Can You Really Make Money Online? Let’s Find Out.
You’ve probably seen those viral videos with catchy hooks like:
- “Make passive income through social media!”
- “A side hustle that takes zero effort!”
Sounds amazing, right? But here’s the truth: most of these people are selling you a dream — wrapped in expensive video courses that promise wealth but mostly enrich the seller.
So, what’s the real way to make serious money online? I’ll tell you—but first, if you find this experiment interesting, you can buy me a hot chocolate to keep me motivated.
Well everyone who says that wants to sell you video courses in which they will teach you how to get rich through social media. Do you know whats the real method to make this huge amount of money? I’ll tell you, but if you think thats useful you could also give me a tip for a hot chocolate. Yes - its selling those videos.
So youve already seen two ways how to “easily” make money online - promising video courses or donations (ofc I realy appreciate your generosity!).
Video courses
Sure, they will gain some attention. Because who doesnt want to get rich while doing basically nothing. Its kinda a bestseller. And if you support this method and think you could really leran something you can check out my course here, just kidding.
The courses are always very expensive. Ive never seen a course below $100, and thats a huge investment. Especially if you overthink that most methods wont give you more than $5 a month.
So instead of actually buying those courses Ive decited to use the tools i already have and some online software which is in it basics free.
Donations
I mean its not very effective, but maybe someone appreciates your work and wants to give something back. Begging for money tho just sucks and i think nobody will donate if you complain about your empty bank account.
If you choose this method try to avoid bothering your users / customers, just give them an opportunity to give something back. E.g. in my discord bots i always implement a /donate command and a small hint on the bottom of a message or nothing at all.
I mean up to the point i write this i havent received a donation yet, but we’ll see. Maybe my work just sucks. idk man.
Setting up a donation link is very easy via paypal or ko.fi.
affiliate links
If you have some people you influence - being a influencer this might be perfect for u. Just search some products u can recommend and share a link to amazon to earn a small commission. Please note that there are some requirements and not every purchace gives you a commission. If you want to support my work, you can set your amazon bookmark to this link: (for germany: https://amzn.to/41rxMDc), for US: https://amzn.to/4i8dPbp
printify
i tried to design things which was pretty easy. however one need to connect to a platform one actually wants to sell those. since i’m not able to pay $30 per month for shopify and have no experience with etsy i paused my project. my goal is to code an own webshop using the printify api and stripe as payment gateway. But thats hard work. So for the meantime, please just do not steal my awesome idea!
The main idea is to put your own art onto clothes, then advertise them over social media or other platforms, and sell them. You don’t need to ship those, all the process after the order is at printify is done by them.
My personal approach is to sell art that allready exists. Some of my own work. Some from the public domain (which can be found on public.work). Thats on one hand easier than creating own art, but also legal confom. Because art thats public domain can be used for anything and can be modified. The last i do - modifying to fit the cool nostalgic (because its mostly art which was published 70years ago - then coppyright claims end) on clothes.
Another interesting approach is to sell AI generated art on clothes. This could also be very cool and time efficient, however one might overthink the moral aspect because the AI is trained on art done by real artists who lives from art.
Personally I think my retro art clothing shop is kinda unique and might work well. Check out some examples (soon)!
There is also an alternative for printify with amazon merch on demand. Its hard to get into that programme, and my request is curently assessed. So I need to wait for that.
“brainrot” content
As I already imply, I want to do an own approach - also with social media. Basically that what those courses offer. But without knowing what a course would tell me.
I want to produce interesting, catching videos a.k.a. “brainrot”. I know many people will hate me for that but thats an experiment. Personally I avoid using “addictive” social media platforms such as ticktok and instagram reels. If you dont like it, just use other platforms like bluesky and mastodon (there are also much nicer people).
Approach 1
So I saw a video saying that answerthepublic.com can give you interesting topics. Then I need to head over to syllaby.io to create a video ig (idk i only took screenshots). And to repost it on all available platforms i can use repurpose.io apperantly.
First step is using answerthepublic.com, to effectly use it youll need an abbonement for 11€/month. I think thats too expensive so lets find something thats actually free. Because all it really does is giving questions and inspo about a defined topic. For that you could also ask chatgpt (free version) or google trends (hier aktuelle trends).
Same is for syllaby.io. The cheapest option to use is 25$/month. This is definetly to much for a beginner. So for that I dont have an alternative yet. But ill research.
repurpose.io has 14-day testing phase, but after that its also very expensive (almost 30$/month). So I also need an alternative for that. But to to that u need API Keys for the different platforms u wanna upload to. So for now I am forced to stick to uploading everything on its own.
Conclusion of Approach 1
This needs a huge investment. i dont have the money to try that. I’ll search for a cheaper option. But if you have the money to invest, go for it. seems pretty promising. But do not make me responsible for your bad descissions
Approach 2
So i found an interesting github project: https://github.com/elebumm/RedditVideoMakerBot here YT tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJJyzUfu8Qc With that it is easy to create reddit content shorts / tiktoks with almost no effort. I used the elevenlabs api, which is not free and absolutely not affordable, but thats the only way I got it to work. If another TTS option would be available I’d use this to generate some content!
Conclusion of Approach 2
Not to bad if you have some basic knowledge about coding and assistance of ChatGPT youll get it to work. It’s still not perfect and so far I only generated two videos. If you want to see some results, you can check out one of the brainrot instagram accounts here: https://instagram.com/femboyvibes_