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Austin Williams has made a career out of sharing his frugal living tips on YouTube — he now earns about $7,000 a month online. And he believes that anyone can make money online if they’re willing to commit to the cause.
“As someone who has been making a living online for the past two and a half years, I can say that it is possible, but it is not easy,” Williams said in a recent YouTube video. “It takes a long time, consistency and a lot of patience, but if you focus on building trust, staying committed through all the ups and downs, and mastering one thing at a time, I can almost guarantee you, in the long term, you will succeed and make some money online.”
Here are the three ways Williams said you can make money online.
Sell Your Own Products and Services
One of the best ways to make money online is to sell your own products and services — but before you do this, you need to build influence.
“In order to make money online, you need one key ingredient, and that is influence, trust and authority,” Williams said. “Without influence, it’s hard to make money online because people listen [to] and buy from people that they trust.”
While building influence takes time, Williams shared a three-step formula to achieve this.
“First, pick a niche so you’re competing with just a few instead of thousands, then create content that solves real problems, like reviews, tutorials or entertainment, and finally, stay consistent and authentic,” Williams said. “Consistency builds credibility and authenticity makes you unforgettable. Doing these three things consistently over a long period of time — whether that’s on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, a blog or any other platform — will give you influence that you can try to monetize.”
Once you’ve built a following, you can now market products or services to your audience. This can be an e-book, digital course, coaching program or an e-commerce store that sells merchandise.
“This can be one of the hardest ways to make money, but it can also be one of the most profitable, because you’re keeping a larger percentage of the profit,” Williams said.
Advertising
Once you’ve built a sizable audience, you can start monetizing your content with advertising. This can be done by placing ads within YouTube videos, making deals with brands to advertise for them, or through affiliate marketing, which involves sharing links that pay you a commission for sales.
“This is a good way to make money if you just want to focus on entertaining and don’t have a huge business sense,” Williams said.
Work Behind the Scenes
Not everyone wants to be an influencer, and if this is the case for you, there are still ways to make money from online content. You can work behind the scenes doing a number of jobs content creators need to keep their businesses running.
These include video editing, which pays between $100 to $500 per video; thumbnail design, which pays between $15 to $50 per hour; digital assistant jobs, which pay $15 to $50 an hour; and script writing, which pays $50 to $300 per script.
“If you don’t want to spend years building a brand or you’re not comfortable putting your face out there,” Williams said, “another way to make money is just to work behind the scenes.”
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