Micro Tutorial
How to Make $50,000 Online
Get REAL examples and learn how much time and capital you’ll need.
The Internet has no shortage of promises for making money online.
After reading headline upon headline with grandiose claims of financial gains online, it’s easy to tune them out and assume that making large sums of money is something only a select few can accomplish.
If the title of this article left you feeling skeptical, that’s okay. We get it; it’s easy to be burned out by false promises online.
However, if you’re sticking around hoping for something different, we will provide the information that makes this goal possible for anyone.
If you truly want to know how you can make $50K online, let’s demystify the time, capital, and skills needed to get you there. You can start your journey to making real money online today.
How to Make $50,000 Online
If you are brand new to online businesses, $50K might seem daunting. Yet, when you break it down and know what to expect, getting started becomes a lot easier. Here are the steps to making your first $50K online:
What kind of businesses can help you earn your first $50K?
Let’s say your goal is to make $50K, but you are starting from nothing. You want to earn online with minimal start-up capital, and you need to build something fairly simple to run.
If this is your position, consider looking into a content-based business. These businesses are a blank slate for online monetization, and they can be easily shaped and molded into a bespoke online business. Content-based businesses include blogs, review websites, or any website that is monetized.
Here are the top ways to monetize your content-based business:
- Affiliate networks: Networks that give you a small commission when someone buys a product via your website.
- Amazon Associates: The affiliate program specific to Amazon. You get a commission from sales made on Amazon if the customer was directed to Amazon through your site.
- Display advertising: This could be either a specific network, such as Google Adsense or Mediavine, which pays based on traffic and clicks on ads placed on your site, or specific advertisers, such as local businesses, who pay to place ads on your site.
- Info products/digital products: These truly vary and include courses, e-books, downloadables, or essentially any materials you create to sell on your site.
- Monetized email list: You can monetize your content by creating a monetized newsletter or paid email list.
- Lead generation: Some content sites are paid entirely through lead generation — the act of securing a potential customer’s information and interest in other businesses’ services.
- Service: This could be freelance services, such as writing or SEO, which are hosted on your site.
You can use any mix of these monetizations, which can often be paired to diversify income streams on a website. Diversifying income streams not only brings in more money each month but also increases your site’s valuation should you decide to sell in our marketplace. Because you can maximize your earning potential with a content-based business, it is a great first step toward building an online income.
Other options for a low-maintenance, low start-up-cost business include Amazon Merch and Dropshipping, which are good monetizations if you’re testing out making money online.
How much start-up capital might you need?
It’s not impossible to begin your online venture for almost nothing. Besides paying for domain hosting and other small fees, you can start with limited resources — sometimes as little as $200.
Remember though, those short on cash need to be rich in time, at least in the early phases.
How much time will it take?
In the case of bootstrapping your business and starting from absolutely nothing, you’ll need time, and there’s no way around this.
A generally accepted rule by most SEOs is that Google will “sandbox” (i.e., keep a new domain from showing up on the search engine results page [SERP]) your site until about six months after it has been established. Not only will you have to clear this hurdle, but in the case of a content-based business, you will likely have to wait 12–18 months before you start seeing income.
Once your business begins to generate income, it can grow and begin to snowball, but you need time to get there, likely in the 22–25-month range before the income is anything significant.
Keep in mind that if you are truly starting a business from scratch, you must make an initial investment of time to create content, market yourself, and monetize your efforts. Time investment varies from person to person, but in the early days, you can expect to be pouring most of your free time into your business (if you are serious about launching a successful site).
However, the time investment could be done as a side project, meaning you can keep your day job.
Real Deal Examples
You can reach $50K either through making an average of $4,166 monthly over the course of a year (entirely possible, but time and effort put in will be needed) or through selling your online business.
It’s incredibly variant, but here are a few real examples of businesses that are selling for $50K or higher right now:
- This listing for an Amazon Associates business making an average of $1K per month selling at 46x for $49,529
- This listing for an Amazon Merch business making an average of $1,643 per month selling at 40x for $65,724
- This listing for an affiliate and display advertising business making an average of $2,647 per month selling at 31x for $82,070
As you can see, thanks to the healthy multiples (a multiple of a business’s net profit), these businesses can reach their goal of making $50K online in a fraction of the time a $4,166 monthly net profit needs to reach the same income goal.
With these monetizations, what’s exciting for sellers in the $50K price range is that it’s not uncommon for these deals to close fast. In the case of this Adsense business’s sale, it sold for $69K in 3 hours.
Given that it takes 1.5–2.5 years to build a business and as little as 3 hours to sell, that’s a pretty quick way to make $50,000.
Ready to start making $50K online?
Hopefully, this quick how-to gives you a better idea of your options for making a healthy salary online. With all the tangible options available, you can get started today. What are you waiting for?
If you like the idea of selling your online business to reach your $50K goal, you can easily begin the process here.
