Today, I went through the posts of my friends here on hive and I first saw the the article by @bitcoinflood, later I saw the post by @niallon11 and finally there was the post of my friend @ph1102. What all these posts have in common is that they speak about an economic depression bearing the following titles: The Economic Depression No Ones Talking About, It's tough out there, Signs Of Economic Depression Phase.

It's certainly not a coincidence that I find 3 posts about the same subject on a same day here on hive. The traditional media don't really talk about it but we all feel it. Things cost more and more and we don't have more money in our pockets. We see how the margin of what we can put aside is diminishing every month and it might even come to the point where we need to spend more than we earn.

Additional income sources to fight inflation

In his post @niallon11 suggest to find additional income sources to compensate for the loss of purchasing power. When not enough money comes in to pay the bills, this could be a solution. He then produces a list of potential income sources that he found over a search engine:

I realised that I actually tried out almost all these options already and it's definitely possible to earn some money with them but it's by far not as easy as people might think.

The only thing that I haven't tried out from the list above is Dropshipping but I actually studied it but decided against it. For all the others, I have tried them and made some money with each of them.

E-commerce

I've run several e-commerce shops and I'm still running one for my offline company. I make some sales but it has become much more difficult lately. The problem is that there are so many online shops out there that competition is very fierce and the big challenge is to attract your customers. I believe it's a great solution if you have a customer base already and you provide an additional way to sell your products.

We created an online shop for Liotes for example and we sold and rented out NFT's, token stake. It worked not too badly because we had a certain customer base made up by the members of the Liotes community. We stopped the shop because it was a lot of work for little income and because Splinterlands brought out rental tools that were much more performing than our shop.

Sell digital products

I have created several e-books and actually managed to sell some copies. It was a lot of work to create them in the first place and then it was even more difficult to find a market for them. What frustrated me was that the content of my e-books was actually soon out of date. So either I should edit the e-books on a regular basis or I should stop selling them if the contained information is not up to date. Considering the few sales I made, I decided for the latter.

Create a blog

That was actually the first way I tried to make an income online. I had a website about financial products and I monetized it with google ads. I made some money from clicks on ads but it was definitely not much and it was about 15 years ago, when the internet looked totally different. Nowadays there are so many websites out there that it's very difficult to get a lot of page views. In addition to that the income from ads has dropped significantly over time.

Create a youtube channel

I did that as well and I was even able to monetize it for a time. It was long ago and youtube didn't request the same requirements than now. It has become very difficult to get monetized on youtube and the income isn't that great either. In addition to that, your risk every day to be demonetized and all your efforts were for nothing.

Affiliate marketing

That leaves us with affiliate marketing. There are several categories there. Basically, affiliate marketing rewards you for selling products of other people, for bringing new members to a website or for other things. It can be interesting and a lot of influencers on Instagram or youtube use affiliate marketing to monetize their efforts.

Let's say you work together with an online shop. They provide you with an affiliate link for a certain product. You make a video about this product and paste the affiliate link in the description. When one of your followers uses this link and purchases the product, the online shop will realize thanks to tracking that you sent the customer and they will give you a cut from the sale.

It sounds great but it's actually pretty difficult to put into practice. I tried this for several years and probably made a handful of sales. However, I was much more successful with referral marketing.

Referral marketing

Contrary to affiliate marketing, referral marketing rewards you for bringing new users to a platform. I was running several crypto faucets and on these faucets I used such referral links. People came to my faucet to claim some crypto and I hoped that they would see these links and go to these other faucets and claim from them. The great thing was that once I referred a user, he would remain my referral forever.

I started several strategies for that. I put the referral links in very good positions on my faucets and I used big interesting titles that would attract the attention of the users. I then changed these links regularly to be able to send the users to several sites.

After that I went a step further and I created lists of faucets and I promoted them on my website.

Screenshot from one of my faucets where I promoted lists of faucets in very prominent color and position

I went so far as to learn how to code and use the API of external sites to create dynamic faucet lists. They actually still exist and thanks to the API, they are still up to date. If you want you can check them out: https://www.ref-hunters.ch/dogefactory/new_faucetpay.php?currency=BTC

Promoting websites where people could actually earn money was my biggest success among all the things that I've tried out. It's the easiest thing to sell.

In conclusion, it's not easy to earn money online. I know it since I've tried about everything. The income potential is limited and you need to consider it like a full time job. If you are active on hive, you should think about what you could add to your hive activity that could provide you with an income.

Use the potential of hive to develop additional income sources

With hive you have an amazing tool that can be the base for several additional income sources. You have a free website already and you can actually use it to promote affiliate or referral programs. You have 3speak that allows you to monetize your videos. You can create a shop where you sell physical or virtual products and use hive to promote it.

We are often so focused on getting upvotes that we forget that Hive is also a tool that could help us to build other income sources on the internet!

Let's connect ! You can find me on these platforms:

• Hive
• Leofinance
• Publish0x
• Lbry
• Torum