Most people are fascinated by the idea of an online income.
If you are from a tech background, you know what you have to do— build something that solves problems.
If you are creative, you know what you have to do— create content people will enjoy.
Then there are people like me who have no specific skills. So people in this category try everything to earn a quick buck.
When you live in a developing/third-world country, the most common idea to make money online is to find a website that pays you to do something.
The idea that you can earn money online in USD excites most people.
So, they buy courses on making money online or spend hours on websites that can pay them online.
Though I have never looked for websites that pay money, I have spent a lot of time observing people who make loads of money online.
It's never the platform that will provide you with additional income. It's what you are capable of doing.
I have made some money from writing articles and am very bad at writing.
I have no specific niche. I have never practised writing consistently. When you apply for online jobs on Upwork or pitch ghostwriting services on other people's websites, you realize that you have to show proof of work.
If you have proof of work, people will automatically come to you.
For example, observe any Instagram influencer. If they are genuine and not a part of any engagement group or their posts are not filled with likes from bots. Instead, they have a sound community of 100k people.
Do you think they have to search for sponsors and collaborations? They easily get $400-$500 worth of promotion offers.
They have to decline most of the offers because it doesn’t go with the brand they are building.
Another example— if a person has built a blog, and it gets millions of impressions each month. Does that person have to run after SEO and writing jobs?
Nope, everyone would be interested in that person’s growth strategies. People would pay to learn from that person. People would buy 100s of dollars worth of products from that person.
But if you are looking for cheap thrills, thousands of websites will pay you cents for hours of your work.
In turn, they will make much more money from their traffic.
You can fill out surveys if you enjoy earning $1-$2. There is a limited number of surveys you can fill out. And they are location and people-specific.
How many online influencers have you seen who make their living by filling out survey forms?
Then all these terms are thrown easily, like making money is a piece of cake—like blogging, SEO, web design, copywriting, crypto trading etc.
If you try any of these, you will realize in a week that making money from these is not easy.
Sure, you can make lots of money from any of these skills. But it takes time to develop these skills.
For example, to make money from blogging, you must write more than 100 articles, 1000 words each. Only then you have the data to analyze whether you can write about something for long enough or not.
Being interested in something doesn't mean you can write about that topic or you can explain it to others in simple terms.
To get paid for SEO, you have to become good at SEO. To become good at SEO, you must write articles, understand keywords, run a website, and become a master of a topic. Prove your worth to other people.
To become good at copywriting, you have to be good with words. To become good with words, you have to practice for years.
You need a starting capital to make money from crypto trading, algorithm trading, NFTs, staking, play2earn games, etc. Then you have to be good at understanding all these things and the general trend, and then be quite lucky more than once. Most people get lucky with some amount of capital and think they understand these markets. They believe they are the smart ones!
The better alternative is to figure out something to get good at. Pick a topic, a platform and a skill. Then repeat the process daily for months.
Suppose a person can design ten different versions of a website every day. And then send them to potential clients. What’s going to happen? Eventually, that person is going to be better at designing websites. And someday, someone will accept the offer(for $10 maybe😅), But you start from somewhere.
When you try something every day, you will get good at it. Every day you practice, you will learn more about your field.
Even stock traders/crypto traders who trade daily learn how to be profitable and sell their courses. Whether you like it or not, they have built a business around trading and selling their knowledge. And it’s quite a profitable skill(both trading and selling).
There are better opportunities when you become good at something.
With time, you figure out things that work for you. For example, if you learn web development, you can write about tech(technical writing), make websites and apps, and build a community.
Of course, there are risks. You can write something that will offend people. You can lose your capital. Google can change its algorithms, and your traffic will drop significantly, or you may get shadow banned on insta/twitter.
But if you are serious about building skills, these things won’t stop you. You can learn from it and build again. This time, it won’t take years!
In the end, you can always keep looking for websites that offer to pay 10 cents for an hour's worth of work. And then, they won’t even pay you that money.
The choice is always yours!
