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When it comes to making money online, it can be hard to find ways that aren’t a waste of time or scammy.
For me, it has been important to find ways to earn money online because I have always had the goal of living a remote or destination independent lifestyle. In other words, a lifestyle that doesn’t require me to stay in one place to make money.
I’ve tried a few things over the past few years and thought I would take the time to write about my experiences with different platforms.
I’ve listed these platforms from oldest to newest. So, the ones that I’ve been with the longest to the ones that I’ve joined recently.
I started my first Etsy shop when I was starting to get familiar with Adobe Illustrator. Pretty Printin’ Amazing is the place where I sell printable party decor and stationery. I started out selling designs that someone might want to use when hosting a party or event (like invitations, bottle wrappers, and place cards) and I have since started to introduce designs that someone giving gifts might want to use (greeting cards and printable wrapping paper).
At the time, I knew that I wanted to get into designing logos and brand identities but I was super familiar with using Illustrator. Setting up this Etsy shop was my way of working on fun projects that allowed me to get familiar with the functions in Illustrator and make a little bit of money selling digital products.
I don’t make a huge amount of money from sales and, of course, 2020 wasn’t exactly the greatest year for the party industry (thanks a lot Covid). So far, my most popular products have been my Mexican themed products. I have a series of sugar skull party decor designs (all printable digital downloads) that are always really popular for Day of the Dead and I also have a series of papel picado greeting cards (also all printable digital downloads) that have also gotten a lot of sales.
I joined Swagbucks a few years ago based on curiosity. I had come across a random blog post on ways to earn extra cash online, probably related to taking surveys or “work from home” searches, and decided to give this website a try.
The idea behind Swagbucks is to accumulate points or “Swagbucks” (SB for short) and then once you have a certain amount, you can redeem them for gift cards.
At first I wasn’t really into the idea of taking surveys so most of my Swagbucks earned were from purchases made. Every time I made a purchase online, I would go to the “Shop” section and click on the Swagbucks link so that I would get a little something back from something that I already had intended to purchase or pay for.
Up to now, I have used the Swagbucks link to make purchases or pay for things on Vistaprint, Sephora, Amazon, and Expedia, but I have other stores added to my “favourites” for future purchases with Etsy, Hotels.com, Groupon, and Henry’s Camera.
When I was first getting started on the platform I had a goal of saving up a large amount of Swagbucks. That way, I could redeem it for either a Paypal or Amazon gift card and treat myself to something new on Amazon (like more camera gear). Lately, I’m enjoying redeeming smaller SB amounts for a $10 or $25 Cash Paypal gift card.
To reach my monetary goals, I try to use the website once a day and take surveys until I reach my daily Swagbucks goal. When you reach your daily goals, you earn bonus SBs for the day and when you reach your consecutively for more than 7 days then you earn more bonus SBs.
That is just one strategy that I’ve been practicing to earn a bit of extra money. The other was that I installed the SwagButton on my Firefox internet browser so I get alerted to any Swag Codes out in the internet world. Swag Codes are just “coupon codes” that you can enter and earn a couple of extra SBs here and there.
If you’re interested in checking this website out, click this link and you’ll also get an extra 300 SB if you earn 300 SB within 30 days. Really, earning 300 SB is fairly easy and probably the equivalent of completing around 6-7 surveys. Usually I only aim to make around 100 SB per day so I’ll spread out my survey taking activity and only complete 2-4 surveys per day.
When I started to get a little braver with getting into designing logos I decided to join Freelancer as a way to practice creating logos for other people. At the time, I still wasn’t sure what my niche was. I didn’t know who I wanted to design logos for so I thought this might be a good way to figure that out or at least see what concepts I got more excited about versus not.
Up until recently I haven’t had too many bad experiences. I have only been entering designs for contests as opposed to submitting a bid for projects. I felt like bidding for projects would be based on dollars and that clients would mostly choose designers who were offering to do work at a cheaper rate.
I don’t know how true that is but because there are a lot of freelancers on the website from countries like India and Pakistan, where a living wage is a lot lower than in North America. I felt like I couldn’t compete in that way if it was based solely on dollar signs.
Instead what I’ve been doing is submitting designs on contests that way the winner would be chosen on quality of work rather than dollar amount.
For the most part, I’ve been ok with the whole contest submission. I haven’t won a lot of contests so there have been a couple of times when I would be inactive on the website for a few months just to give myself a break from the rejection.
I suppose rejection itself isn’t the end of the world but when you lose to a design that you know is created from stock graphics or logo generators, it does kind of deplete my motivation.
I put a lot of time, effort, and creativity into submitting custom logo designs that I’ve sketched out by hand and then turned into digital, vector designs. On Freelancer, I’ve found that most clients aren’t at the level of appreciating or wanting custom logo designs.
Aside from the frustration of not being chosen as the winner so many times, I did encounter my first negative experience where Freelancer decided to lock money owed to me because of some “security issue.” I got paid for a contest that I won and went to withdraw my funds because I had finally gotten past their minimum withdrawal amount. The day that they were processing withdrawals I got an email notification to say that my withdrawal request had been cancelled and that the funds had been locked because of a “security issue” with the employer.
I have since been reading a lot on this issue and learning that it is a common thing to happen on Freelancer and that some don’t end up getting paid the amount owed to them. It’s disappointing because the client/employer has already received the designs. In all honesty, I have low expectations for the outcome of this situation. I won’t be surprised if I don’t end up getting the money for that particular project but it is a learning experience that is pushing me to other ways of earning money online.
I have now received those previously locked funds from Freelancer but I had to reach out to their support teams after the specified “waiting time” ended and let them know that the time period had lapsed so where’s my money.
I’m not going to say that I’m never going to do anything on this website ever again because I did win contests before and didn’t have any problems getting paid or withdrawing the funds in the past. This recent issue is the first time that I’ve experienced any kind of frustration with payments.
Facebook Marketplace
Facebook is a place that I have mixed feelings about. I only started using this platform to try and sell physical items when the pandemic started. At this time, I hadn’t tried posting things on Facebook Marketplace, I just posted items on my feed and then shared them to groups or asked friends to share it on their feeds.
When I did finally decide to try listing things in Facebook Marketplace, I didn’t have the best of luck. I tried to list some of my handmade products but out of everything that I listed, I only made one sale.
Some of my family members have had better luck selling used items like furniture, books, and baby items but for my handmade products, I didn’t have as great of an outcome.
I decided to open this second Etsy shop in February 2021 after working on a project for my graphic design YouTube channel.
At the time, I was looking for editable video animation templates that vloggers or video content creators might find useful for their food vlogs or DIY/home renovation videos or their daily vlogs.
A lot of the search results that I found led me to a lot of Adobe After Effects templates, which is a great solution for experienced video editors. I wanted to provide a more do-able solution for those DIY video content creators with limited experience in creating videos so I opened a second Etsy shop and added video animations that were created using Keynote.
So far, I’ve made a decent amount of sales. I still feel like I need to add more products to my shop and be more consistent with publishing new products but I am satisfied with the activity and interest in my shop and will continue building on it.
After seeing many videos on YouTube from content creators who were sponsored or just seeing ads on and during videos, I finally decided to check out Skillshare. On YouTube, most content creators and ads were promoting Skillshare for the learning aspect but I decided to do more research on the teaching side.
I spent a lot of June 2021 researching to see what was and wasn’t on Skillshare and figure out a topic I could teach. Towards the end of June, I came up with an outline for my course and started to record it. Then, in the middle of August I published my first class on Skillshare.
I’m so used to joining platforms and not seeing any kind of revenue until I make a minimum amount but on September 16, 2021, I received an email that notified me that $5.69 USD were deposited into my Paypal account.
I know it’s not a large amount but because I really thought I needed to make a minimum amount of watched minutes before I earned any kind of payment. Needless to say, I was pretty much jumping up and down after seeing that email and have been more motivated to create and publish more classes.
If you are interested in checking out my class or any other classes on Skillshare, sign up with this link to take advantage of their free trial for one month.
A couple of platforms that I did try but ended up deleting my account with were Redbubble and Clickbank.
Redbubble was the first platform that I looked into for selling products with my designs on it. Originally, I wanted to look for a platform that would go well with my Etsy shop for party-related items but I decided to delete my account because I felt like I was getting into too much, too soon. I may look into getting back into either Redbubble or Society 6 in the future but, for the time being, it just isn’t the direction I want to take my designs in.
Clickbank was a platform that I came across from someone who offered a lot of valuable advice for Etsy shops and passive income opportunities. It’s an affiliate marketing network and I thought I would check it out to see what it was all about. When I started to look at the products on the website I just felt like there wasn’t anything that fit with what I could talk about or that I could really trust. I’m not one of those people who can promote products that I don’t believe in and I just felt like there were a lot of spammy products on that website.
Do you have any experiences with any of the platforms that I’ve listed above? Are there other platforms that I should consider exploring in terms of establishing more online passive income streams?