Legitimate Ways To Make Money Online

You’re here because you want to learn how to make money online.  Most us us do,  and, you’re not alone.  Most people do and we all have different reasons for doing so.  If you’re like me, then you want to spend more time with family and avoid the hustle and bustle of a daily commute.  For others, making money online means owning their time and not having to answer to anyone else.

Now you may be asking, how can I really make money online?  Is it legitimate?  Is it possible?  Yes and yes.
For example, Rosemarie Groner of The Busy Budgeter - www.busybudgeter.com,  earned $113,222.00 from affiliate marketing this year already (January through August 29th, 2016).  On average that's $14,152/month (and climbing!) from affiliate marketing.
Her best tip?

The key to affiliate marketing is to know your target audience very well. I find solutions to my target audience's problems. I research, try services and products out, and get feedback from readers.   Then I get paid (incredibly well) to let my audience know what solutions are worth their hard earned money. Which helps them, helps me grow my business and helps the brands trying to get exposure. A great affiliate strategy is a win for everyone. Rosemarie Groner - www.busybudgeter.com

As you can see, you can make money online and there are tons of legitimate opportunities for you to do so.  We’ll cover a total of 10 ways to do so here but we will make this a 3 part series since I want to go into details with each way to make money online.

Start A Website Or Blog

• Personal finance blog
• Weight loss blog
• Relationship blog

The above-mentioned website niches are really popular and of course come with the ability to make money.  Specifically, personal finance, weight loss and relationship websites are of high interest and are very lucrative when monetized effectively.  This is because they represent vices that we all struggle with in some way or another.
As a result, people are always looking for ways to improve their lives in these 3 specific areas.  These sites can be monetized via lucrative social media campaigns for large brands, freelance writing for other sites and of course advertising.
Before getting started determine how you can effective monetize it and create a monetization and marketing plan.  Sorta like a business plan for blogging.  Sounds weird but trust me, when you have a plan laid out for what you want to do and how you plan to accomplish it, everything falls into place.

Ten Ways To Make Real Money In Virtual Worlds

As thepopularity and sophistication of MMORPGs has skyrocketed, enterprising gamers have found ways to make real money playing them–to the point where experts say that it has become common to run across gamers who make their entire income with virtual jobs.
“It’s eminently doable,” says Edward Castronova, an associate professor at Indiana University and author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games. “If a person in Shanghai can live on a dollar a day, they can make their living playing video games.”
Gamers mine virtual worlds for currency, build virtual real estate empires and even sell their virtual bodies—all in the name of real-world profit.
One such entrepreneur is Julian Dibbell, a contributing editor for Wired magazine, who in 2003 challenged himself to spend a year making a living as a retailer in the massively multiplayer game Ultima Online. Dibbell sold in-game items, currency and real estate on eBay , eventually making almost $4,000 a month in profits, translating into roughly a $36,000-a-year salary. And Dibbell says that his income only qualifies as lower-middle class among virtual businessmen.
“There are people making six figures,” Dibbell says. “One-man operations, basically, doing seven figures. It’s not hard to make money doing this.”
The upshot, Dibbell says, is that as more users find ways to wring dollars out of gold pieces, games like World of Warcraft develop sophisticated economies, with measurable GDPs and exchange rates.
“On one level, there’s very little that distinguishes this world from the real world,” Dibbell says. And indeed when he talks about his experience–which he has documented in his new book Play Money–it is sometimes hard to tell that he is talking about a universe that doesn’t exist.
There’s Dibbell’s story about a real estate tycoon who pounced on foreclosed residences, invested in renovations, and sold them–making around $40,000 a year in the process.
Or the one about the turf wars between bands of gold farmers, who would tip off the authorities when rival cartels encroached on their territory.
The similarities between virtual economies and real ones have emerged, Dibbell says, because MMORPGs have introduced the concept of scarcity to their games.
“What’s kind of weird and interesting about these worlds is that it turns out that while a world of very negligible scarcity is appealing on one level, it’s not very fun as a game,” Dibbell says. “The whole point of these games is to reintroduce a certain level of scarcity. And that’s weird, in the context of the Internet, but it tends to make these economies much more like the real world.”
Game developers have reacted in various ways to the phenomena of people earning their livings on their servers. In May, Blizzard, the publisher of World of Warcraft, banned over 30,000 gamers who were using automated processes to harvest gold, and removed over 30 million gold pieces ($4,048,582, according to GameUSD.com’s latest exchange rate) from the game’s economy. Sony, on the other hand, recently opened Station Exchange, an online marketplace where EverQuest II gamers can buy, sell and trade currency and items. Second Life, a comparatively small MMORPG, has an official currency exchange Web site and a boutique where users can buy computer hardware and other real-world commodities for Linden dollars, the game’s in-world currency.
The trend has also attracted some attention from real-world governments. China, where many gold-farming companies are based, reportedly began penalizing gamers who play massively multiplayer games for more than three consecutive hours. And Castronova says there are indications that the Korean government is considering penalizing real-money trade in online games as a “disruption of business.”
After a year of trafficking in virtual items, Dibbell went to the IRS to ask if his virtual commerce should be taxed. “Their answer was ‘yeah, that’s very plausible, we just don’t know,’” Dibbell says.
Given the IRS’ very inclusive barter income rules, Dibbell says, even gamers who have no interest in turning gold pieces into dollars could eventually be subject to taxation, since the items being traded have fair market values.

Making Real Money In Virtual Worlds

Still toiling away as an elementary school teacher or a firefighter? Turns out you could probably be making more money as a troll or a night elf playing World of Warcraft.
World of Warcraft is a popular, massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG, that takes place in a Lord of the Rings-inspired world of wizards and warriors. Recent advances in video game technology have allowed users to assume a virtual identity and interact with thousands of other gamers in three-dimensional, Internet-based worlds. MMORPGs allow gamers to build up their character’s attributes by completing goals and collecting items, and typically charge a monthly subscription fee for access to the servers that power the vast online realms.
In 2004, the launch of games like Sony Online Entertainment’s Everquest II and Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft, along with increased access to broadband Internet, turned a niche market into a global phenomenon. In January, industry Web site MMOGchart.com put the total number of MMORPG subscriptions at over 13 million, and The NPD Group estimates that game developers raked in $292 million in subscription fees in 2005.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is at the heart of every successful endeavor on the web. For those serious about making money online, email marketing is certainly where it's at. But it has to be done the right way. Before you even try to market anything to anyone via an email list, be sure that they're people that subscribed and opted in directly to you.
When you try to market to people via email out of the blue, you won't find as much success. But, if those email subscribers are actively and keenly interested in what you have to say, and they signed up directly through your blog or site, your success rates will be much higher.

Sell Professional Services On Upwork

Sell Professional Services On Upwork or 99Designs
Upwork and 99Designs are two of the biggest resources for selling just about any professional service under the sun. If you have extensive experience in a field, you might want to consider selling your services through one of these sites. 99Designs only applies to graphic design while Upwork applies to nearly every other professional service.
However, like anything else, the beginning will be difficult. Before you have a significant track record and extensive reviews, sourcing work in one of these highly-competitive platforms will be difficult. Find the most successful people in your niche and try to model your approach and

Ways To Make Money

Technology's ever-pervading permeation into every last fiber and morsel of society has caused a dramatic upheaval in the way we live, work and entertain ourselves. Thanks to the disruptive nature of the internet, the rate of change has only increased exponentially in recent years.
Yet, with so much change in the world today, and a nearly-instantaneous access to the globe's population through mediums such as social media and online search, many people are still left perplexed by how they can utilize the powerful technology inherently available through the internet, to actually make money online.
The truth? It's not easy making money online today. With so much competition and so many people and headlines vying for our attention, sifting through and finding reputable sources to generate any respectable amount of income through the web has become an ever-increasing challenge.
Often, what happens is that we run into unscrupulous Internet Marketers (IMs) who have less-than altruistic intentions of extracting money from you rather than helping you to make it. However, this isn't something new. People have been falling for networking marketing, pyramid schemes, and affiliate marketing scams since before the start of the net.
So, where are we supposed to turn to make money the legitimate way online? This isn't just about generating passive income; this is also about finding ways and means to create an active income through the conveniences afforded to us by the internet that will not only help us with our debt obligations, but also empower us to save, invest and get really rich in the future.
It's not easy by any means. Anyone that tells you otherwise isn't being transparent with you. It takes an enormous amount of effort and authority-building before you can really start getting rich through your online income-producing activities. However, there are some basic methods for making a respectable amount of cash in the short term.
Pain Versus Pleasure
Before I talk about some of the methods for making money online, I wanted to address the role of pain versus pleasure. Every decision that we make in life is weighed on a pain-versus-pleasure scale. We will always do more to avoid pain than we will to gain pleasure, plain and simple. However, this is also what holds us back from succeeding in any endeavor.
Let me explain...
Now, making money online should seem like a pleasurable activity. Why wouldn't we do just about anything to see things through, since it would be a major source of pleasure, right? Wrong. In the beginning, like anything else, we might get really excited about it. We might also set our hopes very high. But that all comes crashing down when we begin to fail.
The problem? In order to make serious amounts of money online, you need to the most amount of work for the least initial return, not the least amount of work for the greatest return. Translation — major amounts of pain. That's also the problem with how affiliate marketers, network marketers, and IMs attempt to sell you the "dream," so to speak.
When people buy into the hype, they set their expectations extremely high. All they need to do is send a few emails out, and voila, instant millions overnight. Well, clearly it doesn't quite work like that. The issue at heart is that we will always do more to avoid pain than to gain pleasure in the short term, not in the long term.
That's why it's so hard to quit bad habits or do anything else that requires any semblance of struggle. The human mind is hardwired to avoid pain in the short term, not in the long term. It's part of our survival instinct. However, you can easily overcome this in the long term as long as you set your expectations the right way.
What Are The Best Ways To Make Money Online? 
As someone who's been immersed in a number of online industries for quite some time, I know a thing or two about what it takes to succeed in this arena. However, just like you, I started at ground zero with little knowledge, but a great deal of passion. What I learned along the way were some invaluable lessons from failure that hurt at the time, but helped immensely in the grand scheme of things.
Today, if you're at all serious about succeeding in any endeavor, whether online or offline, you have to deliver enormous amounts of value. Yes, you have to do the most amount of work for the least initial return. This is especially true online. Why? Because it takes time to build authority and create an audience, two primary ingredients necessary to succeed in the wonderful world of commerce on the web.
Every successful business and person has delivered a tremendous amount of value at the outset. They did the most amount of work, and they inspected every detail meticulously, to ensure that they were doing right by their customers. As long as you keep that in mind, and you don't look for a quick buck, you'll succeed in the long term.

• Find your niche — Figure out what you're good at or what you want to be good at. You don't need to be an expert right now, but you do need to decide where you're going to fit in if you're at all serious about making serious cash in the long term.
• Build a blog on a custom domain — Your blog is your virtual home. Without it, you've no place to filter all that traffic and people interested in what you have to say. But don't build a blog on a subdomain like yoursite.wordpress.com, create a blog with a custom domain like www.yoursite.com. 
• Always add value — Adding value over time creates authority, and authority breeds trust, which in turn helps to grow your audience and readership. Without a significant following, you'll find it hard to gain any traction online. It simply takes time. 
• Create an email list and treat them right — One of the best ways to make money online is by marketing to an actively-interested group of email subscribers. While most people think that email marketing is dead, that's far from the truth. This is your greatest potential source of income online. Think of it as your money tree. 
• Don't sacrifice morals for a quick buck — At the outset, you'll want to do all sorts of things to make money online, but don't sacrifice your morals for a quick buck. Not only will you put people off, but you'll lose Google's trust. You also shouldn't concern yourself with things like Adsense or other ads on a blog before you have around 100,000 visitors per day. Yes, per day. 

The point? Think about the long-term results of your activities. It will seem frustrating in the beginning. Then again, everything worthwhile is going to be difficult. It will take time. Stick it out and don't give up. In the meanwhile, here are some of the best and most legitimate ways you can make money online in the short and long term.
#1 — Write And Sell An Ebook 
If you have a propensity for writing and you can slay with your prose, consider writing an ebook. While the market has certainly become saturated as of late, books that help teach people about a technical topic still sell extremely well. This is a great source of passive income but does require a large amount of effort at the outset before any money is generated.
You can sell your ebooks through Amazon's Kindle program or Apple's iTunes Connect, which gives you access to a large majority of the digital-book reading market and the barriers for entry are incredibly low. You don't need to invest lots of money to make this happen, but you do need to invest lots of time, not only in writing the ebooks, but in marketing them as well.
#2 — Sell Audiobooks With Audible
I've been in the audiobook-selling business for some time now and have over 3 dozen titles to my name. I know a thing or two about audiobooks. And, what I've noticed recently is that audiobooks are growing in popularity as their digital-ebook counterparts are becoming less and less popular.
People are turning to audio and visuals when it comes to technical subjects. However, you should consider doing an ebook first and turning it into an audiobook through a resource like Audible's platform. You can hire a producer either through a royalty share program, so you don't have to shell out upfront cash, or you can do a pay-per-hour hire as well.
#3 — Create An App 
Yes, this is far more technical. Unless you have the right app-development skills, doing this is going to be a significant undertaking. But, apps are also a great source  when done the right way. You can reach a massive audience of smartphone users by building a great app.
However, like anything else truly worthwhile, apps require a significant investment of your time or money upfront. If you don't have the skills, then you have to hire someone who can assist you in creating a great app. But first you need to come up with an idea that will sell. Do the proper market research and analytics to come up with the right app.
#4 — Use Mechanical Turk
Mechanical Turk is Amazon's take on micro-jobs. These are small miniscule-jobs that you can do for other people, which they call HITs, or Human Intelligence Tasks. These are super simple tasks that anyone can do. Some examples are listing off some URLs with certain kinds of images for one cent, or recording a few phrases with a microphone for 6 cents.
Yes, they don't pay much, but if you string together hundreds of well-paying HITs, you can make a bit of money quickly online if you're in a crunch for cash. Also, it's important to note that you can also employ people with HITs to help you with whatever micro-tasks you might have.
#5 — Offer Gigs On Fiverr
If you have some professional experience in graphic design, accounting, social media marketing, web development or SEO training, for example, you could offer gigs on Fiverr starting at $5 per job. You could perform a valuable service that you could also up-sell to make more money per gig.