How to Make Money From Home During COVID-19

If one could know how to make money from home during Covid-19, it would greatly help people to financially survive. Here are your options. You can hope your job will still be there when stay at home orders are lifted or you can take matters into your own hands.

There are two options & both should be used

The ultimate goal is to have a way to earn income that does not require you to leave your home or even have to meet anyone face to face. In the beginning if your finances are low, you may have to interact with other people in person just to start getting some income.

However if you have a few hundred dollars you can invest up front, you could avoid having to buy, sell and meet other people. For the sake of this post I will continue as if you do not have much money to invest in these income earning opportunities.

So what are these two options? Well one of them you have heard of already and that is eBay. Now before you roll your eyes just give me some time to explain how easily it is to get started doing this and how eBay will be the quickest way to earn some money in the short term.

The second option, which is what I do now, is more of a long term, highly profitable and flexible solution known as affiliate marketing. This is a very popular way to earn because you promote other company’s products. This is a 12 Billion Dollar per year industry and climbing.

Though you may not have noticed, I am sure you have seen or even purchased products online from companies like Amazon but didn’t realize you were purchasing from an affiliate marketer. That’s the beauty of this form of internet marketing. I will link to some examples in just a bit.

Make this bad situation into a profitable solution

This pandemic has brought to light a change in how people will need to look at earning an income going forward. Though COVID-19 is the current pandemic, it certainly will not be the last. Coronaviruses are fairly common and another one will happen at some point.

It would be wise to anyone who prepares financially for the future to realize that we cannot go back fully to the way it used to be. Change is inevitable. Not only where we buy our products is changing fast, how we earn an income will have to change at some point too.

When you can secure different ways to earn money online from the comfort of your home, you give yourself the freedom to not be at the mercy of someone else’s company. You do not need a pandemic to lose your only source of revenue, a natural disaster can even do that.

Those who go on to adapt and survive the current and coming changes are the people who turn a bad situation into a productive solution. There is an old saying, “necessity is the mother of all invention.” Your necessity is a stay at home job. The solution below is the invention.

The only things you will need to get going on your journey of becoming your own boss is a computer, internet access, an email address and a combo copier/printer/scanner. There is a really good chance you have all or most of these already. So now what?

How to get started making money from home

In order to make some quick cash you will need to get rid of some things around the house. Trimming the fat can be a therapeutic thing for both freeing up space and making some money at the same time. I remember before I started selling on eBay I sold items at garage sales.

However selling at a garage sale or even on Craigslist, your possible customers are limited to your immediate area. When you sell online whether it be eBay or affiliate marketing, your potential customers are now the entire world. Definitely a target rich environment.

Though you can sell practically anything on eBay, I recommend starting out with items that are the easiest to slip in a padded envelope or small box. I also recommend that whatever it is you do sell, that it be in the best condition as possible so you can make more money.

If you are not sure how much something is worth or what will sell on eBay, I will give you a list of things I sold below. You can also go on eBay and search for an item in the search bar, then scroll all the way down in the left side menu and click the “Sold Items” box, see below image.

Yes, someone sold a 12-pack of Angel Soft toilet paper for $24.99. That’s cheap. During the height of the toilet paper panic buying, I had seen other 12-packs of toilet paper being sold for as much as $80.00! Panic buying is great for eBay sellers if you have what is in demand.

However for the most part what you sell on eBay will not be during a panic buying spree, but that doesn’t mean there are not hot items for sale on eBay. Even common items can sell well if priced right and in good if not new condition. Below are the items I sold on eBay.

• Used DVD Movies (I even had new ones still shrink wrapped)
• Used DVD Box Sets of Popular TV Shows (24, X-Files, Game of Thrones,…)
• Used Video Games
• Old Unused Cell Phones
• Unused Tablets (Kindle, iPad,…)
• Food Storage Containers
• Old Toys
• Lionel Trains
• Disney Related Items
• Coca-Cola Related Items
• Old Gasoline Advertising Tin Signs
• Movie and Music Related Memorabilia
• Christmas Decorations
• Collectibles (Coins, Stamps, Baseball Cards, Precious Moments, Garage Sale Items,…)

I want to comment a bit on that last item under Collectibles. What are Garage Sale Items? Have you ever heard someone say it is possible to find some valuable items at garage sales? Many times when people have sales, they do not realize how much something is worth.

I made a $40.00 profit on salt & pepper shakers

I went to a local garage sale once and the man selling items had lots of video games, toys and action figures. Then he had this small table off to the side with random old items that were not in the same genre with the bulk of what he was selling. I was surprised to find something valuable.

I noticed two small light green glass Coca-Cola bottle salt & pepper shakers. I immediately snatched them up because I know old Coca-Cola items are worth money. Then I continued looking through his DVD movies and used video games, choosing popular ones I could resell.

When it came time for me to pay I asked him how much he wanted for the Coca-Cola salt & pepper shakers and he said, “I don’t know. Give me $4.00. I found them in the basement this morning. This used to be my parents house.” I went and sold them on eBay for $44.00.

Picture courtesy of antiquesnavigator.com

You can make some good money doing this in the beginning, but do you really want to do all the running around to various garage / yard / estate sales? Plus not everything that is used will sell, nor will it earn you enough to justify the effort you went through to source and list that item.

Once you start selling new products that are still shrink wrapped the more money you will make. A great place to find these would be at store closeouts or liquidators. Depending on what you wish to sell, you can find wholesalers that will work with small online and eBy businesses.

Some will do drop shipping for you, which will save you some time and space. However though I do recommend people try selling on eBay to make some smaller quicker income, there are a lot of hassles you will have to deal with on top of having to perform customer service.

eBay can be a really good way to earn an income from home but it does require you to put in an effort to source items for sale, pack and ship those items. Plus eBay and PayPal will charge you fees for their service. To learn more, read my post on how to make money selling on eBay.

Earn more money passively for less effort

Even though eBay can involve a lot of manual work to get it going so you can start earning quick money, it can be very time consuming. Still I suggest you do this just so you are not earning zero income. In addition to eBay I highly recommend you begin learning affiliate marketing.

The concept of affiliate marketing is easy. You recommend specific products being sold by an online retailer to people who are interested in them. With each sale made, that retailer pays you a commission on the total cost of the purchase. The money making process is that simple.

Now you might be asking yourself, what kind of products do I recommend to people and how do I promote them? I will go into detail on both below. You will see that affiliate marketing can be a really fun way to earn an income from the comfort of your home, even while you are asleep.

PRODUCTS TO RECOMMEND:

• Adidas Basketball Shoes
• Android Smart Watches
• Baby Strollers
• Barbecue Accessories
• Cargo Pants for Women
• Computer Desks
• Dart Boards
• Dog Harness No Pull
• Electric Bicycles
• Essential Oil Diffusers
• Face Masks
• Family Board Games
• Garden Trellises
• Gift Baskets for Men
• Haggar Pants
• Hitch Mount Cargo Carriers
• Ice Cream Makers
• iPhones
• Jacuzzi Filters
• Jigsaw Puzzles
• Kayaks
• Keto Snacks
• LED Headlight Bulbs Conversion Kits
• Lego Star Wars Model Kits
• Makeup Vanity Table with Lights
• Mens Dress Shoes
• Nintendo Switch
• Nutribullet Replacement Parts
• Organic Teas
• Outdoor Solar Lighting
• Paper Shredders
• Pet Trackers
• QuadCopter Drones
• Queen Bed Frames
• Rain Boots for Kids
• Refrigerators
• Sony HD TVs
• Star Trek Collectibles
• Tablets for Kids
• Treadmills for Home
• Under Armour Running Shoes
• USB Hard Drives
• Vacuum Cleaners
• Vape Travel Cases
• Water Purifiers
• Womens Lingerie
• Xbox One Controllers
• Xerox WorkCentre Printers
• Yankee Stadium Wall Art
• Yoga Pants
• Zero Gravity Massage Chairs
• Zipline Kits for Backyard

The above 52 products are also considered as niches. There are practically millions of niches one can create their online affiliate marketing business around. I only gave you 52, two for each letter of the alphabet and they were easy to find. So what exactly is a niche?

In simple terms a niche is a segment of the world’s population that shares a specific interest in a particular product, service or experience. With any of the above products it is easy to see that each one would have multiple people interested in it. Look at how many people have iPhones.

Finding those above niches were not hard, you could easily do this too. All I did was to go up on the Amazon website and randomly searched for products. It is important to note that Amazon is the world’s largest Affiliate Marketing Retailer and they will pay you to promote their products.

It is not hard to pick a niche to base your affiliate marketing website on. Though it is always best to choose a niche you have either a great interest in or a lot of knowledge about, you can always choose a niche you know nothing about, as long as you do enough research on it.

How to promote your selected products

Now let me explain how you can go about promoting whichever niche products you have decided to build your business about. You may have noticed in the above paragraph that I mentioned the words ‘affiliate marketing website’ in regards to your new business.

Having a website is the easiest and least expensive way to promote, share or sell anything on the internet. A website is your own, you own it and can do what you want with it. Consider it like a piece of internet real estate. In fact you can even sell your website like real estate.

In today’s technological automated world, building your own website is extremely simple, even if you know nothing about computers. When I built this website I had no knowledge at all and I was happy to learn that I could build the shell in four easy steps within five minutes.

Once you have your affiliate marketing website built and full of information about your chosen niche out on the internet, the world is your oyster. You can get customers from the other side of the world and not have to do any manual selling to capture that customer. How?

There is something called SEO, Search Engine Optimization, which uses the power of Google and the other search engines (Yahoo & Bing) to showcase your website. Have you ever searched for information on Google? The websites in the results are because of SEO.

What is SEO and how you can make money with it

Let us say you decided to make your affiliate marketing website about the niche of baseball. Even though baseball is a sport it is also a niche, because millions of people are avid fans. However, you don’t want your site to be about baseball in general.

You want to be more specific so you can attract a targeted kind of customer and most likely one who is looking to spend money. The niche of baseball is too broad, but the niche of oldest major league ballparks is more focused to a specific group of baseball fans.

To get SEO to work in your favor you need to find keywords that best describe the website content you are about to write. What is a keyword? A word or a group of words in most cases, that you type into a search engine like Google to find an answer.

Now you should not pick any keywords. You want keywords that have a certain amount of monthly searches, the least amount of competition, and a high SEO value. I realize that means nothing to you, but I am going to easily show you what I mean in just a bit.

First I would like to explain that doing what is known as keyword research, will greatly help your SEO efforts. When you can find the best keyword for your niche, you can rank on the first page of Google, which every website owner strives for and SEO is how to do it.

How keywords impact the SEO of your content

Having your own website, you always want to get your content seen on the first page of Google search results. The reason for this is so you have a better chance at making a sale. How many times have you searched for something on Google and clicked to the second page?

Approximately 95% of search engine traffic goes to websites found on the first page of results. This is why it is important to try and get your website post on that first page of results. Only 5% of the world’s population will click to the 2nd page of results. That 95% is free advertising.

Keeping with the baseball niche from above and most specifically Oldest MLB Ballparks, you will need to research some appropriate keywords to find those that will help you to rank within the first 10 search results on Page 1 of Google. Using a keyword research tool will greatly help.

I use the AWESOME Jaaxy Keyword Research Tool which makes the research so easy. There are many different keyword research tools you can use but I think Jaaxy is the easiest as I will show in the two below images when researching the keyword – Oldest MLB Ballparks.

Without going into too much detail it is important that you pay attention to only 3 groups of numbers to find a really good keyword. The numbers in the columns that say AVG, QSR and SEO are the ones that matter the most. A keyword with a high AVG and low QSR will rank well.

The basics of keyword research

The AVG is the Average amount of monthly searches for that particular keyword. The QSR is the Quoted Search Results which represents the amount of competition to that keyword from others using it. The SEO displays how likely you will rank on the first page of Google.

The guideline for selecting keywords for your website is to use those with No Less Than 40 AVG (the higher the better), a QSR of 100 or Less (the lower the better), and an SEO of 90 to 100. The keyword above “Oldest MLB Ballparks” is perfect with AVG=40, QSR=63 and an SEO=96.

Another thing to consider is that a keyword needs to be grammatically correct. Notice that there is another keyword I researched three rows below that says Oldest Major League Ballpark. I could use this one too but the QSR=188 is too high and the SEO is below 90 at 89.

However by switching up the words, see above image, I can get a better keyword that says the same thing. Instead of using Oldest Major League Ballpark I can use Oldest Ballparks in MLB. This also has an AVG=80 but now the QSR=54 and the SEO=98. This would be the best.

It is really easy to use a keyword research tool like Jaaxy. All you do is type in a keyword like you would when doing a Google search and Jaaxy will give you all of the desired numbers you will need to make an informed decision on which keyword to select for the SEO of your website.

Putting it all together

Let us say you came up with the list of 10 keywords mentioned below that are relevant to your niche. You could write informative details about each one, making sure to use the keyword in the title of your post and perhaps using that same keyword once or twice in the content.

• How old is Fenway Park
• What is the curse of Bambino
• Fenway Park tours schedule
• Who plays at Wrigley Field
• How many World Series have the Cubs won
• When did Wrigley Field get lights
• Where is Dodger Stadium located
• How long did Jackie Robinson play for the Dodgers
• Dodger Stadium history
• When was baseball invented

For example using one of the keywords above you could write a post entitled, When Did Wrigley Field Get Lights to Play Night Games? Then you could go on to write up information on the history of this event and why it took so long when many other ballparks already had night lights.

While creating your written and visual content for each of these posts based on one of the specific keywords above, you can become a free affiliate of The MLB Shop which sells all kinds of Chicago Cubs related items. See my Top 4 Baseball Affiliate Programs to view their offers.

Then within the written content of your post you can place photo advertisements given to you by the MLB Shop for anything having to do with the Chicago Cubs. When people are reading your article and see an ad for a Cubs jersey, hat or collectible they want to buy, they can click the ad.

This action takes them to the Shopping Cart on the MLB Shop website where they can either make the purchase or purchase more products. Once the buyer makes a purchase, the MLB Shop will see that order came from your website, because of a special ID code within the ad.

The Cubs product advertisement on your website is called an affiliate link. As such it has a unique ID code assigned only to you. This is how the MLB Shop will know where the order came from and who to pay their commission. You get paid for the sale of a product you promote.

Affiliate Marketing can replace your day job

I realize that all of this is most likely new to you but let me state right now, that affiliate marketing is nothing new. The concept has been around since people started buying things on the internet. It is a 12 Billion Dollar per Year in Sales Industry worldwide at the start of 2020.

The bulk of all sales and how you make money in affiliate marketing is very popular with both you the marketer and the retail companies that have an online store. Now because of this global pandemic, more people than ever are purchasing products online giving you a great opportunity.

With a huge uptick in online sales for almost every known product or service, affiliate marketing is leading the way. I do not know how much more that $12,000,000,000 per year in sales has increased since January 2020, but I do know that sales total has increased since Covid-19.

You do not need a pandemic to create a very lucrative business based on any niche you desire. Affiliate marketing is an industry that shows no sign of stopping. The more people shop online, the more money companies like the MLB Shop are willing to pay you to promote their products.

Take this time to start learning how to make money from home during Covid-19 by building your easy website in affiliate marketing. Choose whichever niche products you wish and become the next online entrepreneur for free today. If you have any questions please leave them below.