How to Make Money Online in India Even If You Are a Beginner in 2020

Do you want to know how to make money online in India? If yes, you’re in the right place.

Earning online is not rocket science. There are millions of people who are using online to make millions of dollars every single year. There are also successful affiliate marketers like Pat Flynn who are making $100,000 every single month from their websites alone.

So there’s no shortage of making passive income when it comes to online. But the only thing we want you to know is this: don’t look for shortcuts.

Here’s a thing you should always remember: don’t giveaway your money to those people or websites that says you can make a thousand dollars (around 65 thousand rupees) within 24 hours. Those are online scams which you should avoid at all costs.

That said, we’re going to talk about some of the legit ways you can use on how to make extra money online in 2020 and beyond.

This post is going to be detailed so grab a cup of coffee and start finding legitimate ways to earn online money as a beginner. Let’s get started without much ado.

How to Make Money Online In India: 6 Legitimate Ways for Beginners In 2020

how to make money online in India as a beginner

Table of Contents

How to Make Money Online In India: 6 Legitimate Ways for Beginners In 2020

1. Use online learning platforms to get paid as an instructor

There are a ton of people who are using online learning platforms such as Udemy to earn millions of dollars every single year by selling what they already know.

Imagine if you can get your hands on just a fraction of that, you’ll be making thousands of dollars (if not millions) every year and that even while you sleep. Just create your course out there on sites like Udemy and watch the extra cash flowing.

Let’s talk about the most popular 3 online learning platforms you can use to become an instructor and for getting paid online.

Udemy
Coursera
Skillshare

Let’s talk about how you can use each one of them to earn passive income as an instructor by creating courses online in 2020 and beyond.

How to make more money as an instructor at Udemy?

If you’re into online, you should probably know about Udemy. It is one of the biggest online teaching marketplaces with over 80000 courses and 24 million students worldwide. It is where thousands of instructors make millions of dollars by selling their courses ranging from programming to marketing to SEO.

If you curious to find out how to make dollars as an Udemy instructor in 2020 and beyond, here are few powerful tips you can use.

Get the basics right

If you want to become an instructor at Udemy to make online, you need to have a few minimum requirements such as;

Presentation software (be it Keynote on Mac or Powerpoint or Windows)
Screen recording software (Camtasia or ScreenFlow)
Webcam (HD cam will be even better)
Microphone

If you’ve the above requirements, you can right away create a video course, create lessons in video format and upload it on to Udemy to start making dollars.

Find the perfect course topic for Udemy

The only difference between a successful course that makes a lot of money and the one which doesn’t make even a sale on Udemy is the course content. If the course topic is desired by enough people, you can attract a lot of people to buy courses from you (even if you don’t have any prior experience).

Just make sure to find your core skills and find topics that actually solve your target audience problems so you can come up with profitable course ideas to make more on Udemy.

How to make profits as an instructor at Coursera?

Millions of students are flocking on Coursera (which is another popular platform for learning online) to learn something or find solutions to their problems. So if you can find way to scratch your audience problems by creating a course, you can generate a ton of money.

Here are few essential tips for you.

Know how to write a perfect landing page

How you create your landing pages on Coursera to sell your courses is what makes or breaks your success. Here are few quick tips to write great copy on your landing pages while creating courses on platforms like Coursera.

Keep the sentences you use on your landing pages short. Use short words instead of long sentences because they are easy to understand. People can also skim through your landing pages quickly.
Don’t use jargon and never get fancy with your copy. Instead use simple language that even a 3rd grade should understand your landing page copy.
Keep an eye on top selling landing pages on Coursera to see how they are using headlines, description and structuring their course contents to capture people’s attention.

Create an engaging promo video for your Coursera course

The best way to create curiosity among people to buy your course on platforms like Coursera is to tease them. You can give you a preview or sample taste of how your course content looks like by making a promo video around it.

Not so many course creators do this but if you’re just starting out and want to make more sales from your course, make sure to create an appealing promo video for your course (it can be as short as 1 minute or even 30 seconds).

How to monetize your skills as an instructor at Skillshare?

Skillshare is another biggest online learning community for creators which has access to over 3 million members worldwide where instructors make a ton of money by selling courses which are available through subscription.

If you curious to find out how to make a lot of money as a Skillshare instructor in 2020 and beyond, here are few solid tips for you.

Understand the key principles to promote

The #1 key to make more money as an instructor at Skillshare is promotion. Learn how to promote your course to ensure high sales. It doesn’t matter how great content your courses has but it all comes down to how effectively you promote it.

Go find out where your target audience and customers hang out online. Is it Facebook, twitter or Instagram? Or forums or LinkedIn? Then, you can lay down ways to promote your course to generate more sales from Skillshare.

Give a money back guarantee

When people are buying something online, they are usually skeptical. You can remove the fear of buying from people by providing them a money back guarantee on platforms like Skillshare to make more money as an instructor.

You can provide a 30 day money back guarantee and promise people that if they’re not getting the results you’re promising, then they can ask for a full refund. If you can show that they have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain, your course sales will skyrocket.

2. Become a holiday advisor to earn from home

Do you want to earn from home? Did you know that you can become a holiday advisor and start earning money from your home?

A holiday advisor is someone who suggest visiting places, tourist places nearby, local sightseeing attractions etc and get paid in return. This is really a great opportunity for someone who’s interested in earning dollars by helping other tourists to plan their holiday trips comfortably.

If you’re wondering about how you can become a holiday advisor, there are 2 major travel sites Yatra and MakeMyTrip that provide you this work from home opportunity.

Let’s dive into the details to find out how you can use both Yatra and MakeMyTrip to earn more from online as a holiday advisor.

Earn as a holiday advisor using Yatra

Yatra is India’s leading online travel companies which was launched back in 2006 which is also one of the very travel sites that provide you the opportunity as a Yatra expert (holiday advisor).

What’s the primary eligibility criteria to become a holiday advisor at Yatra?

Here’s what all you need to know;

Your age should be between 25 to 55
You should not be in a full time employment
Well traveled with decent communication skills

So what do you get in return after becoming a holiday advisor at Yatra?

You can earn from home
You can win travel vouchers to save on hotels, trips, bookings etc throughout India using Yatra platform
You can get a free chance to go out with your family for vacations

Not only that, you get all the support such as completing training and sales support you need to provide assistance to tourists by being a part of Yatra holiday advisor.

So what are you still waiting for?

Click here to become a holiday advisor at Yatra

Earn as a holiday advisor using MakeMyTrip

MakeMyTrip is another popular travel site which is used by millions of people across India to book hotels, flights etc. It also provides you an opportunity as a holiday expert to earn passive income from home.

What’s the primary eligibility criteria to become a holiday advisor at MakeMyTrip?

Here’s what all you need to know;

You should be willing to attend a 10 day training program (Its mandatory)
You should be able to invest 6 to 8 hours of work on daily basis though this is not fixed working hours
You should have a computer or laptop with internet connection at home
You should not be in a full time employment

What are your responsibility as a holiday advisor through MakeMyTrip?

You should guide guests and tourist on their holiday enquiry
You should designing Itineraries
You should be doing costing for the packages and keep a track of the payment collected
You should follow up on queries and sell holiday packages
You should attend classroom trainings, webex and con calls to become better as a holiday expert

Here’s the link to join as a holiday expert at MakeMyTrip (and click on “Work from Home” to find current vacancies).

3. Become a freelance writer

There’s a HUGE demand for content writing. Every professional blogger, SEO, marketer and small business owner is looking for talented writers to create content consistently for their sites.

There are so many people who are ready to pay thousands (if not lakhs) of bucks every single month for content writing services. Do you know why others are ready to pay so much in content writing?

Because content is what generates traffic from search engines like Google. Just don’t go for sites like Fiverr, UpWork etc where you can only attract cheap paying clients where you can’t really improve your writing skills as a freelancer.

Instead it’s better to find bloggers who are ready to pay for your content writing and start spending more time on creating quality content for them so you can benefit it two ways: one is, you’re earning from content writing and the other is you’ll be learning a lot in the process (so you can also later start a blog from scratch from it).

That said, here are few vital tips you can use if you want to earn more as a freelance writer.

Start pitching every day to get clients: When you’re getting started as a freelancer writer, no one will come looking for your content writing services. You’ve to go and find where your target clients are and start pitching them every single day.

As a rule of thumb, try to send email pitches to at least 3 to 5 new people every single day (for a month or two), even if 1% respond to your pitches, that’s 10 people who are actually interested in paying for content writing services. It then depends on how well you negotiate with your clients to start working with them.

So how can you find clients for your writing services?

The best place is start with blogs. Find out a list of blogs in various industries that are already making decent income (at least 1 lakh or $2000+ per month) to stand a chance to get paid for your content writing services. You can simply do a Google search on “money making bloggers” etc to find a list of all the top bloggers.

Most of the money making bloggers are more interested in generating revenue, driving more traffic and promoting their content to reach wider audience – so they often outsource their content writing part to others who can create good enough content for them.

Quick tip: Start your own blog, write guest post for others and use your bio in the guest posts to drive people to your portfolio or service pages where you can actually offer your freelance content writing services.

Invest in a course or mentor: If you’re completely new to online world and never made even a penny as a freelance writer, we highly recommend you to take a course on Udemy or look for any successful writer who is providing courses on how you can get paid to write.

If you have enough money or budget, you can even hire a blogger or mentor to help you with landing high paying clients. Investing money and time on a course can give you tremendous results and you can really avoid so many dumbest mistakes most freelance beginners make.

Just make sure to implement all the tips and strategies mentioned in the courses you take in order to get the results you want. After all, action is what gives you results.

Pro tip: If want to become a successful freelance writer, make sure to spend quality time in writing every single day. We highly recommend you to write at least 500 to 1000 words (on any topic that you’re interested in) every day for a few months and you’ll notice a drastic improvement in your content writing.

Become friends with other freelance writers: One of the simplest way to accelerated your income as a freelance writer is to network with other freelancers who are already earning while offering their content writing services.

That way, you can easily find out the ins and outs of freelance writing and probably find some interesting and new ways to land high paying clients offering your freelance writing services. You can find other freelancers on blogs, twitter, Facebook groups or even on platforms like Fiverr – just make sure to incentivize them in one or the other way to get help.

4. Become a virtual assistant

Did you know that Transparency Market Research recently published a report claiming that the global market for virtual assistance will be worth $7.9 billion dollars in the year 2024?

Virtual assistance industry is growing rapidly.

If you want to earn from online in India as a student, housewife or anyone who wants to earn from home, looking for virtual assistant (VA) jobs as there are so many professionals ready to pay to manage their day to day tasks online.

Realistically speaking you can easily make around $10 to $20 or even more an hour by becoming a virtual assistant within a particular industry (such as SEO, content uploading, website promotion etc).

Where can you find jobs as a virtual assistant?

We personally recommend you to give a try to both Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and LinkedIn where you can find a ton virtual assistant jobs. Apart from MTurk and LinkedIn, you can use the following major platforms to get paid as a virtual assistant.

UpWork
Fiverr
Freelancer
Guru

Although there are a ton of other platforms you can use but the above mentioned sites are where you can find a ton of virtual assistant jobs as they are widely popular.

Here are few tips if you want to earn as a virtual assistant.

Put yourself in the shoes of your potential customer: The best way to get paid as a VA is to put yourself in the shoes of your potential customer who is looking for a virtual assistant to manage their tasks.

What kind of money they are ready to offer? What are the day to day tasks they will assign? By putting yourself in the shoes of someone, you can find ways to quickly get paid using sites mentioned above.

Find out what kind of services you want to offer: Before thinking about earning dollars as a virtual assistant, it’s important for you to figure out what are the skills you already have and what services you can provide with ease.

Are you a good translator? Can you type faster? Do you code a lot? Can you do research for projects and websites? Can you do keyword research or backlink analysis for websites? By asking these questions, you can quickly find VA jobs.

5. Make money from websites

If you’re looking for PROVEN methods on how to monetize online or any part of the world, the surest way is to start a blog, create content, drive more traffic to start earning every single month.

It’s easier said than done though but it’s not a rocket science to earn more money from blogging. It’s not a get rich scheme as you have to put lots of efforts. The blog which you are currently reading now makes at an average of $10000 (more than 7 lakhs in rupees) every single month. We’re consistently generating more income every single year so blogging works like a charm.

That said, here’s an excellent tutorial on how you can start a blog on in 2020. Yes, starting a blog on platforms like WordPress costs you some money (around $100 a year) but it is worth every single penny.

If you are wondering about how bloggers earn from their websites, here are 3 of the widely used monetization strategies you too can consider from blogging.

Google AdSense or other alternatives

Google Adsense is an incredible ad publishing platform which lets you earn dollars with your content based websites or YouTube channel where it shows ads to target audience.

The more people who click on your AdSense ads, the more money you can generate. The amount of earnings you generate each month from Google AdSense directly depends on the CPC of keywords that you use within your website or YouTube to attract visitors.

So if you want to make huge earnings with AdSense, you need to use high CPC (Cost Per Click) keywords and try to get more visitors from western countries like US, UK, Canada etc.

All in all, AdSense is a great monetization source for beginner bloggers who want to make more every month from a trusted source like Google.

If you’re finding it hard to get your AdSense account approved or looking for high paying alternatives to it, you can consider signing up following websites. Some of them pay via Paypal, so get a Paypal account if you don’t have it yet.

RevenueHits
Adsterra
Media.net
Chitika
Infolinks
Taboola
Ad Maven and so on

Here’s a detailed post on best paying AdSense alternatives you can use to make more money from publishing platforms in 2020 and beyond.

Affiliate marketing to earn passive income

Do you want to earn dollars online even while you’re sleeping? Then, give a try to affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is a billion dollar industry which is only growing at rapid pace every single year. It is expected to become a $10 billion dollar industry by the year 2020.

Have a look at the following stats to know how popular affiliate marketing is.

Why affiliate marketing is a great way to earn?

If you’re wondering about why affiliate marketing is the best way to earn passive income, here are 3 major reasons.

Low cost: With affiliate marketing, you don’t need to invest any money or capital. Of course, it’s better if you have access to few premium tools like SEMrush to increase your search traffic in order to generate more sales but it’s not essential.
No inventory required: The best part about picking affiliate marketing online is that you don’t need to create products or rent any stuff. You simply need to find the right products that are created or developed by someone else, promote them on your website or social media using your affiliate referral and start generating commissions on every successful sale.
Ability to earn passive income: Affiliate marketing helps you make dollars online even while you sleep. Enough said!

That being said, here are 3 of the best affiliate marketing tips we have for you if you want to become a successful affiliate marketer in 2020 and beyond.

Choose products that meet your target audience needs. There’s no point in promoting a product that pays you high commissions but you won’t get even a penny if your target audience don’t even need them.
Promote only a handful of affiliate products instead of picking a ton of products. That way you can put more serious efforts on making more commissions.
Always track your progress and make necessary tweaks in your affiliate marketing strategy so you can consistently increase your overall average affiliate commissions.

If you want to learn more about affiliate marketing, here are few top affiliate marketing blogs you can follow to learn more about it.

Selling own products from your website

Information products is all about teaching something via products, which could be delivered as text, audio or video. That means, information products can be anything from eBooks, podcasts, videos.

There are a lot of people such as Darren Rowse, Pat Flynn etc who are selling information products like eBooks to earn passive income online.

The only thing you need from information products is to build an email list where you need to educate your audience about the products you create.

That way you can build trust and strong rapport with your audience which you can use it later to easily buy your stuff.

If you’re wondering about how to create information products online even if you’re a beginner, you should check out this awesome post.

6. Start selling your products on eCommerce platforms for high profits

If you already have offline store or shop where you sell various products to other people, why not selling them online? There are so many eCommerce platforms where you can easily sell your stuff online for high margins.

Become a seller on Flipkart

There are over 10 crore registered customers are waiting to buy products from you on Flipkart. It is undoubtedly the #1 India’s eCommerce platform.

You can literally sell everything from utensils to clothes to electronic gadgets to make high profits and margins.

What are the minimum requirements to sell on Flipkart?

If you want to start selling on Flipkart, you need to have the following:

PAN Card (Personal PAN for business type “Proprietorship” and Personal + Business PAN for business type as “Company”)
GSTIN/TIN Number (not mandatory for few categories)
Bank account and supporting KYC documents (Address Proof and 1 cancelled cheque)
You need to have a minimum of 1 unique product to sell on Flipkart

Here’s how you can become a seller on Flipkart:

To start selling on Flipkart, you need to register yourself from here (free to join)
List your products under specific product categories
Once someone places an order, pack the product and mark it as ‘Ready to Dispatch’. Flipkart logistics partner will pick up the product and deliver it to the customer. So there’s no need for you take all the hustle to ship the products to the customer.
Once the order is successfully dispatched, Flipkart will settle your payout within 7-15 business days based on your seller tier.

The payment will be made directly to your bank account through NEFT transactions.

Become a seller on Amazon India

Amazon India is quickly becoming the one stop solution for most consumers who wants to buy stuff online and it offers some of the amazing benefits to the sellers such as no fixed costs, fast and free product shipping, timely payouts, customer support and so on.

What are the minimum requirements to sell on Amazon India?

If you want to start selling on Amazon India, you need to have the following:

Update your bank account details supporting KYC documents including address proof
Setup basic account information like invoice address, customer service contact etc.
GSTIN
PAN Card (Personal PAN for business type “Proprietorship” and Personal + Business PAN for business type as “Company”)

Here’s how you can become a seller on Amazon India:

Click here to register yourself as a seller on Amazon India (free to join)
List your products using their listing tools
As soon as someone places order, you can view and manage it from your order management dashboard which is enable with Amazon Easy Ship to deliver the products the products from you to the customers for free
You can also list your products international by selling in the US and EU through Amazon

Your payments will be deposited directly into your bank account within 7 days.

Become a seller on eBay India

We usually find a ton of new items on sale on eBay India when compared to other eCommerce platforms like Amazon, Flipkart etc. eBay India is another largest eCommerce site where most people are interested to sell their products.

What are the minimum requirements to sell on eBay India?

If you want to start selling on eBay India, you need to have the following:

You must have a valid and active user id of eBay Website
You must have its principal place of business
You must hold a valid Permanent Account Number (PAN) and Tax Identification Number (TIN) for doing online transactions

Here’s how you can become a seller on eBay India:

Register as a seller in eBay India (it’s free to join)
List your item and provide all the details such as title, product description etc
Once the buyer buys the product from you, you’ll get a payment confirmation from PaisaPay, upon receiving it, you need to ship the item to the buyer within 3 days
You need to pick a courier company such as Bluedart, FedEx etc to deliver the item to the buyer within 7 days

eBay transfers your money to your registered bank account which takes 3 to 21 days depending on the seller status.

FAQs

Here are few frequently asked questions on how to earn more dollars online as a beginner in 2020 and beyond.

1. How do I make money online in India being a student?

Although there are a ton of ways to earn as a student such as data entry jobs, going to survey sites and filling surveys, clicking on ads etc but we don’t recommend them. Instead we highly recommend you to consider picking those choices which can help you improve your skills and provide passive income even in the long run.

That said, for students who want to earn, we recommend blogging, affiliate marketing, freelancing and becoming an instructor on sites like Udemy. They not only expand your knowledge but you can also become an expert in the long run.

Read: Online Jobs For Students: How to Make Dollars Online As A Student in 2020

2. Are there any online jobs from home without investment?

Yes, of course there are a ton of online jobs from home where you don’t need to invest anything except your time. These include data entry jobs, filling captchas, freelancing, filling online survey, online micro jobs (such as sharing a page, giving review or rating for a product) etc.

That being said, we highly recommend you to focus on finding those online jobs where you can get paid even in the long run such as freelance writing, designing or coding etc instead of looking for shortcuts.

3. What are the best freelancing sites in India I can use to earn?

Here’s a list of some of the popular freelancing sites you can use to find freelance writing, designing or other freelancing related work in 2020.

Broxer
Truelancer
Touchtalent
WorknHire
FreelanceIndia
Peopleperhour
Fiverr
Engineer Babu
UpWork

Read: Top 10 Best Fiverr Alternatives for Freelancers In 2020 to Make More Money

4. How do I earn money through blogging in India as a beginner?

We actually wrote a detailed post on how these top 10 Indian bloggers are making money from blogging where you can find a ton of PROVEN ways through blogging even if you’re a beginner.

5. How do people monetize from YouTube?

There’s a thing called Google AdSense which most YouTubers use to monetize their videos where Google pays for the advertisements which appear on the videos you’re watching on YouTube. There are lots of advertisers who are advertising their products and services through YouTube platform.

Besides AdSense ads, people also use other monetization strategies like sponsored reviews, YouTube “Sponsor” button, brand collaborations etc to earn passive income from YouTube. It all comes down to your target audience and the kind of videos you’re uploading on YouTube.

Recommended resources around making money:

Final Thoughts

So there you go. We have compiled the best methods on how to make money online even if you’re a beginner. All the methods mentioned on this post are truly legitimate and with consistency and hard work, you can easily earn even from home.

Let us know if you have any questions to making money online as a beginner in the comments below.