If you have spent any time searching for the best way to make money online as a beginner, you already know the frustration. Every video and article promises you a shortcut, and you end up more confused than when you started. Web hosting, eBay flipping, Udemy courses, freelance web development, affiliate marketing — they all sound promising until you actually try them.
Alston Godbolt spent years testing each one before recording this video. He ran a web hosting company, sold old video games and DVDs on eBay, built WordPress websites for clients through Thumbtack, taught four or five courses on Amazon Web Services through Udemy, and kept coming back to one method above all the rest. This breakdown covers exactly what he learned from each approach and why one consistently wins for anyone starting from scratch with limited time and money.
What You’ll Walk Out With
- A side-by-side comparison of five real income methods tested by someone who actually ran each one
- The honest drawbacks of web hosting, eBay reselling, Udemy course creation, and freelance web development
- Why affiliate marketing pays you for content you created years ago
- The real math on Udemy payouts and why a $9.99 course can put just two dollars in your pocket
- How Thumbtack can charge you $50 to $60 even when a client never hires you
- What it actually feels like to wake up to a $100 commission you earned while sleeping
- A way to figure out which method fits your actual schedule — use finder.platformproof.com to find yours
The Five Methods Alston Actually Tested
Before anyone can credibly say which online income method is best, they need to have tried more than one. A lot of voices in this space have done exactly one thing and then decided that thing is the answer for everyone. Alston’s position is different because he spent years running income experiments across multiple categories before forming his opinion.
The five areas he tested are web hosting, eBay reselling, Udemy course creation, freelance web development, and affiliate marketing. Each one taught him something concrete about the real relationship between time, effort, and income. Not all of those lessons came easy.
Method One: Web Hosting
Running a web hosting company means providing server space to businesses and individuals who pay you a recurring monthly or annual fee to keep their websites online. On paper this looks like the perfect semi-passive business. You set it up, clients pay automatically, the servers run themselves.
The passive part depends heavily on the technical sophistication of your customers. When a server goes down, you deal with it. When a customer does not understand how the internet works, you spend time walking them through basic troubleshooting. Alston ran his hosting operation through Rebuilt Web Services and was fortunate to have relatively self-sufficient clients, but he is clear that this is not something you can count on. The income is good and it does run semi-passively, but “semi” is the key word. You are on call in a way that does not exist with affiliate marketing, and that distinction matters when you have three kids under four at home.
Method Two: eBay Reselling
Selling on eBay made sense as a starting point. Alston had old video games, DVDs, and household items sitting unused. He sold them, made decent money, and learned the platform. Compared to GameStop trade-ins, eBay is a clear winner. GameStop pays a fraction of an item’s actual market value. eBay connects you with buyers who will pay what something is actually worth.
The real limitation appears once you have sold everything you already own. At that point you face a choice: stop, or start sourcing. Sourcing means rummage sales, estate sales, thrift stores, and garage sales. You need to develop an eye for what sells and at what price, invest cash upfront before you know something will sell, then pack and ship every order yourself.
Gary Vaynerchuk popularized this reselling approach and many people have built real income with it. The method requires something most beginners underestimate: large blocks of available time on weekends. Alston had three children under the age of four when this video was recorded. Breaking away to spend Saturday mornings at estate sales was not a realistic option. If your schedule has that flexibility and you enjoy the treasure hunt side of it, eBay reselling can work well. If you are working full time with family obligations, the active time requirement becomes a dealbreaker fast.
Method Three: Udemy Courses
Teaching what you know on Udemy sounds like an ideal arrangement. You create the course once, students keep enrolling, and royalties flow in while you sleep. That is the pitch. The reality involves several unpleasant surprises that Alston discovered firsthand.
He built four or five courses focused on Amazon Web Services and published them on Udemy. Here is the payout math he encountered. A course priced at $9.99 is what most beginners set. When Udemy runs a promotion — and they almost always are running one — your actual take on a sale can drop to roughly two dollars per course sold. If you are the one driving traffic from outside through a YouTube channel or social media, you keep around 70 percent of the sale price, which on a $9.99 course lands between five and eight dollars. That is before Udemy’s own promotional discounts cut further into your share.
Beyond the math, there is a platform dependency problem that Alston finds more troubling than the payout numbers. When someone purchases your Udemy course, they become a student of Udemy, not your student. You cannot access their personal email address. Communication with them runs only through Udemy’s internal messaging system, which carries strict rules about what you can and cannot say. Send the wrong promotional message and the platform can ban your account entirely, taking your entire course library and income stream with it.
There is ongoing customer service to manage as well. Students ask questions. If you ignore them, they leave negative reviews. Negative reviews drop your ranking in Udemy’s search results, and the platform is crowded enough that your ranking directly affects how many new students find your courses. One creator Alston mentions on TikTok has built substantial success on Udemy, but that person has 90 courses and an active YouTube channel driving external traffic — a scale of effort that takes years to accumulate.
Method Four: Freelance Web Development
Freelance web development is genuinely accessible to beginners if you know where to find quality WordPress themes. Sites like ThemeForest sell professional templates you can purchase, install, customize slightly, and deliver to clients for a significant markup over your time and cost. The technical skill floor is lower than most people expect.
The acquisition problem is where things get painful. Alston used Thumbtack to find clients, and Thumbtack’s pricing model contains a trap that is easy to miss at first. When you submit a bid on a project and a potential client views your bid profile, you get charged an advertising fee. That fee runs around $50 to $60. It does not matter whether the client hires you or not. A business owner could browse through 50 different web developers, choose none of them, and every developer who submitted a bid absorbs that fee.
The math on that is brutal for a beginner. Spend $50 per profile view and get passed over three times before landing one client and you have spent $150 in acquisition costs before you see a single dollar of revenue. At that level of spend, running targeted Facebook ads might produce better returns — but Facebook ads are their own learning curve and their own ongoing cost. Beginners start out behind no matter which direction they turn in this space.
Web development can be a solid income path once you have clients coming to you through referrals and reputation. As a cold-start strategy with no existing network, the acquisition math is punishing enough to kill momentum before you ever get going.
Method Five: Freelance Writing
Alston also did freelance writing as part of his income mix during this period. Writing is legitimately beginner-accessible. You do not need expensive tools, certifications, or a large upfront investment. The problem is the same as with web development: you trade hours directly for dollars. The moment you stop writing, the income stops with you. There is no compounding, no residual, no scenario where an article you wrote two years ago earns you money while you are picking up your kids.
Freelance writing and web development both sit in the category of service businesses. They are honest work and they can pay reasonably well. They are not the kind of income that builds while you are doing something else entirely.
Why Affiliate Marketing Wins for Beginners
After running through every method above, Alston arrives firmly at affiliate marketing as the best starting point for a beginner. His reasoning is not theoretical. It comes from watching his own affiliate content generate commissions months and years after he originally created it.
The core mechanic works like this. You create content — a YouTube video, a blog post, a product review — that solves a specific problem or answers a question someone is actively searching for. Inside that content you include affiliate links to products or services that help the reader or viewer. When someone clicks your link and makes a purchase, you earn a commission. You do that work once. The content keeps driving traffic and generating commissions long after you have moved on to creating the next piece.
Alston describes waking up to a $100 commission he earned while asleep. He describes receiving another $100 commission while driving to pick up his kids from daycare. These are not marketing embellishments — that is what the income model actually feels like in practice once you have built a real content pipeline. At the time of this video, he had approximately 400 videos on his YouTube channel. That library is constantly being discovered by new viewers who then encounter his affiliate links and become buyers, without him doing any additional work on those old videos.
His estimate is that affiliate marketing runs about 75 percent passive once you have real momentum. The startup phase — before you have meaningful content online — runs closer to 90 percent active. You have to produce consistently before the compounding effect engages. But unlike Udemy or freelance work, the active effort you put in during year one is still paying you in year three. The work accumulates instead of expiring.
The Dirty Little Secret About Affiliate Marketing
One observation from the video stands out because most beginners completely miss it. Almost every large website you visit is running some form of affiliate marketing. That blog post comparing the best laptops? Affiliate links to Amazon. The article reviewing travel credit cards? Affiliate links earning the site a referral fee. The personal finance site with ranked product lists? Affiliate links to every financial product on the page.
This is not a gray area or a niche internet hustle. It is how the entire content economy is built. Large publishers, small independent bloggers, YouTube creators with millions of subscribers, and solo operators with a few hundred monthly readers are all using the same basic model. The only variable is scale. When you understand this, affiliate marketing stops looking like something shady and starts looking like the obvious infrastructure of how online publishing actually works and always has.
That reframe matters for beginners because many people approach affiliate marketing with skepticism at first. It sounds too passive. It sounds too good. But the websites you have trusted and used for years have been doing exactly this the whole time. The model works because it is built on genuine problem-solving. You create content that helps someone find the right product or service for their situation, they purchase it, and you receive a commission for making that match happen.
Not sure which online income method actually fits your schedule and skills?
Answer a few honest questions and get a clear recommendation at finder.platformproof.com.
The Email Advantage That Changes the Math
One specific reason Alston prefers affiliate marketing through YouTube and blogging over Udemy comes back to the email access issue. With Udemy, you cannot reach your students outside the platform. With a blog or YouTube channel paired with an email list, you can reach your audience whenever you have something worth saying.
This matters because most people do not buy on the first, second, or third exposure to an offer. They need to see it multiple times in different contexts before they feel ready. If someone watches your video and does not buy today, and you have no way to follow up, that relationship ends there. If they subscribed to your email list, you can continue adding value over time, share your story, answer common objections, and eventually make the sale when the timing is right for them rather than right for you.
With affiliate marketing running through your own platforms, you are building an owned audience that no company can lock you out of. That is a fundamentally different position than building your income entirely on Udemy’s platform, where rule changes or an account ban can wipe out your income overnight.
Multiple Revenue Streams From the Same Body of Work
Another advantage that compounds over time is how a single piece of content can feed multiple income streams at once. Alston points out that a YouTube channel built around affiliate marketing is simultaneously working toward YouTube’s own monetization threshold — 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time — which unlocks ad revenue layered on top of affiliate commissions. The same content that earns affiliate clicks can also drive visitors to a blog generating additional affiliate income and display advertising revenue.
You are not choosing between YouTube ad revenue, affiliate commissions, and email list building. A single video does all three simultaneously. That efficiency ratio is completely different from creating one Udemy course, earning a two-dollar commission per sale during a promotion, and then having to field ongoing student support questions with no access to your students’ contact information.
Honest Drawbacks of Affiliate Marketing
It would be dishonest to present all the advantages without being clear about what affiliate marketing actually costs you upfront. The passive income Alston describes is real, but it is not immediate and it is not easy to reach.
The first year or more of creating content will feel almost entirely active with minimal visible return. You are producing videos or articles consistently, watching your analytics show small numbers, and wondering if you are wasting your time. The pipeline does not generate meaningful income until it reaches a certain size and search algorithms and platforms start surfacing your content to new audiences at scale. Alston had roughly 400 videos in his library before using that as a clear example of what a pipeline looks like. Getting there took years of output.
There is also a real learning curve around keyword research, search optimization, understanding which affiliate programs pay meaningfully versus which ones waste your time, and developing a sense of what content your specific audience actually needs. None of this is prohibitively difficult to learn, but it does not arrive instantly. Beginners who expect their first affiliate article or video to generate income within a few weeks will be disappointed and likely quit before reaching the point where things start compounding.
Affiliate marketing also carries real reputation risk when done carelessly. Alston acknowledges that bad actors exist in the space who promote whatever pays the highest commission regardless of whether it actually helps anyone. The version of affiliate marketing that works long-term — and that he practices — is the version where you are genuinely solving problems and recommending things you believe in. Shortcuts to higher commissions burn audience trust, and audience trust is the only real durable asset an affiliate marketer has.
Real Numbers Breakdown: Comparing All Five Methods
Looking at the methods side by side with the actual numbers from the video makes the comparison concrete rather than abstract.
Udemy course at $9.99: During a promotion, you keep roughly two dollars. At full price with external traffic driving the sale, you keep five to eight dollars. You cannot email your students. You must answer support questions or your rating declines. Platform rules can change, and your account can be banned, eliminating your income with no recourse.
Thumbtack web development: $50 to $60 per client profile view, whether they hire you or not. You need to win enough projects at a margin that covers those acquisition costs before you see profit. You are competing against developers across the country, not just in your local market.
eBay reselling: Real money from existing personal inventory, but that supply runs out. Sourcing new inventory requires upfront cash before you know something will sell, plus time at physical sales locations, plus packing and shipping each item yourself. High time demand on weekends and evenings.
Web hosting: Semi-passive recurring revenue, but you are responsible when servers go down or customers have problems. Customer service demands scale with the number of less-technical clients you bring on. Good income category but not genuinely hands-off.
Affiliate marketing: Work created once keeps generating commissions years later. No customer service burden from the products you recommend — that falls on the product owner, not you. You own the relationship with your audience through your email list and content platforms. Multiple income streams activate simultaneously from the same content: affiliate commissions, YouTube ad revenue once monetized, and blog advertising. Estimated at 75 percent passive once established, with the remaining 25 percent of active effort going toward building the next layer of the pipeline.
A Simple Decision Framework
If you are trying to decide which method to start with, here is the most useful set of questions to ask yourself based on everything in this video.
How many hours per week can you realistically protect for income-building work? If the answer is fewer than ten, methods that require active sourcing or client acquisition like eBay reselling and web development will frustrate you before they pay you. Affiliate marketing allows you to work in smaller consistent blocks and have those blocks accumulate over time.
Do you have cash to invest upfront? eBay reselling requires inventory purchases. Thumbtack charges you to bid. Udemy requires you to create a course before earning anything. Affiliate marketing through YouTube is possible with a smartphone and free platform accounts, making it the lowest cash barrier to entry of any method here.
Are you willing to wait a year or more for meaningful income? If you need money in the next 30 days, freelance services are the only honest answer because they pay immediately for time exchanged. Affiliate marketing is a long game. If you can run a service business to cover your immediate needs while building an affiliate pipeline in parallel, that is the most realistic path for most working adults starting from zero.
What do you actually know and care about? Alston built his content around escaping traditional employment and online income strategies because those matched his lived experience. The affiliate marketing approach works best when you are creating content in an area you know well enough to speak honestly about, not an area you chose because someone told you the commissions are high.
Find Your X
Every method above can work for the right person in the right situation. The honest question is which one fits your actual schedule, your starting resources, and the kind of consistent work you are prepared to sustain over years, not just months. If you want help sorting through that specific to your situation, finder.platformproof.com walks you through a short set of questions and gives you a clear recommendation based on where you actually are, not where you wish you were.
Frequently Asked Questions
What exactly is affiliate marketing and how does it work?
Affiliate marketing means you create content — a video, blog post, or review — that recommends products or services. Each recommendation contains a unique tracking link. When someone uses your link to make a purchase, you earn a commission from the seller. The seller handles all fulfillment, customer service, and everything else. Your job is to create the content that connects people to solutions they are already looking for.
How long does it realistically take to earn money from affiliate marketing?
Most people building from scratch see minimal income in the first six months and start noticing meaningful growth after a year or more of consistent content creation. The income ramps slowly at first and then compounds more quickly as your content library grows and algorithms start surfacing your older content to new audiences. Expecting fast results leads to quitting before the compounding phase starts.
Is Udemy a good platform for earning income from online courses?
It can be, but the economics are more difficult than they appear at first. Promotional pricing frequently reduces your payout to roughly two dollars on a ten-dollar course. You have no access to student email addresses and operate under Udemy’s communication rules, which can result in a ban if violated. People who do well on Udemy typically have dozens of courses and a large external audience driving traffic to the platform — a scale that takes years to build.