Top 10 Underrated Ways to Make Money Online That Nobody Talks About

The internet has produced a very small number of make-money-online methods that get all the attention: dropshipping, affiliate marketing, social media influencing, and selling courses. These work for some people. But they're also extremely competitive, require significant upfront time investment, and the advice given about them is often years out of date.

This post is about the ten methods that actually work in the current internet economy, that are either new enough to not be saturated, or niche enough to have stayed under the radar. They require real work — nothing here is passive income you set up in a weekend. But all of them are more achievable, and less competitive, than the standard advice you find everywhere else.

1. Newsletter Sponsorships at Small Scale

Everyone talks about building a massive newsletter with 100,000 subscribers before monetising. But the economics of niche newsletters have shifted: a 2,000-subscriber newsletter with a focused professional audience (HR managers, security researchers, indie hackers) can charge $200–$500 per sponsored issue because the audience quality is exceptional.

Companies pay more per reader to reach 2,000 exactly-right people than to reach 50,000 broad ones. Platforms like Beehiiv and Substack make publishing free. The tools for audience building via X (Twitter) or LinkedIn are better than ever. The monetisation ceiling for well-positioned niche newsletters is higher than most people realise at the starting stages.

2. Prompt Engineering and AI Workflow Consulting

Most businesses know they need to use AI. Almost none of them know how to do it effectively. "Prompt engineers" who can build systematic AI workflows — setting up custom GPT assistants, automating content pipelines with Zapier and OpenAI, building internal knowledge bases with AI search — are finding clients in every industry willing to pay $50–$150/hour for consultation and implementation.

This is a skill gap that opened in 2022 and hasn't closed yet. The barrier to learning it is low (a few weeks of serious experimentation), and the market is enormous. Solo consultants who've positioned themselves as "AI implementation specialists" for specific industries (legal, real estate, healthcare) are doing very well right now.

3. Selling Notion Templates and Digital Systems

Gumroad, Lemon Squeezy, and Notion's own marketplace host thousands of template sellers. The ones who do well aren't selling generic "life planner" templates — they're selling very specific systems: a "freelance invoice and project tracker", a "job hunting CRM", a "content creator editorial calendar with analytics tracking". Specific, professional templates for people with identified problems sell for $15–$97 and require zero ongoing maintenance after they're built.

The best templates are built by people who had the problem themselves, built a system that solved it, and then productised the system. That authenticity shows in the product and in the marketing copy.

4. Technical Content Writing for Developer Tools

Developer-focused companies — SaaS platforms, APIs, DevOps tools — pay exceptionally well for technical documentation, blog posts, and tutorials. Rates of $300–$800 per article are standard for writers who can both code and write. Draft.dev is a platform that specifically places technical writers with developer-tool companies and is transparent about rates.

The shortage of people who can write technically accurate content in a readable, engaging style is genuine and persistent. If you have a technical background and reasonable writing ability, this is one of the highest-paying per-hour freelance opportunities available online.

5. Faceless YouTube Channels on Niche Topics

YouTube channels that produce high-quality content on narrow topics without on-camera presence — through screen recordings, voiceover, and motion graphics — are doing well for a specific reason: there's less competition on niche topics than general ones, and YouTube's algorithm continues to reward consistency over charisma.

Channels covering topics like "Adobe InDesign tutorials", "Python for finance", or "mechanical keyboard reviews" can reach 10,000–50,000 subscribers in 12–18 months of consistent output, at which point sponsorship and affiliate revenue become significant. The key is the niche. "General tech" is saturated. "AutoCAD for civil engineers" is not.

6. Micro SaaS — Small Software Products That Solve One Problem

"Micro SaaS" refers to very small software products built by one or two people that solve a specific problem for a defined audience. Examples: a tool that auto-formats academic citations, a Slack bot that tracks daily standups, a Chrome extension that monitors website downtime. Prices are typically $5–$29/month.

With AI coding assistants, the barrier to building these has dropped significantly. Many successful Micro SaaS founders have no formal coding background — they used ChatGPT, Claude, or Cursor to build a working product that solves a problem they personally had. Indie Hackers and Product Hunt are full of case studies of people making $2,000–$20,000/month from products they built in weekends.

7. Buying and Selling Aged Domain Names

Aged domain names with existing backlinks and domain authority can be purchased on marketplaces like GoDaddy Auctions, Flippa, and Namecheap Auctions for $50–$500, then sold to businesses in the relevant industry for $500–$5,000. The value comes from the existing SEO authority — a 10-year-old domain with 50 quality backlinks is genuinely worth more to a business in that niche than a fresh domain.

This requires learning to evaluate domain authority using tools like Ahrefs or Moz, understanding which industries value domain age, and developing an eye for underpriced domains. It's not passive, but it's a legitimate arbitrage opportunity that most people have never heard of.

8. Localisation and Translation for AI-Generated Content

As businesses generate more content using AI, the demand for human translators who can localise that content — not just translate words but adapt cultural references, idioms, and tone for specific markets — is growing, not shrinking. AI translation is good at literal meaning but poor at cultural nuance. Platforms like Gengo and ProZ connect translators with businesses, and the rates for specialised technical or marketing translation are $0.10–$0.30 per word.

9. Pinterest SEO and Affiliate Marketing for Visual Niches

Pinterest is essentially a search engine with 450 million monthly active users, and its SEO dynamics are fundamentally different from Google's — backlinks matter almost not at all, and the content that ranks is purely based on visual quality and keyword-optimised pin descriptions. For niches like home decor, fashion, recipes, fitness, and crafts, Pinterest can drive massive affiliate traffic with relatively little competition compared to Google-focused content.

The strategy: create a website with affiliate links, create Pinterest "pins" that link to that website, optimise pins for Pinterest search. The traffic from a well-maintained Pinterest account in a visual niche can sustain $1,000–$5,000/month in affiliate income at scale, with almost no one talking about this as a strategy because it requires patience and consistency rather than viral growth.

10. Ghostwriting for LinkedIn and X (Twitter)

A significant proportion of the thought leadership content you read on LinkedIn was written by someone other than the person whose name is on it. Executives, founders, and consultants who have ideas but not writing skills hire ghostwriters at $500–$3,000/month to maintain their social media presence. The work is entirely confidential and involves interviews, research, and consistent content production in the client's authentic voice.

Finding clients for this is the hardest part. The path that works: build a visible personal profile on the platform yourself first, demonstrate what good content looks like, and approach people who clearly have ideas but post infrequently or poorly. Outreach conversion rates are low, but the contract value once landed is high.

Video: Real Ways to Make Money Online in 2024

Skill Leverage Is the Real Variable

Every method on this list requires applying a specific skill to an underserved market. The people who succeed at any of these aren't the ones with the most followers, the most money, or the most connections — they're the ones who identified a specific thing they can do well and found the specific audience willing to pay for it.

The mistake most people make is choosing a monetisation method and then trying to acquire the skill. The more successful order is: identify your existing skills, find the monetisation methods where those skills are most valuable, and execute within that intersection.

For more strategies, read our posts on making money online and our overview of AI tools for online business.