In today’s world, there is a unique opportunity to make money online. You can offer services and skills to clients from anywhere and at almost any age or situation. The means that there is more opportunity than ever to earn money online for students. A student of almost any age can offer skills and services online. Age, geography and education status aren’t barriers to earning money online for students.
For example, we know (and have worded with) a seventh grader who offers graphic design services to clients! She’s really good. She’s even started an online store selling her own products. Her clients often don’t know how old she is, at least initially. They just know that she does good work.
Some Things to Know in Advance
For students to earn money online, there are a few things to know in advance. You could consider these warnings or just things to look out for. There is immense opportunity to make money online for students but there are a few things to look out for too.
- You shouldn’t have to pay for an online job. You might pay to learn some skills in a course, but if anyone wants you to pay for training for their job, run (don’t walk) away very fast. These are often scams and you want to be careful of them.
- While there is a great opportunity, it takes time to make money online. There are a few ways to make money quickly, but overnight successes rarely happen overnight.
- Along the same lines, be prepared to put the work in. This might be marketing or hours of labor but it takes effort to make money online.
- Do Not Neglect Your Studies!!! – You might be a lucky one, like Mark Zuckerberg, who finds their fortune, gets rich and drops out of school, but probably not. You will have far more opportunities with a good education and work experience than business experience alone. An online business is a great way to make extra money for school or have some spending cash. It doesn’t replace school.
With these thoughts out of the way, let’s take a look at a few ways that you can make money online as a student.
Ways to Earn Money Online for Students
Earn Money by Creating Blog
A blog is just a website with your thoughts, ideas, or articles. Maybe you have an interesting hobby or live in a fascinating place. You can tell the world about your thoughts, ideas, and experiences. With over 600,000,000 blogs in the world, it can be hard to stand out, but you can make some money doing this.
The idea is that you write stuff that is interesting to an audience, who keeps coming back. Once you have enough of an audience, you can start to make money off of them. You can do this with ads, selling products, courses, or services. There are a few options. For now, we’ll limit it to ads on your site.
Services like Ezoic and Google will pay you to put ads on your site. The idea is that you have enough of an audience and they click on the ads. The ads display company makes money from them clicking on the ad and they give you a portion.
To start a blog, you’ll need a home for it. There are a few free services out there, but a good and affordable starting point is to use WordPress. WordPress is a content management system that helps you build a website. WordPress itself is free, but there can be costs associated with it.
The place where your website lives is called hosting. The hosting company stores the files and database that make up your site. Some of the free options are difficult to get advertising on or put their own advertising on (that you don’t make any money from). To be able to control your own destiny and have good service, we recommend a good hosting company, which isn’t usually all that expensive.
Here are the companies that we usually recommend:
Make Money with YouTube
Another great option for making money online is YouTube. Just like with a blog, you need a certain amount of traffic to earn money online with YouTube. You’ll need 1,000 subscribers to your channel and 4,000 hours of content watched in the last 12 months. It’s not easy but with good content, that’s doable.
You can even combine the ideas and have a blog and YouTube content that supports it. That can bring you in traffic from YouTube to your blog or if you include your videos on your blog, some of your website audience will watch your YouTube videos.
You make money on YouTube in a similar way to with your blog, at least for advertising. Once you have enough audience, if you sign up for their partner program, you will get a cut of the money they make from advertising on your videos. You can also use videos to help promote things like your affiliate offers, which we’ll talk about in a minute.
TubeBuddy is a FREE browser extension & mobile app that integrates directly into YouTube to help you run your channel with ease. It gives you tools and techniques to run your YouTube channel to be able to better market it for more views.
How much anyone can earn money from youtube?
Nobody tells you about, how much money can we earn from YouTube? YouTube earnings depend upon so many things like the number of video views, Visitors locations, Advertisers and Video type, etc.
For example, one channel gets $1 for every 1000 views and some other channel earns $10 per 1000 views.
You need some video making and creating skills to make money with YouTube. Here is the Complete Guide for Making money with YouTube.
Affiliate Marketing
You can earn money online with affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, you use your blog, videos, email lists, or other techniques to promote products. You have unique links to advertise to your audience. When your audience uses those links, you can make money from them.
The best affiliate marketers provide value to their audience. While it’s officially advertising, to the audience, it’s helpful. You might do reviews of different products or help your audience use the product better or learn how to use it at all. In other words, you aren’t just sticking ads for something on your site or video, you’re giving back and helping someone with something that involves the product.
While it is possible to get deals directly with a manufacturer or company, the easiest way to get started is to sign up with an affiliate network. These companies have thousands of partnerships that you can become part of (you usually have to apply.) Then the network manages the relationships, billing, payment,etc.
Top Affiliate Marketing Websites
- ShareASale
- Amazon Associates– Believe it or not, Amazon is probably the biggest affiliate network. They don’t really partner with anyone else, but you can make a commission for referring people to their site. They generally pay a lower commission than other companies, but they also sell….everything, making it easier to find products to market
- ClickBank
Types of Affiliate Programs
PPC (Pay Per Click) – You can earn money if any visitor clicks on your affiliate link and goes to the advertiser site. The visitor doesn’t need to buy anything.
PPL (Pay Per Lead) – You can earn money if any visitor clicks on your affiliate link and register or submit email on advertiser site. A visitor doesn’t need to buy anything.
PPS (Pay Per Sale) – You can earn money only if any visitor clicks on your affiliate link and buy advertiser product or service.
You can also directly signup with companies that you want to promote their products. For example, If you want to promote hosting company (Like Siteground and Hostgator etc), Just join their affiliate program and get affiliate links to promote.
Your commission is different from one company to another. Amazon gives you 3% to 6% based on the product you sell via an affiliate link. Some Hosting companies give 20% to 60% commission and some give fixed rates for sale.
Check out this guide How to make Money with affiliate marketing.
Make Money Online as a Student Freelancing
With freelancing, you sell your services to a client. Sometimes these services need special skills like computer programming, database engineering or graphic design. There are others that require some more general skills like writing content (which most students do regularly already.) There are also projects like data entry that don’t require much specific skill.
While you can make money selling services directly to someone, it can be hard to find people to buy services from you, especially when starting out.
A better way is to use one of the online marketplaces. Upwork is the largest online marketplace for freelancing. On Upwork, a client posts a project online that they need to be done and the skills and price that they’re looking for. Freelancers then apply for the job if they think that they are qualified and can do the job. One of the great advantages of Upwork is that they do this worldwide, so clients and freelancers could be anywhere. This allows clients to find amazing talent at fair prices and it allows potential freelancers to make good money with a huge market – if you’re good.
It can be a bit tough getting started, though. While the anonymity of being online means that your client doesn’t have to know how old you are or that you’re a student (a huge advantage), it also means that people are leery of being scammed or getting shoddy work. There are strategies to getting started on Upwork and we’ve built a guide for you to make that easier.
Upwork isn’t the only marketplace. Others include Freelancer, which is very similar to Upwork. Fiverr allows you to post projects at set prices that clients hire you for. This can be good because you can advertise projects that you’re comfortable doing and confident in your abilities. The downside is that there is a lot of competition and that can make it tough to compete.
Another option is Textbroker. We will talk more about that in a moment because they are looking for talent that many students have skills in – writing stuff. All those papers and tests can pay off.
Freelancing is a great opportunity to get started making money online for students without having to pay any money upfront. If you’re careful, you can also pace how much work you take on so that you can make money and continue to focus on your studies.
Become a Content Writer
While it’s a type of freelancing, content writing is its own skill and its own market, so it’s worth spending a few minutes on by itself. There is a lot of need for written content. With millions (billions?) of websites, advertisements, lead magnets, and much more, someone has to write all of them. For many website owners, they hire someone to do some or all of that for them.
Additionally, while much of the content out there is in English, there is a huge market in many other languages. Someone needs to translate all that.
This opens a huge opportunity for someone who has writing talent or someone who speaks more than one language (or both.) If you can learn SEO concepts, even better. That will make you very marketable.
Finding Content Writing Projects
While you can find writing jobs on sites like Upwork, or advertise them on sites like Fiverr, there are sites that specialize in content writing projects. Sites like Textbroker and ProBlogger (among others) have projects just for content writing of all sorts and skill levels.
Also, many sites advertise for writers for them. You can try Googling ” write for us” or, if you have unique skills and knowledge in an area, you can also search keyword + “Write for us” to find sites which are related to your keyword.
You can earn $10 to $500 per post depending on your skill, the area of expertise, the length of the post among other things.
You will want to get samples of writing that you can show to potential clients. Many will want to see that you can deliver.
Content writing is a terrific opportunity to earn money online for students. Students by their nature are often doing a lot of writing already. It doesn’t cost anything to get started making it an ideal way for students to get started making money online. You have everything that you need.
Teach Courses Online
You are sitting in classes learning different skills and knowledge. If you’re in college, you probably have a program of study with specialized knowledge. You already area learning more about some topic or topics than most of the public will ever know about it. This gives you a great chance to find something that people are interested in an put together an online course.
If you know a skill or knowledge that people are interested in, an online course can be a great way to earn money online. As a student, you are learning a lot of things about various topics. If you can build an audience of students, you can build an online course and sell it.
One great thing about selling online courses is that once you build them, you can keep selling them while you attend classes and make money without having to do much more. You will probably need to be able to answer student questions, but that doesn’t have to be live.
Getting Started Building Your Online Course
It does take work to create an online course, but it doesn’t cost much. Here are some of the basics that you will need to get started
- A cellphone camera
- A website that can sell online courses (WordPress has some great plugins for this which are very affordable, or even free.)
- Video editing software
You can certainly spend more, but you can get started with this.
A great strategy for starting your online course looks something like this:
- Figure out what students want for a course. You can do some keyword research to see what people search for on Google.
- Look at the competition
- Determine how you can improve on what is already out there
- Build an outline of your course. Determine the lessons and objectives
- Record the first few lessons
- Build your website to sell your online course
- Sell your course. If you have enough interest, keep recording more lessons, which you can adjust based on the feedback of your students
- Don’t try to build out the entire course in advance. If it doesn’t sell, you spent all that time and effort for nothing. If it sells but your students ask for something else, it’s wasted effort. You want to stay a few steps ahead of your students, but you don’t have to have the whole thing build before you sell it.
If you don’t have enough interest to make it worth it, then refund the money to your students.
This approach will give you the best opportunity to get started with the least investment. You may need to look at paid advertising and SEO strategies to attract customers to your site. They’re not likely to find it by just having it sit out there so it may take some time and money to attract people.
Earn Money Online for Students
We talked about a few ways for students to earn money online. There is a whole world of opportunity. We could have talked about selling products or other things, but the goal here was to find the options that were best suited for a student lifestyle and budget. Selling surfboards from a dorm room might be profitable, but isn’t that practical. You could do it though.
There are many more options out there but hopefully some of these ideas can get you started. We wanted ways to make money online as a student that didn’t cost much and wouldn’t interfere with your studies.
Please, don’t neglect your studies. It’s great to have the drive to build a business but you’re in school for a reason. Make it count, you’ll be glad you did later on.
