When the internet first made its way into people’s homes, nobody knew what it would turn into. Some people were laughed at when they suggested that email would become more popular than sending letters, but they had the last laugh. Email replaced ‘snail’ mail as long ago as 2002. After that, people had doubts about whether it would be possible to make money online, because nobody would trust entering their banking information onto a computer and sending it across the internet. That, as we know, also proved to be incorrect. People doing exactly that is what’s turned Amazon.com into an empire, and Jeff Bezos into one of the world’s richest people.
In 2019, we know that the internet is as valuable for business purposes as it is for social purposes. The worlds of business and socializing even come together on social networks, where it’s impossible to keep track with your friends without being subjected to a barrage of ‘sponsored posts.’ You don’t need to be a computer programmer to make money online, though. There are various ways to make a successful career for yourself on the internet, and all you need is a little basic training in the right areas.
These are the skills you need to acquire if you want to make money on the internet in 2019 – and they may surprise you!
- Creative Writing
A little skill with the English language can go a long way. Without content, the internet would be full of pictures and nothing else. Until emoji takes over as the one true universal language (and make no mistake about this – it will happen), the written word is still the most important method of communication online. Someone has to write all the content which you read online – including this article you’re reading right now! You might be surprised how much demand there is for people who can provide interesting content to a high degree of literacy, and in bulk. It’s not just content we’re talking about here though – it’s blogging. Blogging is the journalism of the future. Just as the print journalists of twenty years ago would occasionally be paid to review a product or put in a good word about a service, the bloggers of today get the same treatment. If you’re interested in – for example – cooking, and your style of writing appeals to enough people to draw an audience, you’ll soon find businesses involved in food and cooking want to advertise on your blog.
- SEO
SEO is one of those buzz-phrases which everybody’s seen, but few people understand. It stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization.’ and it governs the way that search engines rank web pages (for ‘search engines,’ read ‘Google.’) If you opened a flower shop in New York, it would be helpful for your business webpage to appear on the first page of Google results when someone searches for ‘flower shop New York,’ or variants thereof. As a new business, that might be a struggle if several other New York-based flower shops have got there before you. Search Engine Optimization is how you change all that. It’s a process of rearranging the content of your website in a way that Google approves of, and therefore ranks higher. The good news is that you don’t need any computer programming literacy to learn how to do it – and you can take a course through Google which will teach you everything you need to know in about a week. After that, you can charge big money to companies who don’t understand how it works to let you handle it for them. It’s easy money. You should take a slice of it!
- WordPress
Building a website used to be an arduous and cumbersome process. There were multiple different programming languages, and multiple display issues to consider. The way a website would appear on Internet Explorer (which nobody misses) might be completely different to the way it would appear on Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome. Tiny coding issues could take days to identify, and days beyond that to fix. That isn’t the way of the online world anymore. HTML5 has come along and made achieving a uniform look easy, and WordPress has made website building a streamlined process. As with SEO, though, businesses – especially small businesses – don’t take the time to learn how to do it. They’d rather pay someone else to come along and do it for them. If you can master WordPress, then you’ll also have mastered the art of making a fantastic-looking website that likely only took you a day or two to put together.
- Gambling
Gambling online is a huge business. Almost as soon as the internet became commonplace, casinos moved online and began to reach people in their own homes. Gambling stopped being something that was done by men in smoky casinos, and became a unisex activity that people did in the comfort of their own home. Now, online poker tournaments pay prizes of millions of dollars. If you can teach yourself how to play poker like a professional, you’ll be better than almost all the people who are betting and losing at virtual tables right now. They’re putting their money on the line, so go and take it. There’s more to gambling than poker, too. Mobile slots are the way most people now engage with what used to be called fruit machines, or one-armed bandits. There’s not as much skill involved in mobile slots as there is in poker, but a little knowledge can make all the difference. If you know how to sort mobile slots by return-to-player rate, and spot when the progressive jackpot of a mobile slots game is about ready to payout, you’ll find yourself winning more often on casinos and their sister sites than mobile slots players who just point and click. You get all the satisfaction of a big win in Vegas, but without the jet lag.
- Photography
The words’ Instagram influencer’ has negative connotations. People hear ‘Instagram influencer,’ and visualize a twenty-something stick-thin model trying to sell dieting solution through photographs. They’re probably pouting, and somewhere sunny. While that type of influencer exists, they’re not the only people involved in the marketplace. An Instagram influencer is anybody who has an audience of a few thousand followers or more. When you have an audience, you’ll find people will come to you wanting to put their products in front of that audience. All you need to do to build an audience through Instagram are great pictures, and the ability to jump on the right hashtag. People get hundreds of ‘likes’ for posting pictures of their cats doing nothing. How many could you get for taking good-quality pictures of your neighborhood? What can you photograph that nobody else can? Those are the pictures that will make you stand out online, and all you need to do to get them is to go through a photography course and get yourself a decent camera. If you get it right, both the camera and the course will become an investment – the firms you bought them from will likely come to you and ask you to promote them!
If you’re unhappy with how you’re making money right now, why not give the digital economy a try? It might just turn out to be more accessible than you think.