People ask Alston the same question multiple times every single day: what is the easiest way to make money online? After years of testing, failing, and eventually winning with several of these methods, Alston sat down and ranked seven real income streams from easiest to hardest. Not theory. Not guru hype. Actual ranked experience from someone who made less than $20 after hours on SwagBucks and also built clients paying him up to $3,000 for a single project.
This post walks through all seven methods in order, including the honest pros and cons of each one, so you can make the best decision for you and your family. If you want money in your account in the next three days, the answer is near the end of this list. If you want income that keeps coming in while you sleep, that answer is there too. Either way, there is a method here that matches where you are right now.
What You’ll Walk Out With
- An honest ranking of seven online income methods from easiest to hardest, based on real firsthand experience
- The hard truth about why the easiest method is also the worst-paying one
- Why Fiverr is a race to the bottom and what to do instead to get paid much more for the same skill
- The WordPress client business that pays $300 to $3,000 per project and how Alston found his first clients
- The one digital product truth that most creators miss: traffic is the job, not the product itself
- Why affiliate marketing payouts take 30 to 90 days and what that means for your cash flow planning
- Amazon FBA realities that no guru is putting in their thumbnail
- Not sure which method fits your existing skills? Get a free answer at finder.platformproof.com
Method 1: Completing Ads and Surveys (Easiest, Worst Pay)
The number one easiest way to make money online is completing ads and surveys. You are either watching TV on your computer or smartphone, or you are filling out simple surveys that do not require much attention. The barrier to entry is basically zero. You just sign up and start.
Here is the problem. In Wisconsin, the minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. Alston spent literally hours sitting on his couch on SwagBucks, watching ads and completing survey after survey, and walked away with less than $20 total. That is not a misprint. Less than $20 after hours of real time invested. He found out his wife was pregnant with twins and was looking for any way to bring in more money, and a guru at the time was claiming you could make hundreds of dollars per hour this way. That turned out to be completely false.
Easy does not mean good. If the goal is actually making money, you are better off picking up a part-time shift at McDonald’s or Burger King than spending your evening on a survey site. At least the hourly rate would beat what surveys actually pay. This method is ranked first because it requires the least skill and setup, but it should be the last thing you choose if you are serious about building any kind of real income online.
Method 2: Fiverr and Freelancing Sites (Easy to Start, Hard to Profit)
The second method is listing your services on Fiverr or other freelancing platforms like Upwork or People Per Hour. Getting started is genuinely easy. You create a profile, write a gig description, set a price, and people start reaching out. Compared to cold outreach or building an audience, that part feels almost effortless.
The reality of what happens next is a different story. Alston had services listed on Fiverr for AWS, Amazon Web Services. This is a high-income technical skill that commands six figures per year in the open job market. On Fiverr, buyers were reaching out wanting to pay him fifty dollars to set up complex cloud infrastructure. Fifty dollars for work that should cost thousands. That is not a typo and it is not rare. It is the standard on Fiverr because the platform runs on a race to the bottom. There are so many sellers underbidding each other that buyers expect to pay almost nothing, and the platform structure reinforces that expectation.
Alston does not believe in competing that way, and he has a better approach for anyone who has a real freelance skill. Instead of listing a gig on Fiverr, create content around what you do. If you are a logo designer, start a TikTok account that shows your process. Record your color selection, show a before and after, let people see how you think. When potential clients see the quality of your work before they ever talk to you, they reach out on their terms and they expect to pay real rates. Someone who watches you build logos on video does not offer you fifteen dollars for a logo. They ask you what you charge and they take it seriously. That is the difference between Fiverr and building your own audience, and the income gap between the two is enormous.
Method 3: WordPress Website Development ($300 to $3,000 Per Client)
Third on the list is building WordPress websites for small and medium-sized businesses. This is where Alston spent real time, building five-page sites for local businesses and getting paid between $300 and $3,000 per client depending on the complexity and the client’s budget. The process is relatively straightforward even if you are not a developer. You go to ThemeForest, download a theme that fits the client’s industry, customize it based on what they want, and hand it over.
Finding clients was the job. Alston used Thumbtack to find people looking for website work. He listed services on Fiverr, which as he noted did not produce great results on its own. He reached out to friends and family to get those first gigs. The cold truth is that building the website is the easy part. YouTube will answer every technical question you run into, no matter how specific. The challenge is keeping a steady pipeline of clients who are ready to pay, and managing clients who have seen Fortune 500 company websites and expect that level of polish while paying a fraction of what it costs to build something like that.
The other real limitation here is that this is active income. The only time money comes in is when you have a paying client. No client, no check. That makes it solid for quick cash, especially at the $300 to $3,000 per project range, but it does not build the kind of income that shows up while you are asleep or on vacation. Alston notes that this is exactly why he eventually moved toward the methods further down this list. The upside here is undeniable for someone who needs money fast. A single client at $500 can change your week. Two or three clients in a month can change your month significantly.
Method 4: Reselling Web Hosting (Recurring Income, Steeper Setup)
Fourth is reselling web hosting, which Alston paired directly with his WordPress business. The concept is similar to being a mini version of Bluehost or GoDaddy. You purchase a reseller hosting account from a larger provider, in Alston’s case that was NameHero, and then you sell individual hosting packages to your clients at a markup. Those clients pay you every month or every year to keep their sites running.
The appeal of this model is that once it is set up, it is genuinely set it and forget it income. Your clients are not calling you every month with a new request. They are paying their renewal, their site stays live, and you collect the recurring revenue. That monthly recurring structure is something Alston values a lot. Getting paid once for work you did last year is a completely different experience than needing to chase a new client every week.
The challenge with this method is the front-loading. You need money upfront to buy the reseller hosting plan, because no provider is giving you a block of server space for free. Then you have to configure client accounts, set up the hosting environment so it is ready to sell to others, and build enough trust with enough clients to make the recurring income meaningful. There are more moving pieces in the beginning than most people expect. If you go into it knowing the setup phase is the hard part and the recurring phase is the reward, this is worth building alongside a WordPress development business. The two complement each other naturally.
Method 5: Selling Digital Products (Create Once, Sell Forever)
Fifth is selling digital products, which Alston describes as one of his favorites because of one core reason. You make it once and you can sell it again and again and again. The range of what counts as a digital product is wide. Ebooks, journals, printables, SVGs, templates, checklists, courses, and much more. You can sell through a marketplace like Creative Market or Etsy, or you can sell directly from your own site and keep more of the revenue.
Getting started costs almost nothing. You can create a PDF or a Canva template for free, list it, and start selling. If design is not your strength, you can hire someone on Fiverr to build the product for you, then focus on selling. The product itself is not the hard part. The hard part is traffic. Traffic just means getting eyeballs on what you are selling, and that is where most people get stuck and eventually give up.
There are two basic paths for driving traffic: paid or free. On the paid side, you can run ads through Facebook, YouTube, or solo ads to get buyers looking at your product quickly. On the free side, you can create content on YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram that naturally attracts your target buyer. Alston takes the content route, which is what this channel and this blog are built on. The payoff with digital products is real: you can generate income 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in any niche, from anywhere. A printable you made on a Tuesday can sell while you sleep on a Saturday. That is the promise, and it is real for people who solve the traffic problem.
Method 6: Affiliate Marketing (Medium Hard, Long Payout Timeline)
Sixth is affiliate marketing. Alston puts this at medium hard, and he is direct about why: the process is simple, but the execution is not easy at all. You identify a product or service to promote, you figure out how to get in front of the people who need it, and you create content pointing them toward your affiliate link. Simple on paper. Genuinely demanding in practice.
The content can be free, like YouTube videos or TikTok posts, or paid, like running Facebook ads or YouTube ads to your affiliate offer. Either way, you have to understand your target audience deeply. You have to know what they want, what they are afraid of, what problems keep them up at night, and how the product you are promoting actually solves those problems. Consistent content is non-negotiable. You cannot post once and expect commissions to roll in for years. The audience has to keep seeing you and trusting you.
The other reality that Alston flags is the payout delay. With the other methods on this list, you can get paid within 24 hours. A WordPress client pays you when the site goes live. A digital product sale hits your account the same day. Affiliate marketing does not work that way. Depending on the program, payouts come 30, 45, 60, or even 90 days after the sale. You might make a commission today and not see that money for three months. That delay requires cash flow planning and patience that not everyone has at the start.
There is a genuine upside to not owning the product, though. You do not handle customer service. You do not deliver anything. You do not manage complaints. If a customer is unhappy and wants a refund, that is between them and the product owner. The flip side is that when refunds happen, you lose the commission you thought you had earned. Those are the real trade-offs with affiliate marketing: simpler logistics, longer wait for money, and income tied to other people’s products performing well after the sale.
Method 7: Amazon FBA (Hardest, Most Complex)
Seventh and hardest on Alston’s list is Amazon FBA, specifically the private label model. When he made this video, he had just started this path himself, which means this is not theory. He was actively in the trenches with it. The model is: source products from China or other countries, apply your private label brand, send them into Amazon’s fulfillment network, and sell them on Amazon US to customers who find you through the platform.
The process sounds clean. The reality has a lot of obstacles, including setting up your seller account correctly, finding products that have real demand but are not already dominated by established brands, negotiating with suppliers overseas, managing shipping and logistics, and then once your product is live, monitoring your ad spend so it does not run unchecked. Any one of those steps can stall someone who is new to the model.
The appeal is the same as the other methods further down the list: once everything is working, it largely runs itself. You are not trading time for every dollar. But the amount of work in the setup phase is real, and the capital required upfront is real too. There is no free version of Amazon FBA the way there is with digital products or content-based affiliate marketing. You are buying physical inventory, which means if a product does not sell, you are sitting on unsold stock. Alston ranks this last not because it is a bad business but because it takes the most to get started and has the most ways to go sideways early on.
Not sure which of these seven methods fits your actual skills and situation?
Get a free, personalized answer in under a minute at finder.platformproof.com. Answer a few questions about what you know and what you want, and it points you directly at the method that fits you best.
If You Need Money in the Next Three Days: Alston’s Decision Framework
After walking through all seven, Alston gives a clear recommendation for anyone who needs to put money in their pocket quickly. The two methods he points to are WordPress development and selling digital products. Here is how to think about which one makes more sense for you:
- Do you have a skill that businesses need? Web design, copywriting, photography, video editing, bookkeeping? Go to WordPress development or freelancing first. One client in your first week can bring in $300 to $3,000 depending on what you offer.
- Do you have knowledge someone else wants? A process, a system, a niche skill you could teach in a guide or template? Build a simple digital product first. A PDF or printable costs nothing to create and can sell the same day you list it.
- Do you have time but not skills? Survey and ad sites will pay you something, but they will not pay you well. Use that time to learn one skill from this list instead. Even 30 days of focused learning in web design or digital product creation positions you far better than months of survey grinding.
- Do you want recurring income without client work? Reseller hosting and digital products are the path. Accept that setup takes time upfront, then enjoy the income coming in without needing a new client every week.
- Do you want long-term semi-passive income? Affiliate marketing is built for that, but plan for 60 to 90 days before your first payout clears. Make sure you have other income covering your basics during the build phase.
The honest truth Alston keeps coming back to is that none of these are truly passive from day one. Every method requires real work at the start. The difference is in where the work shows up: up front in setup, in finding clients, in creating products, or in building content. Match the work type to what you can actually sustain, and that is how you choose.
Find Your X
Seven methods is a lot to sit with. The fastest way to cut through it and find the one that actually fits your skills, your schedule, and your income goals is to use the Platform Proof Finder. It takes less than two minutes and gives you a specific, honest recommendation based on where you actually are right now, not where a guru wants you to be. Visit finder.platformproof.com and find your method today.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you actually make $7.25 per hour doing online surveys?
No. Alston’s direct experience on SwagBucks was earning less than $20 after hours of work. The Wisconsin minimum wage at the time of the video was $7.25 per hour, and he makes clear that no survey site will get you to that rate, let alone above it. Survey income is measured in cents per task, not dollars per hour.
Is Fiverr worth it for someone with real technical skills?
In Alston’s experience, no. He listed AWS services on Fiverr, a skill worth six figures in the job market, and buyers offered $50 for complex systems. The platform structure rewards whoever charges the least, not whoever delivers the most. His recommendation is to use content on YouTube or TikTok to showcase your skill, then let clients come to you at market rates instead of Fiverr rates.
How much can you charge for a five-page WordPress website?
Alston charged anywhere from $300 to $3,000 per client depending on the scope and the business. He used ThemeForest for themes, Thumbtack and friends and family to find early clients, and YouTube to solve any technical problems he ran into during builds. The $300 end is a starter client who needs something simple. The $3,000 end is a more established business with specific needs and a bigger budget.
What is reseller web hosting and how does it generate recurring income?
Reseller hosting means you buy a large hosting account from a provider like NameHero, then divide it into smaller packages that you sell to individual clients under your own brand. Your clients pay you monthly or annually to keep their site hosted. Once the accounts are set up and the clients are onboarded, the income renews without you needing to do additional work each month. The challenge is the upfront cost and configuration, but the ongoing income is genuinely hands-off.
What kinds of digital products are easiest to create and sell?
Alston mentions ebooks, journals, printables, and SVGs as examples. Simple PDF guides, Canva templates, and planners are among the fastest to create and easiest to list on platforms like Etsy or Creative Market. The most important decision is not what format to use but whether you can solve a clear problem for a specific audience. A printable budget tracker for new parents is more likely to sell consistently than a generic productivity template because it serves a specific person with a specific need.
Why does affiliate marketing take 30 to 90 days to pay out?
Most affiliate programs hold commissions during a refund window so they do not pay out commissions on sales that get reversed. If a customer buys through your link and then refunds 20 days later, the program does not want to have already paid you for a sale that no longer exists. Different programs set different holding periods, ranging from 30 to 90 days depending on their return policy and payment schedule. This is a normal part of affiliate marketing that Alston flags specifically because it catches new marketers off guard who expect to see money right away.
What are the biggest challenges with Amazon FBA for beginners?
Based on Alston’s early experience, the main challenges are: setting up the seller account correctly, finding products with real demand that are not already owned by established competitors, negotiating with overseas suppliers, managing logistics and shipping, and then monitoring ad spend once your product is live. Each of those is a skill set in itself. The model is not complicated in concept but has many steps between the idea and the first sale, and capital is required upfront for inventory before you know whether the product will actually move.
Which of these methods is best if you need money within three days?
Alston’s direct answer is WordPress development or selling digital products. Both can generate a payment within days if you move quickly. A WordPress client who needs a site built can pay a deposit upfront, sometimes the same day you agree on the project. A digital product listed on Etsy can make its first sale within hours if the listing is well done and the product is specific. Surveys are the easiest to start but the worst return on time. WordPress and digital products are the right choice when speed and decent pay both matter.
Read Next
If selling digital products caught your attention from this list, the next step is understanding exactly how to build and sell one from scratch. The full breakdown is here:
How to Create and Sell Digital Products Online
Sources
- Alston Godbolt, “Easiest ways I’ve made money online | This Side Hustle Makes $10K Per Month” (YouTube, youtu.be/gT5ECzhmG1g)
- SwagBucks: survey and rewards platform referenced in the video
- Fiverr: freelance marketplace discussed for gig listing
- ThemeForest: WordPress theme marketplace referenced for client builds
- Thumbtack: local services platform referenced for finding WordPress clients
- NameHero: web hosting provider referenced for reseller accounts
- Creative Market and Etsy: digital product marketplaces referenced in the video
Helping 1 million working adults make their first $3,000 online with the skills they already have. Alston Godbolt, Platform Proof.