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Welcome to a BBO super blog, where two experienced marketers have an open dialogue on a particular topic, so please read along as if you are sitting at a marketers table and listening in. Want to join the table for free? Come and say hi and ask any questions you have on this guide within the free slack group here :https://bit.ly/34n2EH5 – Enjoy learning from the blog.
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Kyle: We are going to be talking more generally to people who might not necessarily have a business already, they might be a salaried worker and now they’re at home, working from home and have extra time.
Or they’re being furloughed and they have a lot of extra time or for whatever reason are not working there they have time and maybe not as much direction as they’d like at the moment.
We thought it’d be useful to focus on these people and I know there’s a lot of them out there.
Harms: It could also be somebody who is now working from home and there’s not as much work to do, so maybe you spend the first four hours of the day working and then just twiddling your thumbs.
And you want to be productive, you’re bored of Netflix, Amazon Prime, games, whereas now you’re saying I want to try something else. I’m just over this one-week, two-week relaxation period.
Kyle: What can I do?
I want to come out of this having done something or with the new stream of income, new business or whatever it is.
Harms: The focus now is if you’ve got time whatever the reason is for that case, we want to help you focus on income generation online.
Imagine there was no lockdown but something happened in the world or you may have lost your job or you’ve gone part time, you would go get a side income.
You’d go get a side job.
It could be a part-time job. It could be working for somebody who has got a business.
There are lots of things you can do on the side but that still requires you to leave your house and do something in a physical manner.
You can’t get a job now in a café. Hospitality is one of the most common ways to just jump in and out of a job, restaurant, bars.
You may be thinking, but I could be a delivery driver, I could help out in the NHS and the health system, etcetera but the other risk there is the coronavirus going on.
So you may not want to subject yourself to that risk.
I think what everybody’s doing in that industry is amazing, but somebody who has not been in that industry, they’re thinking the safest thing for me to do is stay isolated, stay at home, but what can I do now with that additional time completely online?
Kyle you’ve put together a cracking list of things we’re going to focus on in this guide, which only requires you to be online with Wi-Fi connection and a laptop is that correct?
Kyle: Yes, I’ve put together a list of a hundred different ideas or one hundred different services you can use, places where you can sell your skills, you can sell your time, or sell stuff in your house to start generating an extra income.
Some of them and the ones we’re going to be discussing require no special skills at all.
Anyone can do them as long as you’ve got a computer and the Internet, and then we’re going to be moving more into professional skill focused additional incomes and then capping the end of this guide with creative, focused as well.
There’s going to be a range of different things because everyone is going to have different requirements and skill levels.
Harms: What we’re not doing in this guide, which is where our passion is and what we love to do is we are not talking about is building out a complete online business.
We spoke about building a business, audience, tribe, offer, network. Under this model system that we call the BATON model.
Now that is a marketing and online business creating infrastructure which can plug an idea into.
Whereas this we’re taking a step back from that and just saying right, we’re in this strange scenario which is lockdown so we need to get as many ideas across to you as possible.
That list Kyle has put together it’s about 102 different ways and Kyle has ranked it in a specific way.
Kyle: On the left is the name of the service or the name of a place where you can generate income.
I’ve categorised them by different types by locations, some are UK only, some are US only. The vast majority can be done anywhere it doesn’t matter where you are and then I’ve got the pay rate how much they pay, as some of these things are a dollar for completing a survey for example.
Whereas other ones are like recording an audiobook which will pay thousands of pounds or thousands of dollars.
We have different pricing structures and then I’ve also categorised them by how much time and effort, and skill is required to get into them.
Generally you will find the easier ones, the ones that don’t require specialised skills will pay less. Finally I have a column called scalability. This is related to what Harms was just talking about, we are not talking about building a complete business of your own, we are talking about ways to generate an income.
Ways to get cash in the door now.
Some of these, quite a few of these on the list if you start doing them today you’d make your first pound or dollar today.
They pay immediately, whereas if you are setting up a business from scratch that’s very unlikely to happen, it could happen, but it is very unlikely.
Harms: Then you’re looking at a business lead in time, the preparation, the creation, the lens collection and everything we spoke about in the BATON model within the industry and infrastructure.
Kyle: There’s going to be a balance, we’ve got some things which you can do right now and you’ll be paid by the end of the day.
They are not going to be scalable, they’re not like building a business.
We have one and done, which is you do it now you get paid.
We have the next level up which I call time constraint, which is basically for each hour you put in you get paid for that hour, but it’s not really a scalable business model.
Businesses ideally want to be paid without you having to put your time in.
Then it steps up from there you can build up your own brand and your own profile online, that’s the next level up, and then from there potential businesses.
So activities you can start now, this week, which can then turn into a business moving forward.
The final level are activities which can become an entirely passive income they’re going to require a bit more time and effort, but then you could be generating money from this or income from this for years to come, without additional effort.
They’re all broken down in different categories and we’re going to be basically reviewing, surveying all of these different options for you to generate cash online now.
Starting with these really easy ones which you can do now you can get paid by PayPal by the end of the day and then moving slowly into more complex, more time consuming, more skill-based activities which could become the foundation of the business.
Harms: What that will allow you to do is start to work through the list and maybe pick and mix, use this week as a pick and mix to say try that.
Is it something I can see myself doing for the lockdown period and then come and ask Kyle and I questions on it.
Kyle: It is a pick and mix but we’re going to try and give you some commentary because if you’re just given a hundred or 500 different options that is too much.
We’re going to try to give some commentary, trying to give you some guidance which ones are worthwhile which ones are maybe not as worthwhile, again depending on your situation, and if there are certain questions people are having we can find experts in particular niches, in particular business practices and try and get them on the show.
Harms: We wanted to give you a broad understanding of online business.
I thought the best way to do that and when Kyle and I were prepping our notes for this section, is to discuss very much why online business has a bad reputation.
Why do people think online business and think, oh no that’s not for me, or that leaves a feeling of uncomfortableness when the conversation around online business occurs.
Even so much to say I have an online business and people look at you a bit strange like is that even a thing?
Is that even a proper professional or workspace?
They just don’t understand it. It can have a bad rep for a few different reasons, one is the fact that there is a lack of understanding here.
We’ve got three or four key points, but we can talk around those points.
Kyle, why do you think online business has a bad rep? Because you’ve been doing this for a long time.
Kyle: Following on from what you’ve said there’s a lot of get rich quick schemes, there is a lot get rich quick mentality in the online business world.
A lot of the advertising you see a lot of the time online businesses talk about it will often be, here I am in my garage with my Lamborghini, or here I am in my $4 million home with my beautiful wife. I did all this online, I did drop shipping or I built an empire using Kindle books or I sell courses, or I do social media marketing.
Whatever it is, it tends to be somebody saying online business is the fix for everything and you will be rich beyond your wildest dreams next week.
There’s a lot of BS around online marketing and unfortunately the people who are good at online marketing and very good at selling themselves and that dream.
They’re the ones making money, the people selling that dream, however, that means a lot of people now associate online business with these get rich quick schemes, which is unfair because there is a much wider diversity of ways to generate an income online.
Harms: I agree and I think the big misconception is that online business is not a business, it doesn’t have the same characteristics as a business, it doesn’t have the same need of that kind of business understanding when creating online business.
I think that’s probably one of the biggest misconceptions because that industry is info entrepreneurs, info and education, and that’s okay.
That’s great, because actually subscribing to a course or whatever it is, it’s great because ultimately it’s going to give you that level of knowledge to go start in that specific field.
I think the challenge is that when there’s a scenario like this there’s almost a feeling of a gold rush or selling the shovels in order to go cash in on a specific thing that is happening.
But the problem with that is there is a focus on very, very niche items like setting up a book publishing Kindle e-store, setting up an e-commerce shop overnight, Amazon selling and selling things on eBay.
There’s even more of the stuff that used to work a long time ago and people are still buying into, things like domain flipping, people very much focus on hey, become an affiliate marketing superstar overnight and all of these things that are very niche, but they fundamentally miss the fact that online business is a business.
Kyle: We have drop shipping, fulfilled by Amazon. We have affiliate marketing. All of these are techniques not a business.
All of these are techniques which can work.
So yes, you can make a lot of money publishing Kindle eBooks.
The books have to be good though. Yes, you can make money drop shipping.
Drop shipping is, I set up an online store I sell products to the online store and it goes straight from the manufacturer straight to the customer. I don’t see the item that’s what drop shopping is.
Harms: You don’t need a distribution mechanism; the distribution is handled for you;
Kyle: It is done for you.
Drop shipping as an idea selling something which is delivered directly from the manufacturer to the customer, that’s fine.
The problem is that that still needs a business underlying it, you need to be sourcing a product that people want, that’s high quality and then being able to market that.
All of these, fulfilled by Amazon, drop shipping, Kindle publishing etcetera all fine as techniques they are not businesses in and of themselves.
First you need to start with the business part online business which most of these courses, most of the people you see on Instagram promise you riches, they forget about this part that they don’t tell you about.
You need a business first and then you apply these different techniques, these different tools.
Harms: I would agree and I think one of the challenges is that when somebody approaches these companies or these kinds of techniques, because there is nothing against the people saying in marketing that they’ve got a business, they’ve got to generate their own revenue and they sell this technique.
But the challenge is that sometimes when you’re wanting to build anything or create anything of value, it’s so much better and I think Kyle and I have learnt this over the years the hard way.
It is so much better to do something you’re passionate about something that you have a skill set for, something that you enjoy and that there is a market for that item rather than chase the dollar or the pound, the money at the back end of it.
What I mean by that is, the technique promises you to get rich.
The fact that you’re going to make three, four, five, £6,000 a month or some people even advertise 20, £30,000 a month selling by Amazon. Great.
That’s okay, but are we going to enjoy doing that process because that kind of revenue generation is great, it probably is doable, but for a small percentage of people who already fundamentally understand business as a fundamental principle and online business is a fundamental principle.
So much so that they had the ability and the skill set to advertise and market to you for their particular course, so they know what they’re doing they are very good at it.
But they’re making the assumption that you also know what you’re doing in regards to this kind of business mechanism.
What I’m trying to say is chasing the money or chasing something that you can finally share your skill set with online.
Kyle: A really simple example is a T-spring. It’s basically on demand t-shirt printing and there are a whole bunch of different ones.
There are a lot of courses, a lot of people selling this business model where you custom design T-shirts and then you can sell them and make profit on each t-shirt, it is fine.
The business model T-spring fine but the problem is you have to be a good designer first.
You need to have T-shirt designs that people actually want to buy and this was forgotten conveniently by the people who were teaching about this.
This happened five years ago.
The market was flooded on T-spring with people who were just rushing in because they wanted to sell T-shirts and make five, 10, $20,000 a month.
None of them were good designers, that was the problem, so the market was flooded, it was oversaturated, people making crappy T-shirts.
Nobody was selling anything and the only people making money were those saying you should go to T-spring.
But that’s a nice simple example, there are people who are good at designing T-shirts who will make a lot of money on T-spring but that’s because they have the skills to actually build a business, rather than just using the technique of custom
Harms: T-shirt printing.
It’s the way that you’re going to generate your revenue.
That’s your idea as such, but that’s not enough.
For us if you look at the BATON model the fact that you’re going to print well designed T-shirts will come right at the start in the business element.
We will then put that through the process of selling those T-shirts online, creating an audience, getting a desire and a raving fan base around your kind of design.
Test that they can be sold, test there is a market for that kind of interest that you’re trying to sell to.
That’s why we feel online businesses have a bad rep but I think it’s useful for us to chat about what is online business very briefly, but also what’s the advantages of it?
And then we can talk about four key areas to focus on.
Kyle: I think you already touched on this when you said online businesses are a business, yes, we have the word online at the front but essentially it’s still a business and a business is the creation of something of value, whether it’s a product or service.
It is supplied to a market willing to pay you enough money for you to continue creating whatever that piece of value is.
Without that unit of value, whether it’s a book, whether it’s your consultation service, whether it is stuff that you’ve made without that value that is valued by the market, the people that are going to buy it, you do not have a business.
That’s the same if you are off-line or if you’re online.
There used to be a very distinct gap back in 2000, you’d have online businesses that only sold online, and you’d have offline businesses which were brick and mortar shops.
The two have now merged, especially most brick and mortar stores have an online presence now.
Especially nowadays we are in quarantine you’re seeing businesses that do not have the ability to sell online, or the ability to deliver online purchases.
They are now screwed or they have ceased to exist because now people cannot leave their homes.
Increasingly online and off-line have merged.
We spend a lot of time on our phones, even if I’m going to a coffee shop which doesn’t sell things online, how do I find a coffee shop? I use this.
When we do talk about online business we are more and more talking about just business in general, we need to remember the fundamentals of business.
Harms: The advantages then are if I were to think what benefits has it given me over time?
For me personally it was fundamental a bit more control of my time, i.e. I wasn’t the kind of personality who would like to go and commute to work, spend an hour commuting an hour coming back.
It was a case of building a mechanism so that I could wake up and walk to my office, because there are two approaches to this.
One is building an online business where you can press play and it does things automatically which a part of the business does, but then there is also a part of the business where the creation is still required.
The monitoring is still required.
There are two sides to the business.
Kyle: It depends on how you design it. It is the same as an off-line business.
You can have a business that is based in an office that has staff and you as the business owner, you could have built it so that you are able to step back.
That’s just how you designed it or you could have built it so you’re needed every single day and you’re working the longest, even though you’re the business owner, same thing whether you’re online or offline.
There are certain benefits of online businesses; they tend to have lower overheads because you are not renting the space which leaves you saving a lot of money.
Whether that’s on the rent to the electricity utilities, etcetera, that just costs money.
Online businesses tend to always get away with not having staff or being able to outsource your work and use freelancers around the world so that you can take advantage of employment arbitrage.
You can hire someone in the Philippines or in India, Vietnam who is just as good at the job but costs 10% of the price of a local worker, that is employment arbitrage.
Harms: Because English, depending on what you’re hiring them for English is not the thing that you’re paying them for.
That’s not the process, you’re also not paying them for the creative thinking, the critical thinking, we’re paying them for a set of instructions or some technical abilities that are now universal.
This is like the online business language or the online world language, which is just technical. That’s what we are paying them for so they can be anywhere in the world.
Kyle: If I’m hiring someone to build a website or ecommerce facility I’m not going to hire them in London.
Since it’s too expensive and you can get those skills anywhere in the world.
Connected to that is the fact that online businesses unlike off-line businesses are global.
The first one I set up the first automatic online business I set up, most of its customers are in the US. The second largest was in Holland for some reason, and the UK was, I think, like fifth or sixth. It was down the list and it doesn’t matter.
Once you’ve set up a store online you can access anybody in the world, which is not the case if you build a coffee shop here in London.
Harms: Which coffee shops are facing that challenge at the moment, some of them are adapting, but not for revenue just for brand recognition at the moment which is the kind of stuff we spoke about last week.
Harms: There are four key areas to focus and create a business around.
These are four advantages, but they’re also if you reverse engineer those advantages, the focus on building the online business and I say, if you can get as many of these four the winning formula is if I get all four in place for my online business, then this is a winning formula.
Those start with number one, which colours Kyle has sort of touched upon, which is the need to be flexible and diverse.
Typically, we are all dependent on one income source, which is a salary. It could be an income source from your own particular business, think about diversification within your business.
Let’s assume that your business only sells off-line and it is a coffee shop.
So what could an off-line coffee shop do online in order to hedge their income or diversify their income?
If I just think off the top of my head maybe they could be selling directly to customers their ground coffee beans as a service which they can sell via their shop for their e-commerce store.
That’s one way to think about diversification because if they don’t, the scenario occurs where coronavirus hits or something like this or you have three or four staff go sick overnight, it could be outside coronavirus.
Or something happens on that particular high street they close a train station so the foot traffic now diverts to another train station and no longer do you get that foot traffic for your coffee shop.
All these things are real-life scenarios, but there’s no diversification of income, it is no different to us relying on one salary and we have no other mechanism.
Try to think of online business as having a diversified income stream or income generation entering your life.
Kyle: That is mainly for the existing businesses if they have a stream of income online it allows you to add another stream of income which can be related to your core business, but it’s coming from online.
Therefore, as Harms says if something goes wrong with the off-line for whatever reason you have this continuing stream of revenue.
The other way to think about diversification is the fact that online businesses in particular if they are structured correctly, you can have multiple online businesses.
Whereas if you set up a shop or a chain of coffee shops that is probably going to be all you’re doing.
Again depends on how you structure it because you have locations, staffing, you can hire managers, etcetera but there are a lot more moving pieces.
Whereas once you’ve learned to set up an online business and you’ve successfully done it, doing that again and again and again and making them automatic is relatively simple compared to doing it with a physical business.
I made some courses about this.
It teaches people how to read and write Chinese. I don’t touch that and I’m not running any ads that just trickles in money.
Not much because I’m not pushing it at the moment but I’m going to guess it’s £700 to £1,000 a month based on something I built maybe five years ago and I do not touch.
If I want to get a chunk of money I can run a sale and do some email marketing and get a chunk of cash in.
Having a few of those businesses just running in the background is really good for diversification because if any one of them suddenly stops working, it is not the end of the world.
You have five or six of them whereas if you have one form of income it is tricky.
Harms: Because what we don’t know now, I think the time that we are living through right now which is just crazy is yes, we could do a classic swot analysis.
What are the threats against this particular income source?
It’s really a case of it’s very difficult to know now in this strange time what the truth for it is going to be.
Yes it’s good to do some research to identify what that is.
Let’s look at what industries as a research project have survived right now are doing quite well right now, we run a special webinar which is going on at the moment that Netflix increase their revenue by about 15 million US dollars per month just in the UK.
Some businesses benefit during this time, whereas some industries have completely lost income. I think that’s where we want you to be thinking about an online business as an advantage, but also a focus area.
How can I have a diversified range of online revenue streams?
No doubt there will be some new ideas and businesses that weren’t necessarily timed for a time like this because a lot of business success is down to the timing element of it.
When is it launched?
When is it launched into a market that is ready for it?
Virtual reality for example maybe not quite right at the moment.
If you look at VR now if there was a lead-in time for what’s happening right now, VR probably is really well placed as a product for what’s happening right now. I guess it just wasn’t an adoption period that was happening.
New ideas will also form that’s number one.
Number one is the need to focus on flexibility and diversification, and that is a great example blog of 10 ideas you get started with straightaway.
Just to start to understand how other businesses are operating and good case studies.
What is number two on the list ?
Kyle: Is probably the main benefit of an online business compared to an offline business.
We talked about how they are very similar but the main thing with online business is that your overheads, your costs of running the business on a day-to-day basis are very low.
Again you do not have to rent a building, you do not necessarily have to have staff, your main upfront course is going to be a laptop and your Internet connection.
From there hosting a website we are talking about £50 a year or so, we are talking about very low costs compared to having a physical location.
This gives us a massive amount of flexibility which is what you talked about.
If I’m paying £2,000 a month to rent a location I need to be making at least £2,000 a month to be covering that straight out the door.
If I’m not making £2,000, I cannot cover my rent and my business is going to be at a loss very quickly.
With an online business, you don’t have the overhead issues.
Even if your sales get completely trumped because of what is going on. Y
ou’re not haemorrhaging money; you’re not losing money because you’re not renting space and you’re not spending a lot of money just keeping the doors open.
Harms: It becomes a thing of who can survive the longest and an online business will out survive a company that has got to pay rent, staff, bills, certain taxes, certain rates depending on where they’re based in the world.
So, that is a challenge.
All of these things add up, and for a small to medium size business this can be serious money.
There are people renting office spaces who may not get a discount and these office spaces will cost five 10, 15, £20,000 a month depending on what the location is.
If we were brought up in the world of online business it can sometimes be absurd to us that somebody is paying 20, £30,000 a month for an online off-line office space.
I think it’s crazy considering you may have maybe not different results, but you can certainly have a business that can survive for a long time because all we have to cut, say, for example, we looked at our online business.
We may just have to cut it if we lost all of our income from some subscription services.
Maybe some expensive ones that cost £200 a month, maybe trim down on advertising costs.
But again, that’s a choice that we spend money on.
Kyle: We would cut them and then restart them in a few months’ time.
Whereas if you are locked into a lease, if you’ve got a two-year, three-year commercial lease that’s not going to be possible.
We would just go on a website, click a few buttons and would cancel the subscription, we would rejoin in a few months’ time and most online services are like that.
For online businesses in general, the overheads are much, much, much lower.
Harms: There are no difficult conversations with another human being explaining why you can’t pay your rent, why you can’t pay staff members and all that stuff that goes into an offline business.
We are just talking really very much around the advantage of online business, plus the focus on what it should be.
If you’ve got an online business and number one, it’s diverse, it’s flexible and now number two you’ve got low overheads.
These are two good solid components for you to think about.
If I’ve got both of those I’m already at an advantage in building my online business depending on where I’m focusing.
Kyle: A good way to think about this now if you are in the middle of this crisis as we all are, right now would you go and set up an off-line business?
As a thought experiment that would be absolutely crazy, raising money to go out and set up an off-line business even if everything opens up right now and people start shopping, going out again.
The idea of spending a couple hundred thousand pounds to set up a physical location right now after what we’ve just seen in the last month, and what we’re going to see over the next few months just seems crazy.
Absolutely crazy to me personally.
Maybe some people are very excited to go and start new coffee shops after this, but I would not be that enthusiastic.
Harms: Trying to get bank lending on that now as well, that’s also going to be a challenging factor.
No doubt we are going to see some government encouragement of stimulus for the relaunch of off-line companies, there’s no doubt.
Kyle: Relaunch of the economy.
Harms: And off-line is a large part of that.
If you look at some industries we have no choice but we are not talking about all industries here, we’re talking about yourself and adding another income stream to your life.
That’s really the focus here.
It could be as you go forward and things start to recover now I need to focus on getting an online business.
Do consider these four things when building that.
Number three is an overreliance that businesses have on a need for face-to-face interaction.
If you look at the previous examples of yoga classes, coaches, educators and personal trainers. The entire business model is built on a face-to-face interaction.
That’s where the overreliance comes in, now we are not saying eradicate or completely remove face-to-face as we get through this time.
What we are saying is do not rely on this 100%, have another mechanism within your business if it exists already, or if you are thinking about creating a business think about how you can attach an online mechanism where there is not hundred percent reliance on face-to-face.
Because some businesses are like that they just do not operate without face-to-face interaction. Or in the past they could have had an option to have an online system they just chose not to.
Kyle: Even ignoring things like coronavirus, face to face means every time you meet somebody or a physical interaction it’s always going to take that same amount of time and you can only see that person or that group of people.
It is inherently or mathematically less scalable than being able to do this online.
We talked about instead of providing a yoga class to 10 people every single Wednesday afternoon, you could provide the yoga class to 100 people or 500 people.
Joe Wicks for example he’s doing PE classes for kids. If he was going to schools around the country and doing the classes for around 30 or 50 kids.
Because of his online reach because he has built this platform, he is now doing PE classes with the nation’s youth in the UK. You can’t get that scalability if you are relying on face-to-face interactions.
Doesn’t mean you don’t do it just means face-to-face becomes even more special; it becomes something you charge a lot more for in the future.
Or it’s meetings only for extremely strategic and important topics and the rest of the time you focus on scalability getting to a lot of people.
And you can do that online, a lot easier.
Harms: What I’m seeing at the moment online and in terms of discussion forums and certain articles is now it’s literally the opportunity for them to change the education system for the better.
It is almost a prehistoric system that is currently operating, but there is now an opportunity in the discussion to rework the education system.
And this is not discrediting teachers but you’ve got a brand, a skill set and sharing it online and in a morning can reach millions of kids.
Kyle: Joe Wicks the nation’s PE teacher.
Harms: II think that’s almost the way, there’s lots of discussion on which way the education system should evolve, but there is now an opportunity to build an online business in order to support the current education infrastructure in place.
That’s the message I was trying to get across.
Joe Wicks won’t be the only person because for every person who likes Joe Wicks there will be somebody who maybe doesn’t like his technique or disagrees with his PE philosophy.
Kyle: I think the world of work in general is also going to change as there have been so many different businesses saying, you can’t do remote work you need to be in the office.
Now all employees know, well we survived the last however months it’s going to be, and the business kept going.
I think flexible working in general is going to become more of a thing after this.
The reliance on face-to-face interaction will decrease and it will happen for only the most important things.
Harms: I agree and it’s an exciting thing because think about how much time is getting saved for everybody, it’s an incredible amount of time. Think of meetings as well.
We’ve discussed three things so far which are essentially advantages of an online business, but also three things that you should have integrated or allowed to be the base of your online business in order for it to be a winning formula.
Kyle: The last one I would say this is more unique to online than off-line.
Online we tend to use our personal brand, we tend to be more human than if we are focusing purely off-line.
Off-line you will call a company, you won’t necessarily know who you are talking to in the company, whereas online because the tools are at your disposal now, video, social media, the ways we reach out to people online it tends to be more person-to-person.
For example LinkedIn which is the largest professional social network it’s not about companies doing business with companies.
It’s about people in companies connecting with other people. It’s peer-to-peer, person-to-person, and I think online allows us to build this personal brand.
It’s who we are, it allows us to put ourselves out there as an expert in our particular field and become known for what we do.
Whereas previously would have to wait for more traditional media outlets like tv, newspaper or maybe a publishing house to validate you are important.
That’s not the case now, we have the platform now and the older publishing mediums like newspapers are slipping, they’re not as important anymore, they’re not the gatekeeper.
They’re not the people who get to decide who is important and who is worth listening to.
Because now we all have this platform or multiple platforms where we can get our voice heard.
I think online really opens up a lot of opportunities there.
Harms: There are some extremely talented people who emerge online.
You only have to search Instagram for five minutes to find some remarkable skills out there, especially with the creative and artistic stuff.
Now you’ve got such a powerful medium for example, the Sun paper coming out and saying hey guys please buy our paper. Which is a big wake-up call for everybody to say has the tide turned?
It’s certainly a great time, I agree with Kyle just to put yourself out there and start to receive those opportunities that are available.
You don’t have to wait for anybody to put us on.
There’s no barrier to entry. There is no please can you put us in this paper or begging to get on a newspaper article,
Kyle: Or please publish my book.
Harms: Also there is a thing which doesn’t really get discussed, which is when you are actually doing something for these mediums your voice is also filtered.
In the sense that you know you are censored or you can’t necessarily say certain things which social media is also now potentially going that way, in terms of censorship and not being able say what you want to say.
Whereas certain platforms i.e. your own website, you can say what you want, you can do what you want.
Kyle: Please use that power for good though it swings both ways.
Harms: But Kyle and I are very adamant on this as well, which is using a platform to spread the good and the positivity and the amazing things like the grandma passing down those pasta recipes.
That is an amazing example of using the power for good for sure.
Kyle: Or providing PE lessons for example these are good uses, but yes these platforms can also be abused.
Harms: Spread the love across the world with these things, the skills that you have.
I think that’s where our discussion is, do you have a skill or service that the online world needs. If yes, now is a great time to share it.
Kyle: Looping that back to what we’re going to be talking about in this guide by going out there and sharing your expertise by coming from this place of giving value from your skills, or creativity or whatever is, there are ways to generate an income online.
That’s what the focus of this section is going to be.
Harms: Hopefully now you feel like actually online business is a business and there is a lot to learn in this, but I’m seeing it now as a business rather than this unique technique which is maybe the silver bullet, the magic pill, which is going to make me rich overnight.
That’s not necessarily going to be the case.
Then we focused on what an online business is, then finally the four advantages.
But also, if you reverse engineer those advantages are four key things you should build your online business around.
We’ve also shared with you the big list of income generation during lockdown, it is a massive list 102 items on there are different and these are techniques.
These are different techniques and areas in which you can generate revenue.
They’re ranked in different ways which Kyle discussed.
Generate income online asap within these 4 categories with ZERO skill required
Harms: We are talking about a technique which is really focused on giving you guys the tools in order to be able to generate an online income as soon as possible.
That’s the key.
Kyle researched and put together a big list, which is essentially 200 different ways which are categorized in different ways.
In terms of ease, time, skill set required. Essentially, some of those there can actually generate you an income very, very quickly without any skill set required.
The tools that we want to talk about are general and essentially you don’t need a specific skill, they are not specifically skill orientated.
Kyle: These are methods that do not require any particular skills, they then require your time and existing resources you already have.
A lot of these will not make large amounts of cash and I’m saying this upfront that is because they don’t require any particular skill, anybody can jump in and do them and as a result of that, there’s a lot of supply for demand that these companies have.
The cost per task or the cost per piece of work you do is going to be quite low.
That said, they can be done in such volume that it’s possible to piece together a few hundred pounds a month. It is possible without any skills, just using a computer and Internet connection to start doing a lot of these things today to start getting a bit of pocket money, a bit of extra cash coming in the door.
Whether or not these particular methods are going to be worth it for you depends really on your personal situation, on your expenditure, how much you’re spending.
£300 a month or £40 a month extra for some people might not be worth the time but for other people it could be life changing.
Because we’re not necessarily only talking to people in the UK these amounts of money can be earned globally.
So maybe if you’re in the UK this isn’t much money, but if you are in another part of the world that’s a substantial amount of cash.
Harms: These are not mine and Kyle’s favourite tactics, techniques because what they are is they do allow you to generate an income of a tiny amount, tiny to low rather
Kyle: Depending on your personal situations.
If you are in the Philippines right now and you get paid this amount of money that could be quite a lot.
It is just compared to the minimum wage in a country like the UK.
Harms: There is no judgement on that level of income because we are all in a different situation.
But if you can implement one of these strategies and it is able to cover your Wi-Fi bill for the month, cover your Netflix subscription, if it is able to cover some kind of bill you have that comes out on a weekly basis.
There’s no judgement.
The assumption is that online business must generate loads of cash and unless it generates loads of cash it’s a complete failure, which is absolute nonsense.
This is very much bringing your awareness on all of the kinds of things that are out there.
Think of it as bringing an awareness to the surface of all of these things that are available out there that we may not be aware of beforehand, but also allows you to get your creative juices flowing.
Of course the income will build as we go throughout this guide, but the reason for that is you need a skill set attached to that.
Whether it’s professional, whether it’s creative.
Kyle: It’s just like any business you need to be providing value.
When the task doesn’t require any skill set it can be done by anyone.
It will be done by a lot of people and that devalues the worth of that task, whereas the things like business consultation or logo design, or article writing, for example.
These require certain skills and therefore you’ll get rewarded higher for them.
Some important disclaimers of the list that we have compiled, we are not endorsing any of this.
What we’ve done is we’ve tried our best to filter out, being polite the rubbish.
Harms: Like with anything you’re going to subscribe to, sign up to, anything you’ll generate an income from doing your own due diligence.
Does it align with your values?
Does it align with how you would like to make money?
All of these things are important but that’s on you.
The intention is surveying and bringing you awareness of all the amazing things that are out there that you just may not have been aware of.
Like renting out your bandwidth.
Who would have thought, you spent a lot of time using a percentage of your band width, actually most of us in the UK do.
Those on a hundred-megabyte connections with fibre, you lucky people. You are not using that, no way.
Kyle: Especially when you’re sleeping.
It is an unused resource that you are paying for. So renting it out is a no brainer.
What I would say is if there is anything that is interesting go look it up, go look at their website. Go to Google.
This is how you technically do it, you type the name of the company, plus reviews or the name the company plus, is it worth it just to find out what other people are saying about it.
That’s a particularly good way to see if something is legit, to see if something actually pays out a decent amount of cash for the time.
Harms: With reviews the best way I found to just identify if a review is legit or the best way for it to seem rational to me is, avoid the five stars, avoid their one and two stars.
These are two extremes of someone’s opinion one is extremely unhappy and people voice their concern.
You’ve got the other extreme, which is this is the best thing I’ve ever done. It might be fake, but also it didn’t tell me much, so the three and four stars are a nice place to understand because those people have spent some time reviewing and they’re giving you a rational opinion.
Kyle: Also in the big list I’ve tried to roughly include how much money you can make from it. Really hard to compare them because some things take you a minute to do and you get paid a dollar.
Some things you might have several hours spread over several weeks or maybe even your bandwidth over a month.
It is very hard to nail everything down to a per hour, or a per minute income.
I’ve tried my best so basically, there’s like a one-dollar sign for doesn’t pay very much, two-dollar signs for it’s fine and three for you can actually make some good money with that.
I’ve also marked if they are trivial so things you can do automatically like renting your bandwidth for example.
Whether they’re easy, medium, or hard, and again depends on your skill level, you’re going to be better at things than certain people.
We are going to be opening up the list for user submissions and comments and stuff like that, so hopefully we can use that crowdsourcing information to refine it.
Because nobody has actually put together a big list like this or when they have, it’s mainly because they’re trying to push a particular service which we’re not really doing.
Harms: What I love about this list is anything that requires upfront cash or that requires dangerous or psychological factors that’s been taking off.
Kyle: If it’s too good to be true. If somebody says you’re going to make $2,000 from home in an hour, exercise caution.
Harms: In online business, digital marketing there’s no silver bullet.
There’s no magic pill that you can take, ultimately everything requires time, effort and skills.
We’re not saying these things don’t work but we’re saying just approach them with common sense, due diligence and then make a decision for yourself.
Is that the kind of business that you would like to start?
How quickly will you actually see revenue? Just ask yourself these questions.
Kyle: That’s the disclaimer and the methodology with which we’ve put this list together.
We want to offer you all the options to show you all the different things you can do, but if there’s something that is just obviously crappy, or if there is a nugget of value in there but it’s surrounded by a lot of predatory companies or lot of predatory practices, then we’ve just left it off.
So yes this is a disclaimer, but it’s also us generally putting together a list and saying we’re only going to give stuff that is valuable but still do your due diligence.
Kyle: The first one is not really a business, it’s about generating cash quickly. Whether you need a cash injection to feed your household, which is fair at the moment.
Or, and this is more interesting, maybe you are thinking about setting up a business, maybe you want to get a website built, or you want to put together an e-commerce shop.
Whatever it is, and you need some cash to get that done quickly, chances are there’s a lot of stuff in your house, which is worth that amount of money.
You can sell things online in order to release cash invested into a project. Whatever you are using the cash for there’s a few different platforms we can use.
This isn’t really a business.
This is just about looking around your house and you’ll probably be quite surprised there is a lot of stuff there which is worth money and you’re not using it.
Harms: Essentially what we’re doing is in the process of using the people’s techniques, clearing some of the clutter we then generate cash as a result of that.
And that cash can be used for your livelihood and it can also be used to help set up things like Kyle has said.
Kyle: Depending on which country you are in there’s going to be classified ads, classified listings. In the UK we have a website called Gumtree also Shpock. In America it’s going to be Craigslist.
These are the most direct classified ads, you take a photo of your item and you put a price on it and a description then you stick it up there. It’s a bit hit and miss because one, a lot of it’s done face-to-face. People will come and pick up the item and give you cash. Not really working anymore because of the lockdown.
But also it depends on people happening to see your item and needing that at the moment.
The good thing about those classified ad sites is you generally get to keep 100% of the sale. You can pay for a listing, etcetera but still you’re taking the full amount.
Very general, very wide, but it might work for your items.
Harms: If I were to give you a tip with this I would say number one have the picture of the actual item but also have the picture and the price images of the original item.
I bought mine from appliancesonline.com and those items were still on the website. Got loads of reviews and the price is what it is on the website. Assume the washing machine was £500, I was selling it for £300 but I took the images off the main site.
So they had this professional looking image with the reviews and captured how much it is officially in the shops and then my own picture. So they’ve got something to compare this to.
This is a washing machine from 20 years ago well no, they’re still selling this washing machine online and it’s worth £500 and I’m getting it for £250, £300.
That tactic I’ve used for years and it seems to work quite well.
Kyle: If you are looking for a wider reach and then you’re going to post it to people rather than them coming to you, which is going to be a bit easier to do nowadays because, again with lockdown.
Amazon marketplace and eBay work very well and a higher chance of selling, but they’re going to take a percentage.
It’s going to depend on the items, something like a fridge the person is going to have to come and look at it and take it away with them.
If it’s clothing, jewellery, etcetera then eBay and Amazon marketplace and Facebook Marketplace are all going to work.
They are the general sites, another is called pre-loved in the UK.
All of these different places you can use to sell items in your home in order to generate cash right now.
What I want to talk about more specifically though, are specific niche sites where you can for a particular product category, a lot of these specific sites, they will have an app on the telephone where you can just.
I’ll use Ziffit as an example.
It has an app on your telephone where you can scan the barcodes on each of your books and I think they do DVDs and video games as well, but mainly books.
You can scan them all and it tells you immediately on screen how much it’s worth, and then you take all those books and you’ve agreed you want to sell them, stick them in a box and they will pick up the box for free.
They just make it so much faster.
You could list all of those books on amazon, you could list all of those books on eBay and sell them one by one by one, but you don’t want to be packaging each book up and sending it off just to make a few quid each time.
Harms: I would agree partially because it depends on how much time you have, what your scenario is. Is that additional four quid you might make by selling it individually worth it?
Whereas I am more like you Kyle where I would put this all in a box and get rid of it. You can sell it for me and give me a smaller percentage.
Kyle: Ziffit takes a cut to you getting a low price.
If you sold the book directly on eBay maybe you could sell it for 5 pounds, whereas if you scan it on Ziffit maybe they offer you two pound.
You make less but the convenience of just throwing it all in a box and them picking it up is just massive.
Harms: I would say with videogames I would say try to sell them asap.
The video game industry is changing subscription models; they give away free games every month. I would say if you’ve got video games right now they’ll be worth more than in six months’ time.
Kyle: For games you can also look at music magpie and in the UK.
Harms: Cex computer exchange.
Kyle: Old telephones a lot of people have old model iPhones and Samsung and they’re never going to be used.
There is buyback boss, there’s Orchard, there’s Gazelle, there’s Swappa. I’ve got them all in the list of which country it is.
Harms: Again we’ve not used all of these, but we’ve done this research for you so you’ve got categories.
Kyle: Find the one for your country.
Plus, if there’s multiple ones in your country, you just check them all and see which gives you thes best result.
Clothing is a massive one.
Until a few days ago I did not know this was such a large market especially things like used wedding dresses, massive market.
In the UK there is Vinted and in the USA it’s Tradesy.
It might be worth looking at Marie Kondo. She has a Netflix series where she has you pick up all your items and ask yourself, does this bring me joy?
For the majority of us, 80 – 90% of stuff in our house is just clutter.
To be able to take all of that stuff to unburden yourself physically by getting rid of it and generate cash at the same time it’s a pretty sweet deal.
Harms: Number one as a category is selling something that you already own for cash and there’s a few different methods, different places for what is general and then number two is categories.
Harms: The next category is, rather than selling an item we are now exchanging ourselves for time.
We’re selling ourselves not for the skill set but for time and attention, not our physical self.
Kyle: There’s a whole category of websites and they are called GPT or get paid to.
This wide GPT umbrella is used because it can be paid to do so many different things. It could be watching a video online. It could be clicking on some links.
It could be filling out surveys, it could be focus groups. It could be downloading the game on your android phone, playing it for 10 minutes to get to level two and then uninstalling it.
It could be so many different things.
Businesses out there require these tasks to be done and they need to be done by actual human beings rather than by computers, there are these GPT sites get paid to sites, which basically farmout these tasks to hundreds of thousands or millions of people.
If a business needs a hundred thousand survey responses, they will get one of these GPT sites to send it out to a mass amount of people and each person who completes the survey, for instance, will get paid $0.50.
Harms: This is very good for people who have time on their hands and to explore.
Kyle: But also a lot of these things can be done while you’re watching Netflix or you’re doing something else, or you’re on the cycling machine doing exercise.
A lot of these are extremely low attention requirements and as a result of this, because anyone can do them because they don’t require much skill or attention, or even time.
Each of these tasks will be extremely low paid, we’re talking about it could be five cents, 10 cents, 20 cents, a dollar or two.
It depends on the tasks, but the name of the game is volume.
If you’re going to complete surveys you need to complete 100 surveys to make your hundred dollars.
There are a lot of websites that provide these tasks and there’s a huge range of different things, and a huge range of how much is paid.
Obviously, the ones that pay well are going to be snapped up a lot quicker.
When I’m saying surveys it’s like one or two questions you have to click on, it’s a short survey. Very different to focus groups which actually requires you to generally jump on a live video.
Surveys are extremely quick, very low and there are also a lot of different websites. The big ones are Survey Junkie and Swagbucks. They are the major players in this area.
I would advise you just go and check out to see which ones are available to you.
A lot of them are restricted depending on your country or the language you speak, some will only take people in the US.
Some will only take people in Europe and some will have different language requirements etcetera. But the big ones start with Survey Junkie and Swagbucks.
One warning though, a lot of them, and we did allude to this earlier, a lot of them do not pay cash, but will pay you in points and the points can be redeemed for vouchers, telephone credit, amazon gift cards etcetera.
If you are happy to be paid in those kinds of currencies fine these are good ways to reduce your costs, but I would say look for ones that payout in PayPal.
Harms: That is the purpose of today’s show, which is how do we generate cash.
Kyle: The next category in GPT is testing.
It tends to be tech testing. So if I am a company who has a website or I have an app I need to make sure that the user flow, user experience for my website or my application works.
For that I need testers, I need people to use the website, I need them to try sign up for user accounts and see if that works. See if they receive emails, etcetera so it’s tech testing.
There are a few ways it’s done.
The most popular is basically you have an application on your computer and it will record your screen and it will record your webcam while you talk through the process of using the website.
You just talk through your thought process.
Because this requires a bit more skill, a bit more time you tend to get paid a bit more.
There’s one called user testing.
They pay about $10 for each 20-minute test. In an hour you could do three tests, that’s $30 an hour. That’s about £20.
Harms: The downside to this is there is not going to be as much available as a survey side of things, but if you are looking for this on a constant basis you’re definitely grabbing a few of these opportunities and making a bit of extra cash.
Number two is now focusing on a focus group, a research group and they’ll pay you £50. Maybe you use something or try a product that they have and then they’ll give you a cheque for £50.
That was the old way to do it, but how have they adapted now due to lockdown?
Kyle: I think even before the lockdown most of this has moved online.
If it’s a physical product they will send you the product, you will play around with it sometimes you get to keep the products which is a nice bonus.
They do the same thing they get a bunch of people in on a live call, zoom call or whatever it is, where again you use your camera and you are talking about the product.
Whether it’s a digital product that they asked you to use or whether it’s a physical product but you give them your time, you talk about the product with them and it’s a live session.
The testing would be just recording your screen and you talking to a camera.
Whereas focus groups tend to be not always, they will tend to be a live session.
Harms: There will be some somebody else on the other side who’s asking you questions, quizzing you about your experience and your product.
Kyle: Another is similar to surveying but a bit different and you can do reviewing. There can be online reviews, there’s one called Slice the pie.
It was set up initially for music reviews, they have expanded that now so it has products.
Five star-ohms and Nice rebate, these ones are mainly about amazon reviews and what they do is they get requests from companies who are selling things on amazon who want honest reviews of their products.
What happens is you buy the product on amazon using your money.
The product is sent to you, you review it, you feedback to Nice rebate or Five star-ohms and then these review companies will refund you, so you get the money.
Plus a bit extra for doing the review so this is a really good way of getting free stuff, if you want free stuff.
Harms: That was focused on human exchange but it requires very low attention all the way up to actually you need to put a bit of effort into it, but again it doesn’t require any skill.
Focus groups the reviewing process, there’s a bit of effort involved there.
Harms: Number three is task-based and again, you don’t need a lot of skill, but slightly different this is a task-based process where now we are fulfilling a specific task that somebody is requiring and they will then give you cash in return for that.
Kyle: It is becoming a bit more skill-based, so we tend to get paid a bit more for these, so there are things like micro task engines.
Micro task might be something like data entry or spelling corrections or listening to an audio clip and identifying certain words used in it.
Something that is very quick can be done in a few seconds and it’s done in massive high-volume and is it worthwhile for the company to farm it out.
Might be things like bleating captures things where it says find the streetlight.
Lots of AI companies want humans to fill out those kinds of quizzes because that helps them to train their artificial intelligence algorithm.
They’ll show you lots of pictures and say which one of these is a woman and you have to press the one that is a woman and all of that goes back to them to help train AI.
For you and your side it means you sit at a computer and you answer lots of very short questions, queries and for each one you get paid a small amount.
Generally the micro tasks tend to be specifically for businesses who are trying to outsource a business process.
Harms: The work is slightly different because the survey you are responding to a set of questions whereas a task is your completing a task for a business function, so the output is slightly different.
The input probably requires the same amount of effort and time.
Kyle: The big player here is Amazon, and in particular Amazon has a division called mechanical turk or Mturk.
You can sign up relatively difficult to get verified most of the people who work for them want them to be in the US, Canada, or Europe. So if you are in those locations, that’s fantastic.
There’s another one called click worker, which is a bit more open globally.
The pay for the tasks is going to vary wildly.
Mechanical Turk have things like translation tasks, it might be rapid translation of individual words or sentences or whatever it is, something like that which requires specific skills will actually pay a decent amount.
Whereas something that just requires you to have eyes and clicking on the pictures will not be very much.
But they have the job boards which tell you how much you get paid for each task you do and how many tasks are available.
Now we’re moving into even higher reward and a bit more skill based.
There are companies that require an excellent search engine review and social media review, search engine work basically auditing or evaluation.
Let’s say I run Sainsbury’s and I want to make sure that I show up in a google search result to buy food in Chelmsford, whatever it is.
They want to know when somebody types in to buy food in Chelmsford, what kind of things are they seeing on the screen?
What things are they clicking on?
How does the search engine so google displaying this data to people around the world?
This is very valuable information for them, but they don’t necessarily want to send somebody to Chelmsford to do that search query.
There are agencies and you need to apply for some of them, I think leap force in particular actually has an entrance exam.
You need to study and learn how to formulate the reports that they send back to their clients. They are much harder to get into.
However, once you do, they are apparently I haven’t used any of these needs, but from the research I have been doing they are apparently very consistent.
You continue to get hours of work.
A lot of the tasks we are talking about are ad hoc. So yes, one month you might make a few hundred dollars, but then the next month there is nothing.
With Lion Bridge and Leap force you tend to get a consistent amount of work if you want it. In terms of the pay, it’s about minimum wage about $10, $12 dollars an hour.
It depends on the skill level and if you’re with them for longer you can progress and some of the jobs I saw some for $22 an hour.
Which is fine because again, this is the stuff you’re doing at home, it’s still not massive time or skill required.
So search engine testing or social media evaluation is the other one.
If you have an Instagram account for example, certain companies will want you to use your Instagram account to access their content.
They want to see how you see it and see what your experience is with it.
Harms: One that we included probably more useful for after lockdown are physical tasks.
Kyle: This is an interesting one because yes, these are going to be more useful after lockdown, but for some people, when we get the antibody or the antigen test and we know that some people are now immune plus not carrying, these are going to be very relevant.
These are physical tasks where people are needed out in the world to go do something, it could be collecting someone’s shopping.
It could be I need somebody to come and fix my leaky tap.
Harms: Somebody to come hoover my carpet, and clean around the house.
Kyle: Very small tasks and odd jobs really but there are platforms online to make it easy to find them now.
Like Task Rabbit and Shepper.
As we said a lot of these are not going to be relevant during the lockdown because there is a physical movement, but in the next few months as that starts to release there will be some people who cannot go out still, who might need additional support.
Maybe this is a useful way to help provide that while getting paid at the same time.
Harms: I feel like there’s going to be a strong demand for it because how say if I needed a service doing physically delivering food, how do I find somebody trusted somebody who’s been vetted, somebody who I don’t have to hand physical cash over to because that’s also a big challenge in this new economy.
Allow someone else to pay them and handle that for the service and I can independently review their service as well.
Things like task rabbit and other similar companies are going to be I personally feel in demand.
The final one is mystery shopping.
Kyle: This is a really weird one.
Harms: It is for after lockdown as well.
Kyle: This is a nice way to earn a little bit of extra cash while going around your normal day-to-day life.
These are a bit like testing but physical shops so there will be small jobs, you’ll be paid a pound to go and buy a crunchie from the local spa and you need to take a photo of the crunchie on its stand, and then you maybe take photo of the crunchie’s receipt.
That’s all you need to do that counts as mystery shopping.
Maybe you need to give some feedback on the service you received when buying the crunchie, it depends as there are going to be different jobs, but you’ll make an amount of money for doing that.
There are now apps for doing this which again, make it easy.
You could have a bunch of these on your telephone, you get notifications of things in your area. Field agent, Be my eye click and walk again they are in the list, but that’s another way to make a few extra quid.
Harms: That’s probably one for after lockdown unless there are some unique jobs that have appeared.
Harms:Number four which is the final one on our list in order to make you cash asap is renting out resources.
This is essentially renting out something that you already have that exists for a fee.
The world of renting economies is going to grow massively in the future, especially in big cities. Think about how often you use your car, how often do you use your parking space?
How often are you using an item?
Even down to how often do you use your SLR camera?
Do you just use it on vacation and is it just sitting on your shelf the rest of time?
Can we monetise our pieces of equipment, resources to the greatest possible effect during idle time, during the time it is not being used.
That’s really the focus of this final part.
Kyle: This is a massive industry and a lot of it is locked off because of lockdown.
But you can do AirBnb if you have a spare room; you can rent it out and make a solid income.
There’s also a parking space rental that is justpark.com.
You can loan out stuff so your DSLR is a great example, you may be using it a couple of weeks a year, the rest of time instead of someone else going out and buying a £2,000, £3,000 camera they can borrow yours and they can pay you.
Harms: Some companies actually have their own equipment which they rent out. We are just replicating that model.
Kyle: You can loan your car; it can be unlocked by people who have the app. They use your car while you’re not using it.
All of these things are fantastic and that’s a big thing for the future.
It’s looking around your house and thinking what stuff am I using and what can I sell?
You can also have that discussion with how much can I rent?
I only use it one-week a year. So that stuff is great and there’s a lot of different ways to do that.
What I want to talk about now is renting resources in your home which don’t require you to leave the house.
Mainly computational or bandwidth rental.
Two different things.
Bandwidth rental is if you have broadband or you have fibre optic you can rent out your excess bandwidth.
In the UK this works because we don’t tend to have data caps whereas in America, not so much as they do have data caps. Data caps have been removed right now during quarantine.
We have packet stream, we have honey gain, so these two they rent it on a per gigabyte basis. It’s $0.10 per gigabyte, so 10 gb gets you a dollar.
Not very much, but again, if you’re not using it overnight it’s an extra dollar.
Generally, they’ll pull down 10 to 15 gb a day, so that’s 1.45 dollar per day. It doesn’t sound like much but it adds up.
There is fluid stack, they are a bit different.
They pay you depending on the speed of your internet.
Upto 200 mb per second is five-dollar month. If you’ve got 500 mb per second or more it’s $50 a month, so you can make bank depends entirely on how fast your internet is.
This is only useful if you’ve got fibre but they mainly do their stuff like overnight when you’re not using it, so they have a piece of software which sits on your computer and it’s making sure that it only pulls down data when you’re not using it.
You can have it on your phone, multiple devices.
This is apparently how you make good, decent money out of it; you have it on multiple lines.
You can have six devices linked to one account so you can make quite a lot of money.
Computational is about computer power.
There are two companies in particular, which I found many others out there. One is called Kryptex; it’s a currency mining platform they need processing power to mind bitcoin.
You don’t need to worry about what any of that means you are just renting your computer.
They require a computer with a good GPU and that’s a graphic processing unit, so if you have a modern pc with a really good graphics card, generally a gaming pc, then they will pay you to use that graphics card when you’re not using it.
They will test your computer specifications and then give you an idea of how much you can get paid overnight.
The second one I looked into which seems a deal is Loadteam.
They use your cpu, so not your graphics card they are using your processor.
You can do this even if you have a laptop it just needs any computer. It looks like $10-$20 a month or so, depending on how fast your cpu is.
Again if you have multiple computers you could potentially have a few of them running things you need to make sure the cost of your electricity bill doesn’t go up too much.
Harms: So number one is selling something really simple, a physical item.
Number two is providing your human input to provide a function for somebody.
Number three is actually exchanging your time to complete a task, typically for a business function.
Number four is actually renting out a resource, anything from a camera all the way to renting out your broadband, your cpu or gpu on your laptop, computer.
These are realistic income figures, but if you start to stack them say you did one thing from number one, one thing from number two, one thing from number three and one thing from number four, now you potentially have got yourself 50 to 150 dollars or pounds, or the currency in your world a month.
Kyle: If you are doing the surveys every day you could probably make another $50 a month.
If you did pick up a focus group or you manage to get into the testing then that can jump up. If you pick up a focus group that is $100 a month.
Let’s say you get one every two months that’s another $50.
Harms: Then the number three which is micro-tasks,
Kyle: Again, it’s going to depend if you manage to get on Appen or Lionbridge you can get consistent work for an hour a day.
Potentially, that could be another $150 a month
Harms: Now we’ve got number four, which is renting out something, a resource.
Kyle: 50 bucks a month depending on how aggressive you are and how many computers and internet connections you use.
If you get aggressive with that you could make a few hundred quite easily.
Harms: If you put some effort and explore these things and check out the big list, you’re looking at about $300-$320 a month which is fantastic.
Kyle: We are talking about an hour a day really.
Harms: There are options there.
These are low skilled, so yes, there’s going to be a learning curve for some of these items.
Yes, there’s going to be setup time and a process you have to go through as vetting or verification, or downloading an app on your phone, whatever it is.
That’s fine once it’s done, there is not much skill required.
What that means is your energy levels on this is actually very minimal and that’s the key, your thought energy can be spent on your normal work, your family, whatever’s going on over there.
This is something that happens in the background because it requires a lower thought energy and the only thing out there which sticks out which is after lockdown which will be physical tasks like mystery shopping, task rabbit.
But again you’re going to get paid more for that.
It’s about how we can make money with the least amount of energy, the least amount of processing power in our mind and still generate cash, which is why the income is comparative to that level of energy as well.
So the businesses are aware of that when they are paying out.
Learn how to make money online from the English language with these 7 no-brainer methods
Harms: We are carrying on the conversation on how we can make money online during lockdown and we are very much leveraging this big list of items which is around 200 different ways you can generate cash online.
As we go through this guide we are upping the skill level.
A bit of advice for an employee is if you’re working from home make it so that the result and the productivity does not dip.
If you can get it so that the productivity increases.
Now you’ve got a case study and something you can take to your boss or your managers and say, I’m way better when I work from home here’s the proof.
Then it is very hard for them to argue otherwise you can fall straight back into the next trap of these face-to-face meetings, et cetera.
Kyle: We are focusing on the fact that you do have skills.
When we talk to people sometimes they are like, I don’t really have any skills. I’m just out of university.
We tend to think of our skills as diplomas and degrees and stuff like that, and that’s not what we’re talking about.
You do have a skill, the fact that you are watching us, you’re listening to us means that you speak English.
Whether it’s your native language or second language, it’s a big skill. It’s a skill you can use in many different ways.
We will be covering all the different ways where the English language can be used online to generate an income.
Again doesn’t matter if you’re a native speaker or you’ve learnt it as a second language, there are going to be different opportunities available, but it’s going to be open for you.
Harms: The idea is just pick one or two of these items and you get paid something, but the good thing about today is because there’s a level of skill set required, which is an English language.
The income that you’re going to generate also increases.
We had an example of a survey paying you may be $0.50 now it’s going to change slightly. Some of those still apply but the level required we’re talking in the 10, 15, $20 plus that sort of arena.
Kyle: Number one we’re going to kick off with teaching.
You speak English and you have the ability; everyone has the innate ability to teach other people.
Teaching English is a massive market, there are one billion people around the world actively learning English right now.
I can’t think of any other market that is much bigger than that. That is obscenely large for a single business.
Really surprisingly, there are 300 million active learners of English in China.
Kyle: In terms of market size this is just mind blowing and a lot of the infrastructure for learning English in China and around the world has been shut down because the classes are not there, so you can’t go to class.
A lot of this is moving online, so we want to talk about how you can use your ability as a native speaker to help people who are learning English around
the world. It’s
not just for native speakers.
Harms: So question one really is do you need a degree?
Do you need some qualification for this?
Kyle: Most of these websites are set up and most language education is set up like this as well, where there’s two tiers.
There are going to be professional teachers so these are people who can put together lesson plans, they can work with an individual or group of students to guide them through a curriculum.
These job offerings or these gigs will tend to require you to have at least a bachelor’s degree, it doesn’t really matter what in and some form of diploma or certificate.
These are basically diplomas that teach you how to teach English to students. For professional teachers, a lot of the hiring positions will be for that level, so you would need some qualification.
Harms: How much does a qualification cost on average?
Kyle: There is a huge range.
There are ones you can get online in a couple of weeks and then there are ones where you actually go and you do a six-month course at a University and they teach you how to run a class etcetera.
CELTA, Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults is considered the top.
There are Tefl and Tesol qualifications which you can do online, they tend to be 200, 300 hours’ worth of teaching.
A lot of it will be you watching videos and doing exercises and some live like elements. It costs a couple hundred pounds basically.
Depending on where you are in life if you just want to get this diploma to teach English now to make money during the lockdown, that’s quite a big commitment.
It’s going to take a few hundred hours to get that diploma. Whether or not you want to make that commitment is up to you.
However, if you are travelling around the world having a Tefl or Tesol is really useful for being able to pick up jobs. If you are backpacking or travelling it’s just a very useful qualification to have.
Now let’s move on to everybody else, to the people who aren’t professional teachers but you do speak English and you can help other people to learn English.
Harms: The result is going to be you’re going to get paid less, but the friction to entry is just completely removed.
To start teaching as quickly as possible and start generating cash as quickly as possible and that is also available as a way to generate an income online through these platforms.
Let’s talk about the platforms that are available.
Kyle: Most platforms out there have both of these levels, the second level we are going to call it conversation partners as it is a more casual form of teaching.
It is basically jumping on a live call with somebody in China or somebody in Uruguay or somebody in wherever and having conversations with them.
They as a student will have had English lessons before and they might speak a bit of conversational English but they need to practice, they need somebody to talk to.
Someone to have chats with basically and they are paying to have access to that. That’s what you can do as a native or a fluent speaker of English is help them with conversation practice.
Let’s jump into a couple of platforms because we can talk about the difference between teachers and conversation partners.
Probably the biggest one out there right now is something called ITalki.
You put up a profile and you are responsible for getting your own students. You write your blurb, you say what you offer, you set your prices. It’s all on you, all Italki does is provide a marketplace platform to help you find students.
They have the most students as far as I can tell. Professional teachers there if you are native speaker the hourly rate is about $20-$40 an hour or more.
If you are starting out as a teacher it’s going to be hard to get that rate off the bat, but that’s something you could build up to over time.
That’s for if you are native speaker and a qualified teacher.
If you are not a native speaker let’s say your first language is Russian but you are a professional teacher and you are fluent in English, etcetera, generally it will be a bit less. So 20 to 30 an hour just because there is a preference to hire native speakers.
In Italki they are called community teachers, but it is the same as a conversation partner.
Again, these are people that don’t have qualifications but they speak English fluently, or native, and they go on and they have chats with people. They tend to be about $10, $15 an hour.
Harms: It could be that you are a teacher and you are not required at the moment because schools are on lock down.
So how can you leverage your skill set very quickly because you already have some of these qualifications that we’re speaking about, or some that are transferable, in which case this is another way to top up.
Kyle: There is also Verbal planet and Verbling. I have not used them. They seem to be very similar to Italki, so check them out.
If you are a teacher, I don’t see why you wouldn’t put your profile on multiple sites.
Harms: If you’re starting off just get your profile on all of them.
Kyle: VIPKids is a Beijing-based start-up. They exclusively focus on the 300 million Chinese people who are learning English.
They have a different model and their classes are 25 minutes long.
You get paid eight dollars per half an hour class; an hours work you get paid $14-$18. If you do 45 classes and you are on-time to every class, you don’t get flagged up as being unpunctual and if you do 45, it doesn’t have to be 45 days in a row, it’s just a sequence of 45.
Then you get a two-dollar bonus per class, which suddenly means you’re getting paid $10 per half an hour class which means $20 per hour basically.
That requires you to be consistent and do 45 classes and be punctual, but if you do that, then you’re being paid $20 an hour.
Harms: So 45 lessons at eight dollars a lesson is $360.
If you plus the bonus to that it brings that up to $450. Now for 22.5 hours’ worth of work which is just over half a week’s work, you’re looking at $20 per hour on average, so that starts to add up.
That’s pretty much in line with a typical salary in the UK if you’re watching this in the UK.
Probably slightly lower in the US but of course it depends on where you’re from.
Kyle: Fair warning, some people have complained about the company. It was more this kind of thing about you needing to do 45 lessons before you get your bonus.
I think from a business point of view, that is a good idea to ensure your teachers are consistent and that your students are getting the best experience.
But with something like this you get lots of work but you are working for a boss. Whereas with Italki, Verbling, etcetera you’re working more for yourself.
It is up to you to brand yourself, it’s up to you to get students and yes, you might be able to charge more but you need to go through the marketing process.
Which one is good for you will depend on you personally.
Number two is tutoring so similar to teaching English but slightly different, we are going to be tutoring around school subjects or academic subjects or whatever it is.
Yes, you need the English language to tutor but also requires knowledge of a subject.
Harms: It could be within a specific subject, it could be you’re delivering maths, science, chemistry, biology, English literature, English language, but because you have the native English language as your base, you can start to teach in any of these subjects.
One of the challenges a listener may throw at us is saying well all the exams are cancelled, there is no real need for tutoring, but that would be if we analyse that market.
The exam side or exam preparation side of tutoring would probably take up a percentage.
But that won’t be 100% of the market and I know parents who have their kids getting tutored on piano right now on other kinds of niche topics, just because their children are passionate about that subject.
So they get additional classes there, think about tutoring as an additional class to complement the number one, which is the language and the teaching and the fundamental education part of things.
How are they facilitating this online?
Kyle: There are a few websites out there, the big ones now are Chegg. Chegg tutors is a giant marketplace for tutoring. In the UK in particular there are Superprof and UK tutors.
Depending on what your skill set is, yes, maybe you don’t know how to teach GCSE biology, but you might be able to teach piano or something like that.
There are going to be a lot of opportunities right now because yes people aren’t doing exams in the UK, so there’s not going to be exam tuition.
But all the kids are at home and they’re being provided with some education by their schools. But that is not enough for a lot of parents out there and a lot of kids.
So there’s going to be extra sessions on the marketplace you can pick up.
Harms: You’re going to be teaching either children, teenagers so they may also be advised by their parents, so try to deliver in a way that you start to build your own reputation as an online tutor.
Because once this is over, they actually may prefer to stay with you rather than go and visit their physical tutor because it’s easy, just pop in an office, or pop them in front of the laptop.
They’ll learn, take notes, you may be able to tutor more than, say, the families got three children and they are all teens. You may be able to provide tutoring to them, especially if it’s in a subject like piano.
If it is not exam related then suddenly it becomes open doors.
Harms: Number three is voice work.
Kyle: If you have got a good voice there are opportunities out there.
Again as a British speaker there are even more opportunities. With audiobooks for example, a lot of people like to have British voices on them instead of American or non-British voices.
If you do have a good voice and accent there’s going to be some work that you can do in voice work.
There’s going to be casual all the way through to professional.
If you are already a professional voice worker you’re probably doing fine as you’ll have a studio.
We’re talking more about people who want to get into doing voice work from home.
You can pick up basic voice work, narration, voice-overs over on fiverr and upwork. These are good casual places to start building up your portfolio because if you apply to an actual voice work agency, they are going to obviously ask what have you done?
Can you send us audio examples of your previous voice work. It’s a professional industry and there will be voice portfolios. If you want to start out, then fiverr and upwork are great places to pick up this kind of thing.
If you are looking for voice over specific jobs, so these are larger projects rather than simple 30 second messages, you can go to voices.com and the voice realm.
These are websites where you can find bigger gigs.
At this point, you’re going to start to need a portfolio, which is why I say start with upwork, fiver and get some basics done then progress.
If you want something really big you can actually do audiobook narration and there’s an agency called ECX which is properly the best place to start with that.
At that point we’re talking about being paid thousands.
But you are sitting down and talking for 18 hours reading a book, so that requires a lot of skill and you’re only going to be paid for that if you’ve proven you can do this work with smaller projects.
If people tell you that you have an extremely relaxing voice and they like to listen to your voice, for whatever reason, look into ASMR.
It’s basically talking in a soft voice while doing certain actions on video, maybe crinkling paper or popping bubble wrap.
There was one example of someone from Finland doing tongue twisters in a very nice relaxing voice and she’s got 2.3 million views on that.
I did some mathematics on that. She’s probably been paid $4,000 for basically doing tongue twisters for 17 minutes.
Harms: That’s a small account for this kind of subject niche area.
Kyle: I know some people will be thinking what on earth are they talking about?
This is big business if you can get into it on twitch and YouTube.
People use these videos to relax, whether it’s listening to the sound of rain and somebody reading a fairy-tale in a soft voice.
Whether it’s someone popping bubble wrap and telling you about their day.
Whatever it is they are relaxing videos that are now just extremely popular on platforms like twitch and YouTube, and that allows you to monetise your voice, if it is of that certain tone.
Harms: We are now leveraging the fact that you can understand English and be able to produce a piece of work which is specifically called audio transcription from what you’re hearing.
We are listening to something and we are going to turn that audio into text and it’s a needed product and a needed service for businesses.
It is a needed item for small businesses and that’s it in a nutshell.
Kyle: Right now AI or computers are not 100% accurate at transcribing audio so if I am a business and I want to transcribe meeting notes, I can record the whole meeting and have a person turn that into a transcription for example.
Something like this when we are teaching we will get this transcribed afterwards and turn it into a blog article.
There are unlimited business users for this and it’s a big business right now.
There are sites like transcribe anywhere, transcribe me, quick state rev.com, that is one of the big ones.
They will pay human beings like yourself to listen to audio and type out what you hear, and then that text is sent back to the business who have hired these agencies for the work.
Harms: In terms of how much they pay people because there’s a few different tiers but it’s all based on quality.
Kyle: The main thing is you get paid how many minutes of audio you transcribe.
Let’s say you’re given a five-minute audio clip; you’ll get paid for transcribing five minutes of audio. If that takes you an hour then you’re not going to be making much money.
If you can transcribe it one-to-one, so it takes you five minutes to transcribe five minutes of audio then you can do very well.
You need to be able to listen and type.
If you can type in real time at the same speed that somebody is speaking you could be quid’s in here, you can make a lot of money. That’s a skill that not that many people have.
Harms: If you have a job and it’s typically been taking meeting notes, logging down stuff, PA’s, personal assistant, notetaker, secretaries and admin staff.
You can potentially go and get a supplementary income just off a natural skill that you already have, which is the ability to type on a ratio of one-to-one.
You can hear it and you can type without the need to pause.
If you can get that skill set you can start to generate revenue.
Typically the prices that you can earn are between $0.30-$0.60 per minute audio.
Kyle: Per minute audio not your time working.
Again if you have a 10-minute piece of audio and you can get that done and transcribed in 10 minutes, then you are also making $0.30-$0.60 per minute.
Harms: Let’s say you did half a working day, so five hours of this and we hit the top mark
Kyle: At $0.50 a minute.
This is the problem with transcription as it is quite hard to work out how much you’re going to be making until you actually start doing it.
Harms: But it’s about $150 for about five hours work if you’re working on that rate.
Kyle: There are different tiers as well so if you’re doing scientific or legal transcription it’s going to be paid more.
The highest I found was $1.73 per minute for audio. So you transcribe an hours’ worth of audio that’s going to be $103.
Technical language you get paid higher for.
Harms: The way we use this in regards to digital marketing talking about online business just off a tangent slightly is.
We would record the audio or the video and extract that audio file and put it into an AI software and the software we use is called Dragon Dictate, but there’s lots out there. There are even some ones that are free for a period of time and they’ll charge you after that but it’s quite reasonable.
Once it’s processed in the AI software it will give you a full transcript. Now that is not perfect, I would say Dragon Dictate is probably about 90 to 95% it’s a very, very good, but it then goes to the final step, which is another human being. Who will clean that up.
What we do in the middle step is rather than go to an audio transcriber because for us it works out expensive because we do so much, we skip a human and we go to an AI and then send it to a human at the end, which works out cheaper for us.
If you’re looking at this in terms of actually producing a lot of content do I need to use these people, an AI software?
There are two different options there, but either one will have a cost associated with it unless you do the whole thing yourself.
But that’s not smart use of your time as a business owner, especially right now.
With that transcription we will then turn it into a guide, a blog, a book in the far future, there’s many different things you can do with it. Depending on what your niche and your industry is.
It’s another way to get paid.
Kyle: In general the next three are all going to be about writing, so we’ve talked about how you teach English, how you can speak English for narration, you can listen and transcribe and get paid for that.
The rest are going to be about writing in English or in your language.
Fiverr in particular, there’s pretty good money to be made in proofreading and copyediting academic entrance essays.
These are people writing personal statements to apply to universities or to schools around the world for their MBA or PhD.
A lot of people applying to the top universities in the world are not necessarily native English speakers and therefore they need proof-readers and copy editors to sharpen up their stuff.
This is a bit different from writing their personal statements which is also an industry, it’s not really what we are recommending.
This is just proofreading and making sure they are up to scratch, but because these are essays, personal statements that are so important for the people submitting them to universities the pay for these kinds of jobs are very high.
People will pay a lot; they will easily pay a few hundred dollars to get a one-page personal statement proofread because they need it to be perfect.
So on your side, the proof-reader can make the average figure in the US is about $25-$30 an hour, the great thing about this is you can do it from home.
You’re sent the file, you do the proofreading and you send it back. There’s Scribendi, Topadmit, Essay edge and in the UK there is proof my essay again.
Harms: If you have a natural skill set for looking at a piece of text and you can sort out the grammar, formatting, remove repeated words whatever these amazing people do, that is a natural skill set of yours.
Or you know you’ve got it, but you’ve never really monetised it, this is a nice place, number five entrance essays in proofreading is a really good place to start to see if you can generate revenue.
Like Kyle said it is higher.
We are in a weird time when it comes to entrance for things, but this could also be for a career, so it is not just university. It’s for job applications, CV’s .
Kyle: Number six is selling academic notes, which is a really interesting industry which I didn’t really know about until this weekend.
If you’ve got a GCSE, A-level university notes or maybe notes from a professional qualification like the CFA finance or ACCA.
If you have useful notes you can upload all those notes to various marketplaces and if they get sold by people taking ACCA or CFA then you receive money from that.
Harms: If you look at ACCA as an example, you’d go to an ACCA exam preparation class and then they would start to extract things that you really should be focusing on in preparation for exam questions.
Those notes to somebody are critical because if time is an essence with these things as well, especially most of this is done alongside people’s career.
You’ve got a choice, you’ve got a super-sized textbook which you have to sift through and extract the information, plus pay for and they are not cheap.
These additional classes where a lecturer will then in a physical location give you a look, I think the exam questions you need to focus on are this, this and this.
For a lot of people you’re actually saving time and money by pulling somebody else’s notes. That’s why somebody would want to do it, so if you’ve got notes at home and they are just amazing then look at these platforms you can be paid for.
Kyle: That’s just an ACCA example but you can go to Nexus notes, Stuvia and Campus shift. These websites you can sell your notes on.
Just go on there and see if there’s any of your previous qualifications or university courses or whatever it is and see if there’s anything you could upload onto there in order to make money.
Harms: Maybe you’re currently at University or education thinking if I now prepare my notes ready for a platform like this, I could cash in for a couple of years to come.
It could be at any age, it could be you’re taking GCSE’s, doing a degree later in life, it could be getting a qualification you’re doing alongside your career.
Think about an incentive for getting a quality bunch of notes together that you can sell down the line.
Kyle: In terms of commission the site will take commission. It depends on the site.
Nexus notes will take 50% that’s quite a lot. Stuvia will take 30% so you’re left with the 70% and campus shift will take 15%, so you’re left with 85%.
Again, if you prepare these notes I don’t see why you wouldn’t put it on every single marketplace.
So yes, you might be making less for Nexus notes, but maybe they’re selling more.
You can put them on to every single one and make money.
The good thing about this is you may only sell four this year but the notes stay on that platform and you can just continuously make money from that. 10 years from now, you might receive a cheque or PayPal, which slightly is 20 bucks or whatever.
Once it is done you can just forget about it and you’ll be making a small amount of cash over time.
Harms: Onto the final one which is number seven, freelance writing.
Now this does require a level of skill set.
This is writing based on a demand or a certain requirement that is sent out by a business, industry, an individual business owner and particularly businesses are in desperate need for good writers.
Especially ones that can have the permission to write on multiple platforms. Because if you are in a career you may only be able to write for that one organisation.
Whereas some freelance writers can write freely across all platforms.
And that’s the way they decide to make their money rather than one source of income, pros, and cons for both.
Kyle: There are websites that want lists, they want blog articles which are like these are the top 10 lawn mowers or the top five fake flowers you should use to beautify your wedding.
This is content that does really well online and there are websites that have now set up specifically to find writers who create this content.
There is Listverse they pay $100 per article. They have a very set format like this is what it has to look like.
Then there’s another one called A list apart. Now they pay $200 for a featured article, $100 for a normal list article and $50 for mini articles. That’s a bit more flexible.
Those two are worth looking up.
Not everything that gets submitted gets accepted, obviously, but if you can crack the code and work out how to create the articles they want $100 for a list is good.
The next one I want to look at is International living. This is a very specific one.
They just have a very open writers program and they take a lot of submissions, but they want articles about living around the world in particular to health, and in particular, for older people.
Very specific, but they pay $225 for 900 words and $350 for 1,600-word articles.
They’re paying accordingly for your skill set which is writing.
Kyle: Another one is Funds for writers, they are mainly competition based. The minimum competition pay-out is $200.
But what they’ll do is they’ll get companies and let’s say HSBC want an article about foreign exchange rates, these are the criteria. Funds for writers will post this competition and you write your article and send it in.
If your article wins you win a prize. The minimum pay-out is 200 but I saw a fellowship and you’d be paid $10,000 and you’d have to keep writing for them.
Textbroker is one of the biggest ones out there.
They connect you directly with companies basically and then it’s earning per word depending on your quality level.
The interesting thing about Textbrokers is that as an author on their site, you are rated from one to five stars by the editors on Textbroker.
They review your work and then you are rated.
Depending on your rank you get paid different amounts. If you’ve got two stars it’s 0.7 cents per word. If you’re at three starts it’s 0.95 cents, going all the way to five-star it is 4 cents per word, which at that point can add up quite quickly.
Harms: Then it’s just establishing a brand and for them it’s great because it’s similar to the incentive we discussed in the language learning centres, which is they want you to become one of their go to writers so they know they’ve got this bunch of five-star reliable writers.
Who are going to consistently come to them and get paid well.
When you Google and research this, find out how to become a five-star writer on Text broker, there will be a lot of people sharing that knowledge and wisdom out there as well, and then you can work towards that in a shorter period of time because now you know how to play their game.
What we’re saying is to deeply explore and do your due diligence on every kind of platform that we are talking about and don’t just take Harms and Kyles word for it.
Explore all of these places but ones that appeal to you.
That’s really the thing, it is a bit of a pick and mix. W
hat do you have a natural talent and skill set in and then just pick those items and just develop that income off of that point.
Kyle:
Another freelance writing one is Medium’s partner program. It is a super blog website, so you can write a blog on their platform and as they’re running adverts on their platform you can actually get paid for producing content.
You get paid for how long people spend on your blog articles.
Think of this instead of you having your personal blog on your own personal page.
Instead, you’re writing a blog, but it sits on medium and because medium is advertising revenue from that they reward you for it.
It’s a bit easier than starting your own blog because they give you the platform.
It’s really hard to get the average of how much people make but I got the March 2020 figures, the highest amount earned for a single blog article a single story was $5,100.
I imagine they got a lot of views to make that amount. The highest amount earned by a single author last month was $17,126.
The more interesting thing is the percentage of active writers who are earning over a hundred dollars is 6.9%, which means 93% of people who are writing on the platform are not earning 100 dollars, they are earning less.
That means the vast majority are probably not making anything or they’re making relatively small amounts of cash.
The fact that 7% are earning over a hundred dollars is quite good, if you really dedicate yourself to it hopefully you can be in that 7%, and if you then breakthrough you can make a lot of money apparently.
But it’s something worth looking at if you do like to write if you want to run a blog.
There is a website called Squad help where they run micro-competitions where businesses want to get a name for the business, a name for a project, name for a product or service or whatever it is.
The business will go on to Squad help give descriptions of what my product does, these are the features, the benefits and I need a name.
Freelance writers will type out names they think will be good for this product and all those names are entered into a competition.
The winning name will win between apparently $100 and $300 for winning again, it’s a competition.
If you do not win, you do not make anything but if you are creative, if you’re good at naming things, if you’re good at branding this is a decent one to sign up for because basically you get sent an email with the other current jobs.
If you’re able to quickly look at the description and say we should call it this and you win, great. That’s a nice bit of extra income.
I think this is a nice one to have as a bonus, if you are good at branding. I wouldn’t rely on this to consistently make money.
Fiverr and Upwork are gig marketplaces, they are places where you can either go and buy services, micro-services from people or context to what we’re talking about, you can sell your services.
The range of services on there is absolutely massive.
Harms: Everything from legal, technical, data, website, product description.
Kyle: If you have any of these skills like grant writing, and then suddenly things are drying up a bit at the moment, maybe you can pick up that work somewhere like Fiverr.
Fiverr tends to be a bit cheaper and the gigs a bit simpler than Upwork. Upwork is more expensive and tends to be longer projects like edit my ebook rather than write 300 words for a blog article.
This is less and less the case because Fiverr have now introduced Fiverr pro.
Harms: It used to be to get a logo for £5 that’s where it originated from to get something for $5, £5.
Over time customers and also the service providers i.e. it could be you on Fiverr providing a service over time, the ones that provide the best work, the best quality, the best customer service on that platform.
The prices have naturally hit a premium.
There is no not much difference in terms of how much you can charge now on each platform. But there is a difference in terms of what kind of work is applicable.
Kyle: If you have been on Fiverr for a while you have good reviews then you can move into this pro category.
The Fiverr pro blog writers are charging about $150 for a blog article, which gives you an idea of if you have the reputation on a platform like this you can command a relatively high figure.
That’s going to be a lot more than if you’re doing freelance writing for one of the platforms we talked about.
But with Textbroker is handed to you on a plate, whereas on Fiverr or upwork you need to build up your profile, you need to market yourself.
You own the business, but because you own the business you have the risk as well.
It’s up to you whether that’s something you want to do or maybe you do a combination, maybe you do a bit on Textbroker while you’re setting up your Fiverr and Upwork profiles.
Harms: Just allow your income to do that and then you can say I don’t need to do any more Textbroker work now because I’ve got a consistent amount of writing work coming in from Fiverr.
If it ever dips you know Textbroker is there and what needs to be done there, you may still have a three or four-star profile and you can jump back on there.
But the range of categories are humongous within Fiverr for writing.
Kyle: I would just go have a look at Fiverr and Upwork.
Harms: The category is writing and translation so find in the category section and it will start to bring up lots of areas.
What these platforms do brilliantly is they handle most of the business side for you, so it allows you to do what you’re good at, which is the actual task-base, the process, the work in order to receive the cash.
Kyle: This is also a really good way to test out whether there is actually demand, if you put together a product offering and you start selling really well on Fiverr fantastic, then you know there’s a customer base for what it is you provide and you can go and set up your website.
Set up your own payment processor and do it yourself to make more money.
But you can start on Fiverr to make sure there’s actually a demand for it and let Fiverr deal with all the things like taking payment, marketing, sending notification emails, all of that stuff let them do for now and then do it yourself later.
Harms: We’ve spoken about how to make money by leveraging speaking English online.
Number one is teaching, number two is tutoring, number three is voice work, number four is audio transcription, number five is entrance essays, proofreading, copy edit. Number six is sell your notes from previous years or you’re creating notes to sell in the future.
Finally, freelance writing.
Within those categories is a range of options in terms of how much you’re going to get paid, skill set required, verification required, setup required.
There is a lot of potential out there online to earn a lot, get yourself in that 7% which Kyle mentions in regards to the medium partner programme, that’s probably doable.
But go explore what’s the best way to get within that 7%.
Learn how to make money online using your existing Professional skills
Harms: Right now we are in self isolation; we’ve pivoted; we’ve been forced to change very quickly.
Industries are closing, we can no longer physically go to work for a period of time.
So we may not have the time, skill set or even desire to go ahead and build a business, because an online business is a business fundamentally.
That’s what we were talking about in regards to what am I taking away from this guide.
Kyle: The whole point of this guide is to give people the ability to generate income right now.
Some of these methods you could be generating money within the same day, quite easily, whereas our normal focus with building businesses online and the work we do with clients, and for our own stuff as well is more about building up an actual business.
That takes months to do.
What we’ve been doing is looking at fast ways to generate cash, to generate income which can help with the current situation in lockdown.
But can also help you if you want to build a business moving forward online.
It is a good way to raise capital just to have some extra cash coming in the door.
We started with stuff that requires no particular skills and with low reward, still works and still worth adding a few of those methods into your portfolio.
We’re moving into professional skills, things that you have got qualifications, diplomas, or you’re just very good at doing and how to monetise those skills and generate an extra income.
Harms: Now we are getting furthering into the guide we are probably in the top tier.
We are looking at professional skills.
Harms: Let’s dive into point number one, which is how do we actually identify the skills in terms of do we have the skills in order to generate this income from the suggestions you are going to give us.
Kyle: This is a great question and we need to frame this before we start talking about skill-based work.
The easiest way to think about what professional skills you have is to look at what your day job is or what your day job was.
What have you been doing for the last few years?
What professional skills have you built up over time?
I’m not specifically talking about the area. For example, Harms if we can use you, you worked in engineering, but a lot of your day-to-day work was project management.
Harms: Yes the job was an engineer, but the skills required to do that job actually if I list them out are quite lengthy.
That would also be the same for anybody else in that profession or similar kind of professional role.
Kyle: Let’s use the skill of project management, for example.
Yes, you did it in the railway industry, but you could easily go and do project management in a different industry.
We’re more interested in the skill rather than the industry in which you act.
You might be thinking I’m a mechanical engineer, or I’m a bookkeeper, but more than that you are going to have additional skills which can be monetised in different industries.
Your diplomas and your degrees, etcetera that’s a really good starting point, but we need to be a bit wider and think if we are going to open up how you think about your skill.
Harms: Take the job and title and say what are the actual skills and a good way to do this if you’re already in a career or a specific job or have done in your journey so far is what skills do they require as part of the job description.
Just pull up the job description and say here is the list of skills and actually eight out 10 of those skills I enjoy, I’m very good and I demonstrate it on a regular basis.
That is my list of a skill set and that’s one way to do it.
Kyle: You can push people and then you start to find out they do have skills, it’s just when we are so used to something when it’s part of everyday existence, when everyone around us is doing it we assume it’s not a skill.
Something like speaking English we assume is not a skill.
However, if you’re looking for gigs or jobs in china suddenly being able to speak fluent English is a massive skill.
Harms: Because there are 300 million people in terms of market size that require that skill or demand the fact that I need to learn and I need somebody to teach me how to speak English.
Kyle: What you consider not a skill is actually a very valuable economic skill if you’re talking about being a teacher or a conversation partner or even doing language consultation work, helping people fix signs, correcting, proofreading their company brochures etcetera.
Suddenly what you consider not a skill is in the right context.
What is really helpful is not necessarily just thinking about what your skills are yourself, because we’re really bad at identifying because we take them for granted.
Instead, think about what it is that people come to you for, are you the go to for organising parties for example.
That’s a skill and people are coming to you because you’re great at organising parties. That means you have skills to do with logistics, bringing people together, event planning, etcetera.
Ask people what am I good at and it’s a weird question to ask people but it’s going to be a very helpful process.
Or if you’re not comfortable asking that, think about what people come to you for, what they ask for your help with.
That’s going to be where your skills lay, because other people identify that in you and they’re coming to you for your help.
Harms: Number one is identify your skills once we have done that, where can we now apply this?
Kyle: Now you’ve got your list of skills we need to find places where you can sell those skills. The first obvious ones are, we’re going to call them marketplaces, there’s a few different types.
We’ve mentioned Fiverr and Upwork.
These are two different marketplaces for online gigs or freelance work.
A gig tends to be much shorter. It will be a logo design and you pay £50 to get a logo designed. That’s all one and done piece of work whereas freelance work might be a bit more consistent.
I have previously hired freelance blog writers and I’d pay them £50 a week to generate two or three blog articles a week.
You can find both of these jobs on all of these marketplaces but we need to be aware there is the difference between gigs which are one-off and to freelance work which are more like a part-time job online.
Harms: It’s very fluid, it’s very flexible.
Once we complete that transaction the transaction stops if the person has been great you may go back to them in the future.
Kyle: Until you go on these sites you don’t really realise that people monetise anything.
It doesn’t really matter how obscure your skill is, there will be ways to monetise it
Harms: What is interesting is there’s enough assumed demand for Fiverr as an example to create a category for that section.
Otherwise they would not go ahead and create a category from that, so just knowing there’s a category there, there must be people paying for this product or service that category.
Kyle: The best thing to do is go on fiverr and have a look around and you’ll realise you can literally do anything.
Whatever your professional skill is, chances are there’s going to be a marketplace for that and you’ll be able to see other people already making money from this.
There are a whole bunch of these marketplaces we are using Fiverr because it’s one the most well-known, it’s been around a long time.
It used to be extremely cheap so the name fiverr was because all the gigs started at five dollars, which is not really the case anymore.
Which is good for you if you are selling your service. There’s also Upwork. If you’ve heard of O desk or E-lance these were two big freelance platforms five years ago.
They both merged into Upwork so they no longer exist, but the two biggest platforms came together and they made Upwork.
Upwork is a gigantic market for freelancers; it tends to be more long-term stuff than fiverr gigs.
It will be like the blog writer that I hired for a year and a half, I found him on Upwork. The prices tend to be higher and again I suggest you go there and see what different categories are and see if your skills fit in there.
Again, there are 100 different sites like this.
Once you’ve built a profile, description and you’ve worked out your product offering, you could actually just post it on to all of these sites.
We are going to be talking about Fiverr but be aware there are a whole bunch of other ones.
Harms: Setting up account basics.
Let’s talk about setting up the account.
Kyle: The main thing you need to do when you are coming to this is you need to think as a buyer, as somebody who would be coming to you and to you as a professional.
Why would somebody come to you and buy your services?
You need to put their hat on for the moment, so when you are exploring fiverr explore it as if you were somebody who wants to purchase a service.
If you’re thinking of it just from your point of view, you’re not going to get very far.
You need to think of it from the demand point of view rather than the supply point of view.
One of the biggest things you need to nail is your category and your subcategory which means you need to know these categories inside-out.
You need to know which one are active, which ones have lots of sales going on.
You can see all the categories, shortlist three or four where your services could sit and then explore them in a bit more detail.
In terms of what you’re actually looking for you’re looking for successful competitors and I know this sounds counterintuitive.
A lot of people will see somebody with 1,000 five-star reviews and think he’s going to get all the business.
Instead of seeing it that way we see it as this guy has done 1,000 gigs at let’s say even if he was doing it at five dollars, that’s $5,000 worth of work.
He probably raises his prices over time, so maybe his average is $50 now, which means he made 50 grand.
What that means is there is demand, and demand is the most important thing here.
You can enter a market which has no competitors but if nobody wants what it is you’re selling you’re not going to make money.
On Fiverr, Upwork and all these other sites look for a category and subcategory that does have a volume, it has reviews, lots of purchases being made and then we’re going to be finding your niche within that.
Remember the guy who’s got 1,000 reviews and five stars, he has probably got his prices up a bit higher now as well.
So competition is good.
The opportunity for you entering is you know there’s a benchmark for a premium, so you know what you can charge top end at the moment from a competitors viewpoint, you may say to get customers I can set my price there.
The buyer is coming from a different perspective, it’s putting yourselves in the shoes of what kind of buyer do you want to attract?
What kind of buyer do you want to provide a service for?
The main thing with category is you need one that has lots of traffic, lots of gigs and reviews.
It needs to be busy and we can’t get much more data from Fiverr or Upwork about best categories unfortunately.
But use your common sense plus the fact that there is active business going on in there to choose an active category and you want active.
You’re not looking for something you can dominate, you’re looking for something that has enough volume for you to start building.
Then we’re going to niche down once we enter that category.
Yes, we can come in at a lower price point and that’s a simple way.
When you’re starting out that’s absolutely fine, but we don’t want you to de-value your services so you need to find another way to define your niche.
Whether it’s providing a specific service, whether it’s your background.
If you are reading this in the UK that actually does give you a leg up on a lot of services in Fiverr, there’s a little flag next to your name in your profile.
A lot of the time native speakers will be hired above people from other countries.
If it’s a language-based gig you’re doing that might actually help you.
If I was selling my services, proofreading legal documents, for example, then the fact that you are from the UK or US could be used as a selling point and you see that a lot on Fiverr.
It is a tricky topic to talk about, but the fact that Fiverr does put a flag next to your name and you have to verify your nationality, it does lead into the sale.
That’s one way to niche, but also really narrowing down what your particular product offering is.
Think about what your skills are, of course, and if you do sell services in the real world, maybe just try putting them directly onto Fiverr.
Harms: If you want this as an additional supplement income and you’ve already got a day job, the hours may be reduced right now so you’re able to get work done from nine 10, 11, 12 and one o’clock you’re free.
The rest of the day rather than dive into lots of different kinds of methods, the best thing to do is to say I can do this task, which is systemised and it’s the same thing for the next two or three hours.
That is a lot more sensible in terms of managing your own time and energy because you’re already handling the multitask stuff in the morning with your actual kind of work that pays you.
If you’re that kind of person who needs an additional income then think about just saying, I like these things. I’m very good at them and I can charge. There’s a marketplace for it. Just do one or two things just very, very much, as niche down as possible.
Kyle: Let’s say you do wedding cards, gift cards and birthday cards and you’re offering these three different services, but for each one you have a slightly different setup.
You have different types of paper, different types of pens and if you’re switching between those three different types of products it takes you time, mentally and in terms of physically setting up. To move from task to task.
Whereas if you are just doing wedding cards that’s it, you can do a lot more to a higher standard of quality in a short amount of time, so try to niche down if you can.
Harms: You could be a HR consultant specifically for cases where staff have been accused of theft as an example. So you become a master of that.
If somebody throws a case at you, you can quite easily consult. You pull the facts and say okay, these are the outcomes and that’s a nice simple way to generate three, $400 as part of that gig.
That’s a professional example for a niche.
Kyle: One thing you need to make sure you do is Fiverr has the ability to have multiple packages and most people set the first package as five dollars, that’s how they get people in.
But the real value, the actual sale happens in packages two and three. It tends to be basic, basic plus and premium. Basic might be five dollars or $10, $50 is premium. But you make the basic one almost too basic so people will be pushed up towards the plus.
The figure I found from last year is that by having three packages it boosts your sales by 64%. Try to have tiered packages.
Harms: The other thing to consider is once you’ve got everything so far setup is how can I generate reviews?
Because most people would purchase based on previous work, or reviews based on your previous work.
A nice way to do that is very much start off in a way that you have a low cost product and I would even go as far as, this is my personal opinion is say that you are a new person on Fiverr, and you offer special promotional period or you have a pricing platform which is purely there in order to provide a great service.
But also allow you to start and collect reviews so be very transparent with it.
The alternative is to do it in a way that you have a low price in order to collect reviews and then you increase your price once you’ve banked a handful of reviews.
Kyle: I think be about open about it, say I have 10 years’ experience in accountancy I’ve just started to sell my services online and for this starting off period that price I’m charging 25% of what I will be charging further down the line, so use this opportunity to get somebody who is a seasoned veteran in the industry at a low price.
Harms: I think the transparency is great there and reviews are going to be essential.
That’s a nice tip in order to go ahead and collect reviews for your Fiverr profile or any of those platforms.
What’s another way to grab people’s attention?
Kyle: This is quite a big one, simple one, but lots of people don’t do it. Shoot a video of yourself talking to the camera so people can see you are a person, talk on camera about services and yourself.
A lot of gigs on Fiverr you think you’re talking to a single person in whatever country but it’s not actually a single person, it’s a front for a larger company.
Which will have multiple workers working for them and a lot of the buyers on Fiverr know this, so by having a personal video of you saying this is me, this is what I do, these are the services I offer.
It makes it a lot more personal, so you aren’t just a Fiverr farm like a lot of these other profiles.
It just makes you more of a person and people ultimately do business with other people.
Very few people do this so it’s an easy way to stand out.
Harms: I think that’s a tip in general.
If you’ve got a website, a landing page have a video like this. It doesn’t have to be amazing production just a bit of lighting and a camera and then you’re good to go to just give that personal effect.
Fiverr farming is a business in itself
Kyle: I could set up a Fiverr profile saying it’s just me and I do logo designs for example, but when you send me an order I immediately turn around and send the order off to somebody else.
I charge you $100 let’s say then I turn around to the designers who work for me or just another Fiverr gig and I pay them $20 and I pocket the difference.
This is a business a lot of people do.
It also means when you do see somebody with thousands and thousands of thousands of reviews you have to ask did they do all this work themselves?
Am I actually paying this person for their work?
A lot of the time you will be, but if they have 20,000 reviews for example, in a year, you have to ask that’s not probably one person designing the logo.
This is why having a video on your site is very useful because you are showing you are a person and that it will be you doing the job.
Because when it is farmed out to other people it means the equality will differ.
You don’t know if you’re going to be getting the same service that the other people who gave five-star reviews did.
Harms: That’s one way to arbitrage in terms of setting up a business, but you’ve also got another bonus here in the notes.
Kyle: I want to keep this more about what people at home can do, but yes, there are ways to build businesses on Fiverr by doing arbitrage.
One thing, it’s more useful on the individual level, so for you at home selling a service is to look at different markets and see what’s being offered on one market, but not another.
That might help you key in on an opportunity.
So you go onto Upwork for example, and you see there are a lot of people purchasing HR consultation reports.
You go back to Fiverr and you find there’s nobody selling HR consultation reports that gives you an idea of okay, well, something selling on this marketplace will it work on this marketplace?
Harms: It is almost like riding the trend and which hasn’t quite hit yet for Fiverr in that example.
Upwork has an established category within your niche, but Fiverr or other companies they might not have established those categories yet.
There are not enough customers to serve that or there are not enough people providing the service, which means they also can’t produce the category.
In that case, setting up on the alternative platforms and offering that service because you know a website or marketplace are very similar, is generating that kind of product, service, and traffic.
Kyle: That is a side hacks you could try but it needs to align with your skills.
Just because you find a goldmine on Fiverr which doesn’t exist on Upwork doesn’t mean you can do it if you don’t have skills.
Harms: Fiverr and Upwork are great right now as short-term.
Harms: Now what if there’s a longer-term project?
Kyle: We have looked at gigs and small freelance work.
What we’re looking at now is something called remote work.
Remote work is much closer to having a part-time or even a full-time job just based on your laptop working from home, these are much longer.
These tend to be on contract basis.
The way you get these jobs is by applying like with a real job.
These are ways again that if you are at home, if you are furloughed, if you have extra hours in your day there are ways for you to take on a part-time or even a full-time job from the comfort of your own home.
There’s a lot of them on the google sheet list.
Two I want to highlight are non-profit remote which is specific for non-profits and power to fly, which is a female focused females. Females in tech. There are niches within this remote work landscape, so whatever you’re looking for, you will be able to find something specific.
A lot of these are the ones I’ve added to the list.
I’ve tried to keep them as general sites, but a lot of them will be coding. Which makes sense because it’s something that can be done from anywhere.
The ones I want to highlight are accounting, bookkeeping, customer service, data entry, billing. That’s chasing people up for bill’s invoices.
Research positions and translation, there’s a lot of them. Bookkeeping in particular, for some reason there are dedicated sites just for this, so I think there’s a big demand for bookkeepers skills.
Harms: If you know that 90% of this kind, if the large percentage of these sites are looking for coders, then briefly an opportunity just spark in your head and say, okay, I don’t necessarily need income immediately, I may use this time to learn how to do that skill.
Alternatively, accounting, bookkeeping, customer service, data entry, billing research translation.
These also may be items where you may say, actually I have the skill set the professional skills to learn these quite quickly.
If I can learn these items quite quickly I can start applying for the job postings and actually make a career pivot and that’s totally fine as well.
Look for the silver linings, the hidden opportunities.
Harms: Number four is professional teaching, but this is not the same as what we discussed yesterday, this is very much that you have a professional skill set.
We’re not teaching the language of English we are teaching or consulting around a professional skill set. It is still teaching, but it is using the professional skills in order to teach.
What kind of websites out there that can help facilitate this?
Kyle: Again depends on your skill set and the best thing you can do is google your skill set, plus coaching or mentoring or teaching and you will come up with things specific to your area.
In the UK for life coaches and for mentors there’s a website called Guru circus which is pretty good and then globally, or US, mainly there is Life coach hub which is similar.
That’s if you want to mentor that could be business mentoring, it could be personal mentoring and coaching.
Harms: The business they’ve created is to be the middle person between the customer and the person who is a professional.
So you the professional don’t have to deal with the marketing, the sales, scheduling the fact that you have to persuade this client to come in your portal to get coached by this portal’s coaches.
Think of it as a portal, a facilitator, a middle person between you and the customer.
They do the business for you so you can do the job of delivering value.
Which is in this case, coaching and mentoring.
Now what is a smaller version for that?
Kyle: Number four is coaching and mentoring generally, you would contract for somebody and talk to them every month.
Now we’re talking about micro-consultation, which is literally talking to a business or answering questions for business as a one-off, like a gig.
You can do this stuff on Fiverr but I also found some interesting sites.
One is Clarity FM they collect business experts and link them up with start-ups and businesses who need expert advice.
If you are an expert on mergers and acquisitions, or you’re an expert on HR, for example and this business needs to have a quick call and sort out some issues, they can call you for 30 minutes using clarity FM. You get paid for a 30-minute call, a 30-minute call averages around $50, apparently.
The main benefit is you are on the platform.
The platform will deal with all the marketing for you and your listing is there, the platform is bringing new businesses to its website, they will see your profile and then book a call with you.
There are also some websites called just answer and any question, they’re a bit like surveys we’ve spoken about.
They will pay more; they will be asking questions about specific whether it’s accountancy questions or bookkeeping.
Harms: They’re assuming that you’ve got a qualification, experience, so that when you answer the question, they’re getting it from an expert who is a proven expert.
Kyle: Another one is Haro, help a reporter out. This is not paid, but this is a way to build up your brand online.
They send an email every single day which will have journalists who are looking to interview people, they’re looking to get full interviews, they are looking for people who have had certain experiences and will talk about those experiences.
You go on and you pick what niches you are qualified to talk about there’s a huge amount of different topics, then each day you will receive this email with all of the journalists from around the world looking to speak to experts in your space.
Not paid, but it’s free PR and it’s worth doing for the brand building.
The free version of Haro you get to sign up for one keyword and I think the paid version first level gets three.
Harms: Point number six is all about starting to create something leveraging the time you have available right now, rather than going out and saying, if you don’t need the cash, then anything we’ve spoken about you don’t have to do it.
It is now in your awareness.
But what can you do with the time now available?
This is where we can focus on starting to create something.
Kyle: We’ve been focusing on things that can generate income right now for you.
What we’re talking about now with creating something is creating an asset which will be able to pay you pretty much indefinitely from this point on.
At the moment a lot of us are at home, we have more times than we’ve had before.
Whether it’s because you’re not commuting, because you’re working less hours per day, whatever it is we tend to have more time.
We can be using this time to create something from our skills.
We have professional knowledge, professional skills we can start to turn that into an asset, which moving forward can pay us every single day.
So we’re not working hour to hour.
Harms: What do we mean by asset?
Kyle: The simplest is like an e-book or traditionally it would be a book.
That’s not really the route you’d take any more, I’m talking about starting a podcast, writing an ebook. It could be creating a course to capture all your knowledge and start to teach people.
Harms: We have done all of these, but the course was quite cool because it was about sharing our knowledge on an online business basis, where we put together a 10-hour course on how to build an online business from the ground up.
Principles first understanding the business side of things first, and then working through the BATON philosophy.
This model we have taught and it is out there, we’ve got it on Udemy, YouTube.
We have 12,000 people enrolled in that program and over 200 people have reviewed it and it has 4.2 start reviews.
That’s an example of putting an asset out there online.
The idea is that the asset is now in place, so how do we now leverage that?
How do Kyle and I leverage that?
Well actually if we’ve got 12,000 people who have enrolled onto our course, 200+ people took the time to review it that’s what we’re talking about.
Creating an authority and a level of expertise out there and that’s an asset as an example.
Kyle: That’s our particular strategy with that course but now that you have time, you could be producing podcasts, e-books, courses, whatever it is putting your knowledge out into the world.
With yes, the idea of building up an audience building up the tribe, but also to generate cash.
This is the idea of an asset, something that you create once and then using online marketing, using digital marketing you can put it up and sell it over time.
Again, this could be an e-book, it could be a course, it could be resources you put together.
You can be using this time you have now to start thinking about this, start brainstorming what could I make and put out into the world that people would buy?
Use your time now to start generating cash using the methods we’ve been talking about, but you can also start to think ahead of what could I create that can generate that kind of passive or automatic income over time.
Harms: That’s where we want to leave it with you which is if the income side of things is okay for you and you are thinking, I don’t need to go explore some more income, now is a great time to simply create something.
Podcast, e-book, a short course just explore it for now.
That’s a nice place to spend your time if it’s not just purely income generating.
We’ve spoken about how to make money online leveraging your professional skills.
Learn how to make money online using your existing Creative skills
Harms: We’re focusing on creative areas in order to make money online.
If you’re thinking in context of what?
Well we have been focusing on tools and techniques and ways that you can generate an income online, especially whilst we’re in lockdown.
We’re leveraging the research that Kyle has done on a list of over exactly 200 and ways of making money online.
The focus has been extracting this list but making it actionable for you in different categories.
Those categories have been number one, is how do we start to make money with no skill required whatsoever?
Low thought energy applied that was the focus early on.
Then we focused on how we leverage our language skills, so how do we leverage the fact that we can speak English and leverage everything from teaching online, tutoring online. Then we focused on how to leverage our professional skills.
If you’ve got a qualification such as an ACCA charter ship in accountancy?
What if you are an expert in the HR department?
All of these amazing professional skills that people bring to the table can actually generate revenue from that online and we showed you a whole bunch of ways in order to do that.
There’s more on the list but we highlighted some categories for you to get started.
Now we are talking about the creative method.
How do we leverage our creative skills that we have art, music, writing, plus more in order to generate revenue online?
Kyle: We are calling it creative but there’s a lot of overlap nowadays for a lot of people, creative work is their profession.
What we’re talking about will still have elements of the professional, about finding gigs, about potentially finding jobs in the creative industry.
It is also more open to people who have a hobby or they do a craft and they’re looking to monetise that down the line.
Harms: The list is endless and this week we’ve had the logo created for the BBO show, so that is somebody out there in the world who has created something using their creative skills and it’s in their field of pixel art.
This is a pixel artist.
That person for example, has been at home leveraging his skill set, which is a pixel artist very niche and made some cash.
We paid between £50 and £70 to create a logo for us. That’s an example of somebody else leveraging the online world to make money from their creative skill.
What other areas would you say fall into this category?
Kyle: When people think of creativity they’re thinking, art and design.
Yes, we are going to cover those, but we’re also talking about music, craft, photography, stock photography is amazing.
Even if you are not a photographer we will be going through a lot of different things depending on what your particular creative skill is though it’s hard for us to cover absolutely every facet of monetising creativity.
We will be talking at the end of each section about how you would find the particular services and the particular websites for your particular niche.
We talked previously about freelance writing, which is mainly writing for businesses who need content, they need blog content, they need editorial content.
There’s less of a market for writing poetry for example for creative writing, but there still are some on Fiverr.
We will cover those things
Harms: But essentially this is very much a case of right now we’re not focused on building an entire business off your creative skill set.
This is actually what can I do immediately leveraging some tools and techniques off the big list of income generation ways to actually generate cash.
Kyle: Fiverr, Upwork, People per hour, Flexjobs, Solidgigs
There are marketplaces out there where you can go and you can pick up gigs so they tend to be short-term gigs, like logo design.
That’s something where we will work with this guy for a couple of weeks and we pay him £50 or whatever, and he does four hours of work.
There are lots of websites on there which are basically marketplaces where you can either look for jobs that you know you can fulfil or you can post a profile up there with the skills you bring to the table and the services you provide.
Most of these will be digitally produced and delivered, so it won’t necessarily be things like doing an oil painting of this landscape photo
Harms: Or creating a wedding card. It is going to be digital.
Kyle: I recommend you just go to Fiverr and have a look at the different categories because it’s massive. Any service you provide will be in here.
Make sure you have a good representation of your portfolio on Fiverr, if you are doing graphics, graphic design, or illustration.
Obviously, you can put them in your portfolio and that’s going to be really important.
Fiverr, Upwork and Freelancer are fantastic because they have everything.
If I’m a business owner and I need to hire creatives to help with my brand it’s great, I can get anything I want from there. From your side, though, as a creative, maybe you want to be on a website that isn’t everything.
It’s just for designers to find clients for example, or just for film and post production editors.
There are industry specific sites which might be better for your needs. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t post on general sites like Fiverr as well as your creative industry specific sites.
These sites will be a mix of job boards so businesses are looking for certain skills and they want to hire you, as well as the ability for you to post your profile, post your portfolio and pick up work that way.
Harms: Here we are saying it’s a mix of things but here we are saying they’re looking for somebody who can do this and then you apply for that particular job, and you may be bidding and competing with a few other people.
So that’s the difference Dribble, 99 designs, and that’s very good for design work.
What about music and films?
Kyle: There’s a bunch in music, sound better is probably the biggest one.
It got purchased by Spotify so it’s to help artists and engineers get work which can then help the music industry.
It tends to be session work, so if you are a session musician you can pick up gigs there. They also have jobs for engineers and post production as well.
Film and editing it would be Mandy.com, creative cow and production hub. Super old-fashioned websites Mandy.com and creative cow.
Harms: That’s if you want to apply for a job posting.
What’s another place that a creative person can go seek out work or have work come to them?
Kyle: There are competition websites where these are particularly good if you are just moving into the space.
If you are a freelancer and you want to start building up your portfolio. These are a good way to kind of practice with real clients and hopefully get paid but you’re not always going to get paid.
The basic of these types of sites is a client, business for example, will go onto the website and say I want a logo, these are my requirements.
Then lots of people will design a very basic version of that logo and the client will choose which designer they want to work with.
And then from there you will go on and do some revisions for them, so you are up against all the other designers, so it’s a competition in that sense.
There is a chance you just won’t get paid.
Harms: If you’re starting a new business or for example you’re a coach or a graphic designer and one of the great tips to get started is just go out onto social media.
Or to your friends, network and say, look, I’m giving away five free services, or five free logos, five free CV designs.
Whatever the creative art is here and that becomes your portfolio and potentially also allows you to gain reviews off the back of that as well.
That’s the trade-off there.
I’ll give you a free design for a review but also, can I keep this and present this as part of my portfolio.
This is a nice modern online way to do that and keep you busy because you may not have explored this before and you may say that cash is okay, but this is a nice way for me to put my creative work out there knowing somebody is going to be critiquing it.
Looking at it and potentially could be using it for their business or product.
Kyle: And if you win you do get paid so 99 designs for example, they have different competition levels and depending on which level the client pays for more designers will design a logo or illustration or whatever it is, there’s a huge category range.
Let’s say I buy the bronze package. I’m a client. I want a logo and I buy bronze that costs me $300.
Harms: X amount of people allowed to do work for that particular project.
Kyle: And then the person I choose will get $200.
99 designs for example they take about 30% it varies but if you do get chosen you do take home about 70% of what the client has paid, so it’s pretty good if you do win.
But the best way to approach it is yes, if I win, fantastic, that’s great. If I don’t then I’m building my portfolio.
I think that’s the only way to go into this without getting frustrated because if you keep applying to competitions and keep not being chosen, I imagine, it’s very disheartening.
So instead use it as a learning process and as an ability to build up your portfolio.
Harms: That’s contest sites.
One is websites like Fiverr where you can post your work.
Harms: Number two is industry specific, so there are websites like Fiverr but they’ll post job boards, but they are very much industry specific, so if you’re in the industry you may be aware of it.
If you are now transitioning out of a career this may be a great place to start to get some cash and get some work in.
Number three are contest sites, so I imagine our suggestion would be just do all three. There’s no reason not to do all three because you never know when that cash is going to come in for each of those areas.
Kyle: What we are going to talk about now are websites and services where you can produce something and that is then sold from now on, so you create a design, you create website templates, whatever it is, that asset is then sold from that point onwards.
This is a different business model.
Previously we were working for time we put in our time, effort, and skills we get payment.
Now these next ones are going to be we create something and whatever we create we don’t know if we’re going to make any money from it, but we put it on these websites on these services.
If people buy it. We then take-home cash from it.
Harms: It is like making passive income off a digital asset.
You do the work once and you continuously get paid.
There’s going to be a lot of variables in terms of it’s not the same as for example a property where a tenant pays you every month or as per agreement, it may be more frequent than that. It may be in short spurts and spells; it could be paid once a month on the exact date.
It is completely variable based on the customer and based on how the platform actually positions where you sit, and there’s different ways that they will incentivise you, different ways that they will position your piece of work on there.
It’s great especially as well if you already have a bank of work that may be sitting there, that you may have thought this isn’t going to make any money or I have to physically go out myself and sell it.
I have to be the sales and marketing machine to sell my work.
If you’ve got a big portfolio of work already these areas we’re going to explore may be somewhere where you say, I’ve got all this work if I upload it, potentially I can get paid passively off the back of that.
Kyle: It is a different model from getting paid for your time.
Harms: So the first one we’ve got is art and design.
Kyle: There are quite a few for design.
I’ve pulled this one out because it also includes art, but there is a barrier between the two, but society six which is the name of this website is really cool because you can actually upload your fine art prints. Your fine art work that you’ve done and they have a market for that.
The basic idea with this website, and with a lot of websites we’re going to be talking about is you create something you upload a digital version.
Whether that’s going to be a PDF or maybe a photoshop file, whatever it is you upload that to their service, and then they will sell that to their clients.
In the case of society six they will take your designs and they will print them on to various items. They also do it with prints which go on walls, cushions. They print onto furniture which I found amazing.
They will take your designs, your artwork and they can put on too many, many, many different formats. They deal with the printing they deal with shipping.
All you need to do is upload your files and if customers come to the website like that stuff, they will go ahead and purchase it.
Society six deals with everything else and gives you a cut.
For them it’s relatively low.
They give you 10% of the sale. However, if it’s a table that costs a couple hundred dollars with your design printed on it then you take home a decent chunk of cash.
That’s just one that I wanted to highlight because it gives us an introduction to how this process works, you upload your artwork in a high-quality digital format and they will find different things to put it on and then market it to the public.
Instead of printing onto physical objects they sell through your designs, whatever you’ve created.
I’ve used the creative market in particular to download templates for PowerPoint.
When we have done courses in the past. We wanted it to look flash so we spent a bit of money getting these pre-built templates.
Harms: Potentially you could be designing for a business like ours who needs templates or presentations.
Kyle: It might be a website template; it might be a template for a brochure that they also sell fonts, logos but the creative market allows you to upload your design files, your photoshop files, whatever it is directly onto their site.
When somebody makes a purchase, you get 30% of whatever that purchase is.
I wanted to highlight these two as they are slightly different.
Society six takes your digital file and then they stick it onto physical objects and send the physical objects out, whether it’s a phone case or a chest of drawers.
Creative market sells your digital files so if you’ve created a PDF template they will sell it to somebody and then give you 30%.
Harms: If you’ve got digital products or templates, or you’ve got cracking PowerPoint presentations or keynote presentations as a structure, then think about somewhere like this about uploading it.
You may have all of this already sitting on a hard drive and you just haven’t leveraged it, you didn’t realise that you could make some cash from it.
The next place we want to cover is music.
You may be at home for two, three, four weeks, that’s another few weeks to now explore your music profession and potentially make some cash from it.
Kyle: Previously we looked at sound better, which is gigs and you’d be hired to produce a piece of music or to play an instrument for a certain gig.
What we’re talking about now is you produce content and then you upload it to a website and people will purchase it to use in their TV, film and I imagine a lot of it will be in ads and commercials.
People can purchase your music, a licence to it for using their own creative work. Very similar to if you’re on the creative market, but we are uploading audio files instead of
PDFs.
Harms: Again, niche is probably a good idea here.
If there is somebody who has got a particular sound in mind if your search term is relatable to that, they can quickly pick that up and find it easily amongst all of the other items that may be on there.
Essentially, what we’re saying is they just upload it and how does somebody get paid here?
Kyle: It is a license fee and then they’re given a royalty based on that licence. It’s probably 70%, so the 70, 30 split tends to be standard.
If you do want to find out how much you get paid a lot of the time, you can just type in the name of the company and then literally how much pay or what percentage
Harms: Put that into Google and you’ll get an answer.
Kyle: All of these websites will have that information on it.
So if they’re asking you to sign up as a contributor as an artist, they will tell you what the terms are before you go on it.
The concept here is that the music you upload and then you get paid, whether it’s a licence fee, whether it’s via royalty, if it’s a one-off.
Whether they pay you every time it’s used will depend on their specific service, but the key here is if you’ve got again, a music bank or thinking it’s a great time for me to produce music per their spec and you have that skill set, then by all means it’s another avenue for you to explore.
Now we’re talking about photography.
Kyle: This is cool even if you are not a professional photographer or especially if you’re not a professional photographer, you can get paid.
Basically, there are stock photo services in the world. Stock photos are just photos held in stock to be used by businesses, websites, etcetera.
We use them a lot when we’re designing websites because we need images and we’re not going to go out and say I need a picture of London like a red telephone box. I’m not going to go out and find a red telephone box and take photos.
I’m going to look and see what’s available online. If I have to spend a few dollars to get that fine, it’s made my life as a website designer a lot easier.
This will be the same for businesses every time you see a business brochure from a great big bank or something, they’re probably not going out and taking all the photos.
They would use a stock photo.
There are some big names here.
There is Shutterstock, Getty, who have historically been a massive photography bank.
Harms: Every celebrity for example, a picture you see online has a Getty logo in the corner.
Kyle: All of this is relevant to video as well.
So stock photos and stock video.
I’m going to talk about Shutterstock in particular because it’s one of the largest. The basic process is you apply. You send them 10 photos. They’re not looking for artistic beauty. They’re not looking for perfect composition.
They just want to see that you competently can handle a camera that it’s not massively overexposed or blurry or whatever, they’re filtering out the complete crap.
The whole point of stock photos is if I’m creating a website I don’t necessarily want something that’s massively creative and artsy because the more subjectivity and the more artistic interpretations being put into that image itself, the less useful it is for me to stick on the header of the website.
Harms: You want something relatively generic
Kyle: Which is why I am saying you do not need to be a high-end artistic photographer to send stock photos into the services.
A lot of the time the things we do well you’d look at the photo and think it’s rubbish, but for whatever reason it has a business use, it has a market.
That’s where the money is not necessarily a beautiful image.
Shutterstock in particular have different ways for clients, for their customers to access the photos. They try to push people into a subscription so you pay let’s say $30 a month, and you get access to hundred photos per month.
You can also buy photos on demand.
They’re the two main models.
If your photo is chosen as part of the subscription you get a relatively small amount about $0.25 that goes up the more you sell, I think it goes up to about 40 or $0.50 once you’re at a higher level.
If somebody picks your photo directly you get about a dollar 40, a dollar 50 one off.
The trick here is to have a lot of photos, a lot of photos that get chosen, the popular photos get more popular.
Harms: We are not going to be hanging this in a gallery, so don’t think about it like from that artistic perspective, we’re thinking about uploading photographs that are practical, usable, and can appear in a marketing document.
Kyle: Shutterstock is apparently the one that pays the best and some of the sites have exclusivity, so normally we would just upload to everything.
Check the terms and conditions. Upload to as many as you can and upload in volume.
There’s nothing really stopping you from just uploading all of your holiday snaps of Italian Streets or whatever it is.
The main work is tagging and adding descriptions and meta data which does take time, so maybe you don’t want to do 10,000.
If you are taking photos of people, make sure you get a release from them otherwise you cannot sell the photo.
Harms: The best thing to do is go check out Shutterstock to see what we mean by generic and simple, usable, and practical versus artistic.
But also the final finish of these photos is also great.
Kyle: Also drone footage sells really well, or at least it did about six months ago. Probably still does because it is relatively uncommon.
Harms: Photography is another method and that’s great as it’s accessible to not only everybody with amazing photography skills, but somebody who’s maybe a hobbyist and never really understood how to make some cash from it.
This may be a great place to start.
Harms: The next one looks cool which is T-shirts and merchandise.
Kyle: It is similar to things like society six where you send in a design and it’s printed on different things, which are then shipped to people around the world.
T-shirts, hoody’s, phone cases, etcetera most of these companies we’re going to be talking about now started with T-shirt printing, but then expanded and printed on most accessories.
There’s a red bubble, there is tee-spring, there’s Tee-Mill and thread less, which are all similar. Red bubble is the most expansive, they will print anything on anything.
Unlike society six where it’s going to be really beautiful designs.
Here there’s going to be a lot of film and TV inspired, lots of pop culture.
It tends to be more poppy graphic design rather than art per se, so different markets go and have a look and see what’s there.
A lot of Japanese inspired anime and manga stuff.
The reason I wanted to talk about these ones in particular, rather than just lump them in with society six is a couple years ago on-demand T-shirt printing was the centre of basically a get rich quick scheme.
And yes, you can absolutely make money on using T-shirts and printing on things, but you’re not going to retire on a beach immediately just by designing one T-shirt.
The business model is absolutely fantastic here, it’s called print on demand.
It is very different to how most manufacturing is done.
Let’s say I want to print T-shirts with a logo on it.
I would have to print 10,000, 20,000 at a time to make it economically viable. However, the problem with that is I then have 20,000 T-shirts sitting in a warehouse, it costs me money to keep them in the warehouse.
It costs me money to ship them out and it costs me money upfront.
The reason it’s done is because the per unit cost is only cheap when you print a large amount. If you were to print one T-shirt at a time it’s normally cost prohibitive.
However there are businesses like Red bubble, Tee-spring, Tee-Mill who have worked out how to print off individual T-shirts and one at a time cost effectively. That opened up the print on demand revolution.
Where when somebody orders your T-shirt with your logo design on it. Only then is that T-shirt printed.
So there is no inventory, there is no upfront cost.
What it means is it’s a relatively expensive T-shirt, but it means you have no risk on your side as a creator, you don’t have 20,000 printed T-shirts in your living room.
A blank T-shirt is about $10 to print and ship from tee-spring, which is a lot for a T-shirt.
If I were to print 10,000 T-shirts that would be no less than a dollar each. So Tee-spring makes their cut there. They’re charging you a lot to print and ship that T-shirt to your customer.
But you can charge what you want for that T-shirt.
If you set your T-shirt price at $25 tee-spring would take their $10 to print it and ship it and then you pocket $50.
You can see from a business model point of view why everyone got really excited, it’s like there is no risk because I don’t need to have a business and overheads, warehouses.
There is no capital investment. I just make $15 every time I sell my $25 t-shirt.
From a business point of view it’s great but the problem was everyone saw that’s a really good business and they rushed in with their T-shirt designs.
It meant the supply of recall design T-shirts and phone cases rose through the roof and discoverability, the ability to be found and sell T-shirts became quite difficult.
A lot of people rushed into it expecting to get very rich very quickly and then they didn’t sell anything.
I wanted to highlight them because for a lot of creative people in graphic design and illustration this will be an obvious route to go down if you do designs. It still works as a business model, but it’s a very busy market, you need to be aware of this.
Thankfully, it doesn’t cost you any money to get started, it’s just uploading your designs which is great.
What I would say is this is really powerful if it is combined with you building up an audience with you building a tribe, however you do that.
You might have a podcast, maybe you have a heavy metal band or something and you want to sell T-shirts, absolutely fine if you have these existing people who are interested in what you do.
Just be aware of just thinking you can start printing T-shirts and you’re going to get rich; people need to care about other things you are doing as well.
Harms: If you do have an audience, if you have a community then you may want to introduce this to them.
Also print on demand applies to books to T-shirt applies to merchandise, so we often meet clients who are not aware that that is even a thing.
They’re thinking, okay I’ve got to order this many books in order to sell them, not necessarily the case.
That is the traditional model.
Just leverage websites are marketplaces like this that provide a print on demand service, which hopefully should save you a lot of cash and capital risk going in.
Kyle: I just talked about building up an audience, building a tribe and then you can sell t-shirts, merchandise, etcetera.
If you are genuinely extremely creatively talented.
One thing I’ve seen working really well is using things like patreons and using twitch to live create in front of people and show people how you’re making things.
This is an artist called Asia.
She does anime or manga art, she’s extremely talented. She’s just published a book which is called Sketch with Asia.
What she does, which is really cool is she has a twitch channel where she will live draw stuff like this, she will go through the processes and show people how she does it.
She’s educating at the same time as creating.
She is getting suggestions from her community.
She’s then live doing these images on a computer while streaming them onto twitch building up this audience, and then she has a patreon here where she gets paid and you can join up for a dollar a month, five dollars a month for $10 a month.
She has 590 patrons, so minimum if they’re all on this one that’s $500 a month.
Maximum that’s $6,000 a month.
Harms: There are lots of ways now to support artists whether they’re professionals, creative artists, music artists, illustrators like this, and you want to be able to support them.
What features does she offer her members?
Kyle: The basic one, if you give a dollar a month, you get additional access to some of her work. It is extremely basic, at the five dollars it starts to become more interesting, you have things like these process steps.
She does these guided walk through videos but then she also uploads process steps, it’s for people who want to start to emulate her work.
They want to learn how to draw themselves and a photoshop layered file of digital pieces, scanned lined art.
So you can try to colour yourself, photograph all the tools she uses for each illustration. It’s more in-depth information about her process and how she creates a sequence.
She’s just published a book and that’s an example of basically a creative.
She doesn’t show her face or anything like that, it’s just her creating her art and doing that live.
If you are a musician, video editor, graphic designer, and illustrator that’s another nice way you could start to build up an audience, community and you can potentially monetise your creativity.
This is less about the end result, which is what we’ve been talking about, selling the end result of your creation, this is more about giving people access to the process of your creation.
Harms: Finally we can’t avoid it, which is Etsy because it’s a place where you can find everything, every quirky thing out there.
Kyle: It is a giant marketplace for crafted and hand made goods. It could be knitted pieces, woodwork figurines. It could be hand painted gift cards.
There are markets for pretty much anything that is created through craft and art, so if you do have any craft skill you can produce and sell it on Etsy.
They’ve started to allow digital products, which seems like a weird way for them to go so they have e-books on there now. To be fair, the e-books are about how to do hand weaving, so they are related to craft.
The categories are just wild.
One thing to be very aware of is shipping as you need to ship these things.
If you are making something that’s heavy you’d have add on shipping prices. Also be cautious of the costs associated with selling on Etsy.
I was looking into them, they seem quite a lot, but basically every time you list something you need to pay $0.20, American cents, and that lasts for up to four months.
But if you’re running a massive shop if you are selling hundreds of different items that’s going to add up.
They also take a 5% transaction fee of any successful sale, and because all the credit card processing is done through them there’s a 3.5% payment fee on the end.
So added altogether maybe it’s 10% or so, which is fine and we’re talking about digital products, where the company will take 30%.
Harms: Also in the context of your own business your marketing fee associated with it and the profit, you’re left with at the end of the day might actually only be 15%, 20%.
Many big companies work on a margin they’re making 7% and they’re like that is a good margin this year.
So yes, they’re taking a percentage, but it’s because they’re doing a hell of a lot of work in the background and they’ve built the trusted brand which you can then go and put your product on.
Lots of pros and cons for it, Kyle and I will always prefer you to have your own place of business, online shop, and brand, etcetera but right now, this all about making cash leveraging the amazing online world as it is now.
Kyle: All of the things we’ve talked about you can start selling one your creative goodies through these different sites.
Whether it’s a service, your prints.
Whether it is handcrafted stuff you start on something like Etsy, creative market, or red bubble. You start to make sales and then you know you have a market that people are interested in what you have.
You’ll know what stuff sells well which stuff doesn’t, you have cash coming in as well, and that’s when you can make the decision like okay, maybe I should build my own website.
Maybe I should take control of my own marketing and then at that point obviously, you won’t be paying Etsy 10%, you won’t be paying the creative market 30%.
You get to keep all the money but only once you’ve fully proven to yourself actually I can sell a decent amount of this.
Harms: Essentially what you are doing is two things.
One is qualifying the demand before you go and say yes let me go and invest in all this stuff to help me set up a business.
Number two is we’re using the platform they’ve already created in order to mitigate the risk, reduce the risk associated with this.
Including do I even enjoy doing this?
Do I enjoy creating this item, packaging it up, shipping it?
Because some people prefer the creative side and not too fussed about the packaging, shipping. Where you find your enjoyment is different for everybody.
We have creative ways in order to leverage these creative skills to make money online.
We pulled things from different categories from the big list which is now over 200 items, which has been vetted and we’ve taken the crap out, potentially the scams.
The gambling all that kind of stuff and not as a judgement, but just simply so you’ve got a good reliable list to start exploring.
We focused on Fiverr and Upwork.
We spoke about going to sites which induce industry specific people that have job postings.
We spoke about contest sites such as 99 designs.
We spoke about generating a passive income through set and forget marketplaces in the product in the marketplace, and get paid ongoing.
Depending on how well that product performs on those sites.
In the areas of art, music, photography.
We spoke about T-shirts and merch using the same model as well and finally Etsy, which is a fantastic platform to put your crafts and your arts out there, your physical products as such.
To wrap up we’ve spoken about how to do it with very little skill. How to do it with the skill set of just having the native English as your language, how to leverage that.
How to do it if you’ve got a professional skill and how to do it if you’ve got a creative skill.
Remember, these are ways not in which to and they can be, but we’re not talking about building an entire online business here which you own, manage, market, you sell, all traffic comes through you.
That’s not the purpose right now.
Right now it’s to help out everybody during lockdown.
Anybody going through a period of change especially financially where we can now generate cash online.
Kyle: We understand that there is a lot here.
It could be overwhelming and we’ve tried to filter it down using that Google sheet.
In conclusion
Often people come to us with the following question, ‘how can I make money online?’. Now this question we know is incredibly broad. So a response to this question may be, ‘Do you have an idea, something you are passionate about that you want to start?’. This question acts as a filter to understand why someone wants to build an online business. 99% of the time (exaggerated number) we find it is to make money. Which is totally fine, actually it’s better than fine. Because if you don’t have a passionate idea you want to take to market – it becomes a lot easier to make money online.
In this blog you have learned about 200+ different ways to do this, without the need for an idea or a way in which the world has to drastically change in order for you to make money. What this means is you don’t need to build a business online (totally against what we normally teach)
But instead we can leverage your additional time, your hustle mentality and your desire to make some extra cash alongside your day job. And deploy it against online businesses that already exist, who have handled the operations, sales, marketing, logistics, software, automation etc. So you can just focus on doing X and making £ from it.
Finally, do you need any competence to make this money? Well we put this list together to serve four common categories:
You require no skill to make money online
You require the ability to be able to speak English
You require professional skills, possibly needed qualifications
You require creative skills
Now all of these can be learned, but the aim is to get you started within the skills you already possess. Without the need to go and build a business online.
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