1. Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is my personal favorite, not because you can make insane amounts of money but because this is the only way that you can control.
If you don't know what affiliate marketing is then it's very simple to understand.
For example, a merchant wants to sell his product so he decides to give a certain percentage as a commission to anyone who helps him sell it. You become an affiliate with that product and for every sale that you make, you earn a certain percentage of the sale amount.
And the more efforts you put in, the more sales you will make and your earnings will be a lot more. That's the reason I consider Affiliate marketing as the best way to make money online.
You can try different approaches with affiliate marketing like you can build niche sites promoting a particular product or use your email list to recommend a product to your readers. I am not a big fan of email marketing but it works much better than other ways.
The best way that works is promoting the products and services to your readers that you personally use. Pat Flynn is a great example in this case because he makes a ton of money by promoting products that he uses.
2. Google Adsense
The second best thing that you can use in 2016 is Google Adsense. This method has been the biggest and probably the most popular way to make money online since its inception. The reason this is in the list is because it is a great way to earn a passive income.
Google Adsense is an advertising platform that serves third-party ads on your blogs and websites and pays you money for every click on those ads. It was quite easy to make money with it in its beginning days but in the more recent years, it has become strict and it's not that easy to use it.
Getting approved with Google Adsense is the biggest hurdle between you and your passive income. But once you get approved with the service, you can easily add the ad banners on your site and monetize your traffic. If you are planning on applying for Adsense, then you might want to take care of a few things before applying.
It doesn't mean that you need a high traffic blog to earn huge income. It all depends on the CTR (Click-through Rate) and CPC (Cost Per Click) and even if you get decent traffic, you can make much more income compared to other sites. So you need to focus on improving the Google Adsense CTR of your site and the CPC of the ads.
3. Sponsored Posts Reviews
Reviewing products is one of the biggest ways that many bloggers make money and it's only about to grow because blogging is evolving and people are now diverting their attention to the bloggers to promote their products and services.
Sponsored posts are simple posts where a person or a company pays you to write a post about their products or mention it in your post with relevant content. This can be either a single article or a series of articles.
If you have a blog with decent rankings and authority then you will automatically attract the advertisers and make money by writing content on your site. You can also join various sites that act as a middle-man between you and the product owners.
The prices for sponsored posts may vary depending on the quality of the blog and so you can refer this article on how you should charge for such posts. You can even refer to this article by Erik Emanuelli as he tells you how to make money with sponsored posts.
4. Video Blogging
Video Blogging is picking up pace and more and more bloggers are now creating videos for their readers. There are various channels on YouTube on different topics that make a ton of money by creating original videos.
If you want an example, then the best one is MKBHD on YouTube. The channel is created by Marques Brownlee who publishes technology-based video reviews on his channel. His channel currently has 2.1 million subscribers making him one of the best tech reviewer on the Internet.
If you think that you need some professional skills to become a successful video blogger then you need to see one of the biggest YouTube channel, PewDiePie. which boasts of a whopping 33.7 million subscribers. The owner of the channel, Felix Kjellberg plays games, records it and publishes it on his channel. Take a look at some of his videos and you won't even understand how the channel is so popular.
So I think you get the picture. You don't need to have a particular talent, you can create videos on anything that you like and publish it on YouTube.
5. Selling Apparel
If you have been online for a while then you might have noticed that a lot of people are now selling t-shirts to people online using various sources like Facebook. The biggest player right now, in the market, is Teespring.
The idea behind Teespring is very simple you create a design for a t-shirt, then you upload your design and set your goals and prices for that t-shirt. Then you bring traffic to your sales page and once people start buying your t-shirts and you hit your goal, the designs will go into print and will then be shipped to every one who ordered.
You don't have to spend any money in creating an account or printing and selling the t-shirts. In fact, you don't have to worry about any of these things. All you have to take care of is creating an appealing design and bringing relevant traffic to your designs, be it free traffic or paid, that's up to you.
There have been a lot of success stories about people making it big with Teespring but the best one out there is about Hung K. who made thousands of dollars off a single design. using free traffic.
There are still many niches that you can target and seeing the market for the t-shirts, a lot of different sites have come up, like Fabrily. and a quick search on Google will give many results.
6. Content Writing
All the websites, blogs, online publications, press releases, everything online needs high quality content and there are people who are on a constant lookout for talented writers.
If you are good at writing, if you can do proper research work and write articles with real facts, then you can build your career as a content writer. You can do freelance content writing or work for some sites or publication on a salary basis, it completely depends on you.
There are various blogs out there who teaches you how to write content and how to land new clients. You can read the articles at Writers in Charge and follow Carol Tice from Make a Living Writing if you are looking to become a writer.
It might be tough in the beginning days and you should focus on building your portfolio before approaching high-paying offers. And if you just want to make money by writing on various sites, then you can refer to this post about sites that pay you to write.
7. Become a Tutor
If you are really good at some thing than you should try teaching others for a fee. You can become an online tutor to make money online in 2016 as there are various ways to do it.
Sites like Udemy have made way for people who are really good at some thing to make a living online by creating courses and teaching others from around the world. On Udemy, you can easily find courses on Photoshop, HTML/CSS, PHP, Android and a lot of other different topics and if you are good at it, why not create a course and become an online tutor.
8. Web Designing
Web Designing is never going to saturate because the businesses are moving online, the eCommerce business is booming and people are now realizing the potential of Internet.
More and more people are creating websites every day and thus the demand of talented web designers have increased. So if you are good at web designing and development then you can easily find such jobs from sites like Elance and oDesk. You can easily make more than $1000 from a single assignment.
If you are looking to learn designing and coding, you should spend more time at W3Schools or join a designing class in your city.
9. Sell Your Services
Selling your services are one of the biggest income source of most of the online marketers. Web designing can also be considered as a service that you sell.
If you know about blogging a lot and how it works and you are really successful at it then you can create a blog consulting service and help other budding bloggers. There are some really successful bloggers like Harsh Agrawal and Matthew Woodward who offer blog consultation services.
There are still a lot of different ways to make money online like blog flipping. copywriting, CPA marketing, drop-shipping and others but according to me, these 9 ways will be the best ways to make money online in 2016 .
I hope that you agree with me and if you have any other awesome way that you are going to use to make money in the new year then I would be glad if you could share it with us.
