4 ways I make money online using only a phone and/or a laptop
By: Anas Bettar
Tags: Make Money, Work From Home, Side Hustle, Online Business, Make Money Online

2020 was a hard year for a lot of people. Many lost their jobs or had a sharp decrease in their income in a matter of days, and I am one of them. But for those of us with multiple income streams, it was more manageable. So here are 5 ways to make money online that you could and should start working on today.

There is no secret sauce

There are no secret recipes when it comes to making money online. Whether you are selling products or selling services, hard work, patience, and consistency is your secret sauce. But as long as you are willing to do your part, you can start earning your extra income within the first week.

Selling products online is by far the simplest, most direct way to make money on the internet but that doesn’t mean less work. Like with brick and mortar stores, sourcing, inventory management, marketing, customer service, and shipping require a lot of time and effort. There are, however, services that can help you start your store while avoiding some or a majority of that headache.

1- Teespring:

Teespring Logo — Wikimedia Commons

If you, or some of your friends, are in your late teens or twenties, you have probably shopped on or heard of Teespring. Teespring is an e-commerce platform that offers creators the possibility of creating various products ranging from apparel to home accessories. All you need to do is sign-up design your storefront in less than 5 minutes, add your PayPal account, and upload your design. You can then choose which products you would like to offer in your store.

Teespring will handle the production process, inventory management, and shipping which frees you to concentrate on marketing and customer acquisition. You won’t need to pay for anything out of your pocket. Your initial investment is your time. The platform takes its cut directly when an item is sold.

By choosing Teespring instead of your own website, you may be saving money and time in the short term but what you lose is the precious customer data. That is in my opinion the biggest downside of using Teespring because all the effort made to attract the customer (via Facebook ads, Google ads, or organic social media traffic) is partly lost when you don’t get to keep your customers’ information. And nowadays, customers’ data is gold.

If you are, however, just starting, or if you already have an audience on your social media (YouTube, Instagram, or Facebook) Teespring is your quickest way to e-commerce. Your store can be up and running in less than one hour and theoretically start making money the same day.

2- Redbubble:

RedBubble Logo — Wikimedia Commons

Redbubble is another e-commerce platform that allows you to sell products online by simply providing designs. It is “The” market place for visual artists. But you don’t have to be incredibly talented to sell your creations. All you need to do is to create your account, add your PayPal, upload your design or photo, describe it, add tags, and as long as it is compliant with terms of service your products will be available on the marketplace within 15 minutes.

Redbubble has two big advantages, it has a wide range of products and an excellent tool that helps you adjust your design on each product at the same time and that helps save time. You are also free to choose your profit margins for each category of products but not for each design which isn’t a big problem. And when you compare profit margins with other platforms, they are decent when you literally have almost nothing to do to make sales.

But if you happen to have a significant following on social media, that would help jump-starts your sales.

Like with Teespring, Redbubble takes the production cost of the item directly from the money deposited by the customer. Your profits will be directly sent to your attached PayPal account on the 15th of the following month.

3- Shutterstock:

© 2003- 2020 Shutterstock, Inc. All rights reserved.

Thanks to the technological advances of the last few years, smartphones can today take very high-quality pictures and as all photographers know, the best camera is the one you have when it matters. Smartphones are always with us especially when we are traveling, and with social media, almost anybody can learn how to take a good picture. So what if instead of posting your photos for free on Instagram, you could use them to generate passive income. That is possible with Shutterstock.

Shutterstock is an online stock photography and footage provider. It is by far the most famous one with more than 200 million royalty-free photos and 10 million clips. Shutterstock started as a subscription-based service where people paid a monthly fee for a specific number of downloads but it started offering an “a la carte” option in 2008. And yes you guessed it, for every picture downloaded the photographer gets a cut ranging from 10 cents to 10 dollars (the amount depends on your level as a contributor).

A large portion of the content available on Shutterstock was uploaded by amateur photographers like you and me. Almost anyone can upload photos to Shutterstock as long as you comply with the terms of service which are pretty normal. Do not upload what is not yours, provide a release form if the photo contains a person, and provide a minimum quality.

You need to upload hundreds of interesting photos to your portfolio for it to be a major income source, but if you like taking pictures and you are willing to upload constantly; you can earn a decent amount every year. Depending on where you live, some themes and cities sell very well, and even with few hundred photos (less than 300), you can earn a few hundred to few thousands of dollars a year, almost every year simply by uploading them.

As an example, one of my urban photos earns around $20 a year. While it is not the case for all of them, you can easily calculate that with 10 or 20 photos like it you can be sure of $200 to $400 of pure passive income. Some professional photographers earn tens of thousands of dollars just by using photoshoots leftovers.

4- Instagram:

Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash

Well, I saved this one for last, because I know that it will be controversial. Instagram isn’t meant to be a business but more like a gateway to business. A lot of people, however, are making a few hundred to thousands of dollars each month without being famous.

One of the most known ways to make money on Instagram is by selling shout outs. Accounts with a follower’s count of 30.000 to 100.000 followers can make from $15 to $80 a day by selling a 24-hour ad spot. Accounts with 100.000 followers to 1 million followers can make from $50 to $500 a day depending on their niche and on their engagement. It is like any other media with lots of eyeballs watching, your payday depends on the number of eyeballs. These rates do not include influencers who can make a lot more than community or theme accounts.

Another less known way to make money off of Instagram is by simply selling accounts. This path is, however, a very controversial one because it is seen by some as misleading and can be considered as not complying with Instagram terms. Nonetheless, it exists and people are making money doing it. The process is simple, you create an account, you get it to at least 15.000 followers and you can sell it for around $5 to $10 per thousand followers depending on the niche and engagement. Going from 0 to 10.000 followers typically takes from 2 to 3 months using automation tools that are available online. People using this business model work on multiple accounts at the same time (I have seen people managing up to 150 accounts at the same time).

The third and last Instagram business model is community management. There are tens of thousands of small businesses on Instagram that are struggling to manage their online presence. That’s where you come and help them manage their account. Community management is an easy but time-consuming job when you have a business to run. By outsourcing this task, small businesses can be sure that comments and messages are responded to regularly and that the posts are up and well captioned every time.

A typical community management gig can get you between $150 and $250 a month per client with around 1 hour of work per day per client. Once you’re used to it, you could easily handle 10 or more accounts at the same time without a problem. You can use automation tools to help you with 50% of the workload.

To sign your clients you simply call or message them directly and show them what you can do, you can use your profile as an example or even create a new one to do that.