With the growth of online marketing, opportunities have emerged for teens to make money online. All you need is a reliable earner to act as a funnel for payments. You can then integrate Google Adsense with your WordPress site to earn money from displaying ads.
While there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to how old you can be to make money online, in general, you can begin to make money at 14. You just need to follow a simple training and then get to work.
Create a blog
If you’ve been following along since the beginning of this series, you know that I advocate starting a blog. Now more than ever, it’s the perfect platform to accumulate relevant learnings and make money from a third party (i.e., advertisers).
Blogs provide multiple advantages for those looking to make money online (and please don’t mistake a blog for a simple website—a blog can be so much more). To start, you’ll want to build a small audience. Ideally, you’ll want to have around 500 subscribers. This will give you the best chance of drawing in the right types of audience.
Further, you can take this opportunity to build a brand for yourself. The power of a brand is that it gives you credibility. If you have a blog associated with an established business, you’ll have the opportunity to tap into the goodwill of that brand. For example, if you’re writing about fashion, you could become the go-to source for information about fashion blogging.
Monetising Blog content
Once you’ve built your audience, you can take the opportunity to monetise your content. There are multiple ways to do this, but the simplest is to go with a simple affiliate marketing scheme. With affiliate marketing, you’ll be earning a commission when someone clicks a monetised link or buys a product that’s promoted on your blog. For example, let’s say you’ve built a fashion blog around female clothing. You can introduce customers to stores that sell female clothing and provide them with a referral link. If someone clicks the link or buys a product that you’ve recommended, you’ll earn a commission.
This is one of the best ways to make money online because it requires very little effort. Simply choose your affiliate products and connect them to your blog. For the majority of products, this will be a one-click process. Affiliate marketing is highly flexible and easy to set up and then monetise. What’s not to love?
How Do You Make Money?
Now is the perfect opportunity to evolve your mindset and consider how you might actually make money online. If you’ve been applying random marketing strategies without a clear goal in mind, you might find yourself falling into a rut. This is why it’s important to set a monetisation goal. Once you’ve identified a niche, you can then find the best ways to reach your audience. Consider what makes your product special or different from other products in your niche. With affiliate marketing, you’re mainly aiming to reach other bloggers and influencers in your niche for example, to become the go-to source for information on fashion blogging. Consider the influencers in your niche to see who’s curated the best content.
You can also look to see which products are performing well and build on that. A quick way to find this info is to use Google Trends. You can enter a keyword or topic and it’ll give you a heat map showing which keywords are performing well at the moment and which aren’t. You can then use this to identify the keywords and topics you should be specialising in.
Make Money With Affiliate Marketing
There are so many ways to make money online with affiliate marketing. I’ve covered the basics pretty well in this article, but to be completely transparent, I’ll list a number of my own income streams below. I’m sure you’ll find a way to make money online that appeals to you.
In 2017, I made over $200,000 from YouTube alone. The income from this channel continues to grow steadily each year. Additionally, I’ve built a brand for myself as an affiliate marketer. Through affiliate marketing, I’ve been able to monetise my blog content and subsequently, my YouTube content. Over the past two years, my income has doubled from affiliate marketing combined with blogging.
Here are some of my other income sources:
- Amazon Affiliate Sales
- Podcasting
- YouTube Income
- Google Adsense
- Etsy
Now that you have a basic understanding of how a 14-year-old can make money online, it’s time to get to work. Don’t worry, this is a very basic guide. All you need is some time and a bit of courage to follow through. In the next section, we’ll discuss some tips on how to become a blogger. Stay motivated and you’ll soon be making money online.