If you’re looking for ways to make money online in South Africa, there has never been a better time…
It is said that the best time to plant a tree was 100 years ago. The second best time is today.
As I type this we are in the middle of the Covid19 Pandemic. Earlier this week, our State President announced a nationwide shutdown for the next three weeks to try and halt the spread of this deadly coronavirus.
For many South Africans, the reality of what is to come has hit home.
For thousands of freelancers and small business owners, the reality that their income is linked to the 24 hours in their day has hit them like a ton of bricks.
How to earn extra money online in South Africa today
Starting an online business in South Africa has never been simpler. Owning an online business allows you to work from and you don’t need lots of money as an initial investment.
There are so many tools and resources available to you right now that will enable you to start generating an income online but it is extremely overwhelming.
In this post, I am going to share with you 8 ways that you can start earning income online in South Africa by leveraging the skills you already have and without giving up what you’re currently doing.
In a nutshell, here are the eight ways to make money online in South Africa: (You can click on any of the links below to go directly to that section)
- Online Coaching
- Digital Products
- Online Courses
- Membership Website
- eCommerce or Online Store
- Dropshipping
- Affiliate Marketing
- Youtube channel or Podcast
Let’s dig into each of them in a bit more detail and start with coaching…
How to start an Online Coaching Business in South Africa
When I say coaching, I don’t only mean coaching in just the athletic sense, of the word, but in the sense that you have a certain skill set that someone else is willing to pay you to learn from you.
Something that comes naturally to you may be extremely difficult to others. Playing the piano. Becoming a better cyclist. Learning to speak isiXhosa.
Whatever your superpower is (you probably don’t even know it is your superpower) someone is sitting at home trying to figure out how to do what comes so easily to you.
Two types of Online Coaching you can offer in South Africa right now
As a professional or freelancer, your most valuable commodity is time. You, like everyone else, only have 24 hours in a day.
There are no do-overs.
1 on 1 coaching in any form should pay you what you are worth. If someone isn’t prepared to pay you what your time is worth, don’t give them your time.
How to leverage your time when coaching online
The second type of coaching you can do online is group coaching. This is a great way to leverage your time by grouping clients of similar ability together and instead of coaching them individually, you coach them as a group.
The second way to generate income online in South Africa is by selling digital products….
How to Sell Digital Products in South Africa
Let’s start by explaining what digital products are.
Digital products, or information products as they are sometimes called, are things like PDFs, ebooks and resource packs, for example. Anything that can be delivered digitally by the end-user downloading it is considered a digital product.
One of the easiest ways to think about digital products you could possibly sell is to consider what your current skills are. Is there something you’re currently doing that you could document the process of and make available as a digital download?
You may be surprised to hear that people are willing to pay for a skill that you take as second nature…
The beauty of digital products is it allows you as a freelancer or a professional to generate an income independently of you physically doing the work at the time.
You create the digital product once, and you can sell it over and over as many times as you like.
Digital products are an absolute game-changer for anyone whose income is reliant on them exchanging time for money. Creating an asser that can work for you while you’re sleeping is life-changing.
The third way of generating an income online in South Africa is by creating online courses…
Creating an online course in South Africa is easier than you think
Online courses can be a fantastic way to leverage your time and expertise and generate a significant amount of income online.
Just like digital products, for many freelancers and professionals, this is an extremely viable way to generate an income online.
The online learning as an industry has exploded over the last decade and it’s never been simpler to create an online course in South Africa right now.
If you currently do in-person workshops or teach people specific skills in a group environment in person, an online course is the ideal next step in growing your business. (If you’re looking for a step-by-step tutorial, I wrote this post on how to create an online course in South Africa that will help)
It’s as simple as recording and documenting the curriculum and then creating the lessons within that framework that will provide a specific outcome. The lessons can be in either written form, audio recordings or video recordings or a combination of all three.
Many freelancers and professionals in South Africa would love to start an online course but do not have the technical know-how to set one up.
In my opinion, the best platform for setting up an online course in South Africa right now is a platform called Teachable.
Teachable is the platform I use to host my online courses and in a future tutorial, I will show you exactly how to get set up. In the meantime, I’d suggest checking Teachable out and play around with the platform.
An example of an online course would be something like my Facebook Ads for Podcasters or The Podcasting Academy.
Building a membership website in South Africa
The fourth way to generate an income online in South Africa is to build a membership site. A membership site is an online community where users pay you for ongoing access to your resources and/or your expertise.
A membership site is a great way to generate the recurring or annuity income in exchange for you providing value to your customers over time.
Examples of membership sites in South Africa right now include a business called Worksheet Cloud that creates worksheets for learners across all the grades in South African schools.
Another example is CoachParry.com. I’m a little biased (as I am a partner in this business) but Lindsey Parry is the best running coach in South Africa right now and we’ve built an extremely engaged membership website.
A lot of South African entrepreneurs are very interested in the fifth way to generate income online and that is by starting an e-commerce store…
How to start an online store in South Africa
For many brick-and-mortar businesses in South Africa the logical step to generating an income online is to simply take what they doing offline and move it on to the web.
In years gone by the technology needed to start and operate an online store was prohibitive on two fronts.
First, you needed to be a tech genius to get your online store running and secondly you also needed a pretty thick chequebook to invest in building your online store.
Just like creating online courses, it’s never been simpler to start an online shop in South Africa.
A business by the name of Shopify has levelled the playing field for big and small businesses around the world. you can get an online store set up in a matter of minutes and trading in a matter of hours on a platform like Shopify.
I’ve written an extensive post about how to sell online in South Africa if you’re interested in learning more about selling your own products online in SA.
Dropshipping in South Africa
Dropshiping is a wonderful, risk free way to dip your toes into the metaphorical waters of online business.
The major difference between starting a regular online store and a dropshipping store is that when you dropship you don’t physically carry the stock. Which means you don’t need a lot of money (if any) upfront to start a dropshipping store.
As a dropshipper you are merely acting as a middleman by selling a product to an end user and then paying a portion of the money you made to the supplier who delivers the goods on your behalf.
I’ve written an extensive post called the 6 Simple Steps To A Profitable Dropshipping Business in South Africa if you’d like to explore dropshipping in South Africa in a bit more detail.
Generating income through affiliate marketing in South Africa
The concept of affiliate marketing is not a new one. Over the years we’ve seen various similar business models in the offline world. Referral commissions are a regular occurrence in business and in the online space it is no different.
There are many businesses online that are willing to offer you a referral commission for sending paying customers their way.
If you have an existing audience online, or if you are thinking about creating an audience online then affiliate marketing is one possible Avenue that you can pursue when it comes to earning income online.
If you are interested in learning more affiliate marketing, then this extensive post about generating an income through affiliate marketing in South Africa will be helpful.
Using podcasts and YouTube videos as income generators in South Africa
The 8th way you can generate income online in South Africa is to start a YouTube channel or a podcast.
Just like big Media houses currently create audio and video content which they broadcast to the audience you, as an independent content producer, can create such content and allow the audience to download or to stream at.
If you build a big enough audience there are advertisers who are willing to pay you to advertise their product to your audience.
I have also written an extensive post called how to start a podcast in South Africa that will walk you through what is needed to record, edit and publish a podcast.
If you’re looking for a step-by-step tutorial, then make sure you check out The Podcast Academy.
This is just a general overview of the ways that you can generate an income online in South Africa.
In future posts I will be digging into each of these topics in more detail in the coming weeks and moths. I’ll also be showing you exactly how to build these platforms in various video tutorials that I’ll be uploading to my YouTube channel.
If you have any questions about generating an income online in South Africa today feel free to be in touch via Facebook or Twitter.