There are various ways to make fast but illegitimate money online. However, this discussion will never go into such. To make legitimate money online in the digital age, there are also legitimate ways. Let us take a general look at the possible revenues and profits that you can make from online business as a whole and how soon you should expect to start getting anything.

There are two main categories of online business: the ones that have the potential to generate cash within the first few weeks and the ones that take some time to build before you start making up to 50,000 Naira or more monthly.

Most of the internet businesses that can get you instant cash require you to invest a little amount in paid online advertising and the more advertising you are able to pay for, the greater the likelihood that you will begin to turn in profits within a short time. On the other hand, the types that don’t require any investment usually take some months to grow (9 to 18 months) before you can expect returns in the range of N50,000 to N200,000 (depending on how serious you are).

Although you can actually start some online businesses without any capital, the truth is that the profit you will make and how fast you can make it is impacted greatly by the number of people you can reach and capture. This number can be drastically increased through the use of paid online advertising on websites like Facebook, Google, etc.

In essence, although paid advertising is not mandatory for online business success, without it you should generally expect to wait much longer before your business will start turning in any reasonable profits. Luckily, online advertising can be very cheap and effective compared to other mediums like newspapers etc.
We shall look at the top profitable online businesses as follows:
1. Affiliate Marketing
This has to do with advertising the affiliate/ referral link presented to you by an online merchant and referring people to their online store. It is mostly used by blog and website owners. All you need to do is visit all these top sites (such as Amazon, Jumia, Konga, etc) and sign up for their affiliate programs. Then start advertising the affiliate/ referral link presented to you either on your website, blog, forum or social networks such as facebook/twitter or whatsapp depending on how many contacts you get. Let’s take Amazon Affiliate Marketing as a case study:

Here you will be referring people to Amazon.com the world’s largest online store. You get commissions when people buy products through your link). Minimum startup: 0 naira (zero capital). You start making N100, 000 (or more) monthly profits 9 to 12 months after learning. What you make increases monthly.
In Amazon affiliate marketing, you will be referring people to Amazon.com the world’s largest online store and you get commissions when people buy products through your link.

You can start with a free website and no other extra cost. In affiliate marketing, the focus is on selecting good, profitable products from Amazon.com, creating a review webpage for the product and driving traffic to that page by improving its search engine rankings. A review is a post or page that contains details about a product including its good and bad sides and also recommendations as to whether the product is good enough to buy or not.

The whole process can be broken down into three steps viz:

Step 1: Select a good quality, high commission product and generate your affiliate links for that product. This could take you 48 hours to a week to complete this step.

Step 2: Create a very high quality review post or page packed full of useful, valuable and unique information about the product. Sprinkled inside the review will be your affiliate links leading to where the product can be bought. This could take a week or two to complete this step

Step 3: Build quality links from other websites to the review page to increase the rankings of the page. This is the most difficult aspect and could take up to 6 months for you to complete.

The downside about doing affiliate marketing in Nigeria is that that if you are just starting out, you have to wait for many months (sometimes even up to one year!) before you can receive your first payment in a form that you can withdraw and spend. This long delay is not always the case and is mainly due to the nature in which Nigerian affiliate marketers get paid which is through cheque.

This cheque, which is a foreign cheque is sent by post from the USA (or whichever country the merchant company is located). If you are lucky and your address is simple to locate, this cheque could take only a short time to get to you. And it will take an additional 21 days for it to be cleared and lodged in your account for withdrawal.

For people not living in Nigeria, this is not always the case as there are faster payment options available in some other countries but not available in Nigeria.

Despite the long delay in getting your first cheque, affiliate marketing still remains the one with the greatest prospects because once you are able to have everything set up, it only requires very little maintenance and it will receive a continuous stream of free traffic and growing revenues from search engines like Google.

This is truly what is known as making money on autopilot. Whether you are asleep or awake or on holidays, the website will continue to generate cash for you without you taking any further action.
Some foreign affiliate marketers have reported earnings of up to $10,000 and even much higher all from affiliate marketing using the same.

As a beginner with affiliate marketing, it is wise to set your revenue goals on a low target like $70 or $100. Once you are able to hit $100 in commissions every month, you can be rest assured that your affiliate business is set to see steady growth.

A word of caution though, getting to $100 may take you many many months maybe even up to a year especially if it is your first time. The beginning of affiliate marketing is often very slow and full of uncertainty and anxiety from not knowing whether all your effort will pay off or whether you aren't just wasting your time. Success is not something that happens overnight therefore you should not expect too much too soon. All you need is patience, perseverance, faith and prayers.

See you on top!

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