Making money online can seem like a daunting or completely impossible task if you’ve never done it before, but once you understand the basics, the possibilities are endless. In this in depth article, I’m going to cover the basics behind how to make money online as a beginner in 2023.
I’ve been making money online since well before I left school, and with over 10 years of experience in all sorts of completely different ideas, I’ve learned a lot of lessons along the way.
Nowadays, I mainly earn my money from investments and creating content which people love. Whether it’s blog posts, videos, music or software, I love when people find value in what I create. It’s extremely rewarding, and I truly hope this post will help you take your first steps into the world of entrepreneurship online.
Step 1: Come Up With a Business Idea
Having an online business doesn’t need to be complicated. You can earn very good money from doing simple things well. People often have this idea that if your idea isn’t totally unique, then it won’t work, but that just isn’t true – can you imagine if there was only one YouTuber who made videos on cooking? Yes, your idea does need to have some kind of value or edge, but the idea of finding something which absolutely no one else has thought of is stopping a lot of people from getting into online business.
If you’re stuck for ideas, here are a few off the top of my head:
- YouTube Channel
- Blog
- Online Store
- Review Site
- Selling Clothes on Ebay
- Importing Products to the UK Wholesale and Selling Them
- Becoming a Content Writing Freelancer
- Developing iPhone Games
- Developing Apps on Platforms (e.g Shopify)
- Selling Teaching Resources
- Creating Sheet Music
- Making a Course on a topic you have expertise in
- Selling Excel Spreadsheet Templates
- Edit videos for people
- Flipping Products
- Producing Music
Step 2: Learn About The Business
We live in a wonderful world, where you can learn just about anything you could possibly want on the internet. Whether you read articles like this, watch YouTube videos or even pay for a course to save you some time, it’s important to gain some kind of understanding from people successful in this type of business to learn how you can have success.
Let me give you an example. I’m a music producer, and a majority of my income doesn’t actually come from writing blog posts or a 9-5, it comes from making music for millions of people to listen to on Spotify, Amazon, and wherever else people can listen to music.
I learned absolutely everything I know about professional music production from YouTube and websites. Everything. When I first bought Ableton. I had absolutely no clue how to do anything, and my music was shockingly bad. By investing some time into learning how to produce music to a professional standard, I was finally able to see success in one of my biggest passions in life.
This goes for almost all parts of online business too, not just something specific like how to make music. How to set up a WordPress site, how to write better content, how to set up advertising on your blog, the answers are all out there. So get to learning!
Step 3: Implement Your Learnings
With the knowledge you have picked up, get to work on your business. Now that you understand the basics, it’s time to learn from doing. Your first attempts at whatever it is you decide to do isn’t going to be perfect, but by learning and improving, any dedicated person can find significant success in whatever it is they are trying to do.
A lot of the time, doing is where almost all of the education actually comes from. By doing, you start to ask questions which you may never have even considered before you started. These are the questions that fewer and fewer people know the answers to, and this is how you build your expertise.
Step 4: Don’t Be Afraid to Fail
Don’t be afraid to fail. Most multi-millionaire, hugely successful entrepreneurs try an absolute boatload of different ideas before they come across their huge win which everyone knows them for. All of the failures along the way were huge learning lessons for them, so if you spend 6 months on a project which doesn’t work out, don’t feel too bad. Seriously.
Personally, I’ve probably made well over 10 websites at this point, and out of that 3 have been successful. The crazy thing is, I still don’t really know what caused some of them to work and some of them not too. All I can say is that over time my success rate has increased a lot, and I can put that down to the lessons I learned from failing.
So those are my 4 steps for beginners on how to make money online. Now, let’s take a look at the three rules of online business. I know, I know, rules are there to be broken, but I really do think that abiding by these three principles can hugely increase your chances of success, and also help you find success quicker in making money online.
Rule 1: Advertisers Love Digital Content
I think a lot of people have preconceived ideas when it comes to the topic of making money online. My parents for instance, still don’t understand what I do and where the money comes from, and perhaps never will.
I’ve been told time and time again that this business is unsustainable by them, and that I should just focus on a nice, stable 9-5. For years, they seemed to think it’s just all some kind of accident when I got paid!
This confusion came from the fact I didn’t appear to be selling anything, so what was I being paid for?
This is where it might get confusing. I was selling, and I was selling a lot. What was I selling? Advertising space, and quality content.
You see, what most content creators actually sell is advertising on their content, and attention to companies. It’s just like television.
These channels often don’t sell you the content, they sell the attention of their viewers to advertisers. It’s a win win for everyone:
- Viewers – Able to access amazing content for free
- Content Creators – Get paid for creating what they love
- Advertisers – Receive more sales
- Platforms (e.g YouTube) – Take a cut of the advertising money to run their platform for free.
Billions of people per year consume content online, and that content is perfect real estate for companies to try to market to consumers.
This digital real estate is valuable. So valuable, in fact, that the digital advertising industry is worth over 600 billion dollars. That’s correct: $600,000,000,000. That’s over $50 per person on planet earth…
It’s predicted that by 2026, digital ad spend will exceed 800 billion dollars, meaning before long this is going to be a trillion dollar industry. It’s pretty safe to say that monetizing online content is going to continue to be a thing for a very, very long time.
So, that’s why making content and releasing it completely free can be a great business to get into.
Rule 2. People Aren’t Dumb.
This is an important one, and I’ll tell you a slightly shameful story from my teenage years when I was just starting out.
It’s super easy to see viewers or customers online as just numbers in a spreadsheet, but please remember that these are real people, and they aren’t stupid.
When I made my first website almost 10 years ago, I had the really bad attitude that a view was a view, and it didn’t matter whether what I was making was any good. This meant that I was creating really low value content but using clickbait (the art of getting people to click on your stuff) to get the views, after which they would be instantly disappointed and leave. Let me tell you right now – making anything which is of little value is not going to take you very far. Whether it’s low quality products or low quality videos, it’s really not sustainable to try to make a business out of anything which people don’t respond well to.
Let me tell you what happened to my low value site – it failed, miserably. Because people were clicking on the site and then instantly leaving, it barely made any money at all despite having thousands and thousands of users.
As soon as I actually learned my lesson and spent time, money and years of learning on making things people actually enjoyed, my income skyrocketed. Save yourself the time and just make the good stuff from day one, okay?
Rule 3. Sometimes Investing Is Worthwhile
It might be appealing to try to get into making money online on the cheap – only using free products and free software, and never paying a penny on anything. Sometimes, it is worth just forking over some money if it’s going to make a difference.
Let me give you an example. I had a really, really bad laptop when I started out in online business. It was slow, old and could barely run anything.
It took me ages to fire up my production software, and meant that anything I was doing took twice as long as if I had a good computer. After it finally got so slow that it was unbearable,
I invested in building a good computer. By making that investment, my multitasking abilities went through the roof – I could have all kinds of software open, hundreds of tabs with research open at a time, and making videos and rendering them became insanely fast in comparison. If you have the luxury of investing some money into great hardware and software, your life in online business will become a ton easier.
Another example is with blogging – yes, you could go with the absolute cheapest website hosting you can find, and get a terrible website name, running on a really slow server, but ask yourself – how much is this going to cost me really? Cutting corners might seem like the best way to save money, but if it’s really going to hinder your abilities, it might be worth considering spending that extra few pounds here and there if you’re being serious about having a career online.
Conclusion – Making Money Online as a Beginner is Rewarding
When you finally make your first dollar online, you will feel like a whole new world of possibilities has opened. It’s an incredibly rewarding process in so many ways, and I hope you are able to join me in my journey to help 100,000 people start their own side-hustle online. This has always been the goal of this blog, and I would love to hear your own personal experiences with making money online. Why not leave a comment below to help out everyone else too?