How to make a million rupees online as a student

If you have travelled in a Mumbai local train I would be surprised if you missed noticing this ad: “Make Rs 30,000 online per month sitting at home, no investment.” At least it is honest about one thing -- you can definitely make good money online sitting at home. However, the investment required is your time, effort, patience and persistence.

Entrepreneurship is a rage today. Everyone wants to build the next big thing; the next billion dollar idea. I remember during my college years, all we cared about was how do we get more money for the next date, or the next weekend trip to Lonavla.

Without digressing too much, let me come straight to the point, yes you can make a million rupees online and that too during college years.

• Blog: Come on, what were you expecting? That I will tell you about some hidden treasure? Almost everyone has heard that you can make money off blogging but what are the key things to remember. Start a blog today; write at least two-three posts about a niche topic every week. Become an expert in it, and remember you are not going to make any money with this for the next six months or maybe even a year. Make a Facebook page to support the blog and Twitter, connect with other experts, and ask them to guest post on your blog. Read how this guy made a million dollars through a wordpress blog. Writing practices your idea muscle. Like I make a point to write something every week. What you are reading is this week’s work. There are a few hacks too, a friend of mine bought top10fastest.com, and got to rank two when people were searching for top 10 fastest cars, what next? 400$ in two months of starting the blog and spending less than two hours on it. Head to blogger.com (for beginners I prefer this over WordPress and the Adsense account gets approved faster).
• Youtube: If you were to tell me that you skip the pre roll ad on Youtube 100% of times I would beg to differ. Come on sometimes we do watch the ad when Katrina Kaif wants to teach us Aamsutra or the next trailer of a Salman Khan movie. And every time you watch that for more than 30 seconds the video channel owner makes money. Usually for every 1000 views you will end up making around 5$ if most of your views are from India. Here also figure out a niche, have an idea? Execute. Upload. Take feedback, then repeat. So we will be expecting more of “The Viral Fevers” and “Khan Academies” in India now. Patience and Persistence. And remember no money for the first 12 months, but ship a video every 15 days.
• iWriter.com: If you are not the one for delayed gratification and want to see hard cash instantly, head to iwriter.com right now, but make sure you have a paypal account before you do that. Now iWriter is as easy as writing content for other people, or to be more precise other people’s blogs, because all they want is more and more content on some keywords depending on their business. For starters, you will get paid around 3$ for an article, as you progress and increase your ratings it increases to 15%. A friend of mine makes 30-40k per month through this. You know what’s another good idea? Make a blog and use iwriter.com to generate content for that.

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• Fiverr.com: Are you that inspirational person who is always the one to give advice to your friends in distress? Do you know you can actually make a lot of money doing that for a lot of people? She is definitely making http://www.fiverr.com/nogalicious/give-you-instant-relief-from-sadness-or-stress , Convert your idiosyncrasies to make money, be it your bathroom singing, or your penchant for being a grammar Nazi, do that for other people and get paid every time.

• Self Publishing: Forget a million rupees, hit it right and you can make a million dollars through self publishing. If you are not the one for patience, then forget about this. This requires most patience and persistence. Your first book that you publish on Amazon will never get you more than 10,000 bucks unless you have already published a hard copy. You have to keep writing, and building your brand. How to start? Take a set of your blog posts, write more on them and convert them into a collection of stories, then figure out the whole process of how the Kindle program works, market yourself, think of more ideas and repeat.
• Airbnb: A few months back I got chatting with Nalin Jha. How did I meet him? I had rented out his apartment for a day through Airbnb. It was a normal 1BHK in Hauz Khas which would probably go for 30k per month. Guess how much he was making out of it? Over 1.2 lakh a month. How? Airbnb. Have an extra apartment or even a room in your house? List it on Airbnb. It’s like renting out your space to travelers. For them it’s cheaper than a hotel, for you it’s more money than the normal rent. Your roommate is going home next week for 10 days? Time to make some hard cash.  Figure out the technicalities though, if you are a tenant you might have to talk to the owner first. By the way, Nalin’s place in Delhi is awesome.

I am pretty sure you knew or had heard about most of the things I have mentioned. So what’s stopping you? It really works. And people who ask what are the first steps to entrepreneurship, well here they are.

But as everything in life, and I repeat again, patience and persistence is what you need.

This article has been originally published on Flat.to’s blog.

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