Most people who want to make money online eventually hit the same wall. They find some method that looks promising, but something feels off about it. The income claims seem stretched. The reviews look bought. The person promoting the product clearly has never touched it. And you start to wonder whether the whole space is just a trap designed to transfer money out of your wallet and into someone else’s bank account.
It does not have to work that way. Alston has been making money online through affiliate marketing, selling courses on Udemy, freelancing in web design, and selling physical items on eBay. In this video he walks through the practices that kept him honest and the five income streams that actually paid out. If you want to build something you can be proud of rather than something you have to hide, this is the breakdown.
What You’ll Walk Out With
- Seven specific ethics practices that separate legit online earners from the ones who get banned
- Why testing a product for 30 days before promoting it changes everything about your credibility
- How to talk about your failures without tanking your authority
- The exact disclosure language that satisfies FTC guidelines without scaring readers off
- Five proven income streams ranked by barrier to entry, from lowest to highest effort
- Why email marketing converts at two to three times the rate of other online marketing channels
- A simple framework for deciding which income stream fits your current skill set and schedule
- A free tool to match your skills to the right starting point at finder.platformproof.com
The Ethics Problem Nobody Talks About
People are more suspicious of online purchases today than they were five or ten years ago. Scam after scam has trained buyers to question every claim they see. That suspicion is not irrational. It is the market responding to how many people have been burned. And the side effect is that if you are trying to build a real online income, you are starting from a trust deficit. The person reading your content or clicking your link has been lied to before. You have to earn your way out of that hole before you can earn a dollar.
The good news is that the bar for standing out honestly is genuinely low. Most people in the online money space cut corners on transparency. If you simply refuse to do that, you already look different. Alston’s core argument in this video is that honesty is not just the ethical choice. It is also the strategically smart one. Your brand is the only thing you actually own in this space. Protect it.
Practice 1: Test Every Product Before You Recommend It
The first practice Alston recommends is straightforward: do not promote a product you have not used. This sounds obvious, but the majority of people reviewing or recommending products online have never touched them. You can usually tell because they describe features instead of experiences. They read back the product page. They mention customer reviews they found somewhere else. They talk around the product without ever going through it.
Customers who genuinely want their problems solved can detect that pattern. They are not fooled by it. And when they buy based on a shallow review and the product does not deliver, they remember who sent them there.
Alston’s recommendation: use the trial. ClickFunnels offers a 14-day trial. Many software products offer 30 days. Run the product through its paces during that window. If it solves the problem it claims to solve, you now have a genuine story to tell. If it does not, you have saved your audience from a bad purchase and saved your reputation from a bad recommendation.
Practice 2: Be Honest About What Worked and What Did Not
The fastest way to build trust with someone you have never met is to tell them something that costs you credibility if you are lying. Talking about your failures is one of those things. When Alston talks about how he made his very first dollar online, he does not dress it up. He made it by spamming his affiliate link in comments. It worked for a little while. Then he got banned. That is the honest version of the story, and it is far more useful to someone just starting out than a highlight reel would be.
The same principle applies to products. When Alston used the example of a Bluetooth mouse he might recommend, he named a specific drawback: it does not work for left-handed people, and the battery does not hold a charge particularly long. Naming those weaknesses did not destroy the recommendation. It made it believable. A review that has no drawbacks reads like an advertisement. A review that names the drawbacks reads like a real person who actually used the thing.
Give your honest assessment, strengths first, then weaknesses, then your overall yes or no. That structure builds rapport with the reader and it stands up over time when they actually buy and use the product.
Practice 3: Be Upfront About Where You Are Located
This one might seem less obvious, but Alston ran into it directly while working in web design. He was looking to hire a freelance writer on Upwork. The person’s profile said Brooklyn. The listed university was near Alston’s home in Kenosha. Everything looked right. But the Upwork time zone said Russia. When Alston asked about the discrepancy, the person disappeared.
The problem is not geography. People make good money online from everywhere in the world. The problem is the lie. Because if someone is willing to lie about their location, a client has to wonder what else they are willing to lie about. Are they actually doing the work? Is the quality real? The small deception poisons everything else.
Alston’s view on this: say where you are. If someone will not hire you because of your location, they were not the right client anyway. The people who will work with you based on your actual skills and honest communication are the ones worth having. And they will stick around because the foundation of the relationship is solid.
Practice 4: Make It Personal
The internet puts distance between people. Text on a screen does not feel the same as a conversation. One way to close that distance is to bring actual details from your life into your content. Alston mentions that he lives in Kenosha. He talks about making money with affiliate marketing, selling courses, doing web design and web development, selling products online. He is not presenting a polished version of himself. He is being an open book.
That approach makes him relatable. The reader sees someone who is actually going through the same process they are, not someone who has already won and is now selling advice from a yacht. The emotional effect of that is significant. It says: this person is like me. If they figured something out, maybe I can too.
You do not need to share everything. You need to share enough that a reader could picture you as a real person with a real life. Where you are, what you have tried, what has worked and what has not. That combination of honesty and specificity is what makes someone want to follow your content over time.
Practice 5: Show Where You Are in the Process
One of the most common mistakes new online entrepreneurs make is pretending to be further along than they are. They present themselves as experts when they are beginners. The audience senses it, even if they cannot name exactly what feels off.
Alston’s approach is the opposite. If you are just starting out, say you are just starting out. People will follow your journey. They will watch you figure things out in real time. That is compelling content because the outcome is genuinely uncertain. If you are somewhere in the middle, like Alston describes himself in the video, say that too. Say you have not hit your goal yet but you are not a beginner either, and you are bringing your audience along for the ride.
This works for any business model. Drop shipping, retail arbitrage, service selling, affiliate marketing. Whatever you are doing, honesty about where you are in the process builds a more loyal audience than pretending you are already at the finish line. The audience that follows a real journey will stick with you. The audience that thinks you are already a millionaire will disappear when they find out the truth.
Practice 6: Show Proof, Not Just Claims
If you watch Alston’s blog content, he shows his actual results. The real numbers from his blogging process, including the shortcomings and the things that did not go as planned. Most people are not willing to do that. They are afraid of being embarrassed. They would rather make general claims than show the actual data behind them.
But here is the thing: everything is findable on the internet now. If you make claims that cannot be verified, or that contradict what someone else can look up, people will find that inconsistency. The cover-up is worse than the original problem. By showing real proof, even when it includes results you are not proud of, you remove the ability for anyone to catch you in a contradiction. There is nothing to catch. You are already showing all of it.
Proof does not have to mean income screenshots. It can mean showing the actual process, the tool you used, the outcome you got, the thing you would do differently. That kind of documentation is more useful to your audience than a screenshot of a PayPal balance anyway, because it shows them the steps, not just the result.
Practice 7: Disclose Every Affiliate Partnership
Alston keeps his affiliate disclosure in the description of every YouTube video. It does not need to be complicated. It can be one sentence that says some of the links in this description may include affiliate links, which means he may earn a commission if you click and buy. That is it. That is all that is required.
The disclosure does two things. First, it keeps you on the right side of FTC guidelines, which require disclosure when there is a material connection between you and a product you recommend. Second, and more importantly for your long-term business, it demonstrates respect for your audience. You are not trying to hide the relationship. You are letting them factor it into how they evaluate your recommendation. Most people who trust you will still buy through your link even knowing it is an affiliate link. The ones who were going to buy anyway now know that their purchase is also supporting your work.
Trying to hide affiliate relationships is the kind of thing that works once or twice and then blows up your credibility when someone figures it out. Disclosing upfront costs you almost nothing and protects everything you are building.
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5 Ways to Actually Make Money Online Ethically
Once you have the ethics practices in place, you need an actual income stream. Alston walks through five in the video, each with a different barrier to entry and a different skill requirement. Here is a breakdown of all five.
1. Sell Your Knowledge
After learning Amazon Web Services through his technical background, Alston built courses on Udemy to cover the knowledge gaps he had to fill himself. That is the logic behind this model: what did you have to figure out the hard way that someone else could learn faster with your help?
Udemy is one place to sell. You can also sell through your own site, through Teachable, through Gumroad, or through a simple PDF or video course hosted on a landing page. The format matters less than the content. If you genuinely know something that saves people time, frustration, or money, that knowledge is a product.
The ethics application here is straightforward: only teach what you actually know. Do not build a course on results you have not achieved. Do not promise outcomes you cannot reasonably support. Teach what you can document, and document it honestly.
2. Sell Your Old Stuff
This is the lowest-barrier entry point on the list. Alston sold old DVDs and video games on eBay over the last couple of years and made real money doing it. eBay makes it relatively simple: list the item, include shipping in the price, buy the packaging, ship it out.