Best Way to Make Money Online in 2023

These methods let you conduct business on your own schedule and from anywhere. You can make money while traveling the world or from the comfort of your home.

1. Start a YouTube channel

If others can make money from YouTube, so can you. The highest-paid YouTuber is Jimmy Donaldson (a.k.a. MrBeast), who uploads bizarre stunts on his YouTube channel, which made him $54 million in 2021. Another high earner is Jake Paul, who’s made $45 million on YouTube by sharing high-energy prank videos and boxing content. His YouTube (and boxing career) fame helped him use his influence to make money online beyond his YouTube earnings.

Your YouTube channel should focus on a single niche so you can build a strong, loyal audience. For example, you can create makeup tutorials, stream video games, review products, teach skills, create prank videos, or anything else you think there’d be an audience for.

The secret to making money on YouTube is to create content that people want. Create witty headlines to entice people to watch your videos and use keywords in your description to optimize for YouTube search. Once you’ve reached the 1,000-subscriber milestone, you can officially monetize your channel with YouTube ads.

2. Sell on Amazon

Business type: Product based

Amazon has become a marketplace that welcomes new ecommerce entrepreneurs. It takes a few minutes to sign up for an account and a few more minutes to get a product listing live. 

The platform has a massive audience, it’s a global marketplace, and it’s a go-to destination for product discovery and research. Listing optimization can help your products get found and unlock new opportunities. And Amazon’s in-app promotions can increase your brand's visibility for highly targeted audiences. 

Yet, some ecommerce entrepreneurs question the long-term sustainability of selling on Amazon. While the marketplace is great for helping shoppers surface desired products, it’s challenging for sellers to get their business noticed. Amazon attracts many resellers of the same products you may offer. Tack on fees and trying to differentiate your brand and you may end up working harder to generate sales but not grow your bottom line revenue. 

While selling on Amazon is a good way to make money from home, there are some caveats to consider:

Amazon sets the rules for its marketplace. We know Amazon is a leader in collecting and using customer data to create better shopping experiences, but that information doesn’t get shared with you. If you compete head to head with a product owned by Amazon, it’ll be hard to make sales. Amazon Retail tends to get the Buy Box advantage.

Amazon prefers sellers to use Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). FBA is Amazon’s fulfillment program offered to sellers. Once you put a product in its fulfillment centers and a customer orders it, Amazon will fulfill the order. You must use FBA to be eligible for Amazon Prime and Amazon Super Saver Shipping, two ways to help retailers improve conversion rates and earn extra money. 

Amazon owns the customer relationship. Sellers cannot add Amazon customers to a CRM or re-market to them after the sale. 

That said, Amazon is a great additional sales channel for your Shopify business. Similar to Etsy, you can use Amazon to get your products in front of a built-in audience, get discovered, and use your ecommerce website as the main sales channel. You can even integrate Shopify with Amazon to manage listings and sync inventory faster and easier

3. Digital products

Digital products carry some of the best margins of any product you can sell. The upfront costs of development can be high, but the variable costs of selling digital products is comparatively low. Once media or software is made, it isn’t very expensive to deliver to customers.

At its core, a digital product is an intangible asset you can sell repeatedly without restocking an inventory. They often come in downloadable files such as a PDF, plug-in, or interactive document. These products have become such a good source of passive income that many top professional influencers, bloggers, or public icons release digital products such as guides, ebooks, templates, research findings, plans, and tutorials. 

Some key benefits of selling digital products are:

They’re scalable. There’s no limit to how many products you can sell. No inventory. No manufacturers. No shipping or logistics. Just market the products. When a customer purchases a digital product, it’s delivered instantly without your help.

Low overhead costs, high profit margins. Since there’s no recurring cost of goods or shipping charges, you keep a majority of the profit for each sale. 

E-learning is becoming more popular. The e-learning industry is expected to reach $325 billion by 2025. Digital products are a smart way to take advantage of this trend and expand your business.

Digital products can be a great supplement to your main income. Many creators make them to add another revenue stream to their businesses, whether it be consulting, education, memberships, etc. You could build a presence on Twitter and LinkedIn or build an email subscriber list to promote your products to and make sales. 

4. Write a book

Whether you’re burning to pen the next great American novel or just have an idea for an e-book that will teach someone how to do something, it’s easier to write a book than you think. Gone are the days of agents and book publishers. These days, self-publishing has become simple and profitable, thanks to sites like Barnes & Noble Press (a free service that lets you sell print or ebooks to millions of readers), Blurb (which helps you create, print and sell professional-quality photo books) and Lulu (a print-on-demand platform with free tools to help create, publish and sell your story).

5. Offer freelance services

Writing, editing, graphic design, coding, digital marketing, admin work—whatever skill you have, the options are endless when it comes to freelancing. But how to get the word out there? You can easily offer services to clients around the world via a number of websites that allow users to enjoy the freedom and flexibility of finding freelance work from anywhere across the globe to grow your brand—and your dreams. Some of the best online talent solutions for connecting businesses with freelancers include Fiverr, Upwork, Freelancer and Working Not Working.

Since the barrier is so low when selling digital products, it doesn’t require much upfront investment or risk. The best care scenario is you sell 10,000 templates. The worst case is that few people buy and you lose a few hours of time.