How to Make Money Online: Work, Build, Then Invest

With the pandemic-accelerated shift to the online world, a huge portion of the world was exposed to the potential to make money online. But how are the people who make a side-income, living, or fortune online doing it?

There are three phases to building online wealth that can set you financially free, even if you’re starting from zero-to-little cash in the bank:

Earning quick cash with side hustles
Building entrepreneurial wealth
Buying online businesses

In phase one, you don’t need any cash or experience to start making money online.

7 Ways to Make Money Online Today With No Experience or Skills

These methods of making money online are going to introduce you to the online world while giving you some supplementary cash for your efforts. Consider it your “online wealth apprenticeship”.

To make this guide easy to follow, we’ve included breakdowns of each money-making method in the following structure:

Total time: how long it takes to carry out the service/do the work.
Setup: the time needed to get started.
How easy to start: what to expect when getting set up.
Age threshold: minimum age requirements.
Payment speed: how quickly you’ll earn money after carrying out the service/how frequently you’ll be paid.
Average pay: how much you can earn.
Need to know: extra considerations.
Requirements: what you need to carry out the service.

Alright, let’s dig in!

1. User Testing

User testing is a service whereby you test websites for companies as if you are one of their customers or a casual site user.

You record your screen and audio while you navigate through the website and comment on your experience.

When doing a user test, you’ll be given a task to complete, for example, in an ecommerce store you might be asked to find a pair of white shoes and add them to the basket. As you’re carrying out this task, you’ll be thinking out loud to give the company insights into what it’s like for a consumer to use their website.

You can sign up to get paid for user testing through sites like Conversion Crimes who offer the best user testing training, or usertesting.com, userbrain.com, and intellizoom.com.

Total time: tests are usually between 20-30 minutes long.
Setup: 1-1.5 hours to sign up and do some training tests.
How easy to start: very easy. Training is clear and easy to follow.
Age threshold: usually 18+.
Payment speed: usually one month.
Average pay: $5-$15 depending on the type of test.
Need to know: work frequency is sporadic. You need to keep an eye on your email inbox for when tests come in and they go pretty quickly as others are also waiting to do the tests.
Requirements: fluent English, age 18+.

2. Online Surveys

This service consists of filling out survey forms for companies for product, service, or industry research.

Some survey providers will post surveys in the account you create when you sign up for you to complete. The service is as simple as answering the questions on the survey, but some of these services include other ways to earn money online, including watching videos and searching the web.

You can sign up for surveys on sites like swagbucks.com, inboxdollars.com, qmee.com and surveyjunkie.com.

Total time: surveys are usually 2-25 minutes long.
Setup: 30mins to 1 hour to create your account.
How easy to start: very easy. Explainer videos often provided.
Age threshold: 13+.
Payment speed: 1-2 days.
Average pay: 50 cents to $20.
Need to know: some surveys pay gift cards instead of cash or points that equate to a cash amount. Surveys pay very little, so be prepared to take a lot regularly to make any significant income.
Requirements: online account like PayPal or a bank account, strong English, age 13+.

3. Amazon Mechanical Turk

Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing marketplace that Amazon businesses can use to find workers for simple operational tasks that are best completed by a human. From simple tasks like performing data deduplication to carrying out research.

You can sign up on the Amazon Mechanical Turk website.

Total time: variable depending on the jobs you sign up for.
Setup: 30 seconds to create your account.
How easy to start: straightforward to create an account.
Age threshold: 18+ .
Payment speed: workers are paid on a regular schedule.
Average pay: varies widely depending on the types of work tasks you carry out.
Need to know: the quality of your work is assessed by the requester. If the task wasn’t completed up to par, you may not be paid.
Requirements: age 18+, bank or online payment account such as PayPal.

4. Sell Old Clothes

There are platforms where you can sell your used clothes. For example, Poshmark has a sharing platform where you can post your clothes for sale. They’ll even provide you with prepaid labels to send your clothes.

However, eBay is an open marketplace with a much larger audience.

Total time: time to take photos of your clothes and create your posts. Also time needed to answer customer questions if necessary while your clothes are up for sale.
Setup: a few hours to create your account and publish your clothes for sale.
How easy to start: very easy. You just need to create an account, take some photos of your clothes, and post them for sale.
Age threshold: 18+.
Payment speed: within two business days after the sale.
Average pay: depends on the platform you sell your clothes on and what clothes you sell.
Need to know: depending on the platform, they may only accept certain clothing brands. eBay is open to all brands, though they do carry out authenticity checks on some products.
Requirements: you need clothes to sell with high-quality photos, age 18+.

5. Share Coupons

There are websites that pay you to share coupons you find on the web.

While you’re doing your online shopping, you might come across a promotion on a site or the brand might offer you a coupon for signing up to their newsletter. When you get those coupons, you can share them with couponchief.com and earn money.

Set up: a few minutes to create your account.
How easy to start: you just need to set up your account.
Age threshold: 18+.
Payment speed: you are paid when someone uses your coupon.
Average pay: 2-3% commission on each coupon sale.
Need to know: there might be a limit on how much you can earn from each store you share coupons for.
Requirements: the coupons you sell cannot have been shared before by another user, age 18+.

6. Research Projects

People make money online by carrying out research for companies via online platforms like wonder.com.

The research projects revolve around product or service recommendations, competitive landscaping, trends, statistics gathering, and market research.

To sign up, you submit an application, they assign you a quiz and a trial project, once accepted you can explore project requests and get paid to carry out research.

Set up: a quite rigorous application process compared to the other ways of making money online discussed so far. Could take days to be open to take projects.
How easy to start: difficult compared to other ways to make money online.
Age threshold: 13+
Payment speed: dependent on research tasks carried out
Average pay: between $8-$16
Need to know: since you’ll be working with content, you should be aware of Wonder’s terms of service around infringement and liability.
Requirements: pass through the application process, age 13+.

7. Transcribe for Cash

Platforms like rev.com offer transcription services. Humans transcribe the audios and videos submitted to Rev and anyone can sign up to make money online transcribing audios or captioning videos.

Rev is a huge platform where millions of audios are submitted every month, so there should be a decent amount of work for a transcriber. All transcribing consists of listening to audio tracks and typing what you hear.

You can earn more if you speak a second language and are able to translate audios.

Set up: take an English quiz, do a transcription or caption sample. Once approved, you’ll be able to explore the platform for jobs. You can start taking jobs within a few days.
How easy to start: the application process is pretty straightforward, then you can dive right into projects.
Age threshold: 18+.
Payment speed: payments made every Monday.
Average pay: transcriptionist: $.30-$1.10 per audio/video minute. Captioner: $.54-$1.10 per audio/video minute. Translator subtitler: $1.50-$3 per audio/video minute.
Need to know: the amount of money you make per minute depends on how quickly you’re able to accurately transcribe the audio. When you’re first starting, expect to spend more time completing projects until you build up the skills.
Requirements: pass the application process, age 18+.

Those are the seven ways you can start making money online potentially today, without any necessary skills or experience. Carrying out a combination of these services will help you build your money pot faster.

Once you’ve collected some online cash on top of your job salary and you already have a rainy-day fund for any life emergencies set aside, you can begin phase two of your online wealth-building journey.

Start a Business to Make Money Online

Many aspiring entrepreneurs are at a loss with how to start a business; there are so many different types of online business models out there—how do you choose which one to build?

You could start a business from scratch by learning the ropes, but there will be only a few business models that are well suited to your knowledge and work experience. Using these two factors to guide the process of elimination, you can narrow in on the business model that’s right for you.

For example, if you have worked in journalism or a writing profession, you are ideally suited to the blogging business model.

How to Earn Money With Affiliate Marketing

The affiliate business model is one of the most popular and easiest to start. It’s commonly referred to as blogging, which you certainly will have heard of, but you might not know exactly how to make money with affiliate marketing.

It’s a type of blogging whereby you monetize your content, i.e. articles, videos, podcasts, or anything really that you publicly post online.

To monetize this content, you sign up to affiliate programs that connect you with brands that will pay you to promote their products in your content. Some of the best affiliate programs to make money include commission junction, impact.com, awin.com, and shareasale.com.

There is no barrier to entry for this business model, so anybody can start a blog and with the numerous website builders available.

Business type: commission on referral sales.
Effort: affiliate marketers usually have to put in 8-14 months of hard work before they even make their first sale, but once they start earning, the business becomes a lot more hands-off and scalable.
Leverage: there are many courses, website builders, tools, and freelancers to help you build your site. Your own audience that you have direct contact with.
Startup costs: $500-$1,000 for a website domain, website hosting, and any educational courses you would like to take.
Profit potential: commission rates can be 30-80% for high-ticket products or 3-20% for low-ticket.
Need to know: you need to gain strong search engine optimization (SEO) knowledge.

How to Start Affiliate Marketing

The first thing you need to learn is how to create a website for affiliate marketing.

There are many website builders out there that allow even those who aren’t tech savvy build a functional website in a matter of minutes. Some of the best website builders include squarespace, Wix, and Weebly. If you’re building your website with a plan to sell it one day, you should build it on WordPress as this is the most trusted platform.

These platforms have website templates where you can simply add your content in, without having to build any website elements or pages from scratch.

The next step is to buy a domain for your site. Try and think of a brand name that is specific enough to be unique, but isn’t too specific as to silo your brand. For example, a good domain name for a blog on dog food could be “littledoggytreats.com”; a one that is too specific would be “littledoggytreatsforyourwhitecockerspaniel.com”.

Finally, you need to find affiliates to connect with so you have products or services to promote on your blog.

When starting out, you’ll be best off finding affiliates through affiliate programs like Commission Junction, AWIN, and ShareASale.

Those three steps essentially make up how to start an affiliate marketing business; you’re basically able to start affiliate marketing for free, minus platform and domain hosting fees.

Making Money With Amazon Associates

To make money with Amazon Associates, you need a blog set up just like for an affiliate marketing site.

Instead of finding brands to promote through affiliate programs and direct outreach, your main affiliate will be Amazon: it will be the platform on which you run the backend of your business.

With regards to how to earn from Amazon Associates, when a visitor to your site clicks through the link and purchases an Amazon product you’re featuring in your blog, you earn a commission on the sale; which is between 1% to 20% depending on the product category.

How to Start Amazon Associates

Most who are new to affiliate marketing, and indeed digital entrepreneurship in general, start an Amazon Associates site to make money online because you don’t have to already be a business expert to learn how to start selling on Amazon Associates.

The Associates platform is designed for beginners. It takes a matter of minutes to sign up and it’s easy to search for products to feature in your blog. Once you’ve connected your site, you’ll have your own Amazon dashboard to track all of the important metrics: link clicks, sales, revenue, and profit.

Business type: commission on referral sales.
Effort: similar to the affiliate business model, it takes 8-14 months of consistent content production to start earning through Amazon Associates.
Leverage: Amazon’s platform is designed for beginners with courses and support. Plus, Amazon is the biggest ecommerce platform, so you will likely make more sales for the traffic you drive to Amazon compared to ecommerce businesses directly.
Startup costs: $500-$1,000 for a domain, website, and any educational courses you’d like to purchase.
Profit potential: Amazon affiliates earn between 1-20% commission.
Need to knows: the Amazon Associates policies.

How to Make Money on Amazon FBA

Whether you can make money online with Amazon FBA is debated by aspiring entrepreneurs because selling on Amazon is a foreign concept to those not in the online business space.

What they don’t know is that 58% of Amazon’s sales are made through third-party sellers who have set up their ecommerce stores on the Amazon platform.

As for how to make money using Amazon FBA, you find and source your own products by producing them yourself or through buying products from outlets to resell. However, the most common method is to carry out product research online and find manufacturers to produce products for you.

Amazon stores and delivers your products for you and you just manage the inventory ordering.

You earn your profits after you’ve paid your suppliers for your products and Amazon’s fees for storage and order fulfillment.

How to Start Amazon FBA

Once you’ve found your product and suppliers, it’ll be time to set up your Amazon storefront.

On Amazon, you’ll find walkthroughs and instructions on how to start your Amazon FBA business within the Amazon marketplace. The functionality of the marketplace is designed for anybody without any tech expertise to use.

You’ll need product photos to insert into your product listings, as well as all of the product dimensions and details, just like you see on product pages when you’re shopping on Amazon.

In terms of how much it costs to start Amazon FBA, the biggest expense is your inventory. Depending on what type of product you’re selling and how much, you would be looking at anywhere between a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands.

Business type: physical product-based.
Effort: you must spend a substantial amount of time researching products to sell and finding and communicating with manufacturers to arrange supplier deals. You also need to set up your store on Amazon and have product photos taken.
Leverage: Amazon’s formidable logistics structure, Amazon support and training, and the biggest audience of ecommerce shoppers in the world.
Startup costs: considerable amount of capital required to invest in inventory and to promote products through Amazon advertising.
Profit potential: profits on product sales are usually around 20% for a well-built business and Amazon ecommerce is a highly-competitive industry. However, there is potential for great wealth on Amazon if you stay persistent.
Need to know: Amazon’s terms of service, ecommerce logistics, product development.

How to Make Money with Amazon FBM

When looking at how to earn money from Amazon at home, Amazon fulfilled by merchant (FBM) usually comes in second to FBA because it isn’t as beginner friendly. So what is Amazon FBM?

It’s a similar business model to FBA in that you sell products on the Amazon marketplace, but the key difference is that you set up your business with its own order fulfillment logistics, as opposed to using Amazon’s fulfillment network.

Instead of using Amazon warehouses and delivery trucks, you find your own inventory storage units and delivery services to fulfill orders.

The Amazon FBM sign up process is the same as for FBA, so it’s easy for beginners to get set up.

How to Start Amazon FBM

Onto how to start Amazon FBM.

When you’re sourcing your products and manufacturers, you need to find storage facilities and carriers for order fulfillment.

Sometimes manufacturers also offer storage services, but its best to shop around for the best rates. It also depends on where your manufacturers are located; if they are in China and you’re selling in the US, it might make more sense to find a warehouse in the US.

A good place to find storage and carrier services is through a third party logistics company (3PL); they can handle all of the logistics process for you.

Once you have the backend of your business set up, you can sign up for an Amazon Seller Central account and start selling!

Business type: physical-product based.
Effort: you must spend a substantial amount of time researching products to sell and finding and communicating with manufacturers and 3PLs to arrange supplier and fulfillment deals. You also need to set up your Amazon store.
Leverage: Amazon’s formidable logistics structure, Amazon support and training, and the biggest audience of ecommerce shoppers in the world.
Startup costs: considerable amount of capital required to invest in inventory and to promote products through Amazon advertising.
Profit potential: profits on product sales are pretty low and Amazon ecommerce is a highly-competitive industry. However, there is potential for great wealth on Amazon if you stay persistent.
Need to know: Amazon’s terms of service, ecommerce logistics, product development.

How to Make Money with KDP

Amazon KDP stands for Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. You might have books on your own Kindle, but have you ever thought about making money with Kindle books?

There are two approaches to make money with Kindle Publishing: you write and publish the books yourself or you outsource these tasks to contractor writers and designers.

How to Start a Kindle Publishing Business

As for how to start a Kindle Publishing business, because you’re building on Amazon, it’s really straightforward.

You start by creating your KDP account, which doesn’t take long, and uploading everything you’ve built on the backend; the books, author bios, and all of the brand assets. Once your account is fully set up and your book listings created, it’s just a case of marketing your products to generate sales.

On Amazon is a good place to start; try and increase the rankings of your books by generating reviews. To give you a kickstart, you might want to also run some Amazon PPC campaigns to drive traffic to your books.

Business type: digital and physical product-based.
Effort: a lot of startup effort needs to be invested into building out the business, creating the products, and then promoting the brand. However, once profitable, KDP businesses require just a few hours per week to run if they are set up well.
Leverage: Amazon’s name and platform.
Startup costs: almost free if you write your own books. Depending on the standard of writers and or designers you hire, it can cost as little as thousands of dollars each month.
Profit potential: very high profits from sales because startup and maintenance costs are low.
Need to know: Amazon’s commission terms and Amazon’s policies, market research.

How to Make Money on Amazon Merch

Merch by Amazon is a print on demand (POD) business model. On Merch by Amazon, you can sell a limited variety of products, including t-shirts, hoodies, phone accessories, and bags.

The products are produced only once the order has been placed, not before like with the traditional ecommerce business model. You simply create the designs for the products that are produced by Amazon, you publish them for sale, and when a product is sold Amazon pays you a royalty.

That’s pretty much how to make money on Amazon Merch—it’s that straightforward!

How to Become a Merchant on Amazon

Once you understand the basics of the POD business model, there isn’t much else to think about regarding how to become a merchant on Amazon.

As for how to start Merch by Amazon as a business, you create your Amazon seller account then do some research into the trending designs or general market trends you can take advantage of. Then you can create the designs yourself through an online tool, or you can hire a graphic designer to create designs for you. You apply your designs to your products in your Amazon account and after approval from Amazon they go live on the marketplace.

Business type: POD.
Effort: some effort into researching and producing product designs, then some effort into marketing. Once up-and-running, this model is highly hands-off.
Leverage: Amazon’s name and platform.
Startup costs: Almost free if you produce your own designs. Depending on the standard of designers you hire, the costs can be thousands of dollars each month.
Profit potential: very high profits from sales because of low startup costs, however, the market is small and highly competitive.
Need to know: Amazon owns your products and have control over its pricing, there are limits on the number of designs you can sell.

How to Make Money with Digital Products to Make Money Online

The digital product business model is ideally suited to creatives who want to make money online, especially if what they create can be produced digitally. Having said that, non-creatives who are registered professionals in a particular field can also sell products that can only be acquired from a recognized professional in digital form.

The most profitable digital products tend to be ones that are widely used, like photographs, downloadable music, and document templates.

How this business model works is you sell the usage rights of your product to consumers, allowing them to play your music, display your photos, or print off your documents for a one-time or subscription fee.

If you don’t want to create your own digital products to sell, you can resell digital products created by other brands and redesign them for your brand.

In terms of how to resell digital products, the simplest way is through a platform that sources products for resale like plr.me.

How to Start Selling Digital Products

Though there are many creatives and professionals with the potential to earn money online with this business model, few know how to start selling digital products.

The first step is to create your products. This could be as straightforward as typing out a contract template if you’re a lawyer, or uploading your photographs to your computer if you’re a photographer.

The next step is to research the legal rights around the sale of digital products and produce your own terms and conditions in line with the relevant laws.

Once you have your products, you set up shop by building your own branded website and uploading your digital products and terms of service then marketing your brand to the world!

Business type: digital product-based.
Effort: minimal effort to create the digital products and build the website. Considerable effort to grow an audience through SEO or social media.
Leverage: your expertise and/or qualifications, tools to build digital products. Your own audience that you have direct contact with.
Startup costs: small costs for a website, domain, and your digital products.
Profit potential: profit margins are high since business running costs are low. There is high potential to earn money if you’re able to identify a niche you could become a big player in.
Need to know: SEO, marketing, and social media.

How to Make Money Dropshipping

The basic way dropshipping works is a merchant promotes and sells products on an ecommerce store and a manufacturer sources and delivers the products to the customers. After paying the manufacturer for production and delivery, the merchant earns their share of the sale.

There are platforms where you can find products to sell and manufacturers to source them. Many aspiring entrepreneurs wonder if you can make money dropshipping from AliExpress as it is one of the most famous dropshipping platforms that you’ll hear about. Not only can you make money dropshipping on platforms like AliExpress, it’s one of the easiest ways to do so!

In terms of how much money you can make dropshipping, the sky is the limit, but know that because of its low barrier to entry, this is a fiercely competitive industry and the margins you make on sales are really thin because of the high costs associated with this business model.

How to Start Dropshipping

To explain how to start a profitable dropshipping store, it’s best to explain the traditional ecommerce model for an understanding of how the mechanics of the dropshipping business model works.

Building a traditional ecommerce business starts with discovering a product to sell and finding manufacturers to produce that product, storage facilities to house the products, and delivery services to fulfill orders—you are responsible for managing this entire process.

With dropshipping, instead of managing this whole process, you find a third party company with connections to manufacturers, storage facilities, and delivery services to handle all of the logistics for you.

There are many aspiring digital entrepreneurs wondering how to get started dropshipping on Amazon that have a misunderstanding of the key difference between the two models: with dropshipping, products are produced on order; with Amazon products are produced and stored ready to be sent out to customers when an order is placed.

Business type: physical product-based.
Effort: considerable product research to find the right product in an uncompetitive, but growing, niche. More effort is required to create and promote your store and brand.
Leverage: time saved on logistics to spend on marketing. If you build your store on Shopify, you can also leverage their trust in the consumer market and easy-to-build store templates. Your own audience that you have direct contact with.
Startup costs: Little startup costs to build your online store and carry out product research, but high costs to market your products.
Profit potential: profits on sales are low, but if you are able to market your brand well in a good niche, the earning potential can be very high.
Need to know: marketing, ecommerce logisitcs, product development. Profit margins are very low, so you need to make a lot of sales to earn substantial wealth.

How to Make Money with Ecommerce

Ecommerce is the buying and selling of products through online stores. You can set up an online store from scratch on which to build your own ecommerce business.

How does ecommerce make money for you? Every time someone purchases a product from your online store you earn money on the sale. After you’ve paid your suppliers and carriers and other expenses like marketing and taxes, you’re left with your profits that you can take home or reinvest into your business.

In terms of how long it takes to make money with ecommerce, this depends on numerous factors, namely the trending growth of the niche you’re in, the level and amount of competition in the space, and how much time and money you invest into building the business.

How to Start An Ecommerce Business

Once you understand how the ecommerce business model works, the question of how to start an ecommerce business becomes easy to answer.

You have your logistics system set up with your manufacturers, inventory, storage facilities, and carrier networks, and you have your online store to present and sell your products.

The next step is to market your brand. This can be done in two ways: paid advertising through Facebook or Google ads, or organic marketing through SEO or social media marketing.

These marketing channels are crucial elements that make up the fundamentals of how to start a successful ecommerce business and build a long-standing brand.

Business type: product based.
Effort: substantial effort researching products to sell and finding and communicating with manufacturers and 3PLs to arrange supplier and fulfillment deals.
Leverage: if you use Shopify, you can leverage its easy-to-use platform and recognized name. Your own audience that you have direct contact with.
Startup costs: high costs to purchase inventory and pay manufacturing, storage, and carrier fees. Low costs to build the online store.
Profit potential: profit margins are quite low because of high running costs. However, there is potential to earn considerable wealth if you’re successful.
Need to know: ecommerce logistics, marketing, product development.

How to Make Money with Info Products

It’s pretty easy to understand how to make money with info products.

The info product business model is similar to affiliate marketing, except you’re selling your own products.

You create information in the form of video courses, webinars, an application, a quiz, or an exam. Taking the course example, once you’ve formatted the course so consumers can purchase and download it, the information has become a product, therefore, as an entrepreneur running this business model, your job is to sell info products.

How to Start Selling Info Products

If you have a wealth of experience and knowledge behind you in a particular field, there are many opportunities for you to sell info products. You can create your own online teaching course; there are plenty of niches to create a name for yourself in as an educator and source of helpful information.

The beauty of this business model is that you’re able to use physical assets that you use in your profession, such as books and resources, to create digital exams or videos and sell info products online.

Business type: digital product-based.
Effort: minimal effort to create the digital products and build the website. Considerable effort to grow an audience through SEO or social media.
Leverage: your expertise and/or qualifications, tools to build digital products. Your own audience that you have direct contact with.
Startup costs: small costs for a website, domain, and your digital products.
Profit potential: profit margins are high since business running costs are low. There is high potential to earn money if you’re able to identify a niche you could become a big player in.
Need to know: SEO, marketing, and social media.

How to Make Money Selling Leads

If you have experience in a particular industry, you might be able to make money selling leads.

You provide leads to companies in the niche you’re operating in. A lead is a potential customer who contacts the company with interest in their service. Interest could be classified as the lead completing a minimum 30-second call, a form, or an email.

You will be paid a certain amount for generating that lead.

The best place to sell leads is through your own website on which you build your lead generation business.

How to Start a Lead Generation Business

To create a lead generation business, you need a website and a list of companies to send leads to. You link to the companies on your site and when the leads contact them, you earn your fee.

Some aspiring entrepreneurs wonder how to create a lead generation business for legal services: fundamentally, it works the same as for any other industry.

Business type: commission on referrals.
Effort: it takes 8-14 months of consistent content production to build a sizeable audience of leads for businesses.
Leverage: your industry expertise and experience. Your own audience that you have direct contact with.
Startup costs: $500-$1,000 for a domain, website, and any educational courses you’d like to purchase.
Profit potential: commission depends on the industry you operate in. Lead generation isn’t the most lucrative business model because of its small market size.
Need to know: referral terms with your referral partners, SEO, marketing, and social media.

How to Make Money With SaaS

SaaS stands for software as a service. The software is built on the cloud, so it’s accessible online.

The most well-known SaaS companies are Microsoft, Google Workspace, and Zoom.

In terms of how to make money with SaaS, the easiest way is through a no-code SaaS platform; here you can build a SaaS product without having to build the back-end of the software. Or, if you have development experience, you can build a software yourself from scratch.

Once you have your software product, you sell its usage for a subscription fee.

How to Start a SaaS Business

It’s essentially possible to start your own SaaS business with no money; the only associated expenses are paying for the no-code platform and website hosting for your site.

As for how to start a SaaS company, you just need your software product and a website on which you’ll sell your software subscription. Market your product through channels like social media and Google and you’re good to start making money online!

Business type: cloud-based software.
Effort: considerable effort building, testing, and improving the software if you’re starting from scratch. Can be run with just a few hours work per week once established with developers and employees.
Leverage: the software knowledge of you or your developer, the demand for your SaaS idea, the huge size of the growing SaaS market. Your own audience that you have direct contact with.
Startup costs: considerable money needed to hire developers. Also, costs for the technology for the software.
Profit potential: running costs can be kept enormous growth potential in speed and size if you find a strong product-market fit.
Need to know: basic understanding of software development, strong understanding of your target market and the software tool.

How to Make Money with Subscription Boxes

How subscription services make money is by selling packaged physical goods on a consistent basis—be it monthly, quarterly, or annually—for a recurring fee.

Probably the two biggest examples of membership websites that make money through selling subscription boxes are HelloFresh and Dollar Shave Club.

How to Start a Subscription Business

To start a subscription business, you first need a product or a bundle of products to sell that consumers use on a regular basis, such as makeup or food. Then, you build your online store on a platform like Shopify and carry out some marketing campaigns to generate sales.

When thinking about the cost to start a subscription box business, you should consider how much money you will need for inventory, storage, and carrier fees—unless you opt to go for a dropshipping model—as well as website hosting fees and marketing costs to get the business off of the ground.

Business type: product based.
Effort: substantial effort researching products to sell and finding and communicating with manufacturers and 3PLs to arrange supplier and fulfillment deals.
Leverage: if you use Shopify, you can leverage its easy-to-use platform and recognized name. Your own audience that you have direct contact with.
Startup costs: high costs to purchase inventory and pay manufacturing, storage, and carrier fees. Low costs to build the online store.
Profit potential: profit margins are quite low because of high running costs. However, there is potential to earn considerable wealth if you’re successful.
Need to knows: ecommerce logistics, marketing, product development.

Buy a Business to Make Money

If you already have a substantial amount of savings set aside for investing, not your rainy-day fund, then you can in fact buy a business online.

As far as online money making ideas go, this is the fastest route to wealth creation.

While if you’re new to the space you’ll still need to learn about the business model you go for, you skip the phase of building the business from scratch when you acquire one. The best thing about acquiring a business is that you earn 100% of its profits and start making money online from day one!

Buy An Affiliate Website

Buying affiliate sites is a great way to make money online because of how easy they are to scale. For example, you could buy a site that is monetized through affiliate marketing and integrate display advertising into the site to create another source of passive income.

When going to buy an affiliate marketing website for the first time, you should consider what niches you have experience and knowledge in and the types of blogs you read online. By being the target reader, you will be in a good position to know what content could do well to scale the site.

Buy an Amazon FBA Business

The FBA business model is ideally suited to someone who is highly organized and good at creating operating procedures. You should only buy an Amazon FBA business if you have a good understanding of logistics as this is the lynchpin of this business model. You will also need to know the policies of the FBA program so you know how to run the business.

As for how to buy an Amazon FBA business, you can search our marketplace and contact our team if you ever need help finding the right business for you.

Buy an Amazon KDP Business

You don’t necessarily need online business experience to buy an Amazon KDP business because it is an easy model to operate.

When considering what type of KDP business to buy, think about what books you like to read and your favorite topics of interest are. Or, if you have expertise in a particular field, you could create books yourself to add to the business and grow its earnings—this would be easier than creating a business from scratch as you will already have an audience to sell to.

Buy a Dropshipping Website

To buy a dropshipping store you only really need a basic understanding of paid advertising and logistics; your role as the owner won’t be too involved with the logistical process since that side is mostly automated, but you will need to market the brand to get the sales.

Whether you’re new to dropshipping or not, it’s best to buy a Shopify dropshipping store as this is one of the biggest ecommerce platforms in the world and it has a lot of support for beginner store owners looking to start making money online.

Buy an Ecommerce Business

Buying an existing ecommerce business is a time-saving way to get into a business model with a lot of earning potential, but that is also more hands-on to build from scratch than some other online business models like content sites.

If you want to make money online as passively as possible, then you should look to buy an ecommerce business with a team of operators who handle the operations.

Buy a Lead Generation Website

To buy a lead generation website you should know the basics of how websites function and how content marketing works. Once you know these two things, a pre-built lead generation site is easy to maintain.

You can also hire a marketing agency, writers, and virtual assistants (VAs) to help you scale the business.

Buy a SaaS Business

The unique quality of SaaS is that it offers investors recurring revenue; that’s why so many who want to make money online want to buy a SaaS business.

However, few know how to buy a SaaS business; it’s a complex business model that requires deep technical knowledge if you are to run it yourself.

With developers to help you maintain the software, you could be successful with a SaaS without any prior experience, but it would be best to acquire one through a brokerage like us who can migrate the business to you, as this is a complicated process with many opportunities for error.

There Are Many Opportunities to Make Money Online

There are a wide range of online money making ideas that can earn you anywhere from a few dollars to millions. Starting with easy-entry ways to earn money online to supplement your income is a great way to introduce yourself to the online world and get that snowball of wealth rolling.

If you have enough funds to acquire an online business, that is the fastest route to make money online. Create a free account and start searching for online businesses that you could buy, scale, and sell for an ROI.

Even a business that is minimally profitable could be a good acquisition for you, as the brand is already built and the operational processes already set up. It might just be a case of better promoting the brand, upping the content production, or streamlining the operations to take that minimally profitable business to a highly profitable business.

Take for example an Amazon KDP business earning $500 a month in profit. For the average market value of that model earning that amount, it would be worth around $20,000.

Just by maintaining the profits and not considering anything else, you should make an ROI in a little over three years. However, if you were to increase the profits of that business to $800 a month, which shouldn’t be too difficult, then you would make an ROI in a little over two years.

We have many first-time buyers come to us, get advice, and increase their wealth with online businesses.