We all been there, either too broke to make something real happen or just too cheap to try it. Well, I got good news for you because you can still make money online without paying anything in 2020.
How To Make Money Online Without Investment?
So, there's 1 way you can really make money without paying anything or investing in 2020 and that's promoting affiliate products with either YouTube or Web 2.0s. Let's get to it.
Before we start, I want to make something clear. I do believe that starting a blog is still the best way to earn online, but I'll give you the best resources to do it for free.
What does that mean?
It means I'll exclude everything you need to pay for and things you'll most likely not get into if you're brand spanking new.
That means NO:
- Amazon Associates – it's getting harder to get approved for Amazon associates program and without a proper website it's not going to work
- CJ and other big affiliate networks – Same as above without already earning or at least having a decent website it's hard to get approved.
- CPA Networks – most of these will vet you hard these days and those that don't might not be worth your time. I mean, you do want to get paid?
- Private Networks – Good way to earn a lot of money but once again you need to be established. I'll write another post about these in the future.
But, wait! There are other ways on how to earn money from home without any investment that are not affiliate marketing, right?
Yes, and if you into writing content, doing tasks for pennies, or gigs for $5 or less than you can try your hand at that. In fact, you can build a whole business out of it if you spend enough time.
However, you actually have to be good at it or learn quickly, beat out the competition, and put in a lot of work before you see any results. I think my method is easier.
Make Money Online Free: Or How I Would Start In 2020
That's right, I put a lot of thought into this one and if I had to do it all again without a website, connections or any specific knowledge this is how I would do it.
All you need is a computer or a laptop, internet connection and some time to get into it!
How To Make Money With ClickBank?
Clickbank baby! It's one of the oldest and most trusted affiliate networks out there. Pretty much anyone that made money as an affiliate at one point or another promoted products on Clickbank, many still do.
In fact, my first 2 sales online EVER were on Clickbank back in July 2012, nearly 7 years ago.
I still have the screenshot to proof it. It's still one of the best feelings in the world to just log in and see you made a sale, especially first sale.
The first thing I did when it happened was take out my husband and our 2 year old daughter for some pierodgies! True story.
While I don't promote offers on Clickbank as much as I did, which is a shame because it has less drama that private offers, I still do jump on their big ticket offers from time to time.
In fact, I did a 2 week promo recently that netted me almost $6k with just 6 sales and with 1 being refunded. Here's a screenshot of that:
As you can see it clearly works and after writing this review I might just start promoting offers on it again. As once you start to make money with Clickbank you get paid by them weekly or bi-weekly without delays or having to fight for you money.
Come to think about it, I might even make a case-study out of it. Let me know down in comments if that's something you would like to see.
So, How Does Clickbank Work?
All you need to do is:
- Sign up for the account at Clickbank.com (5 minutes tops)
- Pick an offer you want to promote
- Get the link or so called hoplink on clickbank
- Start promoting it!
Sounds simple, but what's the catch?
There's not catch, if you pick an offer and get targeted visitors (probably the hardest part) you'll make sales and earn commissions. Most Clickbank offers pay from 50% to 75% commission on each sale to you.
So, if you sell a product for $50, you get $37.5 out of that if it's 75%. Pretty sweet, right?
I'm not going to do a whole Clickbank review on this post or get into each aspect, might do in another post if people want it, but let me just cover the basics on how to pick an offer.
Above is CB's marketplace with categories where you can find products to promote. All of them can make you money. Which one is the best?
The most money are in categories that include either Wealth, Health or Relationships. In fact, I earned the $90(screenshot above) from a relationship program. However, it's a good idea to start with something you're really into, or at least have an interest in/know about.
It's not necessary, but does make it easier and you sound more genuine, but about that later.
If I was starting right now and had no prior knowledge of online marketing I would go with Parenting & Families.
Why? Because I'm a mom of 3 wonderful children and, even if sometimes I need a bottle of wine after a long day, I'm always on a lookout for ways to give them the best start in life.
It's a really good niche that has a lot of passionate parents looking into parenting and or early education.
It's also one of those markets that the student can become the master. Once you're well verse in the niche you'll be able to create products yourself and have affiliate promote it. A circle a life complete.
Now, let's start on how to promote it.
YouTube Method + CLICKBANK
Pros:
- Easier to go viral/become popular quickly
- People often prefer video to text
- Dominate YouTube and Google at the same time
Cons:
- Need to make the videos
- Video quality matters
- Video can be taken down
Promoting Clickbank offers on YouTube is nothing new, but it works and if done correctly can be scaled nicely. The only thing is that you need either a phone, camera or a screen recording software and a microphone.
Don't have it? You can skip this one but seeing how almost everyone has a phone or a laptop with build in camera and mic I included this method.
Best Way To Combine Clickbank with YouTube
So, start pumping out video reviews of clickbank and bring in the cheddar?
You could, there are still some channels that only do reviews and they seem to be doing fine. However, if you really want to bring it I would suggest doing 4 educational/helpful videos for every 1 review.
I've made this mistake of doing mostly reviews with little to no content in between and it bit me in the butt. You see, reviews will bring in money, but helpful videos will give you views, subscribers with the added benefits of authority and trust.
Let me break down that further, as most people online these days see affiliate reviews as commercial posts. Which means:
- Doing only reviews with no other content = lost trust/authority
- Most money keywords around reviews have low volume = low view count
- Limit amount of products to review in specific niche = no money
Don't get me wrong, it still works and you might just cross niches to get more products, but there is a better way.
How to make it better?
Let's go back to my parenting niche example. If you don't want to buy the product yourself, after all this is Make Money Online Without Paying Anything post. What you can do is research based on other reviews and either piece a review out of that or make videos around that topic and than ask the product owner for a review copy.
From my experience they will usually give it to you for free if they see you can sell it.
Let's say you pick “Children Learning Reading” which looks like an old established product in the niche. However, this example is only for the purpose of this post, I'm not affiliated with “Children Learning Reading” nor am I promoting it at this time.
So, naturally one of your videos will be titled along the lines of Children Learning Reading Review. However, seeing how this product is about having your children learn to read in just 12 weeks the video possibilities for it are endless.
Any lights-bulbs turning on?
Just type in “teach kids to read” and you'll get a massive amount of related searches right at the bottom of Google that looks like this:
Best part? Google gives this to you for free, and every time you write a related search it will give you more on the bottom. In result providing you with endless amount of video ideas that people are already searching for.
Do you need to be an expert?
No, in fact, it's better of to come out as someone the viewer can relate to rather than be lectured by an expert. It's best to come off as someone that not that long ago was just like the viewer.
Which will be true if you're getting into a niche you're not an expert at. With time you'll transition into more of an expert, and even come out with your own product, but keep it friendly.
Personalize it
Another important part is using your own voice and experience when making videos. Try not to sound like a robot talking about pros and cons of everything. Inject some life and yourself into the videos.
If you're okay with having your kids on video, use that as well. In not, you can just record an audio of them reading for example and put that in the video.
How To Put It All Together
There are several ways to do it. You can simply target a phrase like “how to teach a 6 year old child to read” and just make a video about it and at the end you can ask them to click a link in the description that will take them to the product you're promoting.
However, I prefer to do structure it like this:
The KW Video simple means video about a search term people are looking for.
Instead of sending people the sale page of the product, which is fine as it's related, you might want to send them to your video review of the product.
This works for two reasons:
- You're warming up the audience to make the sale easier and more natural
- You're powering the review video making it rank higher in YouTube
The first one makes the sale easier as before sending your viewers to the sales page, you give them more content and why you think they should get the product you're reviewing.
For example viewer searches for “how to teach a 6 year old child to read” finds your video, watches it and at the end is redirected to what you think is the best way to do it (AKA review of the product you're promoting.)
Now, this kind of interlinking videos will increase the view count, click-through-rate as well as likes and subscribers. All of these things will help you rank higher in the YouTube algorithm.
Other things you can do to push it further:
- Write comments on related videos
- Spread the videos on social media
- Do embeds and build backlinks
However, I'll talk about this later in the review.
Web 2.0s + ClickBank – Do these even work?
Pros:
- it's free with no fees
- you can build as many as you want
- some still rank well in Google
Cons:
- It's third party so you technically don't own it
- watch out for their terms of use
- they are off putting for some people
I personally love Web 2.0s, basically web properties that you can create and post on for free. While there is much debate on the name and types it includes the idea is that you can use them without any technical set up or need for other things like hosting and domains probably describes them best.
One of my first big payouts in 2013 was generated with web 2.0s and I used them ever since. In fact, I use them on almost every project as supporting sites. Which looks likes almost exactly like the YouTube video version, except with Web 2.0s
Why does it say site/post/page?
Well, these days I use them mostly for my website as ranking that is my ultimate goal, but you can use it for web 2.0 or even a video instead of a your site or post. And it will work just fine.
In fact, I rank the “Web 2.0 KW” properties in Google the same way I rank “KW Video” in YouTube, so I know it works. Yes, despite what many people say Web 2.0 do rank, not as well as they used to, but they still do.
I just think Big gurus our there say they don't because if you're rolling in money than there are better way to spend your time than making Web 2.0s. However, seeing how this is make money online without investment, it works for us.
What Web 2.0s To Use?
Honestly, sometimes the more obscure the better. These days ranking popular web 2.0s like WordPress (.com not .org), Blogger, Tumblr, and even Weebly is not as easy. It seems people abused those too much to get easy rankings in the past and Google caught on.
However, they still pass juice so I used them in my campaigns. Just don't pick it as your money, AKA property you want to rank in Google.
Meet Over-Blog: My Favorite Web 2.0 To Rank
It seems that over-blog.com is just big and popular enough to rank well in Google, but not spammed like the other ones. Finding smaller web 2.0s, even local ones can work really well also.
However, if you're just starting now go with the OverBlog as your money web 2.0. It will be the web 2.0 that you'll post articles and reviews to, and use other web 2.0s as supporting content.
As I showed you before, you can use it the same way I did with the videos, but here's how to take it a step further:
As you can see, in this one there are 3 supporting pages for overblog. The plus of web 2.0s over videos is that each one can, and even should, have more pages/posts than just the homepage. You can use them as supporting pages with their own related keywords.
Just be careful with Web 2.0s as they can be taken down and you will lose it all. In a similar way a YouTube video can, but in my experience OverBlogs is fine and I don't remember loosing a site on their website. WordPress and Blogger is a different story.
Why are Supporting Videos or Article Important?
As you saw above I'm a big believer in adding supporting content, in both video and written post, to the main money maker. Thanks to this method you kill two birds with one stone, but be assure you no birds were harmed in writing of this post.
- You get more views/visits by having more posts/videos
- You help your video/post to be higher in YouTube and Google algorithm
Of course, you also gain authority and trust but the 2 above are crucial even if you're not well known. I've talked about this above but really want to drive the point home as it's something I was missing for the first few years of my online venture.
I was creating these little sites, or posting single videos about a topic trying to pin point buyers and get them to my page. It was trying to catch specific type fish. Which there nothing wrong if you just want to fish for a specific type of fish, but by castings a net you'll be able to feed a family.
On top of that, both people and algorithms are changing. Most folks searching for something online are no longer interested in an obscure one page website or a video just trying to sell them something. They want to have a connection with the person in the video or on the blog. That's why social media is so popular.
Same way both Google's and YouTube's algorithm are constantly trying to replicate humans actions and reactions. That's why factors like ctr (click-through-rate), time on video/post and sharing are key to ranking higher.
So let this guide help you get started on how to make money online without paying anything. If you want me to write any of other guides like these or want more information please comment below
Anna VanDem is a loving wife, caring mother and passionate entrepreneur that wished to help everyone in their online journey. Anna's focus is SEO and affiliate marketing, but she also enjoys eCom, crypto and investing (also chocolate).