There are so many ways to make money online, but this article is specifically about how to make money online without selling anything.
We are going to go over all the best ways to earn a sustainable income online while avoiding making sales.
Some of the methods that will be discussed will allow you to make money without selling a thing even if you don’t have a website. Let’s get right into it.
10 Easy Ways to Make Money Online Without Selling Anything
1. Pay per lead affiliate marketing (PPL)
Pay-per-lead affiliate marketing is a form of affiliate marketing that pays marketers for getting merchants qualified leads but not sales. These qualified leads can be new users that sign up for a free trial or free plan of a company’s software.
They can even be those that simply submit their emails on a merchant’s landing page. Merchants pay affiliates for these free leads because they hope to turn a profit by converting a number of them into paying clients.
Earning commissions using the PPL affiliate marketing model is one of the easiest ways to make money online without selling anything. All you need in order to make a ton of income is to sign up for high-paying pay-per-lead affiliate programs and get lots of qualified sign-ups for your affiliate partners.
You can use free or paid traffic sources to get traffic to these offers. Website organic traffic and social media traffic are two cool sources of free traffic to pay-per-lead offers.
The amount of money paid per lead differs significantly from one program to another. Some pay a few cents while some can pay up to $30 per free sign-ups. On a personal note, I earn an average of $5 per lead from this business.
2. Earn from ad space on your blog
It’s common for people to create blogs or websites in order to sell goods or services, but this is by no means the only way to monetize your website. The easiest way to make money online without selling products on a website or blog is to monetize it with ads.
This way, you will earn when people click on ads on your website. They don’t need to purchase anything. The amount of money each click is worth is dependent on the website niche, the value of the keyword, and the location of the site’s visitors.
There are generally two ways to host adverts on your website.
The first option is to sign up for an ad network like Google Adsense, which will insert display advertising on your website for you automatically.
The second choice is to make direct contact with potential advertisers and then manually post the advertising on your website.
Using an ad network
The easiest method for publishers to monetize their websites through ads is undoubtedly hosting display ads. It functions in a rather simple manner.
You register with an ad network like Google Adsense, Ezoic, or Adthrive once your website is launched and is receiving some traffic.
After being accepted by an ad network, all that’s left to do is add a small amount of code to your website, and you’re good to go.
As you grow, you’ll be able to adjust your ad locations, sizes, and designs to maximize your revenue, but it will be better to let the ad network do it automatically for you when you are just starting out.
RPM, or revenue per 1000 pageviews, is a common metric used to calculate your income. Your RPM can range from $2 to over $200 depending on the ad network you join and your blog’s niche.
Ezoic and Google AdSense are the two most popular ad networks that accept the registration of small blogs, but Ezoic earnings are often way more than that of Google AdSense.
Using direct Advertisements
You can always get in touch with advertisers directly to see if they’d be interested in paying to have an ad displayed on your website if joining an ad network isn’t for you.
The advantage of handling the ads yourself is that you can determine your own prices based on what you believe an advertisement on your website ought to cost.
You really need to examine the benefits and drawbacks of choosing this option because it can be time-consuming to find advertisers, create the advertising, and handle payments on your own.
3. Create a YouTube channel
YouTube is one of the few social networks where you can make money without selling anything and you can achieve this by publishing high-quality videos on your channel and joining the YouTube partner program.
This method makes it possible for those that don’t have a website to make passive income without selling. Monetizing a YouTube channel this way is also a good option if you wish to make money without affiliate marketing.
YouTube compensates creators who participate in the YouTube partner program based on the number of people who watch their videos. The payment varies according to the country and the channel’s niche.
Compared to the bulk of other social media sites, where content vanishes rapidly, YouTube videos usually have a longer lifespan. YouTube videos can still generate passive income years after you originally publish them.
The ability to flourish on YouTube without having a huge following is another unique element of the platform. The YouTube algorithm frequently promotes excellent videos with strong SEO to a target audience that isn’t a channel subscriber.
It will be wrong to assume that this way of making money without selling is not for you if you are not someone that is comfortable with the idea of creating video content that shows your face or reveals your identity.
There are ways you can earn from the YouTube partner program by uploading video content that doesn’t reveal your identity and the method I found easiest and most effective is creating videos using a video animation tool called SketchGenius.
It’s an AI app that helps me automatically create both long and short videos from written text.
4. Drop service
Drop servicing is a way of making money off of freelancing without actually selling services as a freelancer. This business model involves promoting services people are ready to pay a high amount of money for and flipping the service to a freelancer for a small fee.
You will make profits without selling from this business by acting as a middleman between clients that needs a service and freelancers that are willing to render the service at a price lower than the amount you received for it.
The profit margin of this business can be quite high if done correctly. You can start this business without owning a website by doing drop servicing on Fiverr and you can run it on a drop service website on WordPress.
To get started, you should choose a good niche for your drop service business. There are a number of profitable niches with services you can easily flip for profit, but you should only work with the ones that interest you.
Finding freelancers to do excellent jobs for a lower price after getting orders is not difficult at all. Fiverr is a freelance website where you can find lots of talented freelancers that charge moderate fees for services.
5 Earn free cryptocurrency
Earning free cryptocurrency is a way of making money from home without selling products that are rarely discussed.
Although you can’t make a lot of money using this method as you would with the other methods, you can still make a decent income that can be converted into spendable cash without investing any money.
There are a number of ways you can earn free cryptocurrency online. Signing up for free cryptocurrency apps and taking surveys for crypto are two popular methods.
You actually don’t need to have prior knowledge of cryptocurrency in order to make money with this method. In fact, some crypto trading platforms are willing to pay you for taking video courses that teach you about cryptocurrency.
The more free crypto training videos you watch, the more the amount of money you are going to make. You can earn up to $50 or more for each video.
6. Create an Instagram page
Instagram is one of the best social media platforms to make money online and there are some effective ways to make money on Instagram without selling anything.
If you are an influencer or have a decent amount of following on Instagram, you can monetize your account in ways that do not require you to own a business or sell products.
You can succeed without selling on Instagram if you create a page around one of the fastest-growing niches on Instagram, post high-quality content consistently, and build an engaged audience.
7. Receive micro payment on your website
You will be familiar with this type of way of receiving payment without selling anything if you have visited websites prompting you to donate a few dollars to the website owner.
You may take micropayments on your blog using a free tool like Buy Me a Coffee. It is a small widget that you add to your blog to allow visitors to make a small donation or buy you a coffee.
Users may pay and leave tips for the content they read or watch in this pay-per-use economy.
You may add it to your website in a variety of places, including the sidebar, all of the posts, and more! It’s a tiny (but obvious!) method for your readers to donate without feeling obligated, which enables you to monetize your site.
8. Blog on Medium
Medium.com is a content publishing website where readers pay monthly subscriptions in order to get unlimited access to stories published by writers on the platform. You can earn as a writer on this platform by joining the Medium partner program.
The program pays writers for creating content on Medium. The amount of money you will make from your stories is dependent on the number of reads they get from premium members.
To achieve success as a writer on this platform, you need to find out the niches Medium members are most interested in, join the one that equally interests you and write short and interesting stories around topics in that niche.
Just like publishing content on a blog you own, it’s important to write a lot of content on Medium in order to stand a good chance of earning a lot of money.
Medium and YouTube have similar monetization methods. If you don’t own a website and prefer to make money without selling by creating written content instead of videos, then writing on Medium is a great option for you.
9. Monetize your website with exclusive content
If you own a website, creating paid content can be one of the simplest ways to make money from it without selling. Often, you don’t have to put in much extra work. You simply keep creating blog posts, online classes, or whatever content you specialize in and charge to access some of it.
The only tricky part is creating the right balance between free and paid content. Offering too much content for free might make users feel they don’t need the content you charge for. On the other hand, charging for too much content can turn visitors away.
For this reason, paid content or memberships work best for sites that already have an established following. Users are more inclined to pay for your content if they already believe it is valuable.
10. Brand partnership
If you are a website owner with a large amount of traffic or a social media influencer, you can make money without selling products by partnering with big brands in your niche and getting paid by them to create content promoting their products.
In addition to receiving an upfront payment from companies for writing and publishing the product review, based on your contract, you could also be able to make affiliate sales.
Be as genuine as you can in sponsored postings, even while you’re being paid to write the review. Your credibility might be damaged if you don’t do it.
Conclusion
All the methods discussed in this article are easy ways to make money online without selling anything. As mentioned earlier, you can make a lot of money with some of them even if you don’t own a website.
Choose a method or a couple of methods you are most comfortable with and put in the work in order to start earning.
