According to Steve Jobs,
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
We live in Twenty-Eighteen and it’s about the time that you no longer have to grind yourself from 9 to 5 for a living. You no longer have to continue your un-wanted job instead, you can let your passion do the job for you! Regardless of whether you’re hoping to get away from the 9-to-5 crush or you simply want to earn some extra money alongside your job, there are a lot of approaches to transform your abilities and interests into hard cash on the web.
There are plenty of ways out there on the internet for you to make money. Whether you are a designer or developer, photographer or song-writer, have passion for writing or is great at teaching a particular subject.. believe me, you can transform your passion into your income!
Without a doubt, profiting on the web sounds like a wander off in fantasy land. In all actuality, initiating a business, a course or online store of any sort is diligent work, however innumerable individuals have effectively done it and chances are you can as well!
In this blog post we are going to discuss four main sources from where you can initiate your journey – Shopify, Udemy, Fiver and Shutter Stock.
Let’s get started!
We all agree that internet is full of resources. There are plenty of websites that are aimed at providing quality education to individuals by offering both- Free as well as Paid courses regarding every single possible thing, from cooking guides and baking lessons to coding and hacking, from personal development to entrepreneurship, you can learn anything from these sites and Udemy happens to be one of those amazing sites to help you turn your passion into money!
You can make courses of almost anything you are good at and can put it up on Udemy as a seller. You can offer bother Free as well as paid courses. Here are some tips for you to multiply your earnings as a seller,
1- Marketing before product creation
Make use of social media in this regard. Create adds featuring your course highlights.
2- Make more than one course:
It is observed that successful instructors always have multiple courses to offer. They just don’t make one course and sit back for the audience to discover it with the passage of time. They offer variety.
But remember Quality of content should always be GREATER THAN Quantity!
3- Start with Free courses
Of course, to earn yourself a decent number of followers, you should start with free content first.
4- Build connection with your followers
Collect email addresses and send educational announcements (featuring your newly launched courses), discount coupons and free e-books to build your follower-base.
5- YouTube
When you have a paid course in Udemy you should add 20 – 30% of the videos on YouTube to create fascination factor in public. If they like the free content on YouTube, they are definitely going to come and purchase the entire thing too.
You can earn a handsome amount as an affiliate too. An affiliate is a person who sells courses on Udemy to get a commission. As long as you have your own website with a little bit of traffic, you can become and affiliate. Udemy offers a 40% affiliate cut to their affiliates. So, here’s the plan,
- Choose a niche
- Get some traffic by writing review or blogs in that niche
- Then simply put affiliate links to courses in that niche.
Fiverr is the dominating marketplace for services starting at just five dollars. Anyone can sign up and start selling their services (absolutely anything they are good at). Be it graphic design or proofreading, solving programming issues or making gift cards- You won’t believe it even craziest things are available for selling at Fiverr.
One drawback is faced by newbie sellers and which often make them revert is that, there are already plenty of top sellers who have been selling on the site for some time and customers usually prefer buying from them. Newbies have to struggle a lot in this regard to make room for themselves. Here are few important factors-to-be noted for you,
- Eye catchy gig title.
- Concise but clear gig description.
- Offer multiple revisions.
- Proper tags.
- Make use of short videos to introduce your gigs and gif details.
- Story boarding is another efficient technique to capture attention.
- Upload a real picture – Buyers want to know you’re a real person.
- Use keywords for services offered in the profile description area.
- Upload pictures of gigs delivered showcasing your awesome work.
- Respond to inquiries quickly, this increases “responsiveness”.
- Ask probing question when gig is purchased. Don”t assume you know what buyers want.
- Receiving positive feedback is the goal as it directly affects your position in the google Search.
- Maintain communication with you buyer throughout duration of gig.
- Provide samples if needed.
- Offer post-services example: Revisions.
Shutterstock is a market place for buying and selling of high quality photos and videos. Launched back in 2003, now they are operating in more than 150 countries and have customers across the globe. Shutterstock started with an aim to connect digital contributors and buyers. Shutterstock offers two kinds of account: Customer and Contributor. Well of course we are going to stick to the contributor part since we are interested to explore ways of earning money from the site.
If photography, video editing and publishing is your thing, or you find pleasure in creating stunning vectors or illustrations on Photoshop or any of your favorite tool, then my friend this site is a gold mine for you. The content you are going to create for Shutterstock should be created with the purpose of commercial usage. You need to come up with content that is not only creative but have an aesthetic appeal too and is going to capture audience attention. You can sell photos, vectors, illustrations and videos. Let’s now take a quick review of types of earning offered on the site,
- 25-A-Day Downloads: In the site, customers are provided with the option of subscribing on monthly basis and can download images for 30 days. Each time your image is downloaded you get 25 cents and this commission increases up to 38 cents as you reach greater milestones.
- On demand Downloads: You earn $1.88 per download of an image if your subscribers get an On-Demand subscription through which they can download your image and use up to a year. And guess what? This amount is not constant. The more you get visitors and downloads the more money levels up.
- Enhanced Downloads: You earn 28 dollars an image if customers purchase your image for commercial usage by acquiring Enhanced Downloads license.
- Single Downloads: You get 20% of the sale price if your photos are sold as single images without any images.
- Referred Subscriptions: One great way of earning is through joining the Shutterstock’s affiliate program. You can earn 20% commissions by referring customers to the site.
Shopify started back in 2006 enabling people to create their own businesses by selling their products from home and by drop shipping. E-commerce sales has been growing exponentially from last decade and are predicted to grow even more in coming years especially after the current business crisis in the world. It is predicted that they will increase by about $4.5 trillion in 2021. One of the salient features of Shopify that makes it a standout is, Dropshipping with AliExpress. Dropshipping is a technique to sell products without having actual stock of it, but having it delivered by manufacturers/suppliers.
Dropshipping has become a common technique adopted by many people over time and they have earned a handsome amount of money. Well dropshipping is easy and anyone can start it easily, yet many people attempt and fail.
The big question is, how you can make cash using this technique?
Let’s explore!
1. Choose a niche product:
People mostly buy keychains, gifts and accessories related to cell phones, laptops, TV and other electronic items. Choose anything that people needs most of the time. The key to this model is finding an impulse buy product – something that somebody says “Wow, I want that and have to have it now!” and doesn’t think about it too much.
2. Set up your Shopify store:
Set up your store either by using the default theme or you can browse for ecommerce store themes and purchase the one you find appealing. You can make use of a good template too.
3. Design an attractive and appealing store logo:
Store logos are important. People while purchasing online, often have of insecurities of getting scammed by scammers. Having a logo can help by reflecting an impression on your clients that you are not one of them. You don’t need to have a professionally designed logo at the beginning just design anything basic using Photoshop. Later, you can get a professionally designed one from any freelancing site like Fiverr.
4. Installing Oberlo plugin:
Oberlo is a plugin that allows you to add products from AliExpress directly to your Shopify store.
5. Choosing the products from AliExpress and adding it to your store:
Now choose the products and their filters. Make sure you have these filters checked,
- 4-Star rating and up
- Free shipping
- Price sorting (To help people find cheap products you should sort products by price from lowest to highest)
Pro Tips:
- With cheaper items, you can likewise add some high value items to build your net revenues. For instance; with a 1-dollar item you can likewise recommend at least one $5-20 value products to expand sales.
- You can likewise include shipping charges as opposed to expanding the costs for the items, as you would get free shipping from Aliexpress supplier, so in fact that is the place you make profit also.
6. Getting sales and traffic:
Now that you have got your store up and running make your business a Facebook page or promote with any other social site. Launch adds featuring your products and eventually you will start getting traffic with of course increased sales.
Some More Tips To Make The Most Out Of Shopify:
Ø Make your site mobile responsive so customers can view your store in all devices. You can hire developers from Fiverr to carry out the job for you in price as cheap as $5.
Ø SEO or Search Engine Optimization serves as an effective tool in Google ranking. Shopify supports many SEO functions like meta tags, keyword selection, and more. They also provide you with a sitemap making it easier for Google to crawl your website.
Ø Marketing techniques can help increasing sales and loyal customers. Marketing benefits of Shopify include the ability to offer gift cards, discount coupons, codes and email marketing as they have partnership with Mail Chimp.
Ø Providing platform for increase visibility, Shopify also integrates with the major social medial. If a customer is on Facebook, they can even purchase products without having to leave Facebook to complete the purchase.
Ø Shopify allows you to integrate Amazon and eBay. Integration helps you save time and manage your retail store in a better way.
Ø If you want to increase your customer-base, an interesting way is by creating a blog through Shopify. You can advertise new products in your blog and highlight them by displaying pictures and features about them. as blog posts are more easily shared on social media, they can help drive more traffic and sales to your products.
Ø If you want to increase your customer-base, an interesting way is by creating a blog through Shopify. You can advertise new products in your blog and highlight them by displaying pictures and features about them. as blog posts are more easily shared on social media, they can help drive more traffic and sales to your products. TRY SHOPIFY FREE FOR 14-DAYS TODAY!
Bottom Line:
So, you have come along all the way to the end. We hope this piece of content will serve as an effective tool to address your queries and has motivated you enough that now you will start profiting from your passion rather than just your daily 9-to-5 job. Remember life is short and YOLO so make the most of it!
Authored By Muneeba Anwar
“Muneeba Anwar is a Built-In-Geek & Tech Enthusiast who finds solace in reading and writing about latest technologies. She keeps a close eye on happenings in the world of technology and absolutely love to write on tech-related and geeky stuff. You can reach her out at hunain.shah@hotmail.com”