Are you looking for ways to make money online in South Africa? Making money online is easier said than done. There are several ways you can make money online. Like, affiliate marketing, digital products, providing a service, and so on. This blog will reveal, how to make money online from all these sources.

Affiliate Marketing

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing allows marketers to sign up and receive a special referral code from selected online vendors. When you refer other potential customers to these vendors and a sale happens, you make a small commission.

How to start with affiliate marketing?

Just sign up for an affiliate program of your choice. There are thousands of affiliate programs available online that you can join. Just make sure you’re able to accept payment from these platforms!

Once you have your unique links, you can start sharing products with your unique affiliate code on your social channels and in your family and friends Whatsapps and see commission flowing!

Here are two to join in South Africa:

Digital Products

Creating digital products takes some experience and expertise. If you see yourself as an expert or very experienced on a certain topic, you can create any of the following and sell it online:

  • Courses
  • Knowledge Documents like a step-by-step PDF on how to do something

Providing a Service

If you’re a digital native and comfortable working online, there are several ways to offer your services and make money online:

Join a Freelance Platform

Join a platform like FreelanCEO (South African based Freelance Services community) and sell your services. With the likes of Covid, everyone is a digital nomad these days, so if you can work remotely, you can offer that service online. Whether it’s data capturing, designing, copywriting or something else, you can sell all of those services on these freelance platforms.

Outsourced Services

You can make things more professional by getting your own website and offering your remote services professionally. Once again, if your services can be offered remotely, you can offer companies the ability to outsource these services to you.

Blogging

Probably the most difficult way to make money online, but if you’re a good writer, you can start a blog on a topic of interest to you. Once you’ve built up a good readership, it’s time to monetise your blog.

Ways to monetise your blog

  • Do product reviews and post affiliate links to those products.
  • Run ads on your blog and charge companies to advertise (talk to us if you have a blog with good traffic that you’d like to monetise!)
  • Produce advertorials or allow paid-for guest posts – be careful not to make your blog look cheap by doing this.
  • Build a mailing list and monetise it by sending your subscribers timed and well-targeted offers from advertisers – you can include affiliate links here too.

Influencer Marketing

Becoming a social media influencer takes time and a lot of effort, but can be very rewarding. The big social media influencers receive huge amounts of money for promoted posts. Make sure you work in a niche that you love and understand so that you can build an authentic and engaged audience. Followers don’t want to feel a sales pitch coming to them every 5 seconds, so it’s better to provide more value and entertainment than push a marketing agenda. That takes time.

In conclusion

Digital savvy workers often combine many of the above to develop a portfolio of digital assets that they can monetise to make money online in South Africa. You don’t need money at all to start as there are many free social media and blogging platforms available. Once you build up an audience, however, you’d want to build a personal brand and put in some effort to make your services more professional.