Is there still potential to earn money from the internet in 2021?
Recently the web hosting business has been booming in the technological space. New individuals and enterprises are appearing online. Everyone wants to have a name for themselves or their business in the internet world. And it's also worth being on the internet as physically, no person or brand can reach such a vast amount of audience at once.
Many business and individuals have profited from the internet; there is no doubt that the internet has many potentials. It can generate tons of revenue for any brand or individual.
The internet has been growing since the past decade, for the context. In 1995, the internet had only 16 Million users, about 0.4% of the world's population; yeah, 16 million is not a small number, but if you compare it with the users in 2020, i.e. 5,098 Million, which is around 64.7% of the worlds total population it's just unbelievable of how much the internet has gained growth.
And it's not the end; it's just the beginning. The remaining 40% of the world aren't still using the internet. The number of users will be increasing drastically over the upcoming years. As infants would be getting older, they would too become aware of the internet and its uses. There's a lot of potential of earning from the internet in the future.
How easy was earning money from the internet earlier?
Earning some cash has never been easy in any aspect. The internet is no exception. However, it is relatively easier than physical labour. There were many ways of how people earned from the internet; at first, people use to sell goods and earn from the internet, that's how big e-commerce giants like amazon got created, because of the internet.
After that, many business and individuals joined the route seeing such a massive amount of profits. Every brand wanted a piece of cake on the internet. Every brand now has their website where they sell their goods.
But it's not only brands that have earned from the internet; many individuals have earned a lot of money throughout the period.
Earlier, a popular way of earning through the internet was to work or which is known as freelancing for companies and business to create their websites or provide other services.
As there were not many tech-savvy people available earlier, so the ones that knew coding and programming made quite good money through making websites for other individuals and brands.
Even early coders and programmers have the advantage of creating anything on the internet and succeeding in it. They were the first to make such a thing, and no other competition existed.
How did earning on the internet became so popular?
As the internet boomed, companies like Google and Facebook started gaining popularity; they introduced user behaviour tracking with the browser and Java scripts' help.
Being able to track the users gave them the advantage to show users ads of businesses. Slowly the tech giants began to earn a lot of revenue from ads alone, becoming prevalent.
Now every business wants to advertise their products not only offline but in online space too. Brands like google introduced services for individuals to show ads on their websites to get paid some revenue. This business model became very popular and is on the rise.
The idea of serving ads of different companies on an individual's blog was a success. It allowed the individuals to focus on their content, which, if it gets ranked on google, generates an outstanding amount of ad revenue.
But with it, there came many advantages and also disadvantages. Benefits were for both the individuals and the big corporates, as for individuals, it became an excellent source of income, and for companies, they could now reach more targeted customers.
The significant disadvantage about ads is that they are targeted to users search and intent, which means ad companies like Google and Facebook are constantly spying on their users and tracking their every search and quarries on the internet, even they have access to the most potent things like location data of users. They knew every bit of information about their users, making the privacy of the users compromised.
As seen recently, there were also many data breaches of users data from these companies, which makes a big concern about users' privacy on the internet.
This article is not focused on the privacy part, which you can find in our other articles. We will now talk about the potential of earning from the internet in today's age.
How to earn money from the internet in 2021?
Earning money from the internet is not a new topic; it has been covered by many publications, influencers, and other people, teaching tips and tricks on how to earn money online.
In my personal experience, I have tried doing many things to earn money online; I have tried hard to make pennies from the internet. I used to follow anyone guide of things that I can do to earn money online.
Many experts, or so-called influencers, claim to earn a lot of cash, even in millions, by just doing a simple thing or simply filling up a form or just doing a survey.
People claimed to have installed an app that made them a millionaire by watching ads. That's very funny and serious at the same time. Many people believe in such things and waste their time hoping that they would earn some cash.
These apps and surveys may earn you a tiny amount of money, but they can't make you rich or even fulfil your daily expenses.
The bright and legal ways to earn money online:
Earning money online has provided a ton of people with their livelihood and supports many businesses to operate.
There are many ways that people earn from the internet. Lets first talk about the Bright or legal ways to make money online.
Blogging + Ads
I have already mentioned in this article how people are earning a ton of revenue by showing or displaying ads on their blogs or websites.
There are many ad providers available now on the internet; Google is one of the largest. Google has a program call Ad Sense which helps influencers and blog owners to display the ads provided by google for which they earn revenue.
There are also alternatives like Media.net, which is a collab between Yahoo and Microsoft. There are options like Pop Ads or Ads Terra available too for different types of blogs.
These ad companies have their policies according to which they show ads. Some might be showing ads on adult content too, but companies like google have stringent rules, and they maintain the quality of the ads making them the market leader.
If your thinking of earning money online, you can start a blog and post good content on it; if any of your blog posts rank on Google and have ads enabled on them, you would be earing an outstanding amount of ad revenue.
Youtube
If you are not a good content writer or don't want to spend your time figuring out how to build a blog, choose a hosting plan and get fooled by hosting companies. Then you can try it on Youtube.
Suppose you enjoy your time filming yourself and want to share your thoughts, expertise, or personal life through video and earn revenue from it. Youtube is the best choice for you.
We all are aware of how youtube has changed the lives of many people. People are earning so much and also providing a ton of value to the consumers by their videos.
Youtube is owned by Google, which means it is all managed by Google; you need to create a youtube channel, which you can through your Gmail account and start posting your quality content there.
After you meet the criteria of views and subscribers, you can monetise your videos through google ads and earn an outstanding amount of revenue.
Well, it's not as simple as I make it seem, but you can definitely try it as a hobby first, and if somehow your success in it, you can always choose it over other things.
Blogging + Membership
Due to the increasing knowledge of people and raising awareness about tracking f their data to show ads, the Ad situation has been on a slight decline; people now are using adblocking softwares on their devices, making it hard for publishers and individuals to earn from ad revenue.
Still, the ads are very profitable, but there are now new ways for publishers to charge a particular amount of money for allowing users to read or access their content.
Users are not shown ads, and instead, they need to pay a membership fee. This is very beneficial for users as paying for the services eliminates the online ads and trackers, giving a safe and privacy-oriented experience.
However, this has not been so popular as not all users tend to pay for every article they read on a different website, making the internet costly for people.
Blogging platforms like Medium.com have gained success in this model of blogging, as the userbase of Medium.com are more reader-centric and likes to read articles.
Freelancing
If you are very good at something and want to earn online from those skills of yours, freelancing can be the thing to do.
If your very good at writing articles, many business and blog owners are looking for content writers for their blogs and publications.
There are websites like freelancer.com or Fiverr.com, where you can list out your skills, and people wanting them will come to you for your work; you would get paid for the job you have done for them.
This was very popular back in the day, it's popular now too, but the situation has changed a lot, as there are increasing in skilled people, there are many options for clients to choose from, because of the harsh competition people are offering services for significantly less amount of money.
They are making it hard for new people to get the opportunity to earn money. However, don't lose hope as experts verified by sites like Fiverr and Upwork tend to get many clients and make a lot of money.
If that's what you're looking to do, build and develop your skills first, maybe get a college degree in the field your good at; that way, you would have the advantage over other people in this field.
Affiliate Marketing
Another trendy way to earn money online is to market or promote products of brands, in return for which they provide commission for every product bought.
Affiliate marketing is the most popular way to earn without showing ads on your websites, blogs or youtube videos. You even don't need o own any blog or website or even youtube channel to earn from affiliate marketing.
Though having them may help you to boost your revenue. You can promote products of the brand on any platform; you can even pay for ads to promote those products on social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram and, in return, earn a commission for the purchase made.
That way, you would be able to campaign to a more targeted userbase for your promoted product.
Affiliate marketing has a lot of potentials and will be expanding vastly in the future. But, for doing it correctly, you need some good knowledge about marketing and gaining customers.
It would be better to build an online userbase through any platform; that way, it would be much easier to promote products.
There are also other ways to earn money online, by selling your good and products and much more; these were just a few examples; we would be updating the article as things get different in the future.
Not so bright and legal ways to earn money online.
There are also ways to earn money online which might earn you cash but might be not legal or suitable for your long term.
Reselling Pirated Digital goods
Recently piracy has been on the rise, and it's now a massive problem for the internet and the people earing from it and using it.
Nowadays, the digital goods of business and owners are stolen, modified and then resold or redistributed on someone's other websites.
This makes it very hard for the product owner to earn revenue and generate cash to redistribute it without doing any hard work.
Stealing content from other websites and posting it on theirs is one of the types of internet piracy. Many new bloggers don't want to invest their time to research and write content for their websites. Instead, they steal or copy others content and post them as their own on which they also show ads.
Many websites provide download links of paid applications; the websites offer them free and even modify them to unlock more features.
While this may seem reasonable and beneficial to you as a user because you're getting the paid item for free, it's not good for the real owners or publishers to affect their revenue stream.
Not only that, these pirated or modified digital products are not at all safe for you to use. They might contain any malicious virus or may steal your data without you knowing about it.
Using other's copyrighted content as your own
Another not, so way to earn money is to steal other people's content and post it as your own. Recently, the trend has been rising a lot; many influencers on youtube are promoting stealing articles from news websites and publishing them by changing their synonyms.
There are also many softwares or bots available on the internet that can scrape the articles from any website automatically; you need to set up it once, and the tool will automatically scrape content and post it and will also replace the words with their synonyms by which it would be unique and plagiarism free.
Wow! that's an excellent idea. No, it's not; changing the synonyms doesn't make it your content. If something is copyrighted, you can't change anything or even translate it without the permission of the owner.
Doing so can be very dangerous for you as you might get in trouble for copying the content of others without taking permission.
I have seen these types of content ranking on google. Even I have tried it on my own and also ranked articles scraped from other websites. But this is not the way to earn as its very illegal and can get you into big trouble.
Conclusion
Earning money is not very easy, especially now, but it doesn't mean that it's impossible. The internet is still growing and will have more users added in the upcoming years. If you want to earn money from the internet, you would need to develop a skill or do something that will benefit those users.
After all, the people using the internet are constantly looking for information for themselves; they are not using the internet to make you rich. So, to get successful on the internet, you need to provide value to the users.
If you're starting a blog, don't focus on revenue. Try to lean on how to do it perfectly. May analyse and learn what the other people are earning from the internet are doing right.
If you think you can provide value to the users on the internet, you are ready to go; you can earn an unlimited amount of money. It's not only about money; you can even build an excellent image of yourself like the guru of something.
Show your expertise to the people, make them satisfied by whatever you are serving them. Make them come back to you without even spamming them on their inboxes.
That way, you would provide proper value to the internet, keeping it fair and clean for everyone.
I hope you enjoyed reading my blog; if you did, make sure to do something right. If you are thinking of earning something, try to provide good value.
Don't worry about whether there would be a success or not; if you have the patience, you will succeed. Don't expect to get rich in just a day or month. It's not possible.
Big brands and companies took years of expertise to get to the level they are now; if your starting something on the internet, have patience keep on growing and keep on providing value, you would be successful.
There is no guarantee of a particular period for anyone to get something. It might come quickly to some people and late to some, but continuing it can indeed succeed.