8 Ways to Make Money Online From Australia: Legitimate Opportunities

Intro.

The internet has given everyone with access to the online world, a great opportunity to build wealth for themselves via online skills. Unfortunately, there are some scams out there, but there’s also some legitimate ways to make money. Although I’m going to show you Aussie’s how to make money online from Australia, this also applies to anyone around the world.

You see, if I have a website with promotional material, what’s stopping someone from another country visiting, and ultimately making me money through a purchase of some type. The same goes for completing surveys or starting a t-shirt print business.

Here’s what I’ll cover in this article:

• Are Online Surveys Worth It’s Weight
• Is Affiliate Marketing a Waste of Time
• Can Anyone Sell Shirts Online
• Make Money Selling on eBay
• Selling Crafts on Etsy
• Work as Virtual Assistant
• How to Get into Freelancing
• Anyone Can Write an eBook

What Are Your Reasons For Making Money Online

“To get the hell out of my job” you say! And that could well be a legitimate reason, is was one of the main considerations I thought about when I took up an online career.

But why do you want to leave your job? In fact, not everyone does want to be removed from their work duties, many people love their job but just require more income to pay the bills.

Some on the other hand loath their chosen career and are unsure how to do something else.

This can especially be the case once you’ve turned 40. Unfortunately by this time, you’ve got no other skills to take with you to a completely different profession.

Maybe you just need to free up more time for yourself, or to help with more family. I remember the 8-9 hour days of city work. The frustration for me was not seeing daylight in the morning or evening, maybe only an hour or 2 in the summer months. This grated on me and I thought there must be a better way.

Of course there are multiple ways to earn an income online but I don’t want you to think that it’s easy, far from it. Although many websites will have you believe that you can earn $200 or $500 a day doing surveys or sending out links for a dodgy online program. If you come across programs like this, steer yourself away.

I cannot advise strongly enough how the lure of fast money will only turn to disaster. I’ve seen all the scams, I’ve tried a few and I know they just don’t work. I can now spot them a mile off and know how they operate. Best Cash Job is just one of these examples of an unethical con job.

So what are your legitimate options to start making money online? There are a few and I’ll briefly run through some of your options.

Are Online Surveys Worth It’s Weight

The thing you probably need to understand about surveys, is that a you’ll never be able earn a similar type of income that you’d get with a normal day job. If you’re just after a come spare cash or beer money, then by all means, knock yourself out.

I won’t endorse online surveys though as I believe they are a waste of your precious time. We all have less time to spare in this digital age and for the amount of time it takes to fill out a survey, you could have earned much more cutting your neighbors grass (so to speak!).

Your return on investment is extremely low, but many stay-at-home moms or students find this can give them a small amount of play money for various activities. Having said that, not everyone does this for the money.

Some people enjoy filling out surveys, and contribute to companies that require this information to enhance their products or services.

If this is something you’d like to do, then there is a process to get started. You’ll first have to register with one or more of these survey companies such as Swagbucks, MakeSurveyMoney or MyView. You may be required to fill out some sort of profile, doing so can get you ahead in terms of points (the more points you accumulate through surveys, the more you get paid).

You’ll then be presented with various surveys to fill out. Depending on which company you’re logged in with, you may be able to choose the type of survey that suits you personally.

I don’t want to preempt exactly what you’ll earn, but you’d be hard pushed to earn more than $10 per hour. You may find that some surveys will pay better than others, but these better paying studies may also be limited. Good luck to you should this be your choice of preferred online income.

Is Affiliate Marketing a Waste of Time

Well, I’ve changed my mind with this one. The reason for this change of heart is the fact that when I started out with affiliate marketing, I really straggled to get any traction. However, now that I’ve learned my lessons through various websites, I believe it’s the greatest money making opportunity on the internet for the least monetary risk.

If you’re not exactly sure what affiliate marketing is, here’s the process of how money is earned with this method.

1. Create a website in a niche
2. Decide which type of products you’d like to promote
3. Sign up to affiliate programs that sell these products
4. Promote these products on your website
5. When someone clicks on a product you’re selling, they’re taken to the companies website
6. If they purchase a product, you make a commission.

Like many of these money making opportunities, they are available to anyone with an internet connection. What I found with affiliate marketing, is that the income dollar value you can generate is somewhere between, running your own online shop, and taking surveys.

Owning your own online shop is great and the returns can be much larger for a number of reasons that I’ve explained in this article. But as I also explain, you have to deal with many other issues that may not be your cup of tea.

Affiliate marketing allows me to make good returns, without having to stock inventory, work out shipping costs, organise shipping & taxes and most of all, I don’t deal with returns or angry customers. All this is dealt with by the merchant company I’m promoting for.

Affiliate marketing give you the option to work remotely from anywhere.

The other great thing affiliate marketing can offer, is recurring commissions. For instance, if I direct someone to a great program and they join as a member, I can be paid commissions for as long as that person is a member. This could be month after month for years, all from getting them to sign up initially.

There’s also the multiple product commissions that shopping sites such as Amazon will pay out. Not only will you receive a commission for the initial product you’ve advertised, whatever the purchasing customer adds to their shopping cart will also be accounted for. So you will gain commissions on all these products bought in the one transaction.

This is my favourite model of earning money online and it’s not restricted to single countries either. Especially if you create a .COM website which is universally known as a worldwide domain.

If you’d like to know more about affiliate marketing, and where you can learn all there is to know, here’s my No.1 recommendation. I’ve also outlined the best online affiliate marketing course lessons so you get an idea how easy it is to follow along.

Can Anyone Sell Shirts Online

T-shirts are one of those items that are never going to be removed from our daily lives. They are one of the most worn items of clothing, which makes them a popular amongst not only department stores but also online entrepreneurs.

Not that you need to be in the ‘entrepreneur’ category to do this, anyone with some ambition can make a few dollars selling t-shirts.

One of the biggest hurdles to get over if you want this business to last, is coming up with an awesome brand. The competition is fierce out there, as it’s become a venture that is a lot more feasible, due to the introduction of third party software to help companies receive designs.

So, of course anyone can sell shirts online, but how are people going to find you. This is where a website and social media accounts play a part. Rather than setup a website via GoDaddy or similar, your best option is to open a Shopify store. This is because the website is not only secure, it comes with a payment gateway so transactions can occur.

A Shopify store will cost you money though, about $29USD per month as a base cost. But just because you have a website, it doesn’t mean you have online traffic.To get people to your website, you’ll either have to blog using SEO tactics, use social media extensively to direct visitors or pay for social adverts.

Creating a small t-shirt business can be lucrative should you be able to break into the market, as the margins can be quite good. Just be aware of the stiff competition you’ll be up against.

You can learn more about how to start an online T-Shirt business over at Shopify.

Make Money Selling on eBay

You may have heard about selling products on Ebay but is it really viable and how would you get started? Well yes, it’s certainly an option and you it could make you a nice income.

In some ways it’s very similar to opening your own online store but instead, you’re using Ebay as your vehicle to sell items. Although Ebay has a lot more competition from similar sites than it did in the early 2010’s, the audience is still very large as their brand is so well known.

This is what’s going to give you a head start over having your own store. Your audience has already been captured to an extent, but you still need to have a plan of attack. You can’t just place products up for sale and hope for the best, it needs to be run like a business.

If taking on the challenge of an online business, which is the whole idea to making a consistent income online, you’ll want to open your own Ebay store. This will provide you with more options such as marketing tools and some free listings.

You can find out a lot more on how to sell on Ebay by visiting The Balance.

Selling Crafts on Etsy

If you good at creating your own crafts such as jewelry or dolls, then Etsy may be the ideal platform to sell these items. The great things about Etsy is that they are a worldwide platform that has stores set up in many countries.

Similar to Ebay, you can set up a store within Etsy to promote your own products. Unlike Ebay though, which is an auction website, Etsy is more for unique art and craft items made by small business. That doesn’t necessarily mean these products are cheap, some are more expensive that you’d appreciate.

Again, this can forgo you setting up a shopping website yourself. You can use the Etsy website to make transactions for you. Everything is done within Etsy but you’ll still need to deal with returns and complaints. Etsy will offer you the platform, you are still responsible for your stores administration.

To get started with an Etsy store, find out how you can open an Etsy shop.

Work as Virtual Assistant

Companies are often looking to outsource their work to virtual assistants offering particular services. If you have experience in any of these skills then outsourcing yourself as a remote assistant could be just up your alley.

Much of this work is administration, writing, copywriting, accounting or invoicing. You could be great at writing policies and procedures, maybe you’ve worked as a personal assistant before and can transition to a remote worker doing the same thing. This could be managing phone or email inquiries, maybe controlling social media accounts.

The digital age has opened up all these opportunities which allows you to bring your previous skills, and take them into your home environment. This may even be more beneficial than working in a city office, in more ways than one.

Think of the travel time you’ll be saving, not to mention the freedom of working your own hours (to some extent). In fact, this an ideal way for mothers get back into the workforce once the kids start primary school.

For more information on how to get started with offering your services as a virtual assistant, visit the Australian Virtual Assistants Association. Alternatively, you may prefer to do this internationally. If this is the case, or you’re not from Australia, visit The International Virtual Assistants Association.

How to Get into Freelancing

The variety of different freelance positions available is expansive that offers more opportunities than a virtual assistant, which is generally office duties. This is great for those who have a skill that should pay a lot more that what their employer is paying them.

You’ll still have the more common types of freelancing opportunities such as writing or proofreading, but what about all the software programs that are out there. There’s many skill based professions which require the knowledge of various software packages.

For instance, what about drafting (AutoCAD), photography (Photoshop) or Interior Design (Virtual Architect). These visual programs all require skillful software operators, so if you’re one of these professionals then your in a good position to do freelance work.

Freelancing doesn’t just mean working remotely, you’re basically contracting yourself out to anyone that will pay you for your service. So jobs such as an international interpreter or fitness trainers are also in demand, so why not seek out these freelancing options.

One of the most common and well known international freelancing websites is Upwork but if you want to stick to Australia, check out Ozlance.

Anyone Can Write an eBook

They saying goes that ‘Everyone has at least 1 book in them’! So why not create your eBook and see where it takes you. Once you’ve created one, you may realize that it’s not as difficult as you thought, and another may follow.

Ebooks have a large place in sales, as kindles and tablet reading apps are mighty popular. The traditional paperback has unfortunately fallen by the wayside, but this has given opportunities for budding authors in digital format.

The main reason for this, is that in the old days, a publisher was required just to get your book on the shelves. These days you can create an eBook and upload it to Amazon without the need for a middleman.

There’s a few things you’ll need to consider to write an eBook. Will it be saturated in a hard niche? Will you have to hire a proofreader? What about a book cover! These are all achievable obstacles which are going to be easier than writing the actual eBook.

You could even create your own website and promote the book there. This is where your SEO skills will need to come in handy to rank your blog in the search engines. This is another way the affiliate marketing option can help. You could sell not only your own eBooks, but other people’s eBooks where you can make a commission.

To learn more about writing your own eBook, visit Amazon’s Author Central

Wrapping Up

As you can clearly see, creating an income stream online is not limited to only one method. There is a multitude of avenues to achieve this result. The one constant for any of these options however, is to be determined and consistent.

It took me a long time to achieve success because I wasn’t patient enough. If it was that easy then everyone would be doing it. The idea of creating wealth online is very appealing to many and therefore, the competition is huge.

Having said that, the amount of people who fail and drop off is also a large number. Out of the 1.9 billion websites currently online, about 85% are inactive. Read more about the potential and opportunity for success here.

The only other piece I’ll advice that I’ll advise here, is to steer well clear of internet scams. You may come across influencer networking sites that are popping up that offer you $25 just for signing up. These are scams. I’ve reviewed several of these including Click4Kash, Influencer Cash, Earnbucks and Cashgem. Take a look at any these so you know what to look out for.

If you see an offer that is covered in ‘red flags’ such as ‘you’ll make $1000 easily every week‘, don’t believe it. These sites are created to get people looking for fast internet cash, but the only one’s that will be making the fast cash, is the people behind the scam.

For a sustainable online career, the 8 options above are all legitimate choices.