How to make money online for beginners – 9 legit ways

Making money online is a dream for most students and teens, also few of them have successfully managed to earn from online. Whatever if someone says that he/she is earning from online means they provided a value online to their customers or audiences. So at this point, we all have lots of questions about how people are doing this? what are the ways of providing value online? where to start?…blah blah blah. After analyzing all the platforms and possible ways of making money online, I wrote this post about how to make money online for beginners.

After too much research I finally classified ‘how to make money online for beginners’ into 3 categories based on hardness and skill requirements and each category holds 3 ways. Thus in this post, we are going to see 9 legit ways of making money online. 3 categories are,

• Beginner-friendly easy ways – Making money through basic skills

• Skill-based moderate ways – Requires skills

• Experience-based hard ways – Requires skills, patience, and experience

1. Earning through transcription

Transcription simply means converting audio or video files into a text file. Many companies, business owners, editors, researchers badly need this service for their videos and audios. In this sense, we can make money by helping them transcribing their files. 

But obviously neither a company straightly contacts you nor you straightly contact a company for this favor. There are some popular transcribing companies that tie-up with lots of customers all over the world. By signing up these sites as a freelancer, you can indirectly be connected to the customers who need this service.

Although most people say transcription isn’t a big thing to learn, still we should have a good level of English knowledge, listening skills, grammatical and punctuation skills. So let’s see how to make money online as a transcriptionist for beginners.

How to start transcription jobs?

To become a transcriptionist, you need to register in an official transcription company that is associated with the customers who want their files to be transcribed. In the transcription field, GoTranscript and Rev are the two master companies. To join,

• You need to sign up as a freelancer – Click here

• Then there will be a guideline test and a sample audio transcription test

• If you passed the test, then you will be given orders for transcription

But remember every time you make a transcription, you will be given ratings by the editor team. If a new transcriber has a rating of 3.6 or below after 3 transcriptions, he/she will be removed from the team.

How to earn $100 each month by transcription?

Transcription is an active job that you need to put effort constantly to earn money. Normally transcription companies provide an average of $0.60 for transcribing a minute of audio or video files.

To earn $100 from transcription jobs, you will need to transcribe about 167 minutes of audio or video files. 

According to surveys, a transcriptionist can earn an average of $ 150 per month and a maximum of $ 1215.

2. Teaching subjects online

Teaching is the most basic skill of every student or teen that can be easily developed. And I am pretty sure that the very first time when you start thinking of earning money online, you might have thought how awesome if I earn money by teaching students like me online. Even I did the same.

Speaking about teaching, you just need two skills. One is good communication and the other is teaching in a way that your student can understand the concept very well. So let’s see how to make money online as a teacher for beginners.

How to start teaching subjects online?

There are tons of platforms on the internet to earn by teaching. But here for Indian students, I am going to explain how you can become a teacher at Unacademy and make a good amount from it each month.

• Download and register on Unacademy Educator App – Click here

• You will need to upload a demo class – This is a test that Unacademy do to find out whether you are good enough to teach a student

• • Pick an educational topic you want
  • Make a PPT or do handwritten notes and make a copy of it
  • Give a voice over and make sure the audio is as clear as possible
  • Unacademy doesn’t really test your knowledge here instead your ability to withstand your audiences
  • Make a video of 3 mins

• A team will review your video and reply whether you are passed or not.

If you are an overseas student and you would like to teach and earn online, you can choose platforms like TutorMe and Tutors.

How to earn $100 each month as a teacher online?

If you become a tutor in Unacademy, initially you will get paid according to your video views. The chart for Unacademy tutor salary is given below,

• For 5,000 views – Rs. 4,000
• For 10,000 views – Rs. 6,000
• For 25,000 views – Rs. 8,000
• For 50,000 views – Rs. 10,000
• For 100,000 views – Rs. 16,000

Once the educator crosses 100,000 views then after every 50,000 views you will get about 8,000 rupees. But after reaching 100,000 views you will get more kind of earning through stipend and royalty.

Anyways to earn $100 a first month you need to get 25,000 views within that month. Then after that to earn the same $100 in the next month you need to get 75,000 views. But after that, constantly you will be getting $100 every month if you get 50,000 views. 

On average a trained and popular tutor earns about $3,000 from Unacademy.

If you become a tutor in TotorMe you will get $16 for every hour and so if you teach 6 hours and 15 mins in TutorMe every month then you will get about $100 every month. If you become a tutor in Tutors then you will get about $50 for every single hour you are teaching. So if you teach just 2 hours in Tutors for a month then you will get $100.

3. Selling skills online

Teaching online is like you are providing a digital product to people in the form of videos. Generally, It’s not that hard to create an online course. You should know how to make videos. You can simply use your smartphone as a recording gadget.

You can upload your online course on the website SkillShare. Skillshare is an online learning platform where people upload videos based on the categories like creative arts, design, entrepreneurship, lifestyle, and technology.

It is kinda like YouTube, anyone can upload videos. Also Its a lot easier than creating your own website and selling your courses or videos there. So let’s see ‘how to make money online as a skill sharer’ for beginners.

How to start selling skills online?

• Sign up to SkillShare or download the app available in the Play store – Click here

• Also, SkillShare is a premium site so you have to upgrade your account to teach through SkillShare

• For free up-gradation of SkillShare, we have 3 ways.
  

• • 2 months free students scholarship – You need to have a .edu email to claim this offer. .edu email can be created free in lots of ways. YouTube has tons of videos to create.
  • Upgrade your 7 days free trial to 14 days by using the ‘2WFREEGOOGLEB‘ coupon code.
  • SkillShare premium scholarship for 1 year – You need to submit the reason why you need a scholarship, your financial situation, and the reason for joining SkillShare.

How to earn $100 each month from selling online courses?

You need roundabout 1,700 minutes of watch time in SkillShare which is 28 hours of watch time. So if you have a one-hour class on SkillShare, you need 28 students to take that class every month and watch it with a premium membership roughly speaking. And that will make you round about $100 from SkillShare.

On average by teaching in SkillShare one can earn $200 for the first month and a maximum of $3,000.

4. Social media management

What exactly social media management is that you will manage social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Linked In.. etc of a company or a business which have a good amount of revenue through offline-based business but hasn’t tried social media marketing yet. With this, you will help them reach their sales or engagements or revenue counts to another level.

Basically, there are two types of businesses that need social media management and you might work with, those are product-based businesses and service-based businesses. 

For product-based businesses, the ultimate goal is to make considerable sales through social media beyond offline sales.

But in service-based businesses the service provider either would like to give services one to one at a time or the services may be in a video course format so that people can sign up and buy their courses. Most of the service providers use both these methods nowadays. For them, you have to make a lot of engagements and course buyers through social media. So let’s see ‘how to make money online as a social media manager’ for beginners.

How to become a social media manager?

To work as a social media manager, first of all, you need to have experience and a clear idea of how these social platforms work. Then only you will make a profit to the business via social media, otherwise, you can be easily replaceable.

But it’s kinda hard to start the business or get a client initially. You can offer a company a free work of one or two weeks to get their hope. For beginners, it’s a good time period to find out their skills in social media marketing as well.

To start as a social media manager,

• Find a business that needs a social media manager –

1. • You can ask your relatives or neighbors who are having a business that generates a good amount of revenue in offline mode.
   • Contact Instagram or Facebook pages (with fewer followers) of a business for an opportunity. 
   • The best way is to find business clients through Google maps. You can search businesses of your nearby location and contact them.

• Frequently your clients will ask for your case studies or the past results that you’ve gotten for your clients

1. • You can show the pages of your previous clients that generated great audiences
   • Or you can show them your own social media page that has great engagements and followers
   • Or you can tell them the strategies that you have to grow a business via social media
   • Even if you have a great idea about this clients business you can approach them with the statistics of the business

• You can set your boundaries of salary, once you make some successful moves in your clients business

• Grow the business as a team, once you start earning a reasonable amount. You can recruit

• • Other social media managers
  • Graphic designers
  • Copywriters
  • Or an assistant to support your work.

Apart from finding clients through the above way you can try to find social media manager jobs in Indeed, Linked In, UpWork,…etc. But the clients in these companies will expect more, like you should be a graduate, you should have good communication skills.

How to earn $100 each month as a social media manager?

Even if earning through social media management is an active process. If you’ve got skills and experiences you will get more.

Let’s say you have a client who is having an offline profit of $10,000 a month. After you take over the social media if you are making about $1,000 profit for his/her business through social media marketing you can charge about 10% of the profit means $10.

According to surveys, a social media manager makes about $500 to $750 per month on average.

5. Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is simply you will refer a product to someone that belongs to some others and that will generate a small amount of commission if you made that sale. Apparently, 48% of affiliate marketers globally earned $20,000 a year which is $1,660 a month means people are doing very well with Affiliate marketing overall. So let’s see ‘how to make money online as an affiliate marketer’ for beginners.

How to start an affiliate program?

Amazon has its own affiliate program that’s probably the biggest in the world. To create and earn through the affiliate program,

• You will need to have an Amazon account – Click here

• Sign up to the Amazon affiliate website using your Amazon account – Click here

• Then have a clear idea that which kind of product that you are going to sell or make a review (Link Electronics, Mobiles,…)

• After sign in you can the product referral link in three forms according to your need

• • Text only (means product link only)
  • Image only(means image only can be adjustable)
  • Text and Image only (both will be there)

• Then finally choose which platform that you are going to do your review on. As a beginner, you can choose social media like Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube. But after all, posting, your reviews about a product on websites is recommended. You can check out Wirecutter, it is an affiliate website that tests and reviews the best tech and appliances.

How to earn $100 each month from affiliate marketing?

Amazon can pay 1% to 10% for an affiliate purchase but in general 4%.

Let’s say you have an affiliate website in which you are reviewing a product worth $50 to your website visitors. We know not all the visitors can have the interest to buy the product. Generally, the conversion rate of visitors to customers is 1%.

From this, we can say one sale can bring you $2 and 50 sales can bring you $100. To gain 50 customers that can buy your product your website at least has 5,000 to 7,000 visitors every month. But as I said already on average affiliate marketers earn $1600 a month.

6. Selling merchandise online

Selling merchandise online is another spectacular way of earning money online. Actually, this requires both Graphic designing and Social marketing skills. Creativity matters a lot, If your design is cool enough then it can be easily sold out.

After the designing part, social marketing plays a role. For example, you made a design and you infused the design on the t-shirt on a merchandise website. Now you are having the t-shirt to sale but you don’t have the audience to promote. What you can do is you can create a Facebook or Instagram page with a name associated with your niche.

Develop your page as much as possible by sharing contents, memes, tips,… etc. Now you can post your merchandise here on your page. Your audience might like it and buy it. If you have a page with a lot of audiences then your conversion rate will be more and you can get great revenue. So let’s see step by step ‘how to make money online by selling merchants’ for beginners.

How to start selling merchandise online?

There are lots of platforms where you can infuse your design into products like t-shirt, cups, pants, and hoodies. Most often people use Teespring and Redbubble to sell their merchandise. Amazon also has its own merchandise platform but it’s not available in India. To start selling merchandise,

• You need to sign up for either Teespring or Redbubble – Click here

• Select your portable niche related to your category (For example if you are focussing on the medicine category you can design a model or transparent image suitable for doctors and then you can sell merchandise in the name of ‘Doctor shirts’)

• To make designs as a beginner you can choose either Spark Adobe – Click here

• Before making a design on a keyword, check out the keyword in Etsy. It may help you how to make a good design – Click here

• After designing you can infuse that into a t-shirt, pants, or hoodies… etc

• Lastly to sell the merch you have to market it on social media. Facebook is the most relevant medium for marketing.

How to earn $100 each month by selling merchandise online?

The best strategy is to have a market in mind, your target audience, and then brainstorm ideas. If you are having these in mind you can easily make sales for your merchants.

Let’s say you are selling a t-shirt for $22 and you are earning about $12 for each sale. So to get $100 each month you have to make at least 14 sales per month. Also selling merchandise online is partially a passive income once if you made it to a maximum level then the profit will be the easy piece.

On average a beginner can make $750 per month if he/she is consistent with his work.

7. Starting a website

Starting a website is one of the best ways that you can do and earn money as a beginner. Apart from earning, a website is a great way to share your newly gained knowledge and skills with people all over the world. 

You can share the thoughts, you can teach people, you can write blogs about your career your extracurricular activities. That in turn can lead to entertainment over time and the attitude of having to do it every day. Doing it properly will also make a few improvements in your lifestyle as well.

If your website comes up in the Google search, you’ll not only help a person out but gradually build a community of people who are interested in your content. So let’s see ‘how to make money online as a content writer on your website’ for beginners.

How to create a website?

Making a website is a multi-step process in which buying a domain and hosting your domain are the major steps. If you don’t understand what is domain and hosting, you can relate a website to a business. A business needs fundamental machinery first then to run the business you need a place. After that, you need a power supply that controls and gives energy to the machinery. Lastly, to run the business commercially you will need to register it with the government.

Likewise, a website needs a domain (fundamental machinery) then the domain should be hosted in a hosting platform (business place). After that, you need to install WordPress (power supply) to control your domain. Lastly, you need to submit your site to the search console (registering government) to make it available in Google search.

• Register and buy your Domain from websites like Godaddy – Click here

• • Remember your domain name should reflect your content then only people can reach you easily through Google search. You can also register the domain with your name if you wish.

• Host your domain in a hosting platform like Hostinger – Click here

• Install WordPress for your domain

• Submit your website to search console so that your domain can be listed in Google search

• Create contents and publish it through WordPress

• Be consistent in your work and post with a schedule

How to earn $100 each month from the website?

In several ways, one can earn money from a website. But mostly the easy and beginner-friendly way to earn money from a website is by monetizing your website through Google Adsense.

But to get monetized your content should obey all the content policies of Adsense and you need to have an average of 50 views per day for your site. Nowadays you can even apply for Adsense with 10 to 15 blog posts.

Once your site gets monetized then you will start earning.

Adsense will allow you to withdraw the money once the threshold of $100 meets.

In India, for every 1,000 views, you can earn somewhere between $1 to $2 (on an average of $1.5). So to make $100 a month from your website, your website needs to have at least 67,000 views per month or 2,250 views per day.

In countries like the USA and UK, for every 1,000 views, you can earn somewhere between $4 to $6 (on an average of $5). So to make $100 a month from your website, your website needs to have at least 20,000 views per month or 670 views per day. 

If your content is absolutely awesome and you are consistent enough, you can make $2,000 a month.

Apart from Google Adsense, you can even monetize your website with other platforms like Media.net (You need to have more US visits for your site to get approved), Facebook Instant Articles (You should have a Facebook page associated with your site).

Also, you can promote products through affiliate links on your site. As I already said Amazon is one of the leading affiliate programs. In addition, you can also collaborate with CJ affiliates, ClickBank or ShareASale.

8. Starting a YouTube channel

Making money through YouTube channel is something that I do these days and I personally recommend you to do the same as well. But obviously, It will take much of your time to become successful and earn a reasonable amount out of it.

First of all, creating a YouTube channel is extremely easier that each one of you can do it on your own. But uploading a video with good content that people are willing to watch is what matters really.  Let me explain ‘how to make money online as YouTuber’ for beginners.

How to maintain a YouTube channel?

• You have to be clear that what type of content or which area you are going to focus on. Eg you can create a Tech channel, Educational channel, Productivity channel, or Gaming channel… etc. You don’t really need to be a master in your category as you can teach beginners. Actually confidence matters.

• You can create a normal video in which you are explaining your content. This actually needs a quality camera and voice recorder. If you are having a high-end mobile then mobile itself enough. Or you can create an animation video with a video editor like Filmora or even you can create a whiteboard animation video with software like Videoscribe, Easysketchpro.

• Record your voice with a good quality voice recorder or if you are a beginner then you can use your mobile as a recorder.

• Also, your video should be informative as people can be benefitted from that. Then only your channel will be boosted up easily by the YouTube algorithms.

• Anyways to become successful in your YouTube carrier the one you actually need is consistency. Have a schedule like I will upload two videos a week or once a week depends on your profession.

How to earn $100 each month from your YouTube channel?

So speaking about earning from YouTube, your channel should be monetized first. Then only your videos will be shown with ads that ultimately earn you money.

To get your channel to be monetized you will actually need 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time within a year. After that, your channel will be linked to your Google AdSense that’s the place where your YouTube earning money will be updated every month.

In general, a YouTube channel in India can generate $1 for every 1,000 views. So if you are making one video each week, which gets 25,000 views, you will generate $25 a week. And this will help you to generate $100 a month.

But it’s not easy as described in words it really needs your good amount of patience, smart work, and consistency. On average a youtube with 100K subscribers from India makes about $800 to $1000 per month.

9. Investment in stocks and shares

Most people think like investing money in stocks and shares actually a waste of time and energy and also few of them feel like stock marketing is a kind of gambling with money that rich people alone do usually. This is totally fair because most of the Indian system and News podcasts will always focus on market share declining. Whenever Nifty or Sensex (Indian Stock market) points declining these systems will project that as a big failure and most of the investors lost their own money.

But having good knowledge and experience can generate a good amount of money out of it. So let’s see ‘how to make money online by investing in stock markets’ for beginners.

What are stocks and shares?

Actually, what stocks and shares mean you are paying a company (A particular percentage of the total company worth) for their own company welfare. And whenever the company gains a profit they will provide you a part of it based on how much percentage of stocks you owned. Also if the companies are getting developed day by day then the amount you put initially also increases.

Example,

Let’s say the total worth of Apple is $2 Trillion = 100%

Apple company owns or invests about $1 Trillion = 50%

The rest of the 50% will be contributed by many people by buying apple stocks.

let’s say after some time apple gain a profit of $1 million and you owned a 1% stocks of apple

Then you will get an amount of $10,000 as Dividend money.

Also, your net worth will increase as the Apple company is developing. If you bought a 1% ($20 billion) stock of Apple today If the Apple company is worthing about $10 Trillion in 2025 then your net worth will be 5 times the worth during 2020 ($100 billion).

How to start investing in stocks and shares?

Basically, there are three ways a person can invest in stocks and shares,

• Trading (wants quick money)
• Individual stock investment (long term equity wealth)
• Mutual funds (a simple way for long term wealth)

As a student, we all are beginners we don’t really have much experience and we don’t know the ins and outs of the stock market. The first two options Trading and Individual stock investment highly depend on experience. So I don’t really advise you to jump up there.

As a beginner and as a student with a bunch of extras in your hand, you can do Index funding kind of mutual funding which has a minimal expense ratio (Because there is no fund manager in between and Index funds are directly tracked by the country’s indies).

• First of all, if you are going to invest in index funds you need a Demat account, this is more like an account which you need to sign in into the stock market. Nowadays, a Demat account can be opened free by most brokerages, and these brokerages differ in the country.

• Sign up to a Stockbroker to create a Demat account

• • In India, you can use Zerodha, Upstox, Angel Broking, or Groww – Click here

• • In countries like the US, you can use Webull –Click here

• • In countries like the UK, you can use Freetrade or Vanguard – Click here

• • Basically whatever countries you are in, just google it and you can find out the best in your own country.

• After sign up go for the UTI Nifty Index Fund as in the case of India

• Analyze the returns, pros & cons, calculate the SIP/One Time, and then go for the investment.

How to maintain Investment in stocks and shares?

As if you are going for One Time investment then no worries of management. Once you have invested a particular amount for 1 year, 3 years, or 5 years, then you don’t need to invest again which means you don’t need to maintain it every time.

But if you are investing in Index funds in the form of Monthly SIP, you will need to pay the amount every month. So SIP really needs a bit of maintenance.

How to make $100 each month by Index funds?

As in the case of Indian Stock marketing Nifty, there is a formula that for each year point will increase to about 10% to 15%, in every 3rd year it will increase to 25% to 35% and also for every 10 years the point table will increase about 100%. So if you Invested Rs.50,000 in 2010 in UTI Nifty Index Fund then in 2020 you could have received Rs.100,000.

Considering the S&P 500 in the last 12 months from 2020 to 2021, it increases about 50% despite the COVID-19 pandemic is going on. So if you have invested $1000 in S&P 500 last year, then you should’ve got $1500 this year. Also If you consider the last 20 to 30 years S&P 500 increases about 10% each year (Like the Nifty).

So to make $100 each month by Index funds,

• You have to invest $12,000 for 1 year ⇒ Will generate around $1200 a year ⇒ Means you will now make $100 every month (OR)
• If you put in $7500 for 5 years ⇒ After compounding it will generate around $100 a month after 5 years (OR)
• If you invested $5000 for 10 years ⇒ After compounding it will generate around $100 a month after 10 years.

Conclusion

If you made it to the bottom, you are just awesome and you have patience. With that saying, making money online is not an overnight process, it requires your dedication, smart work, and patience. If you are choosing to create a website, it will take at least six to eight months of period to reach a hundred dollars income.

So take a breath, choose your right way, then go for it. Learn something new every day. This is the mantra what I have as a 22-year-old college student. I hope you guys get benefited from this post. Share your knowledge about making money online. 

Also read,

• 3 levels of making money online

• 10 qualities of a successful student