How to Earn Your First Dollar Online

Do you have a job but would like to start something online though don’t know where to start? I run a site dedicated to helping others build businesses anywhere in the world and build lives worth writing about (which is what I did starting in 2009), and after doing a recent survey of my audience and the results came in, a whopping 70 percent of the people that responded fit that description.

To help you have some idea of what your starting point could be, here’s a couple of different approaches for making your first dollar online.

Become a Consultant

I’m a firm believer that we’re all experts at something. Think about what your friends always come to you for advice on. With the Internet, it’s never been easier to get paid for that expertise. There are services online where you can post your expertise, assign an hourly rate and then people can find you and book a call with you on demand.

How to Do It:

1. Go to Clarity.Fm and sign up for an account.
2. Fill everything out on the site.
3. If you have a blog or website, create a link or widget for your Clarity account and put it in your sidebar.
4. Add a link on your about page and in the signature of your primary email address.
5. Share on social media.

Sell Things on Craigslist, Ebay or Etsy

These can be tough, but doable, to build a business around. But I guarantee at the very least you have a few things sitting around the house you’d like to sell. Take a couple of hours and list everything you want to get rid of on Craigslist or Ebay. You could also take it a step farther and turn it into a business.

Related Article: 5 Reasons Your eCommerce Startup Might be Struggling

A couple of my sister’s friends from high school are making a full-time income via Etsy. One of them goes thrifting and looks for cool vintage items and sells them for a big premium. The other takes old wedding dresses from Goodwill and the like, redesigns them and sells them for hundreds of dollars.

How to Do It:

1. Make a list of all the things around your house you’d like to get rid of.
2. Start with the most valuable, and take good photos of them all.
3. Post them on Craigslist.
4. Post them on Ebay.

Sell Your Photos

Do you consider yourself a good photographer? Do you know how to take beautiful photos of everyday objects and situations? If so, you should consider becoming a stock photographer.

Again, this can be tough to make a lot of money from, but I’ve had friends who posted photos they already had and, within a few months, were bringing in an extra $500 a month. The catch here is that everyone has travel shots or beautiful sunset shots. The photos that do well are those of everyday objects or people in very specific situations.

How to Do It:

1. Spend half an hour looking at stock photography sites to get a sense of what sells. I’d check Bigstock or iStockPhoto
2. Create an account on either of those two sites. There are plenty of others as well.
3. Get your photos approved. The approval process can be pretty rigorous, so keep trying if your shots aren’t accepted at first.
4. BONUS: You can also set up a SmugMug account, and try and sell prints of photos you already have.

Become a Virtual Assistant

Are you organized, good at helping people stay on track and want to help someone grow a business? You could be a perfect virtual assistant. With an ever-increasing amount of online entrepreneurs, there’s a huge demand for good virtual assistant work.

For the most part, people seem to have moved beyond outsourcing to extremely low-paying places in Asia, so you should find some solid opportunities to make decent money in this space.

How to Do It:

1. Create an account on Upwork or a similar site.
2. Look for potential jobs you could be a good fit for.
3. Apply for these jobs.
4. Post your services on different city Craigslist Pages in the Gigs section.
5. Go places where potential clients hang out. This could be in-person networking events, online forums or other communities.

Create an Online Product

Consider creating a mini-product. So often people think when you create an online product you have to spend months and months working on it. However, more content isn’t necessarily better. Not everything has to be a huge six-month course. If you can come up with one idea that solves one small problem, you can sell that.

How to Do It:

1. Come up with one small problem you know you can help people solve.
2. Outline your product and exactly how to solve this problem.
3. Choose your selected medium (PDF document, audio podcast, video, etc.).
4. Create the content.
5. Put up a sales page on your website.
6. Get your Paypal “Buy Now” link.
7. Sell the product!
8. BONUS: Want to engineer the launch to have an even better chance of success? Build your interest list first.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but any of these can be applied immediately and help you to bring in a few extra bucks this month or start making money online as an entrepreneur.

A version of this post appeared on the author’s site, here.

Author: Sean Ogle is currently doing the things that most people just talk about doing — traveling the world, building businesses and helping others doing the same thing via Location 180.