Which websites actually work to help us earn revenue working online?
90+ systems have worked for me to generate an income online which I hope will prove useful for you in repeating the results! This post is part 2 of a 3 part post series highlighting most of the ways in that I have made money online. If you missed part one and would like to see the first 30, would you begin by reading it at https://steemit.com/money/@jerrybanfield/30-ways-i-made-money-online because seeing all of these together gives us the confidence we each can make at least one thing work?
30 more ways I have made money online
◆ Number 31: Warrior Forum, Warrior Special Offer to Udemy course. This made more than $10,000 in sales and got a lot of new paying students onto my Udemy courses because the Warrior Forum featured this in an email to everyone who got Warrior Forum emails.
This was one of those things that if I would have tried to hustle and scheme for it early on, I couldn't have even come close. The Warrior Forum literally just approached me and said, "Would you make this Warrior Special Offer for us? Then we'll run the Warrior Special Offer as a deal of the day, you can get a percentage of the sales and we'll send you the students."
A Warrior Special Offer is a little post you pay like $20 to make, and then you put some kind of product or sale you want to advertise. I still give those a try here and there today.
◆ Number 32: I got paid to win a contest on Facebook. There was a guy, he has his son at the office I had for about a year. His son was in a contest and he knew I did Facebook ads and marketing, so he asked, "Can you help my son win a contest?"
I said, "For a hundred and fifty dollars, I'll guarantee your son wins the contest."
He went straight upstairs and sent me the payment through PayPal. I went straight onto Fiverr, bought five or ten gigs for about $30 to $50 total from people who promised to give votes on Facebook for his son. He blew everyone else out of the water and won the contest.
◆ Number 33: SkillShare. I was just talking with my friend @JoeParys about SkillShare recently. SkillShare has paid out thousands of dollars now to put up my videos up there. The problem with SkillShare is that it is very much a here and now focused kind of thing. When you use the link above, you will get 1 or 2 months of free Premium and I will get $10 for referring you.
While I would love to have more time in my life, the Audible version of the Facebook book has sold over a hundred copies in the first month. SkillShare paid last month four hundreds. My first full month on Audible at this rate should pay out over five hundreds. Now think about that, the very little amount of work I have done with very high payout on Audible is a lot better bet to put my time into doing Audible instead of SkillShare.
However, some of my fellow co-instructors have made thousands of dollars and still are making thousands of dollars a month on SkillShare, so it seems to me like it's here to stay, not like it is about to go out of business, which is good to know when you start investing your time with a company.
◆ Number 34 is focus groups for mobile app testing. This was a project I did for my biggest client because they had a huge government project working internationally to test mobile apps that were popular in their country, in all different countries around the world.
I was lucky enough to land the US portion of the focus group for mobile app testing. I was selected to do this because they couldn't find anyone else to do it. It is not that common to have focus groups for mobile app testing and it is especially not common to have them done for cheap.
They offered me $1,500 for a mobile app focus group, which you might think, "Well that's not very cheap!" I promised that I could get people to do a good job with the test.
I thought I could easily find mobile app developers because at the time I worked in an office that had a lot of mobile app developers and tech-savvy people like me in it. So I thought it would be no problem to get them to do a focus group test. What I didn't take into account was how unwilling people like me generally are, to stop doing whatever it is they are doing and do something else, because we are passionate about what we are doing.
If someone came by my door right now and asked, "Would you participate in a focus group?" They would probably have to offer at least $1,000 for me to stop writing this post. Not as much because this is worth a thousand dollars, but because I love doing it and I'm willing to do it for a lot less than you would have to pay me to do something else.
Long story short, it cost me around $200 to get a real mobile app developer to participate in the focus group. According to the guidelines the client and the government wanted. On a $1,500 budget to have often eight to ten plus people do a focus group, you can see the problem I had. I solved this problem with a lot of ingenuity. I thought I would find a temp agency, and I figured, "Hey, anyone, everyone uses their phones, anyone can just bring their phone in and do a mobile app test."
Somehow I did mobile app focus test groups using temporary employees and they worked barely just good enough. No one was happy, the client wasn't happy, the government wasn't happy with the test, they said they looked unprofessional, and somehow I got this one done.
This was one of the toughest ways I made money in terms of getting things actually done, and at the same time it was extremely profitable with using the temporary employees as I mentioned before. It cost maybe five hundred to a thousand dollars to run two focus groups for four hours, and then I would get $3,000 to do that.
It was a really sweet system and I had anywhere from ten to twenty-five plus of these focus groups to do.
◆ Number 35 is selling ten thousand of my Mom's books on eBay. My Mom literally had a huge room in our basement back in 2003 or 2004. She had a gigantic room in our basement full of ten thousand plus books, many of them were in new to a moderately used condition. She liked to go to the bookstore and buy a whole bunch of books at a time after work, and after doing this for years, she had accumulated ten thousand plus books.
My Dad was saying something about getting people to go throw them out in dumpsters and I said, "Let's put all these books on eBay." Someone literally paid five thousand or so dollars to fly out from Oregon, come pick the books up, rent a U-Haul and drive them back out there so his wife could start a used book store.
That was one of the first ways I made several thousand dollars online both for my parents, and then I made about $900 out of it, which my Mom was really depressed then, because I just gambled the money away when I was in college back then. That was one of the earliest things I ever did to make money online.
◆ Number 36: Selling my apartment on Craig's List. I'm spending a little bit of extra time on some of these things like this because then I will go into more of the things in later sections that are all similar like affiliate marketing, selling products et cetera.
You might think that's crazy, something like selling my apartment on Craig's List, what is that all about? When I went to move home after I quit my job being a police officer, I went and moved from South Carolina to Mississippi to live with my parents. My Dad informed me that he would help me move. He would bring his Ford Explorer and put some stuff in there and I had a Toyota Corolla.
I had a one-bedroom apartment full of everything you needed to live: a bed, dresser, two couches, etc... I put almost my entire apartment, almost everything I owned, especially big, but many things small, on Craig's List. I made about $700 having ten to twenty different groups of people come over and take things out of my apartment.
I literally had a status about six years ago yesterday on my Facebook that said, "Time to wake up out of my bed so I can sell it!" Then, I slept on the couch the next week, and I sold both the couches too. The day I moved out, I sold the couch I had slept on the night before. It was a pretty sweet system.
Family came over and took all kinds of extra things out of my apartment. I made about seven hundred selling almost everything I owned on Craig's List. It's amazing how easy it is to get rid of things you don't want anymore, and how liberating it is to go from having a bunch of stuff to having a lot less.
◆ Number 37: Building a website using Google Sites. That was not a good idea. Google Sites is not ideal for building a website, but it is fast and it is supported by Google, which is nice.
Google Sites is Google's kind of little WordPress type platform, except that it has a lot less features than WordPress. It is not compatible, at least the last time I used it, with hardly anything, but I did earn thousands of dollars building websites using Google Sites.
◆ Number 38: Mobile app user testing. Now I told you about the focus groups I did before in a previous post, but this one is different because it is strictly online user testing. I got people, my cousins, friends and family members to go test mobile apps. I paid them something like $10 to download and then test a new app, which would take often 20 minutes or less, and I also hired a bunch of people on Fiverr to help out with this. Now, I hired so many people at once, and so many Fiverr users complained, that Fiverr actually pulled all of the gigs I bought at the same time across the whole website.
I bought hundreds of gigs because the client paid thousands of dollars to get these mobile apps tested by users. I spent hundreds ordering gigs on Fiverr, and they decided that the best thing to do was pull all of my orders at the same time. That means pull the orders that people were happy to have received as well as the ones people didn't like.
I sent a nasty email to Fiverr's customer service, I told them to put my orders back, and they said no. They at least said that they will allow me to go buy new orders and they asked that I use better discretion and not buy gigs that users had offered for one service and attempt to get the users to offer something else.
Another messy failure, and yet somehow I got barely enough users to complete the app test. The client was happy and I made a little bit of money. Although if you calculate the time it took to do it, it wasn't at a great hourly rate.
◆ Number 39: 60 SEO vein articles. This is one of the worst things in my whole life I have ever done for money. The client paid me hundreds of dollars to produce 60 search engine optimized articles talking about their business, which happened to be vein restoration. It still bothers me to even say the word "vein" today because I spent hours and hours spending hundreds of dollars myself ordering these articles on Fiverr.
My theory was that I could just literally outsource the 60 articles straight to Fiverr and make a few hundred dollars. What I didn't count on was that the client would actually want the articles to be decent, and with the people I found on Fiverr for $5 an article, which is $300 in total, it was difficult to get decent quality articles for that price and SEO optimized.
The client paid like four or five hundred dollars, I ended up spending ten or twenty hours and almost the same amount of money the client paid me to get them a bunch of vein articles they weren't even happy with and that they never ordered again.
This is another good example of just a nightmare of trying to offer to do everything for people when you haven't done it yourself. I remember that one hour sitting there editing vein articles, trying to make them even readable. I can't even stand to read about anything vein related today.
◆ Number 40 is a paid email response. This is something I tried recently on my website to limit emails because of the amount of emails I would get on a daily basis just putting my email out there. A bunch of emails, mostly selling things, mostly wasting both my time and the person that sent them's time, so I tried having a paid email response.
I made it $25 and you had to pay to email me. One or two people actually went through and paid the $25 to email me. The problem was that I didn't have a very good way for my customer service to get set up then, and another problem was that lots of the good opportunities I have gotten have come through free emails. Now I'm grateful I have a friend Albert who reads the emails first and is the gatekeeper.
◆ Number 41: Selling Teachable courses on my website. This currently is how I make the majority of the money I'm making online as of September 26, 2016. This is currently making about $300 a day selling courses on my website. Now that's in sales because I have to pay out some of my co-instructors like Ermin, but I have the courses listed on my website using WooCommerce, then I actually sell a free coupon into the Teachable course. I also made Teachable direct sales on the website.
◆ Number 42: Selling free coupons to Udemy courses on my website. Instead of using my website to sell free coupons to Teachable courses, I also sell free coupons to Udemy courses. Obviously, I did this before and this was the first thing I did. I sold access to free coupons to my Udemy courses, now I still sell free coupons to other people's Udemy courses.
◆ Number 43: I sold my website on Flippa. After I got my website banned from Facebook, and when I was trying to re-brand as jerrybanfield.com, I realized I could probably sell my website banwork.com on Flippa and make some money on it, especially because it had made the majority of the money for my entire business, I knew I could put good financial numbers up there and get someone to buy it.
This was also right when my business was nearly bankrupt and everything was a complete disaster. I was just starting getting sober and trying to put my life back together, especially with my business and in my personal life, and out of nowhere I got this idea to just try to sell my website.
I sent emails out to almost everyone who had ever emailed me, personalized individual emails showing that I was going to move to jerrybanfield.com and saying that I was selling my website.
One of those emails reached a former client who really wanted to buy my website and I was able to sell it for $5,500, which was amazing because at that point, it was something I didn't even want. Another random thing, I then made a course on and sold the course for thousands more dollars on Udemy.
◆ Number 44: I sold domains on GoDaddy. My wife is so loving and patient with me. She came home one day and I reported to her, "Guess what, I've got the new next big money-making venture." This was at least three or four years ago when my business was still fairly young and I didn't have hardly any money.
It wasn't self-sustaining. What did I do? I announced to my wife proudly that I bought five hundred short domains. Five-letter dot com domains that I had researched and I thought for sure that they would be increasing in value. Things like weeyu.com or all kinds of other random five-letter dot com domains that were available for whatever the lowest price GoDaddy offered, which was many $6, $7 or $8 a domain in bulk. I bought five or six hundred of those domains for over $5,000. I sold, wait for it, about three or four of them before the next year's registration came due.
Thankfully, I had the sense to not renew any of those domains. Actually, I think I did renew like 20 of them and none of them ever sold, so I dropped them all. Yes, that little adventure cost me not only about $4,800, lost after the sales of the domains, but it cost me a ton of time and energy trying to sell those domains.
I had a bunch of fear, that was realized, that I wouldn't sell hardly any of them, and yet, I did make some money on some of the domains. A few of the domains I bought for $8 sold for $50 or $100. Just it was only three to five of them out of hundreds.
◆ Number 45: Facebook national tour event promotion. Now this was a crazy job. The client paid me thousands of dollars just to make the ads, and then spent tens of thousands of dollars to promote their national tour, where they went around the country from place to place.
Now this was really up and down because the Facebook events all looked huge. We don't know what happened with some Facebook events because sometimes a bunch of people said they were going and never showed up, causing the client to spent all this money unnecessarily. The client would get to some events and there was like a handful of people there, when Facebook said there were hundreds going.
Then, for other events the client would get to, Facebook would accurately represent it as it said there were hundreds going, and the place would be packed. Some places they would rent this huge hall and there would be no one there, in others, they would rent a smaller place and the whole place would be stuffed full.
That was an interesting set of events for promoting the ad campaigns for that. The client then, after the national tour, decided they preferred to just do their own ads, even though the data showed that my ads were working five times better, and if you calculated the cost, they were actually saving $7,000 per ad campaign, to pay me $400 to make the ads on the ad campaign.
An example is the client promoted one new product, spent $10,000 to get around $20,000 in sales, and then often I was making $20,000 in sales on my campaigns for them on a couple of thousand in ads spend.
A good lesson if you are serving clients, as clients are not always rational. Often, doing things how the client wants to do it is more important than the actual results you get. Unless you are a math geek like me, and I ruthlessly care about results, which has caused me sometimes because I have not thought about how I'm doing things in order to get the results.
◆ Number 46: Facebook likes on a weekly basis. This was one of the first successful services I ever had and the most amazing thing about it was that it was a recurring subscription. I got a bunch of people to agree to pay me every week, every month, a few people even every day to get them a certain amount of new Facebook likes, which I did through Facebook ads.
I knew all I had to do was set the ads up once, and then leave them running, and often the subscriptions were incredibly profitable. I would have a dollar a day ad campaign running delivering a hundred likes a day for the client who then often would have bought something like several likes a week. The client was getting more likes than they paid for, I was getting often hundreds of dollars a week to do that.
It was really good services and very profitable for me. The problem was that the clients often didn't care for the global likes. They wanted them to be from a specific country or even if they had ordered the global likes to start with, and they realized that's what they wanted and they chose to do it, they usually would get bored soon enough, or they would just want to save the money and most of these subscriptions didn't last very long.
A few of them lasted quite a while though, and it worked out good for me and the client who got a big Facebook page out of it, built with real people from Facebook ads, and I made some good money from it.
◆ Number 47: Share of a startup for online ad management. Now this is never something I would have done with someone I didn't know. I did this with my friend Rob, who I knew from working across the hall in my startup. I agreed to take a half percent ownership of his startup in exchange for doing his Google Adwords ads for three months.
Now the caveat to this is that I also said that I had the right to record and show anything I was doing for him, put it into a course and sell it, or put it out on free tutorial videos. The tutorial videos and courses I made off of Rob's Google Adwords ads were very profitable and are still selling today. People are still watching the videos today from that because his ads are some of the most successful Google ads I have ever done before.
That is an example of something that worked out very well for both of us. That's something set up for mutual benefit. Rob's company has benefited greatly from having the additional exposure through Google ads. He has made now millions of dollars in Bitcoin buys from the people who found him through the Google ads I set up, and now that's my friend Albert who is running them for him.
◆ Number 48: A thousand YouTube views per month. This was a genuinely helpful service that ran for about a year for my friend John who I met in a Business Networking International group, a.k.a BNI. I met John, who is a real estate agent, and he was building his YouTube channel up.
I said, "John, you really could use more views on your channel. Just get a good foundation, build all your videos up." So he paid me about a hundred dollars or so a month for about a year to get him a thousand YouTube views per month and then I spent about a dollar a day on Google Adwords to do that for him. That was a nice deal, I made about $70 a month working with him over a year, and then he just got a $5,000+ commission for selling my house.
◆ Number 49: Send Facebook page messages for a client. I was so effective at getting new clients via Facebook page messages that one guy actually paid me to send the messages for him. We never worked together again because none of the messages I sent for him got anyone any business that I know of.
◆ Number 50: Twitter advertising. I had at least one client pay me to do Twitter ads for their account. I have never seen that Twitter ads have worked very well for me, and I don't think the client was very happy either. If you will notice, just the sheer amount of failures in this list is amazing. Still, I got hundreds of dollars to create Twitter advertising campaigns.
◆ Number 51: Local mobile ad campaign. Out of all the work I did globally, I actually got at least one client to pay me to do a local mobile advertising campaign with M Media. It was a roofing company and they paid me a fixed amount to show ads for their company all over the place, and that's what I did. They paid several hundred to have me show the ads and I paid about $50 to run the actual campaign.
I should mention that I also met this roofer through Business Networking International group, and they later got paid thousands of dollars to fix my roof.
◆ Number 52: Optimize a Google Plus page. This was for another friend I met through BNI, and he paid me first to go optimize his Google Plus page. He paid hundreds of dollars for me to drive over to his office and make some quick changes on his Google Plus page.
Then, he started getting lots of new clients through. I made a simple change, he was with, and still is, with the same insurance company, and then most of his colleagues just used their name, so he used his name and then LLC for the Google Plus page.
I came up with the idea, "Why don't you put the name of your insurance company in the title of your Google Plus page?" I'm not sure if that's even allowed or not by the Google terms and conditions, but I think it is since he is an independent contractor for the insurance company.
Anyway, I set it up, and he got his insurance company's name in his actual Google Plus business name page. All of a sudden, when people google to search for a local agent for that company, guess who they found first?
He was saying he was getting lots of new clients who found him on that Google Plus page when they were searching for an insurance agent with his specific company, and it did great for his business. Not only that, he sold my wife and I on life insurance, flood insurance and homeowner's insurance. If you are getting the theme here, be willing to give first because often you will receive much greater. Several of these last clients spent a few hundreds with me, and I spent a few thousands with them.
◆ Number 53: Create a digital marketing plan. I had a few clients pay me to create a digital marketing plan for them, which was kind of funny given that when they paid me to do it, I had never done that great of digital marketing for myself, but sure enough they paid me to create a plan. It is often easier to create a plan for someone else than it is to actually do it and execute it yourself.
◆ Number 54: AdSense on my website. This is one of those things you hear about that you think, "Oh man, you can just make a website and put Google AdSense on it and you've got it made." The more accurate description is trying to get visitors to your website and use Google AdSense to monetize it, and it is more like a job.
When I had fourteen plus thousand visitors a month to my website, which is about 500 people a day, I didn't bother with Google AdSense because I was lucky to get $2 a thousand CPM on it.
Now, as I'm getting more visitors a day on my website, I am revisiting the idea of Adsense ads and it should be more profitable. You really need to have lots of traffic on your site to see some significant earnings with Adsense. I have a friend, Jordan, who I talked about through my online success group, and he has made hundreds of thousands doing Google AdSense. He said that it is just like a job, you have to work on it every single day.
◆ Number 55: I built a website for an author of children's books. I actually think that Joseph helped build the website for her and managed the relationship, so I actually built this one and this also was on Google Sites. This was a little different because she also had us to do it in connection with her Facebook page and everything like that, and I actually collaborated to get this one built instead of building it myself.
◆ Number 56: I sold a shirt on eBay. Here is another one of my great ideas. About five years ago when I started my business on video game addiction, I bought hundreds of t-shirts for $1,200 dollars or so from the Vistaprint website I found that was just, I thought, so amazing.
"Look, you pay like $6 a shirt, you get these things printed on the shirts, they're funny, people will laugh at them, and then I can sell these. I can sell these for like $20 or $30 a shirt, I'll be rich!"
My Dad said what a dumb idea that was, as did a few other people in my life. I didn't care, went ahead and bought all the shirts anyway.
Finally, when my wife and I moved a few months ago, I found the last box of those t-shirts and gave them away to Goodwill. However, number 66 states shirts sold on eBay because I actually sold one of those shirts for $10 or $15. I just made a few dollars profit on it. Yes, that's the average entrepreneur, right there for you.
◆ Number 57: My Mom had a bunch of extra jewelry and she thought, "Hey, maybe you can do the same thing you did with those books." So I put a bunch of my Mom's old jewelry on eBay and sold it.
This wasn't quite like the books though. This was a matter of me not knowing how valuable any of the jewelry was and putting some things up there that were probably pretty valuable and getting almost nothing for them, and then spending a bunch of time putting other things that weren't very valuable up there that didn't sell.
Ton of time and energy spent, and very little return on it. I think I still have some of my Mom's jewelry somewhere in a box that I need to give to Goodwill.
◆ Number 58: Clarity calls which have gotten me the highest dollars per hour. Clarity calls earned me a thousand dollars per hour to talk to people about Facebook ads. The problem with the Clarity calls is that you have to submit a request to whoever you want to talk to and then often people will submit three times the exact same day, one hour apart. Clarity is currently a nightmare to manage as it is just annoying to go through the call scheduling process back and forth. It takes often as much energy to schedule a call as it does to have the call. However, if you are starting from scratch and you have got a lot of good skills, Clarity might be a good place to go help people for free, and find some people you could talk to and get paid to do it on a regular basis.
◆ Number 59 is one of the craziest: Online gaming addiction intervention via email. On my gaming addiction website, in my quest to find ways to make money, I offered a service where I would do an intervention for you.
You would pay me something like $10 or $25, something like that, and I would write an email to someone you were concerned about, so it would be anonymous. You could pay me and the email would come from me, instead of coming from you.
So a girl literally paid me, I think it was around $25 to send an email to her boyfriend as an intervention, to let him know that people in his life were concerned about him, that he might have a problem with video games. I never got a response from him, and that is one of the funniest things I have ever done to make money online.
Let's take a moment to appreciate how ridiculous that is, that a girl paid me to send an email to her boyfriend anonymously, that's so ridiculous.
All right, back to work Jerry, back to work!
◆ Number 60: CafePress products sold via Pinterest. Man, I thought I really had it going on for a little while. When Pinterest was new, I started putting all my products up there, many of which were ripoffs of existing products like, "The Honey Badger Don't Give a Shit! Look, he is over there and he has got this, he don't give a shit!"
If you have seen that video, then you might have been a part of the "Honey Badger Don't Care" or "Honey Badger Don't Give a Shit" viral movement online that lasted for a little while.
Many of the benefits of that were that you could put "Honey Badger Don't Care" products up. I had Honey Badger and then the word "care," a little sign and crossed out. That was my best-selling product on CafePress next to some of my gaming products.
I posted pins of my CafePress products on Pinterest, and back then there weren't a ton of spammers trying to just get into everything feed and then make money from it, so my spamming trying to make money off the everything feed worked really well. I put all these pictures up of "Honey Badger Don't Care" and "Honey Badger Don't Give a Shit" shirts and glasses.
I also posted things like baby onesies and I started getting a lot of sales from those, and I was really excited. My wife remembers the excitement: "Oh, can you believe it, there's all these babies out there wearing my Honey Badger Don't Care shirt. There's all kinds of people drinking out of my Honey Badger Don't Care glasses." I was so pumped. I made hundreds of dollars, just by posting pins up of my CafePress print on demand products.
Of course, Pinterest killed that within a month or so of it working as more and more people like me figured out easy ways to spam affiliate links, and then grab commissions, and spam all kinds of products and get all kinds of sales. So that very quickly stopped working as with most anything that's really powerful, it is usually a very limited time.
Thank you for reading with me!
If you enjoyed reading this post, would you please upvote it and read the next one where I will be sharing the last 30 ways I have made money online.
You may want to watch the full video class, which is available free with this coupon on The University of Jerry Banfield at https://u.jerrybanfield.com/courses/100ways?coupon=steem.
Love,
Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk