So how many ways can you make money online? While there may be no exact definite number of methods that you can monetise online, I’ve actually came up with these while working on my WISE (Web Income Systematic Execution) Blueprint :

In this post, let me cover 5 of the methods above which I believe are the most feasible in terms of achievability and also profitability.

Content Marketing – Content Is King

This is probably the most common way for anyone who wanted to start making money online – start a blog and post good informational content in a particular niche that people will tend to search and read online.

So ideally, the contents for these posts must be well researched/written and are optimised for higher ranking in the search engines to acquire as much organic search engine traffic. Advantages for this SEO targeted content marketing method are that not only it’s free, the posts can continually accumulate traffic for your blog over a long period of time.

Once the blog starts to gain traction (or rather, traffic), you can start to monetise from it with cost-per-click (CPC) like Google AdSense and Bitvertiser.

And once your blog reaches the 6 or 7-figure (unique) views goals, the earnings could be quite substantial with your own site advertising mechanism and sponsorships. Though for this to happen, it’ll usually take years and you’d need to reach what we called the Authority Site status with high Google Page Ranking of 3 or more.

In fact, the rest of the models will not be successful without good content. After all, people search online primarily to find the information they want, it’s all about content really. Hence, content generation is the most important element for online success.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is when you recommend a product – it can be an ebook, a program, a software etc. on your website and when someone click on your affiliate hyperlink to go to the actual product webpage to make a purchase, you earn a commission. For infoproducts, the commissions could be as high as 50% and sometime it could be even be 100% … surprised? well, at times the product owners may be giving 100% commission on low-ticket item as they value the email addresses that they are collecting into their “golden virtual asset” (aka email lists) which they will earn much more via email marketing.

Affiliate marketing has been around for decades and it’s still going strong because it’s the easiest way to make money online. It is an easy way to make money while you are working your day job. The best part of affiliate marketing is that you can do it from anywhere and at any time.

Implementation of affiliate marketing is done typically via a blog or e-commerce site – here, let’s “disregard” the medium in which affiliate marketing is implemented but focus on the key advantage of – that is, for affiliate marketing, there is no need for you to have your own product, no inventory to hold, no payment gateway needed, no customer service need to be done; all these are handled by the actual product owner. All you have to do is to promote and as long as your site’s visitors clicked on your affiliate hyperlink to go to the product landing page, your job is done as an affiliate marketer. Whether the visitors will eventually purchase the product depend on the salescopy of the landing page – that’s why to increase your affiliate commissions, not only you’d need to promote good products (typically those that you’d even use them yourself) and the product landing page must have that convincing “conversion” x-factor.

If you’re reading this post, you can probably see affiliate marketing at work on the sidebar of this page – which I’m recommending SiteGround hosting. WillTan.com has been with SiteGround Cloud Hosting for many years now and I’m super satisfied with it and would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who need good affordable and reliable hosting. So if anyone click on the banner or hyperlink and made a purchase, I’d earn a commission from SiteGround.

So yes, affiliate marketing is another excellent stream of online income for a content blog too which can be combined with the CPC/AdSense monetisation as mentioned above.

Print-On-Demand (POD) e-Commerce

Print on demand is a type of e-business that is easy for anyone to start. For me, it deserved to be a specialised category on its own as an online monetisation model.

As of this writing, I’ve 3 POD e-commerce sites – they are using popular print-on-demand providers like Printify and Printful. There are a handful of other POD providers but I believe Printful and Printify (lol, if you’d see my deliberate intention to switch the name as before; both are good) are the 2 best anyone can start with if you’re interested in this fun print-on-demand business.

The key reason why I like print-on-demand is that the POD providers have all the inventory settled for you. Not only that, they handle the printing for you and also the #1 headache for e-commerce – shipping (the logistics). In other words, you do not need to stock up inventory which often requires high upfront capital.

The most tedious task for POD e-commerce is probably the (graphic design). But as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the growth of AI (ie. text to image) tools the mushroomed over recent times have literally eliminate this design hurdle even though you might not be a professional graphic designer.

Additionally, other tools ie. Placeit also make it a breeze to run a POD business.

InfoProducts / Online Courses

It has been quite some time but I can still vividly remembered the first time when my email inbox was “flooded” with “You’ve got payment” notifications from PayPal – that was when I published and sold my first ebook at that time. (Unfortunately, the ebook is no longer on sale nor valid due to changes of the big G rules over time).

But yes, selling ebook is still one good way to make money online. Everyone is bound to some or more in-depth knowledge of something that you can share ie. hobbies; things you love to do and possibly good in it. These knowledge or information, when compiled into a nice formatted ebook or even an online courses is a very good way to make that extra income online.

e-Service ie. Web Design (Freelancing)

This is perhaps my major extra stream of online income – offering my web development service on an ad-hoc freelancing mode. The key advantage of this is you can do this without quitting your full-time job.

But of course, you would need to acquire the necessary skillset to run this freelancing service.

Nevertheless, there is a way you can still run such e-service freelancing even when you have no knowledge at all – via drop-servicing.

I shall not go into detail what is dropservicing here. But I do want to emphasise that even though you can make money through freelancing via dropservicing, it is still ideal that you have the necessary skillset to complete at least the job(s) at hand even when your outsourced partners is CMI (Can’t Make It).

In summary, the choice (or choices) of which you’d like to make that extra or even full-time income online very much depend on yourself. My advice is keep learning and taking consistent actions.