You hear about it all the time. Start-up companies making their owners thousands in extra cash, and all it took was a little laptop and a few hours a day. Want to be one of those with that extra cash in the bank account? There are a couple of ways to do it.
Freelancing
Whether you have a bit of experience as a writer, a web designer, an artist, a bookkeeper, or other talents that you can easily telecommute with, freelancing is a great way to start your own online company, and there are lots of sites out there to put you in touch with the people that want to hire you right now. For example, want to be a writer? Consider joining a project bidding site like Elance or Guru to help you get the jobs you can work on in your spare time. Interested in designing other people’s web pages? Try a site like freelancedesigners.com to find the right clients.
Affiliate Linking
Having your own site is another great way to start your online business, and you can pay for the associated costs through affiliate linking opportunities. Here’s the basic idea. People visit your site every single day for the content that you have on that site. Aside from setting up your own products to sell at your site, there’s not much money to be made from those people, right? Wrong. There are thousands of online merchants out there that would love for those people on your site to see their products. As a result, signing up to be an affiliate for their sites means that your traffic sees their merchandise, and if they buy it, you get a cut of the profits.
Think of it in simpler terms. Farmer Brown sells apples, but he can’t make it to the market to sell his apples. You agree to sell his apples for him at market, and to repay you for your kindness, he gives you ten percent of everything he makes on his apples.
So, how can you get a cut of this tasty apple pie? Simple, find sites that you think your viewers might actually buy from. For example, if your passion is books, consider linking with a bookseller like Amazon.com. If it’s home and family, find related sites. You can have thousands of affiliate links, but if they don’t truly mean something to your site, they won’t make you any money.
Remember, affiliate linking isn’t going to make you thousands of dollars overnight. It’s something, though, that can grow over time. Moreover, the better the content on your site, the more people might visit it, which means that you could considerably increase your affiliate linking profits. Ideas like writing articles and submitting them to article directory services like ezinearticles.com may also help to increase your traffic. You won’t be paid directly for writing those articles, but you will be “paid” with an increase in site traffic.
