This post continues the discussion on How To Make Money Online started in the previous article which you can read here. Previously I told you about affiliate marketing and its variation, dropshipping, as means to make a living on the Internet. Today I will concentrate on the other two methods I mentioned which are auction selling and freelancing.
Auction selling
With the appearance of eBay site came this new way of making money online which is available to virtually anyone who have access to the Internet. Unlike with affiliate marketing, you don’t have to worry about the traffic here as eBay and other auction sites are popular enough to have plenty of it. (Of course, you can send your visitors to the pages of products you sell, but this is not crucial to your success). What crucial is the choice of products you sell and how you sell them.
Firstly, your offer should be unique to stand out. You can achieve this by either advertising rare items (eg. I was selling Russian World War 2 militia) or have great offers on widely popular items (eg. you might have connections at Apple headquarters which allows you to sell iPhones at wholesale prices).
Secondly, you need to decide whether you want to go for:
– traditional auction (people bid on itmes with starting bids of $0.01 and you should be confident that the item will sell at a profit);
– reserve price auction (you are able to set the reserve price below which the item will not be sold and don’t risk if there is not enough bidding, however, you pay a hefty commission for this privilege);
– buy it now auction (this works in the same way a normal store does where products have fixed prices).
The drawback of this way or making money on the Internet is that you actually have to deal with product handling, packaging and shipping which adds a lot of time if you sell many products.
Freelancing
This is another popular method to make money online which is mostly suitable for creative people, designers, programmers and writers. There is a number of sites such as eLance where people find work. These sites operate in the same way auctions do, only in reverse. The clients post the amount of work that needs to be done and the artists make bids on it. Not necessarily the lowest bid wins as there are several other factors that come into play when clients make a choice such as quality of your portfolio, which contains your other works, and rating. The more you have experience and recommendations from other clients under your belt the more money you can ask for your services. I have a friend who has been doing web design for years, so this is definitely a sound alternative to your day job.
As you can see there are legitimate ways to make money online from home. I mentioned only the ones I had first hand experience with, but there are more. You only need to be willing to research them and find out what works for you.