So, this is a great question. At the time of writing this article in April of 2021, I would say the three below methods are probably the easiest ways to make money at this time. Two of the methods I describe – advertising through Google AdSense, and using Amazon’s affiliate program, have been around for a while. They are two of the most reliable ways to earn an income online, assuming you have a website and you have some traffic visiting your website. If you have never built a website before and don’t know how to use AdSense or Amazon, check out my article on making money online on your own website. There you can start learning about search engine optimization, finding a passion for writing content online, and strategies to make your site #1 on Google keyword related searches that are relevant to your niche.
Running Google AdSense ads on your website
Running Google AdSense ads is likely one of the easiest ways to make money online, assuming that you have a website to run the ads on. If you have a website but don’t have much traffic, check out my article on how to increase website traffic. If you don’t have a website at all and need to start from scratch, check out my article on buying a domain and hosting, and then if you want an easy way to build a website, I recommend using WordPress for your first website.
Once you have a website running with some traffic, sign up for Google AdSense. I would generally recommend having at least 50-100 unique site visitors per day. I would also recommend using Analytics or any other traffic suite you want (like Jetpack for WordPress) to observe what your top pages are, as well as how many pages a site visitor will visit on their visit to your website. You want to look at conversion and browsing time. If site visitors stay on your website for a long time and look at lots of pages, then you know that you have good unique content on your site that people are wanting to read more. If people are quickly leaving your site and only reading one page before leaving, you may want to review where they are exiting the site – there’s ways to track that, also.
Anyways, coming back to money money with AdSense now. AdSense now provides “auto ads,” so it’s really easy to get their ad code loaded up on your site. If you’re using WordPress, Google now has a plugin for WordPress called the Google Site Kit. It will help you to run ads, get analytics up and running and whatever else you want from Google basically. Having it all in one place now is pretty awesome and makes it a lot easier, then having to load up all of the Google services you want individually.
You also have the option of placing ads manually instead of automatic ads. Google isn’t terrible at placing ads on its own, but you may find that you want the ad to show up in the same place every single time as opposed to dynamic placement. With Google auto ads, they always move around on the page. That may work for your site, and it may not. Either way, as long as you’ve got some good traffic coming to your site, you can make some money easily with AdSense. Just keep traffic coming to your site, build your site organically by adding new pages often, and as your traffic grows, so will your earnings.
Amazon affiliate program
The other way to monetize your traffic is to have Amazon associate links on your website. Depending upon what your niche is, you can find relevant products to sell on your website. You place links and images for relevant products, and when site visitors go to Amazon and buy that product, you make a commission. The commissions usually range anywhere from 5 to 8 percent or more. Amazon has a scale where if you drive more revenue in a month, your commission rate will increase. However, at the start of the next month, the scale resets back to zero again. So you have to drive that revenue again the next month in order to hit that bonus commission rate again.
One of the things many webmasters will say about the Amazon affiliate program, is that the conversion rate is very good. A lot of the time, a site visitor will click a product link. They will be sent to Amazon, where they may buy that product or something else. Even if your site visitor does not buy the product you were advertising, Amazon will still give you a commission on everything that they buy in that “instance” where they hit your website. Pretty cool, right? So all you need to do is send that traffic to Amazon, and be rewarded as long as they purchase something. It could be totally unrelated to your website and your niche.
Note: The Amazon Affiliate program is selling Amazon products, and earning a commission. In essence, you don’t need to do any real selling – just send traffic through web links to Amazon. Sooner or later, a site visitor is going to buy something. Don’t get this confused with the Amazon Seller Central marketplace, where you sell products of your own, take care of the shipping, and any returns. The difference between these programs is night sand day, and it’s important to keep that in mind.
Online Surveys
So the above methods mentioned require you to have your own website. But what if you don’t have your own website and have no intention to start one? Online surveys require no commitment, and the time investment isn’t the same. If you want to just walk away from online surveys, and not continue anymore, you can anytime. It’s not the same when you pour time into online ventures like building websites.
One thing to understand is that doing online surveys works similar to a job works. As long as you’re there at the computer, providing input, then the output is getting whatever form of currency that that online survey provides. It might be money, but more likely it is some form of points system that’s redeemable for other things.
Online surveys are an easy way to spend time (or waste it however you look at it), but it’s not a residual form of online income. That’s important to note, however there’s also 0 commitment, other then your time. Pros and cons.
In comparison, if you’re able to earn an income online via building a website, this eventually can become a residual income for you. That means as long as you spend a little bit of time here and there, your website will continue to earn even while you sleep. It’s running 24/7, generating income for you. Online surveys are not residual, there’s no way for them to make money for you while you sleep. Unless you build some kind of bot that can fill out the online surveys for you, but that’s beyond the scope of this website.