How to generate income online in 2019

affiliate disclosure

You are probably curious about how to make extra money at home. There are literally thousands of ways to generate income online in 2019.

Gathering them all in one place is simply impossible, especially because no one would read that post anyway.

Nevertheless, it is also pointless because there are some proven ways that people use to work from their home and make money every day.

Purpose of this article is to point you in the right direction and to give you an idea just how you can earn that side income, or start a full time job.

make money online infographic

There is no particular order in which they are sorted and I advise you to read the entire article to figure out what works best for you.

I will write the difficulty, required knowledge or tools, potential earnings and how to get started with making money.

Without further ado, I’ll show you several ways to create income online.

Getting paid to write

writer equipment

There are bunch of sites that will pay you money to write articles on various topics.

Some of them have strict rules, and some of them accept content with ease.

Furthermore, some of them accept only certain types of articles, for example list posts. Some of them are only accepting posts for certain niches like fitness or DIY.

It basically works like this, you create an account on this site, read the rules that they have set, write pieces of content following the rules (usually minimum of 1500 words) and get paid if they accept your article.

Here is a great article that collected huge amount of these websites if you are interested. Click here

Bonus: Here’s free writing email course for you. Sign up for free and they will send you bunch of useful information via email.

When you are writing anything, whether articles for other sites, or for your own site, it could be beneficial if you invest in software designed especially for those purposes.

I use Microsoft Word 2010 due to its powerful features, but you can use any tool you want. Maybe you will find one that suits your needs if you read this article about writing software.

microsoft word black background
My writing environment

Make money with photography – online

what do you need to start photography business

If you are getting into photography, you certainly need a real camera. You can make money even with phone photography, but the options are quite limited.

Go to YouTube and learn about photography

If you don’t know anything about photography, but you want to learn, you can just go to Youtube and you will find unlimited resources to start learning.

When I got interested in photography, I spent roughly 500 hours on YouTube doing research. There is a lot of bad information there, as much as good, so it can be challenging to dissect what works or what doesn’t.

Invest in course

In my opinion, if you really want to get a head start it is better to invest some money on a course that is going to give you all the information that you need about basic and advanced stuff.

Yes, you can learn everything on your own, but having all the learning material at one place will save you a lot of time, and time is money.

One course that I found useful is called Learn and Master, and if you sign up for their course, they will send you 15 DVDs with lessons, and some bonus material.

It costs around 100 bucks and they offer paying in installments, so you don’t have to pay everything immediately.

Now that you started learning from a course, or you are learning from YouTube, what should you do next? How to make dollars?

Stock photography

Some photographers prefer offline model of business, some do only online, and some do both. I will talk only about online business.

Those who make their living online usually do it by selling stock photography.

There are lots of these stock sites where you can upload your photos and people can buy your photos if they like them. It is possible to make living by selling stock photos, but it takes a lot of work to get some sales, at least few thousand photos.

Here is a comparison of some major websites where you can sell your stock photos.

I have three friends that sell stock photos. Two of them make some crazy amounts, ranging from 2k-5k per month, and that is a lot of money in my country.

The third guy only started and has roughly about 500 photos in his portfolio, and is still trying to break through. It takes time to start making money this way, it can’t be done in a few weeks, probably a year at least and 5k+ photos.

You can still make money offline by doing photo shoots with models, or product photography, or doing parties and events. It can be a sweet lifestyle if you choose to go down this road.

If you like photography, take some time to learn about it. I recommend taking that course, but if you don’t want to spend money I will list some resources for free learning.

Guide 1

Guide 2

And some YT channels:

Art of photography

Tony and Chelsea Northrup

Adorama TV

These are just the few from the top of my head. Once you start you will find a lot more great channels.

Generate income as web designer

three monitors with binary numbers
No, it’s not like this.

Web design can be a very lucrative job if you know what you are doing. There is no limit on how much money can you make, when you have the knowledge.

If you don’t know anything about coding (programming), and have no intention of learning it, don’t worry. Building a website in 2019 is almost child’s play.

Maybe you have heard about WordPress, maybe not, but basically it is a platform which makes creating a website extremely easy, with little to no prior coding experience.

I am sure you already know at least one person who has a full-time job doing this, and if you want to learn how to do this, I have a thorough article about finding customers and creating a beautiful, professional website, explained in details.

I won’t go into details how to do it in this post (that is why I created that tutorial), but I needed to mention it here, because it is a great opportunity to create a side job, or if you want become a full-time web designer.

If you plan to make any serious income online, this is something you must learn sooner or later, because at some point you will need your own website. Thus why should you pay someone to do it when you can do it by yourself easily?

Write an e-book

man writing e-book

Sell your book on Kindle

E-books are the best way to make passive income. Once you create your book you can put it on Amazon Kindle and your work is almost done.

Why almost? Because after you write your book, you have to compete with bunch of other authors in your niche to get some readers.

If this is your first book, people will hardly buy from unknown author if you don’t do some kind of promotion.

One way that you can do this is by offering your book for free 5 days, and some people will download your book. There is some knowledge required to rank your book in top20 of certain category on Kindle where people can find it.

Here’s a nice guide how you can do that.

You can sell it on your website also, but for beginners Kindle is the way to go.

Promote your e-book

Getting organic readers on Kindle is fine, but you can also promote your book on other places like Facebook groups, Twitter, other social media sites, and there are also lots of sites that specialize in book promotions where you can promote your book either for free, or pay to promote.

Here is the list of sites to promote your e-book.

If you get some good reviews after those 5 days, you can determine the price you want to sell later, and if your book is really good someone would probably buy it.

Now, what can you write about? Literally anything works. But if you want to improve brand awareness, or build a personal brand and make some money along the way you have to write on topic that you have big knowledge.

You need those good reviews, don’t you?

If you are really an expert on any topic at all, you should be fine on creating a nice 100 page e-book and selling it for 3 to 5 dollars

Do it!

If you want to write an e-book, sit down, relax, and think about what is your area of expertise in which you can provide enough value that people will be pleased that they read your book, that they will be willing to give you a good review and that you will be proud of your work.

Everybody is expert in something, you just need to figure out what is your passion, because passion creates masterpieces.

Here’s a list of additional learning resources, if you want to go down this path.


Niche pursuits

Smart blogger

Also there is that free writing email course that i mentioned earlier.

Buy and resell on Craigslist

craigslist homepage

If you consider yourself as a good trader, or if you want to learn, you can find under-priced items on Craigslist and sell them for profit.

It doesn’t have to be Craigslist, there is a website for buying/selling in every country.

This is not an easy job. There is a big learning curve if you want to make some money on the side this way, and a lot of hours spent online researching profitable products. Not to mention that you need some capital to get started.

If you have a lot of spare time, some spare money, and the desire to make money this way, this can become a big source for generating income for you in the future.

This is not something I would do, but that’s just my attitude. Lots of people make their living simply by flipping stuff online.

Participate in online surveys

checklist image

This can be a great opportunity for you to get some extra cash. You don’t need any special knowledge or resources to get started other that your computer and some free time.

There are many of sites where you can sign up, complete a survey and get paid.

It will not make you rich, but you can do this simultaneously with doing any other type of job or business.

There are unlimited amount of topics that these sites offer.

Most of these survey websites require that you live in a certain countries, so you should check if you are eligible for any of them. Don’t try to cheat by using VPN to get access because you won’t get paid.

I won’t list any of them here because someone already did the research for you and listed best sites in the business.

Give it a shot and see if it is worth your time, or effort.

Check out this article if you want to learn more.

Rent your apartment or room on Airbnb

airbnb homepage

If you have an extra room to rent, or you are going to vacation for a certain period of time, you can certainly generate additional income with Airbnb.

You may be uncomfortable letting a stranger into your home, and that’s quite reasonable, but if you want to make some cash on the side, it can be quite a good option.

So, what is Airbnb? It is a website that lets you post your property or single room for renting, just like Booking does with hotel listings. You get payments directly through their site so no problems there.

Other than making decent side income, there is a benefit of meeting new people, making friendships.

Who knows, maybe the next Elon Musk visits your place and you become friends.

If you are interested in this way of making money on the side, check the links below for more information.

Learn Airbnb

Learn Airbnb 2

British telecommunications

Start from here and do some research by yourself. If you truly want to become financially free, you have to dig deep into any topic that interests you.

Domain flipping

man carrying sign domains for sale

This is a strange way to generate income from investments.

Domain flipping is not something a lot of people talk about online. It basically works like any other buy/sell business model. You buy a domain and resell it for the higher price.

What? How? Why? Many questions must be in your head right now, and I was surprised when I first found out about this.

Which domains to buy?

Well, the domains have their expiration date, and you can track if the domain is about to expire and buy it before someone else does. Also there are domains that have high future value, but are not yet taken.

How can you do that, track expiring domains, find domains with future value? There is an online platform called Freshdrop that does all the work for you, finding expiring domains, calculating estimated value and much more.

freshdrop homepage

Why should you do this, what are the benefits?

The benefits can be pretty high once you get the hang of it. Some domains can bring you significant amount of money.

Of course, you need to have some cash to start with. The membership itself is only 20$ a month, which is not much, and they offer full refund if you don’t like how their software works.

On the other hand, acquiring a domain can be expensive, even thousands of dollars, although there are also cheaper ones for you to start with.

If you want to find out if this is for you, head over to Freshdrop and find out for yourself. They have very good explanations on how to use their software.

Creating a video course/tutorial

Again, same as with e-book, this is another great source of passive income.

You usually don’t need a lot to start with, other than your pc/laptop, some screen recording software and a knowledge on some topic that is attractive to people. You might also need a video camera if you are doing real life tutorials, but creating a course is a great investment for the future.

If you create great content that works for every generation, you can generate income for the next 5, 10, 20 years.

udemy course

Take a look at this picture. This course has 230k+ downloads, and if we calculate the least possible commission, which is 50% by Udemy, this guy made 1.150.000$ from a single course.

Of course, not every course is this successful, but you get the idea. You can create a course in any niche like dog training, yoga, gaming, etc.

How to make courses?

There are 50+ free courses, and couple hundred paid ones on Udemy itself that will teach you how to create courses.

People love Udemy, it has a huuuuge amount of people who search for courses here, so if you think that you can do that, go to their site, search for “udemy course” and pick one from the list to get you started.

You can click on “all filters” and select to display only free.

I personally have purchased 10+ courses there, and enrolled in more than 20 free courses. I just love Udemy, and I’m glad they exist!

There is one better alternative that you can use to create courses. It is called Thinkific, and they have a huge amount of resources that you can use to create a course.

They are a bit pricier, but they offer free trial for everyone who wants to try their tools. You can just go to their website and try it for free, and if you don’t like it, nobody will force you to buy.

They have great guides and support for every step of course creation, and here you can find everything that you need in one place.

Please don’t just skip this offer, go there, take a free trial and then judge for yourself. If you don’t take any action, how do you expect to earn money online or offline?

Affiliate marketing

basic principles of affiliate marketing infographic

What is affiliate marketing, you might be wandering? It is the best way to earn money from home.

It works like this: you find a product or service that someone else is selling, you get a special link, and when someone clicks on your link and purchases a product or service, you get a share.

This is a win-win situation, because a profit is split between a seller and a marketer, it is called joint venture.

The biggest affiliate program is Amazon, with more than million affiliates, and you can market any product that is on their site.

Commissions are relatively low ranging from 1-10%, but mostly below 5% or 6%. You can make a lot of money solely with Amazon affiliate program but it takes a lot of sales to become profitable.

There are other affiliate networks that offer bigger commissions ranging anywhere from 5% to 75%. On these networks sellers are promoting mostly digital products, thus great commissions.

Affiliate marketing is a very complex business model, so I have created a thorough article about it if you are interested. And you should be interested because earning opportunities are literally limitless.

Most of people make their living this way, and you would be a fool not to learn more about it.

Check out my article on affiliate marketing to find out more.


I’m going to stop here for now, but I have about 20 or 30 more ideas that I want to investigate a little bit more and I will update this article in the close future.

So be sure to subscribe to my newsletter to get notified when I add some new, proven ways to make real money online.

For now, if you want to investigate a little more, I suggest that your read more about affiliate marketing in my article, because if I had to choose only one way I would pick this one.

Have a nice day and see you soon.

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2 Responses

  1. Hey Milan,

    Informative content you shared here about to generate online money easily. According to my experience, affiliate marketing and content writing are convenient ways to make passive income online.

    Thanks for sharing valuable money making tips with us…!!!

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