50Rs more/order

How much you can earn with Ecommerce is upto you, if you do good you can earn a  lot if not you can still maintain a decent inflow from your store.

5. Facebook 

First of all check our page on Facebook here.  Their are two direct ways of earning from Facebook. One is monetizing the videos you upload on your Facebook page. In this way Facebook shows ads between your videos. So more views you get more money you make. (screenshot below).

Other way is in running Facebook ads in Facebook instant articles.  Instant articles are fast version of your website articles on Facebook. To make Instant articles you first need to connect your website to your Facebook page then place ads on newly developed Instant articles

6. Content Writing

Although content writing is also freelancing  but the opportunities in it are very large. Content writing means writing website articles, social media contents, whitepapers, marketing content and much more. 

Apart from freelancing sites you can look for content writing opportunities on internship websites like internshala.com and letsintern.com.  You can even goto different news portal, enetrtainments websites etc and look for editorial contacts and get in touch with them to see if they have any content needs.

The earning from content writing starts at 0.3 paisa per word to 20 Rs/word. 

You check content writing opportunities on our website here 

7. Webinars

In simple language webinars are online classes or online workshop. To organise webinars you need a webinar platform, on or two good speakers and relevant audience. So lets assume you want to do a webinar targeting  students who want to MBBS abroad. So first you look for a speaker who can speak on ways of doing MBBS abroad, share his/her  tips and experiences. Then you go and schedule a webinar on some date and time on a webinar platform. After that you will start promoting it online through all possible channels so that people register for your webinar and on the day of webinar login to join your webinar.

In webinars basic way of earning is selling tickets for it. You can promote the webinar as an exclusive webinar for which the people will have to pay to join. Ticket prices vary, it depends on topic of your webinar and people you are targeting through it. If you are targeting students they will you only between 50-500 INR for a ticket, if you are targeting C Level audience or business owners ticket prices range from 5000-10000 INR per ticket.

Other way of earning from a webinar is if you are organise a webinar for some business and commit to them that you will get specific audience to them. For example check out this webinar here, for this webinar the organizer charged the client 4.5 lakh for one webinar. In this organizer had committed the client that they will do a webinar, get 2 industry speakers to speak and get 100 IT people who are working in Banking and Financial Industry ( designations Manager IT and above). For this webinar here the telecom giant paid 3.5 Lakhs to organizer to get any 100 technology people.

Some platform to run webinars are Gotowebinar, CISCO webex, Google Hangouts , Zoom Meeting etc

9. Online communities

You can make money if you have engaging communities online. Online communities can be anything like a Facebook group, Facebook page, Instagram profile, Whatsapp group, Telegram group or apage, Snapchat profile or even Tiki tok profiles. The catch is that you should have many followers or members, it should be about some niche and most important people should be active in it.

You can make money from these communities by asking money to promote someone or someones product. You can ask money to promote someones page. For example for our Gyawun Instagram page we charge around 2000-3000 Rs per sponsored post. 

10.  Ebooks

Many people make money by selling ebooks online.  They find some interesting topic, start writing on it, after writing is done they send it to a designer who designs it and gives it a nice feel and when they ebook is ready they post it on Amazon and other sites to sell. 

For example this lady decided to make an ebook of collection of Kashmiri  wedding Song lyrics, she started collecting them and finally made it and  now its selling on amazon for 1415 INR for one ebook. So in short if you can write a small ebook on something which you think people might buy then go for it. 

11. Lead Generation

Lead generation is also a very good way to earn online. Lead generation is a process by which you collect data of people who show interest in some product/service or people who have a need for a specific  product/service.

For example if you have tried to look for a car online. You would most probably land up on websites like cardekho.com, or gaadi.com. They ask you to fill your details like city, name and contact details before showing all details. They sell these details to either car manufactures or dealers around you, who then start calling you. Same thing happens when you search for a life insurance, credit card, loans etc.

We on Gyawun had also started a lead generation process by which we use to collect details of people who wanted to visit Kashmir. We asked them their name, where are they from, when do they want to visit Kashmir and their contact details. This data was sold by us to a local travel agents, who use to get in touch them to offer a bookings. We used to get paid for our lead we gave them or some commission when the booking was done.

The most profitable leadgen domains are financial services, IT solutions and travel/hospitality services, The leads price even can go from 100rs to even 20000rs /lead.

12. Share trading online

Stock trading is a very good though a risky way of earning money online.  Please done expect do get rich overnight by stock trading. For you to make money in trading you need to know which stock to buy and sell and at what moment, also your greed has to kept very low. If you make yourself happy with small profits you will go long way.

One of the best platforms to start and do training is Zerodha ( make account here) It is very cheap and easy to use.

You can mail me on [email protected]