Working Online

One of the most effective ways to support yourself as a digital nomad is working online to make money and provide yourself with a viable way to pay your expenses for living, travelling and enjoying yourself!

There are many ways to earn an income from the Internet and that's what I'll be sharing with you in these pages.

This page is an overview of what's possible while I'm adding more detailed pages that look into each of the more achievable methods of generating a digital income no matter where you are in the world as long as you have power to run your computing device and a stable connection to the Internet.

How to Make Money Online for Beginners

If you really don't have any idea how to go about getting started to make money online, I'll give you some starting tips and ideas here. For those with a little experience already, you'll probably find my detailed articles more suited to your needs.

There are basically two paths you can head down to start making some digital money via your computing device, whether it's a laptop (recommended) or a tablet or even a phone. These are:

  1. Finding a working online job that pays you for your services
  2. Creating a more passive income stream by selling products or services online for commission

The first option is probably the easiest to get into, as there are many online jobs being advertised on various forums and employment sites. You just need to search on Google and you'll be pleasantly surprised at what's on offer.

The major downside to working at an online job is that you're tied to completing a certain amount of work and working a certain number of hours every day to make your paycheck. That's fine if you're prepared to work like you're at a regular job but without he constraints of having to turn up at an office every morning and not leave until the boss says you can leave in the evening!

For many digital nomads, doing an online job still represents an unacceptable constraint on time and freedom. Plus, if you don't work your allotted hours each day or slack off to the beach when you feel like it, you don't get paid!

The second option is therefore a much more appealing way to make an income online. It takes a certain amount of work to set things in motion, but once you're up and running, the money will come to you whether you work all day or take the day off (as long as you keep looking in on things to make sure they're still working).

Let's look at the options in a little more depth

Working at an Online Job

Online jobs, as I already mentioned, come in a variety of forms. The more popular ones are writing (content creation), taking online surveys, data entry, transcription, proof reading, graphic design, coding etc.

All these require you to be at your computer for a set number of hours each day according to the job requirements and to complete a set amount of work.

As and example, it can appear quite easy to take on a writing job for several thousand words for the going rate per word. However, I can tell you from first hand experience, it takes longer to complete than you think and the research you may have to undertake can eat up a lot of additional hours.

There are also many online jobs that may not deliver what they appear to. There has been a number of scams revealed to get work from hopeful newcomers that never gets paid for, or bait and switch tactics are used to promise one thing but deliver something else.

Some online survey jobs, for example may appear lucrative and easy. You could be thinking, ″Sure, just complete a bunch of simple survey forms and you get paid. Easy money!″

The reality is many of these jobs pay only pennies per completed survey and it may take you along time to reach their minimum payout threshold before you'll see any money!

Some jobs are harder than others but pay better. For example, you can make some decent cash by doing transcriptions or proof reading, but this kind of work can eat up a lot of hours each day. The worst part is, like writing, it can leave you feeling burned out after a while.

Passive Income

The other side of the online income coin is to earn a passive income by selling things to buyers, either for commission as with ″affiliate marketing″ or directly through an online ecommerce store.

An ecommerce store can make a lot of money if you can find the right products to sell and can tap into a big audience for your goods. That is easier said than done in the real world, but achievable with the right know how and a work ethic that will ensure you spend a lot of time and effort building it up from scratch.

An easier approach is to make commissions via affiliate marketing. This is essentially creating a page with a special link to a product that a visitor clicks and if they buy, you get paid whatever commission rate the seller is paying.

The only tough part with any type of passive income model is attracting visitors to your pages and enticing them to click your links and buy the products you are promoting. There are a number of ways to do that.

The cheapest method (in terms of money) being search engine optimization (SEO) and ranking your web pages high in Google's search pages (preferably the first page). This can cost nothing if you use free web hosting and page creation services and invest a lot of time and effort into creating favorable circumstances that Google will reward you with high ranking status.

It also means you are competing with thousands of other SEO savvy marketers for those lucrative heavy traffic search terms (keywords) who will invariably have more experience, knowledge and assets than you.

That doesn't mean you'll never make money from free listings in the search engines. By targeting ″easier″ low traffic keywords (often referred to as long tail keywords), you can still pick up any number of sales if you pick the right products and keywords.

That generally means staying away from highly competitive niches like finance, loans, health and weight loss and choosing less fiercely competed for niches that pay less and attract lower traffic numbers, but still have buyers that can make you enough passive income to make it worth your while going after.

More of that can be found in the more detailed articles to follow.

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