Make Money Online Without Investment – Value Capitalist Blog

The usual advice about earning money online normally centres around finding your passion or area of expertise and building a niche site, a blog or a product around it. Even though this is a good advice it still requires to invest some money upfront to purchase a domain name, pay for website hosting and so on. But what if you want make money online without investment? What if you don’t even have a dollar to spare?

Bad news is your options for making money online without investment are limited. Good news is they do exist. I can think of at least a couple of legitimate strategies that will fit the bill. Please note that I will only cover the strategies that I can personally recommend. There are plenty of get rich quick and easy scams out there but I will not cover them. All of the below strategies are fully legit:

Sell Your Stuff on eBay.

Lets face it, most of us have a lot of junk in our garages and cupboards. Chance are, if you haven’t used something for more than twelve month, you don’t need it. Putting this stuff online can quickly earn you a few dollars. Depending on how much stuff you sell your earnings can run into thousands of dollars without any upfront investment. If you want to improve your chance of selling your stuff for a good price read my previous post 5 Lessons of eBay Selling.

Pros:

Free. Easy. Most people have loads of stuff to sell. You will be able to de-clutter your life and free up space.

Cons:

You need to have stuff to sell. You need to learn how to list on eBay. You need to organise shipping which takes a physical visit to a post office.

Freelance.

Freelancing also makes making money online without investment possible by allowing you to sell your skills. Skills such as writing, data entry, academic research, programming, SEO, translating and many many others are in high demand on sites such as Freelancer and Elance. All you need to do is set up a profile and start bidding for projects on offer.

Pros: 

Work from home. Most people have marketable skills to be sold this way.

Cons:

Some skills are not marketable online, for example physical skills like woodwork, unless somebody wants you to write an ebook about woodworking.  You are selling your time for money – freelancing is no different to a job except you don’t have to go to an office. You may need to build up a portfolio of completed projects to build a track record. Buyers feel much safer about giving work to freelancers with a proven track record. This can be hard for the newbies.

Write Articles for Others.

Sites like eHow, Squidoo, EzineArticles and others allow users to write articles for them and then receive a share of advertising revenue. The articles can be written on any topic and if you do your keyword research properly you can create a steady source of passive income. The more articles you write the more money you can make without any upfront investment. I know of people who make a few hundred dollars this way every month.

Pros:

Passive income. Once written your articles can make you money over and over.

Cons:

You need to be able to write original content. If you really want to make money this way you need to learn basic SEO and do your keyword research to pick the best keywords. Unless you can rank your articles in Google you are unlikely to make a lot of money.

Paid surveys.

Some companies will pay you money or give you gift certificates to do online surveys. I must say I never tried this myself but my wife once managed to earn $100 for doing a survey about kitchens. The catch was she had to do the survey in person which required to set up a time to attend a meeting and some follow up phone calls. Fully online surveys normally pay a lot less.

Buyer beware: Some paid survey companies are scams. Please do your due diligence before you sign up. Remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Pros:

Very easy. No need to write, sell, or come up with any ideas. Just answer the surveys questions and cash in.

Cons:

Low earning potential. Paid online surveys normally pay from $1 – $20 per survey. Paid surveys are not the most lucrative way of making money online without investment but if you are not doing anything with your time, a few dollars here and there beats zero dollars any day.

As you can see there is a variety of ways to make money online without any investment. Selling on eBay, freelancing, writing articles and taking paid survey can supplement your income with no upfront investment of any sort. If you can think of any other legitimate ways to make money online without investment that I overlooked please write a comment below.