How to generate income online without investing in 13 ways

April 6, 2020

Since I started to dedicate myself to online business, I have always looked for ways to generate income online in different ways. Some did not work because they were actually a hoax.

But many others did work for me to at least earn a good extra money without leaving my house.

So here I want to share some of those methods that I have tried and that helped me to earn income online.

And the best thing of all is that with these 13 strategies you will not need to invest a single peso to generate profits with them.

Table of Contents

13 ways to generate income online without investing

1. Earn $ 20 for a 20 minute survey

Doing paid surveys is the best solution for you if you want to make money online but don’t have much free time.

There are many survey companies where registration is free, and where they will send you four or five surveys each day that you can fill out by answering simple questions.

The topics you will have to answer about are very varied: if you travel or not, they will show you ads for products that have not yet come to the market so that you can give your opinion, they will ask you what foods are your favorites …

Each survey will have a different duration: some will be completed in just 5 minutes, and others will last up to half an hour. But the longest are the ones that will make you the most profit.

2. Upload videos to YouTube and earn $ 37 a day

This has become one of the best ways to generate income online for thousands of people because it is easy to start and also very fun.

The only thing you will need to start will be a camera that records well (your cell phone can serve you), a computer with an Internet connection, and a good theme for your videos.

Do you like creating crafts? Show how they are done in your videos. Do you travel a lot or does something surprising and fun happen to you every day? Count your stories with humor to engage your audience!

There is no theme with which you cannot succeed on YouTube. Anything that is interesting to others you can record on video and upload it to this platform to create income with it.

There are many ways to earn money with YouTube : with AdSense ads, promoting affiliate products, collaborating with companies to teach their articles, receiving donations from your subscribers …

If you constantly upload videos (for example, once or twice a week), reply to the comments they leave you, and build a good fan base, you can turn this hobby into a real job of thousands of dollars every month.

3. Take photos with your cell phone and sell them

You don’t need to be a professional photographer or have a hundreds of dollars camera to be able to take beautiful pictures and sell them to others on the Internet.

You just have to know how to capture the beautiful moments around you, and make sure that the images are clear.

You can take photos of any kind of thing: nature, animals, children playing in a park, objects such as traffic lights, nice bags, the city on the move …

Transfer them to your computer, select the best ones, and upload them to sites that you can download to your phone where you can directly upload your photos.

In most of these platforms you can be the one who sets the price for each photo and sell them over and over again without making more effort than taking them for the first time.

4. Do you have a story to tell? Write a book!

If you are good at writing and telling stories, this may be your chance to create a good passive income that will make you profit even while you are sleeping.

You can publish your book for free on sites like Amazon, Bubok, or Lulu, and anyone who sees it can buy it at any time of the day and from all countries in the world.

It doesn’t have to be a novel; You can also publish other types of books such as a manual to learn a skill, a compilation of recipes, a work of poetry, or even a motivational or self-help book.

Make sure that your work has a good cover with an image that captures attention, a description that encourages visitors to want to buy the book, and thus you will be able to sell it to earn income without doing anything else.

5. Teach others what you know

Do your friends and family always praise you for something you know how to do very well? Then teach others that special skill you have by creating your own online course.

With this method of generating income online, you will have to do a little work at the beginning while preparing the course.

But the great advantage is that once done, you will be able to sell it over and over again and make profit automatically without effort.

You can offer these types of courses in different formats, such as video, audio only, or in writing in a PDF file, and sell them on websites such as Tutellus, Udemy, or on your own blog or website.

6. Create podcasts on a topic you are passionate about

Podcasts are one of the new ways of generating income online that are working best to monetize sites like blogs or web pages.

They are like a radio show that focuses on a single topic and that people can listen to online or download to their computer if they want.

The great advantage is that a podcast, when listened to, does not need the same effort that a person puts when they have to read an article, for example.

A good way to make money from podcasts is by including them on your blog and selling them to your readers, or by inserting sound ads into it from companies that pay you to advertise them.

All you will need is a microphone or headphones with a microphone connected to your computer, and a simple and free program to record like Audacity.

7. Insert ads on your blog

The method with which most bloggers start generating income online is by adding small ads to their blogs in different parts, such as the right side of the web page or at the end of each article.

The most popular platform to start with is usually Google AdSense, but there are also other sites such as PropellerAds or directly contacting companies to advertise them on your blog with which you can get it.

Basically this works like this: every time a certain number of people see that ad, or click on it, they will give you a percentage of the earnings that the advertiser has paid to display their article.

So here it is very important that you write new content for your blog frequently (for example, three or four articles every week) in order to attract more visitors and click on the ads.

In the following article, you have a complete guide to placing AdSense ads on your blog: How Google AdSense works to make money.

8. Sign up for affiliate programs

Affiliate programs are a very simple system to generate income online, and it is one of the ways with which bloggers today get their highest profits.

They consist of promoting products of other people or companies through a link that they will give you only for you and, if someone buys that product with your link, you will get a commission of the total price of the sale.

An example: you sign up for an affiliate program that sells books online and where they offer 40% of the commissions you make for yourself.

If someone clicks on your affiliate link, and buys a book that costs $ 37, you will earn $ 14.80 which is 40% of the total for that sale.

The sites where you can promote affiliate products are on your own blog or website, but also on social networks like Facebook or Twitter, or on sites like forums and online communities.

There are many pages to earn money being an affiliate, but the two that have always worked best for me have been ClickBank and Amazon.

9. Work from home

Without a doubt, this is the way in which you can get more income online and constantly, since here the earnings will depend on the time you are willing to invest in working.

Every day there are more people who are employed from their homes and thus can afford to spend more free time with their families, and earn even higher wages than in a regular office job.

All you have to do is think about what you know, what skills and knowledge you have, and look for a job where those talents fit into the different pages to find jobs that exist.

Some job suggestions are being a virtual assistant, earning money writing short texts, translating documents if you know a second language, becoming a graphic designer, transcribing texts by hand to the computer …

It is important that you take into account this way of earning money from your home, because working like this you can get from $ 10 an hour to even earn $ 25 an hour in many jobs.

10. Sell to your Facebook followers!

Yes, you read it correctly: you can also sell to the followers you have on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or any other social network that you work with to earn money with them.

On the Internet, there are people, companies and small entrepreneurs who, when starting their projects, need to promote themselves so that they are known. And that’s why many of them open profiles on social networks.

The problem is that at first they don’t usually get many followers, and that’s why they are willing to buy them from people like you.

So if you have a Facebook page with lots of likes, or every day new people follow you on Instagram, search the Internet for possible buyers who want to acquire some of these followers of yours.

A good page to do this is Fiverr, where people sell and buy followers packs from different social networks.

11. Sell what you no longer use in ebay

Do you have objects in your house that you no longer use and that only take away space from your closets? A good idea that has multiple advantages is to sell them on sites like Ebay.

That way you can make room for the new things you buy, and you will also get good money for yourself.

All you have to do is take good photos of the items, put a specific title on the ad and a good description, and when you’ve sold it, pack it up and take it to your post office for delivery.

Do not think it is silly: several friends of mine make street markets of this type twice a year to clean their houses.

They often sell all kinds of things, from last year’s magazines, lamps, CDs and DVDs, clothes they no longer wear, to sometimes more expensive things like their old televisions.

And they almost always earn between $ 150 and $ 400, which is used to save for vacations or to pay a late bill.

Read this article to learn how to sell your things successfully: 12 steps to pay your debts by selling old things.

12. Do you know that you can sell this?

Sometimes we do not realize how many things we throw away and with which we could be earning a good extra every month.

Things like bottle corks, toilet paper cartons, or cans and containers that can be reused are just a few of the things you can sell to generate income online.

There are many people who create crafts and who are searching the web for people to buy these objects that for you may no longer have any use.

My advice is to dedicate a bag or a box every month for those things you want to throw away but can be reused by others, and then put them up for sale in batches on sites like Etsy.

It is true that you may not earn much with this, but you will get a good extra every month and improve the care of the planet.