Seeing the paths those before me took to profit on the internet gave me the courage to make the effort too and STICK WITH IT for years when I could have made more money with a regular job. For the first four years of my business online, my business consisted of almost entirely fantasy and failure. Most of the 90 ways listed here I would count as failures because they earned less money than I would have made working a job. That said, going through these failures was necessary for building a system with just a few ways that consistently work now that have allowed me to work full time online for 5 years now. Where I failed you might succeed and the paths I have taken might lead you no where. With this in mind, would you read about the ways that made me at least $1 online because seeing these may be inspiring in building and continuing to grow a business online?
This post is part of a 3 part series where I focused on 30 paths at a time to profit with this one being the final in the series for now. If you have missed the first post it is here and the second post is here.
◆ Number 61 is curious.com, which has a lot of short video tutorials. I think it is owned by Yahoo, and even though the quality of the tutorials seems to be very low, somehow they get tons of traffic.
Yahoo must run ads for it or something, and I made thousands of dollars putting up one twenty video Facebook ads course. The original course I put up on Udemy that I had to update and update to get any sales on it, and it made thousands of dollars somehow on curious.com.
Now I'm not sure what's happening with curious.com because I haven't heard from them or got a check from them lately, but it paid out thousands of dollars. It was an incredibly aggravating process to get the videos up there and then putting new videos up was even more aggravating. Joseph and another freelancer fooled around with it and we tried to do more, and now I'm just grateful for the money that was made.
Do you want another story similar to the one above?
Let's look at SkillFeed! SkillFeed was Shutterstock's attempt, or parent company's attempt, to get the basically same thing as curious.com and SkillShare.
SkillFeed was another paid membership website where you could watch a bunch of tutorials, and I had a few good months on SkillFeed bringing in hundreds of dollars. When I was just starting teaching online, I tried to scale that up, and I paid freelancers hundreds of dollars to put more and more videos up for me, then SkillFeed collapsed internally.
The hundreds of videos I put up all started getting rejected, common theme here, because they didn't like the hacking content on their photography focused website, even though people were watching it, and then the website closed down completely.
◆ Number 62: Won the regional round of a national social media competition for a marketing company. It is funny because they did social media marketing and they still saw that I was doing things so much better that they ought to hire me to help them win the competition as they weren't going to be able to beat their number one competitor.
They hired me and paid thousands of dollars, which at the time I thought was amazing, but the problem was that after all the work it took, it didn't result in a good client relationship. I won them the national round of a social media competition using a combination of Facebook ads and Fiverr.
◆ Number 63: StackSkills. StackSkills has been a windfall coming out of the Udemy success. They sell bundles of online courses and they approached me after seeing my courses on Udemy. StackSkills just put a bunch of my courses up in other bundles, and now StackSkills pays out thousands every month, and I don't have to do anything. It is a really sweet system. Thank you StackSkills. StackSkills seems to be continually building bigger and bigger.
◆ Number 64: LinkedIn message to get a Facebook ad client. While most of my Facebook ads clients and Facebook ads campaigns were the main way I made direct money with clients, I also used a LinkedIn message to find a client who paid me $399 to make Facebook ads.
◆ Number 65: Twitter messages both Direct Messages and replies in order to get Facebook like clients. This was similar to LinkedIn, except I was using Twitter. I sent messages on Twitter to people who were talking about getting more Facebook likes, or people who were asking others to like their page. I then would send them a message and I got a few clients that way.
◆ Number 66: Fiverr Twitter Tweet gig. This was a more recent one, just to test things out for my Twitter course. I put a gig up offering that if you paid me $5, I would Tweet your message out to my twenty-plus thousand Twitter followers. Actually a good bit of orders on that one, maybe fifty to a hundred dollars earned on those gigs combined, and Joseph actually ran those gigs.
◆ Number 67: Textbooks on Amazon. Back in college and graduate school, selling textbooks back to the used bookstore was a terrible business to be in. They hardly give you anything, and you would have paid everything. That's when I first started using Amazon to get my textbooks sold on Amazon at a much better price, and that was Amazon's original business model, as far as I know.
◆ Number 68: A paid webinar. Now consider this compared to how most people are doing their webinars trying to spend money to get people to come to their free webinar, and then sell them something.
As a result of my courses on Udemy and all the related sales efforts, someone actually paid me hundreds of dollars to do a webinar for them on what I was doing on Udemy. They had an audience that they were doing a series of webinars with, and I said, "Well the only way I would participate is if you paid me several hundred dollars to do it." So they paid. In fact, they paid it at the last minute, right before the webinar was about to go live because I told them "You'll pay me before I do it, or I won't do it."
◆ Number 69: Mobile app install media buys. I was set up to get people to install mobile apps using mobile ads. I would have clients with mobile apps and they wanted to get the installs. I would then make the media buys for them, on behalf of my client.
Now my client did most all the work to set this up, to get the relationships, and what they needed was then for me to be able to wire over the money to make the mobile app buy. My company has been a big part of getting mobile app installs even though I personally have done little more than look at the project overviews and send the money.
◆ Number 70: Google AdWords monthly management. This has been my most single successful specific service for a client, still to this day earning hundreds of dollars every month. I have been managing Google AdWords for years for a client who often doesn't have me do anything throughout the course of the month with the Google Ads, and then occasionally there is a month where there is a bunch of work.
◆ Number 71: One on one Skype call through my website. Before I used Acuity Scheduling, I would have a Skype call available that you would pay anywhere from $300 to $400 to schedule a Skype call with me, which either was for consulting alone or often was the first step to become a client.
I'm grateful I got lots of Skype calls ordered through my website, and those have been very helpful for supplementing the income from everything else. The Skype calls now led to me setting up the Acuity Scheduling, and those tend to be one of the more productive higher earning parts of my business.
If you think about it, obviously getting paid anywhere from two hundreds to six hundreds an hour, to take a call from someone, is a really good deal. Not just for me, but often the person I actually have the call with is very happy with what they get out of it because what I try and do is listen in the calls, and I try to provide genuine value in the sense of giving honest advice.
Instead of giving advice trying to get them to just buy my products or take more service, I tell them what they need to hear, often which is preventing them from scheduling another call:
"Hey, you don't really need to have another call with me, build your YouTube channel, get a freelancer to help you with your website and that's it. That's all you need to do. Maybe have another call with me in six months if you need, but you have got a lot of work to do right now, do it this way."
I really liked that about the calls, which have been one of the areas I would say of success, where people are consistently happy with them, I enjoy doing them and it compensates me at a good rate as well.
◆ Number 72: A weekly consulting package. I'm grateful a couple of years ago I had a client pay me $700 a week to help out with their ads and do hands-on consulting. I would have a phone call with them every week to do everything with their ads accounts to completely get them out and get their product out there. Now what did we do? We found out very quickly their product was not one that people wanted to buy. I had the benefit, given that I was doing the weekly consulting, of being honest with them.
I ran online ads for it and I said, "Based on these ad results, people don't want to buy your product that much, you need to try some other things with it," and I encouraged the guy who was a consultant often earning ten or twenty thousand dollars a week, to go get hands-on consulting where he would go show up onsite and help companies make major changes.
I encouraged him, I said, "You're doing such a good job with the business you have, why bother trying to set these other things up, just focus your energy on continuing to build the business that you already love and enjoy. Continue building that business, and just do that, you make such good money doing it and these side projects often end up just being a waste of both time and money. There are things you could be doing and having fun with family or friends, and then you already have enough money, so why try to make more?"
He provided me a lot of value too, he said, "You know Jerry, one of the best things about what you do is that you communicate a lot of these same things other people communicate, but you communicate it from a loving and service point of view, instead of a I want to get something out of you, point of view, so you have a rare form of delivery for your Internet marketing message."
I'm very grateful to the client who hired me to do a weekly consulting package and helped me so much as well as I hope I helped him. Last time I talked to him, he was fully booked for his own business, and focusing just on building his, and continuing to do his own business.
◆ Number 73 is blog posts to Udemy course sales. This is something I'm trying to do with my books now because it worked great on my Udemy course sale. I put out some blog posts like "Here is the newest of what's happening with Udemy," and then put a "buy my course" link at the bottom of the blog post.
That has worked good because it gives a lot of free value and then sells a related product. So what I'm doing now is the same thing, taking parts of each book that I write, which are anywhere from twenty to forty-plus thousand words. I take out a percentage of the book, maybe ten or twenty percent, put it out in the form of free blog posts, so I have got the actual content out there for free, and then I send people to the book at the bottom of the post. I'm still doing this one today except that it is not for Udemy courses, just for my own courses.
◆ Number 74: App Store Udemy course sales. Before Udemy wanted to push their own mobile app so much, they were doing really good business selling courses on the Apple App Store. I was really impressed with the sales, so many purchases directly through the Apple App Store for my Facebook course, which I believe they put up a direct app that had my Facebook course in it, which they would sell for like $20 and people were buying it that way.
It's funny to think that I don't look at the App Store as something I have made money from very commonly, but the fact is I have made if not hundreds, thousands of dollars off the Apple App Store in selling my original one or two courses on Udemy. They have discontinued this now because they try, as far as I can see, to push everyone into the Udemy app.
◆ Number 75: Google Play Udemy course sales. Again same thing, I don't look at Google Play and think I have made a bunch of money off that, but I have made if not hundreds, thousands or maybe even tens of thousands of dollars from Google Play purchases for my Udemy course app, back when they made individual courses and individual apps and before they transitioned over to using the Udemy app.
I'm grateful that I had the chance to make some good money out of both the App Store and Google Play and I'm keeping my eyes on opportunities to repeat that process.
◆ Number 76: Udemy in-app purchases. The complete hacking course and several of the other courses took a long time to get in the Udemy app, but I am grateful I made lots of money from in-app purchases of my courses.
These are people who are using the Udemy app and who actually bought the course in a mobile phone. So another thing, I don't feel like I have made money with in-app purchases, and yet I have made probably tens of thousands from them.
Notice some of these methods that I use so intentionally to try to make money and now some of these I'm showing you with almost no effort to make money that way, and yet working with a third party distributor, I have made money on a bunch of platforms like the App Store, Google Play in-app purchases without even setting out to try and do that on purpose.
◆ Number 77: Facebook event promotion campaign locally. I had a couple of clients hire me locally to prevent events for them on Facebook, to set the event up, to promote the event and advertise it locally. These were good things because the client then had their own people coming to the event, and then when the event was successful, they just counted my work with it as a part of it. So these were good mutually beneficial things and I just found them through networking, and I also found a couple of businesses through Facebook messages to then do the event campaign promotions for them in another place.
◆ Number 78: Creating Facebook ad accounts. Often, clients who are using fraudulent systems with Facebook ads need new accounts a lot because they get the accounts, and then they burn through them. They get the budget up to several hundred dollars a day, then they run the budget up on Facebook. They make some real payments, then they run the budget up on Facebook and then don't pay it off.
Often, these advertisers on Facebook are trying to save a bunch of money doing the background work of ads for their clients by trying to fraud Facebook, so these advertisers often need new accounts. Now I didn't realize the whole back end of this system until I started working with an advertiser.
I just thought, "Hey, I know how to make new Facebook ad accounts, I'll help someone out." This was before the business manager, back when you had to have a Facebook ads account created mostly just by using personal accounts. So I made a new Facebook ad account, got it created and working for the client, who then got it disabled right away.
The client wasn't happy because they had paid hundreds of dollars for me to make a new ad account through a wire transfer, so there was no refunds. I said, "That's too bad, but it's your problem you got the account disabled right away, I did everything right on my end." I never heard from this client again.
Another client hired me to do another account and they didn't end up using it correctly. That's another example of what happens when you hustle instead of providing true value. Sure, I made a few hundred dollars, but it was aggravating for everyone involved and overall not worth doing. A good learning experience though.
◆ Number 79 is Bitcoin sales on Wall of Coins. Wall of Coins is my friend's website I talked about before where I get a share of the ownership on it in exchange for doing the ads. On Wall of Coins, you can set up and put your Bitcoins on there and then when people buy your Bitcoins, they literally buy them by going to put a cash deposit straight in your bank account.
It is so convenient and there are so many great uses for it. I made some money on Wall of Coins because the Bitcoin price often would go up, and then the Wall of Coins price would still be the same. So if the Bitcoin price dropped all of a sudden, I could drop my Bitcoin price not quite as fast and people would buy it at a higher price on Wall of Coins, or if the Bitcoin price went up suddenly on Wall of Coins, it was easy to adjust my Bitcoin price and keep it a little bit lower and make a good profit. I made some money, I think hundreds of dollars, selling on Wall of Coins by buying Bitcoin at a lower price and selling it at a higher price.
◆ Number 80: Selling video games and consoles on Amazon. Before I had my business, you might not think of this as something to make money online, but when you are putting all the work in to sell video games and sell gaming consoles on Amazon, that is very much making some money online, and the skills that go into that translate into other places.
Writing the sales pitch for why you should buy my version or my specific used Xbox instead of someone else's used Xbox, seeing the ruthless nature of putting the price lower than someone else's to get an instant sale versus putting it five dollars higher and having to wait days to get a sale.
That was a strategy I learned from Amazon, you put the price ruthlessly low and people will come buy it. You put it lower than whoever the lowest seller is, if the lowest sale price for a used Xbox is $90, you put it at $89, and you will get an immediate sale. That way you don't have to worry about it, you don't have to think about it, you just immediately put it up and get a sale.
Meanwhile you put it up at a hundred dollars, you may wait weeks to make an extra ten dollars, and after you take the fees, it is even less. I learned a lot by selling video games and consoles on Amazon, especially writing things like landing pages. When you write, as to explain why your used Xbox is somehow better than someone else's used Xbox, you learn to write a story as to why you bought the Xbox console, why you are selling it, why it really isn't about to die even though you have played Modern Warfare 2 on it until the wheels have nearly fallen off.
I'm grateful that I have got the chance to consistently upgrade Xboxes, I would sell the old one for a hundred dollars or so and buy a new one for a couple of hundred, and that way I would avoid having my Xbox break. I would use it for quite a while, and then sell it before it broke.
◆ Number 81: HostGator affiliate. When I used HostGator, I would then do HostGator affiliate links and I made some commissions with direct links over to HostGator.
◆ Number 82: Expedia affiliate links. Expedia, HostGator and the next affiliate program are all available through Commission Junction. I made some Expedia affiliate purchases just by putting the links out on my website and I maybe even just bought through my own link.
I'm not sure whether that's exactly how it happened or not, but one of the things you can do with affiliate programs, depending on the terms and conditions, is use the affiliate link to buy your own products or services. With Expedia, I believe I booked a trip and then I got like $6 back through the Expedia affiliate program. The trip was the same price that would have been otherwise.
◆ Number 83: job.com affiliate. I don't even remember how I made money doing this, but somehow, I made money with the job.com affiliate program. I may have done mobile ads for it or just linked to it on my website, but hey, I don't even remember how I made money on it, but I got a payment from Commission Junction for job.com.
◆ Number 84: This was one of my clever moves, Amazon affiliate sales from mobile ads for a client. One of my clients had a product that they wanted to sell on Amazon, so what did I do? I ran a bunch of mobile ads for them because that's what they paid me to do, and then I threw my affiliate links on the mobile ad. So if you clicked on the mobile ad, it took you to Amazon and then I got an affiliate commission if you purchased anything in that session.
It was a really sweet setup because I had a guaranteed win plus a little extra bonus. I don't think I made much, but I made anywhere from ten to fifty dollars in Amazon affiliate commissions by running ads for the client, in addition to the hundreds of dollars the client paid me, and I only had to spend about a hundred dollars in ad revenue. That was a pretty sweet setup. The sad thing is that I don't think the client made one sale, meanwhile people were buying other products on Amazon through my affiliate link.
◆ Number 85: Bulk free Udemy coupon purchase. Now you might think, "What the heck is this?" I wondered what is that at first too.
One person actually asked to buy a link to a specific course with hundreds of coupons available, so that they could then just sell access to the free coupon, the same as I was doing on my website, and Joseph managed to get them to pay about $500 for a hundred coupon links.
That was one of the best deals I have ever made before because I routinely create free links all the time, if you actually buy one of my courses, the free links often have a lot of different redemption. So if you were so inclined, you could literally buy access to the free link and then share the free link or sell access to it, I would never know the difference.
Now if I see that there are a ton of students enrolling, I could go and disable it and yet, one thing that I often avoid doing is disabling little things like that because even if you are selling access to my course, then I am still getting new students that way, and new paying students that I can then do my marketing for. So I'm very grateful that one person paid $500 for their own access to coupons.
If everyone was that honest and that giving, I would need to be a lot more generous in giving and spending my money away, because I would have so much that I wouldn't know what to do with it, and therefore I would have to be spending it with other people, so that would be a lot more work. I'm very grateful that they came along and paid for coupons for that course.
◆ Number 86: Daily digital marketing retainer for a week. Now this was a cool one. I was paid by a client with a digital marketing retainer that I would help out with any of the needs that they would have with digital marketing, and they paid to have me on retainer on a weekly basis.
They did that for a while and in the course of serving clients, that was a cool thing that happened. It came through what I would guess was a Facebook message. Now, there are so many of these, sometimes they all run together.
◆ Number 87: Twitter followers delivered via Fiverr. One thing I offered as a service was that I would get you more Twitter followers, and I delivered that through Fiverr. Just like with my Facebook likes gigs, I would have on my website that I would give you a thousand Twitter followers for like a hundred dollars and then I would go buy them for $5 on Fiverr.
I tried as many of these different angles as possible, and I don't offer the majority of any of these services anymore.
◆ Number 88: Google AdWords account audit and ad campaign creation. One client hired me to actually audit their existing Google Ads and make some new ads for them. When they weren't happy with the very first group of ads I made though, then they didn't have me do anything else for them.
◆ Number 89: Leadpages affiliate program. When you buy Leadpages at the right level, they will allow you access to the affiliate program. Now the problem with this is that it costs $500 for a year of Leadpages at the rate you could get into the affiliate program, and so far I have made about $20 out of the affiliate program. I will be cancelling my Leadpages subscription and no longer be doing the affiliate program as soon as possible.
◆ Finally, the grand finale! The number 90 you have been waiting for. Are you ready for it? It's a huge shocker. I sold "100 Ways I Made Money Online" on Audible!
I sold a total of eight books on Audible. My first, "Video Gaming Addiction Stories" was just a test pilot book, a really quick book to see if I could get a book approved on Audible, and then the second one "Facebook ads and marketing" sold hundreds of copies.
This is currently my favorite way to make money because Audible is something I use myself. I bought over a hundred and fifty books on Audible, so I know how great it can be to have Audible customers. Meanwhile, I didn't like buying video courses that much, I just am not a sit down in front of the computer and learning a course kind of person. I like to learn by listening while I'm doing something like going to the gym, driving on a trip especially, et cetera.
Therefore, if you have bought "100 Ways I Made Money Online" on Audible by now, then it actually is the part of the number one current way I'm using to make money online because I think Audible will scale just as well, if not better, than Udemy did because Audible has a huge reach.
Audible has books like Harry Potter on it. There are huge bestselling books, that then once people read, they need new books, and while there are always new books to read, some areas are really weak on Audible like in some of those things I know how to teach, so I'm excited to be making books available on Audible.
I'm honored you went through this entire long list of different ways I have made money online if you have read until the end.
I hope that this list is inspirational for you to see different things that are possible, to hear some of the stories behind some of these foolish ways I made money online and to see that it is not about coming up with a great idea or some scheme to get money out of people.
It is about doing something you genuinely enjoy, like I genuinely enjoyed writing this post.
It is about doing something you genuinely love and enjoy that provides real value and service to others. You can see that most of these things I did to make money online did not do that. The ones I have enjoyed the best and that have worked the best have done that.
You may want to watch the full video class, which is available free with this coupon on The University of Jerry Banfield at https://u.jerrybanfield.com/courses/100ways?coupon=steem.
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Love,
Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk
