10 Ways to Make Money Online for Beginners: Earn $100 Per Day (Honest Reaction)

Most “10 ways to make money online” videos are padded lists built to sell you something at the end. I sat down and watched this one by Sam and went through it method by method, not to dunk on it, but to tell you what I actually think after building my own online income across more than half of these methods. My name is Alston Godbolt and I have been earning money online long enough to separate what actually works from what sounds good in a YouTube title.

The original video frames everything around hitting $100 per day. That is a real goal and one I want you to reach. But the path matters a lot. Some of these 10 methods get you there faster. Some will drain months of your time before you see a dollar. A few have hidden costs the original video glosses over. My job here is to go through all 10 with you honestly, tell you what I know from personal experience, and help you figure out which one fits where you are right now.

What You’ll Walk Out With

Which methods require zero startup money and which ones need real capital before you see a return
Why faceless YouTube channels built on AI voice are riskier in 2023 than most creators admit
The Pinterest trick that gives small blogs a traffic advantage over large brands in competitive niches
What the original video left off the list that I think is actually the most sustainable income stream
The real reason Amazon affiliate marketing beats ClickBank as a starting point for beginners
My honest take on low content books, Etsy digital art, and dropshipping from someone who has tested all three
The one mistake most beginners make when creating digital art that kills their sales before they start
Which method fits your specific skills, schedule, and budget right now. Find out at finder.platformproof.com

Method 1: Branded eBay Store

The original video leads with a branded eBay store, and I think this is actually a smart starting point for one specific reason: you do not need to buy any inventory to begin. People assume eBay requires you to go source products from a supplier before you can make a single dollar. That is not true. I started by walking around my own house, taking stock of what I owned, and listing it. One of the first things I sold was NCAA College Football 14, a video game sitting on my shelf. That game sells for hundreds of dollars now because EA stopped making the series after a licensing dispute. I had no idea it had that kind of value. Most people have items sitting around that are worth far more to the right buyer than they realize.

Once you have a few sales under your belt, the next step is to watch what other successful sellers in your category are selling, find their supplier, and replicate their product catalog with your own branded store. That is how a personal house cleanout turns into a real business model. The downside is real though and the original video does mention it: shipping costs, packaging, eBay fees, and the cost of labels all cut into your margin. Nothing is pure profit. Calculate your costs before you list anything and you will avoid the nasty surprise most beginners get on their first few sales.

Method 2: Faceless YouTube Channel (YouTube Automation)

I run faceless YouTube channels. I believe in the model. But I want to be direct with you about what is going to happen to a specific version of it in the near future. The version where you use an AI voice, AI-generated images, and tools like InVideo to produce everything automatically is at serious risk of demonetization. YouTube and Google are analyzing millions of videos. They are listening for patterns. When three million videos are using the same AI voice with the same sentence structure, the platform is going to identify that and act on it. In my view, we are about six months away from a large wave of these channels losing monetization.

The right way to build a faceless channel is to use a real human voice, either your own or someone you hire, and to focus on niches where people have specific problems they are actively searching for answers to. Health, wealth, relationships, and technology all have dozens of profitable sub-niches within them. A channel called 10x Income does this well. The host is completely faceless but uses a real voice and real content. He has done well. I have a couple of channels where I hire people to handle the scripting and voiceover work. That costs money but it produces content that holds up over time.

One more thing: do not build your entire business model around the YouTube Partner Program. Use the channel to drive affiliate sales or sell your own digital products. The Partner Program is great money if you can get it, but it is not guaranteed. If you build the channel as a sales engine for products you control, the ad revenue becomes a bonus instead of the whole plan.

Method 3: On-Camera YouTube Channel

Both the original video’s host and I agree on this one: showing your face on camera is the stronger path. When people can see you, they connect with you. They come back to your channel not just because they found a helpful video but because they feel like they know you. That relationship is worth real money. It leads to higher watch time, stronger conversion when you recommend products, and a loyal audience that sticks around even when a video underperforms.

The gear argument is an excuse and I want to put it to rest. You can use your smartphone. The webcam I use in my own setup cost around $50 to $60. The people watching you do not care what you look like. They care whether you can solve a problem they have. If you can get past the discomfort of being on camera, the results come faster, the community grows more naturally, and you do not need nearly as many subscribers to make real money. My channel has under 100,000 subscribers. I published a video earlier in 2023 showing exactly what I earned in the first six months of the year. The number surprises most people who assume you need massive subscriber counts to earn serious income.

Method 4: Selling Low Content Books on Amazon KDP

Low content books are journals, planners, and coloring books where you create a nice cover and fill the interior with lined pages, blank grids, or coloring outlines. You publish them on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform and earn a royalty on each sale. The original video included this method and was honest that it is not a top pick. I agree with that read.

The problem is that Amazon itself is not a huge fan of pure low content books and large brands dominate most of the visible search results. If you want to make this work, you need to go one level up: medium content. Add writing prompts. Add haiku. Add short illustrated stories. Use Midjourney to generate AI coloring pages for specific sub-niches, military vehicles, train sets, unicorns, animals. Those narrower topics have real buyer interest with less competition. You can also sell these as digital downloads on Etsy as a second channel. The ceiling on this method is not high unless you put in the extra work to stand apart from the thousands of identical journals already on the platform. Low effort almost always yields low results, and that is as true here as anywhere.

Method 5: Ranking Articles on Google (Blogging)

Blogging still works. I have multiple blogs. I still get significant daily traffic from them in 2023. Every few months someone declares blogging dead and every few months I check my analytics and see otherwise. The people saying it is too saturated are usually the ones who tried it once, wrote ten posts, and gave up when Google did not rank them in week two.

Here is the specific tactic I use that most competitors will not bother with. Write a blog post about a topic in a competitive niche, then create 10 to 20 Pinterest pins that link directly to that post. Large brands and banks in that same niche almost never manage a Pinterest presence. A small independent blog about credit cards can outrank a major financial institution for a specific long-tail keyword if that blog has consistent Pinterest traffic pointing at it. You are getting traffic from a source your competition ignores, which signals to Google that your content is worth ranking.

Write toward a human reader, not a keyword density target. Your post should be as long as it needs to be to fully answer the question someone is asking. A 35,000-word post stuffed with filler and keyword variations is going to rank on page 17. A focused 1,200-word post that actually answers the question, linked to by 15 Pinterest pins, has a real shot at the first page. Go get the traffic that other writers are too passive to go find.

Method 6: YouTube Shorts

YouTube Shorts is a real opportunity and it operates under different rules than long-form YouTube. The algorithm, the format, and the viewer behavior are all distinct. The best way to understand what is working in your niche is to pull up Shorts on your phone and scroll. You cannot get the same picture from desktop. Pick a niche, commit to it, and post one to two Shorts per day. They are only one minute long. Two per day is doable even for someone with a full-time job.

The tactic I want to add: always send viewers somewhere off the platform. End every Short with a call to action for a free ebook, a free digital planner, or a free checklist. When they click that link and enter their email address, you have an asset you own. No algorithm can take it away. You then follow up with those subscribers through email, promoting affiliate products, your own digital products, or brand partnerships. Shorts is not just an AdSense play. It is a list-building engine when you treat it that way.

On the tool Opus Clip: it turns long-form video into short clips automatically. I tested it and published an honest review. For repurposing your own long-form content, it is useful. For clipping other people’s videos, you are spending your effort to grow their channel, not yours. Build your own content.

Method 7: Google Shopping Plus Shopify (Dropshipping)

This method is about setting up a Shopify store and running Google Shopping ads to bring buyers to it. The person in the original video made multiple six figures in profit doing this. That is real and I am not going to minimize it. My own experience here is that I looked into dropshipping, tried to understand the process of sitting in the middle between the consumer and the supplier, and it did not click for me. I did not go all in on it.

I tell you that because I think it matters. When something does not make sense to you after genuine effort, it is okay to move on and find the method that does. Dropshipping with Google Shopping ads is an established model. But you need advertising budget before you see returns, and you need to test multiple products before finding winners. The income does not come before the investment. For someone with zero budget, this is not a starting point. For someone with a few hundred dollars to test ads and a real interest in e-commerce, it is worth learning.

Method 8: Selling Digital Art with Midjourney on Etsy

I actually do this. I have an Etsy store where I sell digital art and digital products made with Midjourney. So I can give you the real experience here, including the biggest mistake I made starting out. I created art based on what I thought looked good. I made pieces I personally liked. And they sat there with almost no sales. The problem was that I was creating for myself, not for a market.

The right approach is to do the research first. Go to Etsy, look at what is actually selling in digital downloads. Find the sub-niches with buyer demand and manageable competition. Then use Midjourney to generate the specific art that fills those gaps. The tool is only as useful as the strategy behind it. Once you have the product right, point traffic from a blog or social content directly to your Etsy listings. I have a blog that ranks for specific printable art search terms and sends buyers to my store consistently without me doing additional work. Build the traffic funnel and the sales follow.

Not sure which of these 10 methods actually fits your specific situation?

Answer a few short questions and get a clear recommendation at finder.platformproof.com.

Method 9: Amazon Affiliate Marketing

Amazon affiliate marketing is one of the most beginner-friendly entry points in all of affiliate marketing, and the reason is simple: people already trust Amazon. They know the product will arrive. They know returns are easy. They are not skeptical of the store. Your job as an affiliate is not to convince them to trust Amazon. It is just to put the right product in front of them at the right moment.

The formula is straightforward. Write a blog post or film a YouTube video that reviews or compares products in a specific category. Put your Amazon affiliate links in the content. When someone clicks your link and buys that product or anything else on Amazon within 24 hours, you earn a commission. The commission rates are not the highest out there. Some affiliate programs pay 20, 30, or even 40 percent per sale, and a few pay 100 percent on the first commission. Amazon generally pays between 1 and 10 percent depending on the category. But the conversion rate from click to purchase is among the best in the industry because of that built-in trust.

This is a slow build. You will not make $20,000 in your first month. You might not make $20,000 in your first year. But if you publish consistently in a specific niche, focus your content on questions people are actively searching for rather than what you want to say, and build either a blog or a YouTube channel over 12 to 18 months, you can reach a full-time income through Amazon affiliate marketing alone. The people who tell you it does not work are usually the ones who published for 45 days and quit.

Method 10: ClickBank Affiliate Marketing via YouTube Ads

ClickBank is one of the oldest affiliate platforms on the internet. There are thousands of products there and some of them are genuinely high quality with solid conversion rates. The problem with ClickBank is not the products. It is the reputation problem created by years of beginners grabbing ClickBank affiliate links and spamming them across YouTube comments, forums, and social media without any real content or context behind them. That behavior has made a lot of people skeptical of any link that comes from a ClickBank offer, even when the product is legitimate.

Running YouTube ads to promote ClickBank offers can work. But you are spending real money on ads before you know whether the campaign will be profitable. You need to understand ad targeting, copywriting, landing page structure, and split testing to make paid traffic to an affiliate offer pencil out. This is a level-two move, not a starting point. If you have no experience with paid advertising and no budget to test, this method is going to cost you money before it makes you money. Build your organic traffic skills first and revisit paid ads when you have something to test against.

The One Thing Missing From This List: Digital Products

At the end of the original video, the host said he wished digital products had been on the list. I agree completely, and I want to expand on why. A digital product, meaning a guide, a template, a course, a spreadsheet, or a planner that you create once and sell unlimited times, gives you something none of the other 10 methods alone provides: a product you own entirely. No platform can take your commission structure away. No algorithm change makes your product disappear.

Here is how digital products stack with the other methods on this list. Build a YouTube channel or a blog in a niche you understand. As your audience grows, they will tell you, through their questions and comments, exactly what product to create. You already know what they want because they keep asking you for it. You build the product, offer it to the list you have been building through your email opt-ins, and then use affiliate marketing and content to keep growing both. This is the full picture that most beginner lists skip. Individual methods are tactics. Digital products plus content plus an email list is a business.

Honest Drawbacks of This List

A few things the original video does not address directly that I want to put on the table for you.

The timeline question is the most important one. The phrase “$100 per day” is a real goal, but the timeline to reach it is almost never mentioned. The organic methods on this list, blogging, on-camera YouTube, and Amazon affiliate marketing through content, typically take three to six months of consistent work before producing reliable daily income anywhere near that level. Go in expecting that timeline and you will stick with it. Go in expecting 30 days and you will quit at day 32 and say it does not work.

The startup cost question matters too. Several of these methods cost real money before they earn you anything. Google Shopping and YouTube ads both require ad budget. Shopify has monthly subscription fees. Even an eBay store needs shipping supplies and packaging. If you have zero budget, you are limited to the organic methods, and that is fine. But know that going in so you are not surprised when you hit the paywall in the middle of setting something up.

Finally, the methods that do not require your face, your voice, or your real creative work are also the methods most likely to be disrupted by platform changes. AI-generated content, pure low content books, and basic dropshipping arbitrage are all areas where the platforms are already making things harder. The methods that are genuinely difficult to automate, real video, real writing, real relationships with an audience, are the ones that hold up across algorithm changes. Pick the method with the longer shelf life.

Find Your X

All 10 of these methods are real. None of them is a scam. But the right one for you depends on your schedule, your existing skills, your available budget, and what you can realistically do consistently for the next six months. I built a free tool specifically to help you cut through that question. Answer a few short questions about your situation and it tells you which method fits you right now. You can find it at finder.platformproof.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can a complete beginner actually make $100 per day with any of these methods?

Yes, but not in the first week. The methods most accessible to beginners without startup money, specifically on-camera YouTube and blogging, tend to take three to six months of consistent work before producing reliable income at that level. The $100 per day target is real. The timeline to reach it is longer than most videos admit.

Which method requires the least money to start?

Selling items you already own on eBay is the closest to zero dollars required. You take inventory of what you have, list it, and sell it. Blogging and on-camera YouTube also have very low startup costs if you have a smartphone and are willing to do the work yourself without hiring anyone.

Is blogging actually still worth starting in 2024?

Yes. The key is finding angles and sub-niches that large sites and established brands will not bother with. Pair that blog with a Pinterest traffic strategy, creating 10 to 20 pins per post, and you get consistent visitors while your Google rankings build. That combination works even in niches most people consider too competitive.

Are faceless YouTube channels going to get demonetized?

Channels built entirely on AI voice and AI-generated images are at elevated risk based on the direction YouTube has been moving. The safer approach is to use a real human voice, either your own or someone you hire, and to build content that clearly reflects genuine human expertise and perspective rather than automated content production.

Is Amazon affiliate marketing worth it given the relatively low commission rates?

Yes, for two reasons. People already trust Amazon and the conversion rate from click to purchase is high compared to most other affiliate platforms. And while individual commission amounts are modest, the volume of buyers on Amazon means that a consistent content operation, a blog or YouTube channel in a specific niche, can generate meaningful monthly income over time.

What is the actual problem with ClickBank?

The problem is not the products themselves. Some ClickBank products are genuinely good. The issue is that years of beginner affiliates spamming ClickBank links across the internet without real content or context behind them has made audiences skeptical. Using YouTube ads to promote ClickBank offers can work, but it requires ad spend and a solid understanding of conversion before the campaign becomes profitable.

Should I start with affiliate marketing or create my own digital product?

Start with affiliate marketing. You will learn what your audience actually buys, which categories convert, and what problems they are willing to pay to solve. Once you have that information from real experience, create your own product in that space. You will already have the audience, the traffic, and the market validation before you build anything.

How do I figure out which of these 10 methods is the right one for me?

That depends on your specific situation, your time, your budget, and your existing skills. The Platform Proof Finder asks you a few short questions and gives you a clear recommendation based on where you are right now. It takes about two minutes and costs nothing. Find it at finder.platformproof.com.

Sources

Original video: 10 WAYS TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE For Beginners | Earn $100 Per Day (2023): https://youtu.be/REZYh7eeEzU
Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP): https://kdp.amazon.com
Midjourney AI image generation: https://www.midjourney.com
ClickBank affiliate marketplace: https://www.clickbank.com
Amazon Associates affiliate program: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com
Etsy seller resources: https://www.etsy.com/sell
YouTube Partner Program requirements: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72851
Opus Clip video repurposing tool: https://www.opus.pro