How to Make Money Online in South Africa FAST [Full Guide]

Have you been searching for ways on how to make money online in South Africa?

And all you keep coming across are undetailed steps, fluffy posts, and unpractical approaches on how to legally make money online in South Africa.

In the end, you become confused and frustrated without direction on how to make things work out for you in the online marketing space.

You invest money into various ‘fraudulent’ online businesses – you were either scammed, deceived, or given the wrong information on how to make money online.

We all have been there, say no more my friend.

I want you to be aware, here and now that you will no longer go back to those fake stuff after reading and IMPLEMENTING the make money online strategies in South Africa right in this post.

I hope you can see the boldly written word up there? Taking action and implementing is all that matters.

In this comprehensive guide, I will layout deep steps and strategies on how to make money online in South Africa.

Just pick a SINGLE method and start run with it, until you make your first dollar. Never jump from one pole to the other thinking there’s a greener grass somewhere.

NO!

The grass isn’t greener on the other side, its greener where you water it.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a student, a graduate, or a working-class individual. All you need is some spare time and a good internet connection to work on your internet business and earn.

This is my ultimate guide on how to make money online, and we’ve worked hard to keep it completely free.

There’s no catch, no tricks, and no up-sells here.

We’re sharing everything we’ve learned over the past years, pulling from our experience in earning a consistent $30,000/mo or more inside income.

Gospel About Making Money Online in South Africa

I’ve been making money online for quite some time now in different online investments. And no, I’m not talking about cryptocurrency, network marketing, surveys, or those muscle straining online tasks that waste your precious time.

I’m talking about making money from serving thousands of targeted audiences online. Don’t get me wrong, some of those opportunities are legit but we’re a firm believer in serving to get served!

The truth about making money online in South Africa is that: IT IS HARD!

The only ways to earn money online in any lasting manner, involve putting in real time, effort, blood, sweat, and tears.

It’s actually NOT EASY for a beginner in the online marketing world to start making money right off the bat.

But if you have an online marketing experience – then finding your way and understanding the concepts would be much easier.

BUT HEY,

Be you a beginner or an expert in the online space – getting paid online in South Africa is easy! (I’m not trying to confuse you here)

One of my mentors constantly hammers it all the time that – I shouldn’t waste my precious time trying to reinvent the wheel.

The processes and systems are there for us to reverse engineer them. So that even a day-old baby can follow and still make a good income online doing what works.

A day-old baby? Nah! I was exaggerating lol.

Replace the “baby” with “marketer”

Are we good?

7 Proven Ways How To Make Money Online South Africa Legitimately Today

I don’t want share methods where you earn a quick buck today and the next day you lose 5X or more of what you made the previous day. Nope!

Despite the fact that there are countless approaches to earn – not all of them are proven to work.

Our aim of this post is to help you start a legit internet marketing business that has the potential to truly change your life for good.

From our years of experience, we’ve found that creating a steady stream of passive income is the best route you can take to make money. Or call it recurring revenue.

It does take a lot of work upfront – but can change turn your story around.

Okay, now with all that out of the way, let’s get into my ultimate guide of how to make money online South Africa.

#1. Build a Profitable Blogging Business

Making money from blogging is so REAL, and still remains one of the cost-effective ways to start an online business in South Africa that pays

You can make 100X back of your investment or more within a year of starting your blog in South Africa.

I’m not trying to hype-up here because we’re a living testimony and I can tell you that blogging pays.

The opportunities within the blogosphere are boundless! Apart from the fact, I monetized a few of my blogs using affiliate marketing in various blogging niches.

That’s just 1/10^th of methods on how to make money in South Africa through blogging. There are literally dozens of tactics that you can employ on your blog to make money online in South Africa.

Maybe you’re new to blogging, there’s a tutorial on how to start a blog in South Africa here.

The steps are simple:

• Choose a blog topic
• Select a blogging platform
• Get a domain name and hosting
• Customize your blog
• Install important plugins
• Write your first post and pages
• Drive traffic and monetize

You know, blog creation is one thing, then actually making money from your blog is entirely another. This is where most people fall short in their online business journey.

Well, below are strategies on how to monetize your blog and make money from it:

• Pay per click advertising
• Affiliate Marketing
• Course creation (Building a membership site)
• Freelance Blogger/writer
• Selling of your own products
• Writing of your own books
• Become a consultant
• Rent a space for adverts
• Flip your blog

It just never ends. One of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life is starting my own blog – which has landed me countless opportunities. And It’ll for you.

Go to bluehost.com and let them buy you a free domain to launch your blog and you only pay for hosting for less than $3 per month.

This takes us to our next which is…

#2. Making Money Via Affiliate Marketing

Yeah, you guessed it right: Affiliate marketing involves promoting a particular product or services using diverse marketing means to earn commissions.

From my experience, this method of making money online is one of the most profitable, if not the best method anyone can use in making a living online.

It’s passive and recurring.

You do not need to have your own product or services here… All your energy and time would be focused on marketing and making passive income.

If you’re new into the Online marketing world, this way on how to make money online in South Africa might seem a bit difficult for you, but there’s absolutely nothing that can’t be learned and mastered.

How Affiliate Marketing Works

No profitable business succeeds without a mapped-out step-by-step actionable plan. It all starts with picking the right niche and affiliate program to promote.

• Pick a niche, sub-niche, then a product

For example, fashion is a niche, men’s fashion wear is a sub-niche, then trousers, ties, men’s shoes, and attires are the products.

Another perfect example is – Internet marketing as a niche. SEO, Dropshipping, and Social media marketing are examples of perfect sub-niche, SEO tools, dropshipping plugins, and software are products.

Making sense, right?

• Apply in programs and network

After deciding on the affiliate niche and type of products to promote. Now it’s time to apply to the vendors of products in your niche.

There are affiliate programs in South Africa and abroad you can promote without limit whatsoever. Get all your links in an excel sheet and ready to go.

• How and where to promote

This is the aspect I see many people screw things up and give up even before the sun rises. There are tons of ways to go about affiliate promotion, generally.

But I’ll expose you to the few methods that have been proven to work for us – which are guaranteed to make you great commissions.

No matter whatever you decide to promote as an affiliate here in South Africa, know that these methods work for any type of product or service:

Traffic Source #1: Using Blogs

This our most recommended strategy for affiliate marketing.

It’s is organic (free) and tends to last forever. Plus cheap.

I broke down the process on how to starting a blog in the previous section. It hasn’t changed yet.

All you have to do is to create a blog, perform keyword research, put up some great content related to the niche products you plan to promote.

Here are some types of posts you can create:

• A review about an X product
• An alternative to an X product
• A tutorial on how to use an X product
• List of the best Y tools in Z industry
• Y reasons why Z experts prefer X products to T
• A guide on how to perform a particular task (using X product as a case study)

Then you can optimize your site for SEO. Build links, share posts madly, create a page for your blog, and boost on social media for high Google rankings and traffics.

When you use an amazing hosting service that gives you a free domain and one-click WordPress install, like Bluehost – setting up a blog has become an easy task.

Traffic Source #2: Using YouTube

YouTube is really a goldmine for affiliate marketers. And making money eventually from the interwebs.

I haven’t worked a lot with YouTube, but I know a handful of affiliates who have no website, no blogs, but still sweeps more than $5k recurring income monthly from this world’s 2nd largest search engine.

Just create your own review videos, tutorials, comparison, and so on… Just the way you would do for blog websites, then place your links in the description.

If you need inspiration, just look up a successful YouTuber in your niche and see how they run their stuff. Just reverse engineer the whole process.

Traffic Source #3: Using paid Ads

I know a lot of you wouldn’t like to spend a dime before making thousands. But another thing is, the more the investment, the faster the return.

If you don’t know how to run a Facebook, Google, or Solo Ad campaign to your affiliate offers, I will advise you to learn it.

However, if you ask me my opinion on starting with paid adverts to earn money as an affiliate: I’d say you shouldn’t. At least not yet.

Start off with free traffic, then once you become profitable – you can put the money into Ads.

Like I always say:

Organic marketing is just like having and owning constant running tap water (traffic inflow) WHILE for paid ads work in a way that when you stop paying for water supply – your tap stops running.

Traffic Source #4: Using Quora and Facebook groups

You can promote your affiliate offers on Quora which happens to be the world’s most popular Q&A site for free and make a passive income.

All you have to do here is to answer questions related to your niche and insert your affiliate links, blog, or funnel links with moderation.

About Facebook groups…

• Join Facebook groups related to your niche
• Interact with other members
• Answer questions and add value to the group
• Buildup your authority, reputation, and trust
• Then accept a friend request from other members and connect – before offering your affiliate offers as a solution to any of their problems.

#3. Making Money from eCommerce

In my honest opinion – this is one of the most sophisticated types of online business I’ve seen. I may be wrong though.

Building and designing your own e-commerce business is as exciting as it is challenging. This method of making money online in South Africa requires lots of considerations and things to put in place.

At a rapid pace, you’ll learn a ton about choosing a product, evaluating its viability, figuring out how to get it produced, building your online store, marketing, and selling to customers.

The process can feel like you’re solving a head-scratcher of a puzzle, but the truth is that: eCommerce it’s rewarding!

One of the most complete guides on how to start an e-commerce business from scratch (by eCommerce CEO) outlines it in the following manner:

Step #1: Market research and evaluation

Performing market research is the first critical step in building your eCommerce business. Here involves knowing what product you want to sell.

This is often the most challenging part of starting an eCommerce business. In this first step, I will highlight strategies you can use to find product opportunities and how to look for product ideas.

Idea evaluation is crucial!

It’s always advisable to niche down if you want to run a profitable e-commerce store. Remember: “the riches are in the niche”.

To begin…

Start by identifying successful companies already working in that space and make sure that the area is competitive.

An absence of competition usually indicates that there’s no market and no potential there. Here’s a 16-step Checklist by Shopify to evaluating your product idea

Step #2: Selection and obtaining of product

After your market research and idea evaluation phase, your next step is to figure out where and how you’re going to obtain your products.

An ideal way to get started on product sourcing if you’re low on a budget is to get started with Dropshipping. Dropshipping saves you the stress of investing in product upfront.

This way you’ll be able to save cost, minimize risk, and focus on marketing which is a crucial part of the business and equally have time to do other important tasks toward growing your business.

Unlike a typical e-commerce business, running a dropshipping store lets you sell a product you don’t have initially and once you made sales, you can then forward the orders to your suppliers who in turn ship the product to your customer as though it was from you.

Step #3: Establish your brand & e-commerce business

This particular step has to do with few basics’ steps such as:

• Registering your business name
• Getting a name for your online store
• Logo creation and design
• Acquiring business licenses, permits
• Getting your employer Identification number

Step #4: Creation of your store

This is the stage where you choose your e-commerce platforms like Shopify, shopping cart software, automation tools, and every other tool you’d need to get your store up and running.

When deciding you need to carefully look at factors like:

• The loading speed of the site
• Payment gateway compatibility
• SEO friendly features
• User-friendliness
• Ease of use

Step #5: Attracting of customers to your store

After building out your eCommerce store – the next line of action is choosing your sales channel and attraction of your ideal customers to your store.

Having an amazing product is a thing and marketing it to make money is always something else. This is mostly the hard part.

Driving targeted traffic to your products requires a variety of marketing tactics- from organic SEO, Facebook and Instagram ads, Google ads, sponsored content, etc.

Whichever you decide, endeavor to always make the audience building your priority.

Create an enticing lead magnet that would allow your visitors to give you their email address for nurturing and remarketing purposes.

You can also host giveaways – which has proven to be great for getting traffic and increasing your subscribers count.

Step #6: Product Delivery

This step is as important as the entire steps altogether. Because this is the one thing that will determine if your customers are going to be a loyal customer.

If you’re keeping inventory of your products instead of dropshipping, then you also need to put in place means at which your customers are going to receive their products without breaking a leg.

The good thing is, this is now easier, as we now have more and more affordable logistics companies that can get the job done for you.

A quick way to get started is by doing a quick Google search on the state you want to have your product delivered.

However, you do have to know that there might be some difficulties in having products delivered in some rural parts of the countries due to extremely bad infrastructure.

#4. Make Money Creating Courses and Digital Products

I don’t think there is any man who isn’t born with an amazing skill set. Whether inborn or acquired.

If you’re already an expert in a topic—either through your current job, freelance business, blogging, personal experience or breakthrough —you can package that knowledge into a high-value course and sell it for years to come.

Be it in an eBook format, membership site, gated content, etc.

It’s no secret that the market for an online course has exploded and you can tap into by helping others get better at life, health, wealth, and in business.

There are thousands of opportunities in the online course creation space for South Africa to still make money from it this year and beyond.

Honestly, you do not need to master a special skill for you to become financially made by creating a course.

All you ever need to have is a passion for what you love doing then find a way to build a business around it by creating an online course or a digital information product that teaches others how to do it and get results

How to Build an Online course in South Africa

The process of monetizing what you’re skilled at or what you love doing to help others succeed happens to be the easiest way to make genuine money online.

Your job is to show others how to get results with what they can’t accomplish on their own.

It doesn’t matter how boring the niche or task might be… You can make passive income by merely imparting knowledge to others.

All you have do is get a membership site software and host your course on it.

If it’s an Ebook, it can be done on PowerPoint, MS-Word, or via an online doc creator.

Let’s get into the steps:

Step #1: Know what you’re good at

This first step involves examining yourself in order to know your weakness and strength.

This first stage is so necessary because it enables you to capitalize and maximize what you know how to do best and ditch all the unnecessary things.

Step #2: Choose a lucrative online course idea

The fact is that not all your online course creation ideas would be able to make you money online… Especially here in South Africa.

What if nobody is willing to pay you to learn whatever you’re willing to teach?

Below are critical questions you should ask yourself while debating this:

• Is this course idea already in existence? The “YES” the better!
• Will anyone be willing to pay me anything in order to learn this skill?
• How high in demand is this skill at the moment?
• Have you reviewed your audience using the SMART approach?

Step #3: Outline your course modules and lessons

This is the stage where you begin to gather resources, contents, and start grouping together the themes, tips, and ideas into modules.

Then you order the lessons within those modules into a progressive and logical form so that they lead your potential students to their end goal, which is becoming an expert in the field like you as well.

Step #4: Plan your course content

This is where you decide how you plan to deliver your online course content. Just bear in mind that the most recommended course format is the video format.

People place more value on video content than texts and audio forms.

Step #5: Build your online course

For you to really make money in South Africa by launching an online course, you must put in the time and resources to reap its full benefits. For Life!

Talking about passive income…

Some people are looking for free ways to make online in South Africa without investment, but sorry to disappoint, that doesn’t exist.

You must put your money, time, and or hustle to make it happen in this space.

This fifth step involves:

• Filming your course and creating the presentations
• Arranging and editing
• The type of video to record
• Choosing the right tools and gadgets

Step #6: Choosing the best online course platform

You’ve successfully built your course and ready to be hosted… It’s time to choose a great course hosting platform

But it all depends on your needs and requirements. Make your research and settle for the one suitable for your budget and course form.

LearnDash for WordPress is the best I’ve seen around. It works with your existing site and easy to use.

Step #7: Set a Price for your online Course

Here is where you determine the value of your online course.

There’s no right or wrong pricing model for you to follow. But what I’d advise you to do is for you to analyze and benchmark your idea and against what online course creators within your market are charging.

Know if your course content is better than theirs and check what’s missing to know what to add to make yours better. (Check reviews in forums, groups, and blogs to find out)

Then you can price your course slightly higher than theirs.

I wouldn’t advise you price lower from the initial point. It will make yours look like it has less value.

Step #8: Promote your course

If I end this method of making money online in South Africa via the creation of an online course without giving you tips on how to promote it, it wouldn’t make sense at all, right?

Here are the various tactics on how to promote your online course:

• Using a blog (best!)
• Starting a YouTube channel (awesome!)
• Start a podcast
• Guest posting
• Start a Facebook group
• Create an affiliate program for your course
• Use Google, Facebook and YouTube ads
• Host a webinar and promote the recordings
• Create a free mini-course and upsell your main course
• Optimize your social media profiles for conversions
• Using email list (build from your blog, YouTube and ads if you don’t have one)

#5. Freelancing Services

A freelancer is a self-employed individual who offers any kind of service to clients. Becoming a freelancer is a fast and affordable way to start earning and making good cash from home online in South Africa.

There are lots of people going the freelancer route in order to make money online because they are aware of the freedom involved in being a full-time freelancer.

• It’s pretty affordable to start
• You can start as quickly as possible and with zero budget
• It’s flexible, allowing you to work part-time independently
• No overhead costs involved
• You must possess a skill to offer a freelance service to people

Almost any kind of service provided to another business can be offered on a freelance basis. Some common freelance jobs include:

• Freelance writer
• Freelance Web designer
• Social media manager
• Virtual assistance
• Graphic Designer
• Language translator
• Bookkeeper etc.

One of the most popular freelancing platforms of all time is been Fiverr. But you really do not need to be on any platform before you get clients. You can get clients from Facebook to pay you for your services.

How?

Join related groups (where your target audience resides), interact, provide value, and build your reputation, authority, and trust right inside that group.

Before you know it, you’ll start attracting people willing to pay you to help them get things done. One problem with this type of online business is that it’s hardly scalable.

But still a good place to start for beginners.

#6. Starting a Marketing Agency

I’m talking about a digital marketing agency whose task is to help businesses acquire leads, convert customers, and bring conversions.

This isn’t really a pure approach to make money online. As it requires both offline and online touch.

You can make money online in South Africa by helping entrepreneurs solve their customer acquisition problems. But how?

Using digital marketing skills such as:

• Social media (Facebook) ad management
• Funnel building and design services
• Google ad management
• Search Engine Optimization
• And many more…

Making money online in South Africa by rendering these digital marketing services happens to be one of the hardest (in my opinion) because the result of what you do will either bring the positive or negative result to your client’s businesses.

To be honest, I don’t like dealing with clients and something along those lines.

But the sweet thing about making money by providing online marketing services is that: all businesses need more customers, want more profits, and desire growth.

This is where you come in to take care of all these.

How Do You Start A Digital Marketing Agency?

First of all – you have to choose the route to go in any of those digital marketing services then LEARN and MASTER the skills by going practical with it.

Secondly, you have to show and prove to your potential clients that you can actually make a difference (acquiring leads) in their business.

To sell a digital marketing service and bring impact to business owners – you have to take business owners through four stages of digital marketing development.

Called the A.I.D.A framework.

It stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action.

This particular framework will help you stand out and also make business owners want the services you have to offer.

#7: Service Arbitrage or Drop Servicing

Don’t let the name scare you off, this is a simple business anybody can pull off and I particularly like this one.

Service arbitrage or drop servicing is a business model that lets you sell services of other people without having to lift a finger doing any of the actual services.

Sounds interesting, isn’t it?

Here’s how it works…

For example, a client hires you to have a website developed and you, on the other hand, have the job done by a freelancer at a way cheaper price compared to how much your client pays you.

Your work is more like the invincible middle man and both parties don’t have to know about it, at least the client.

So, your profit in this business model is the difference in price paid by your client and how you pay your freelancer to have the job done.

This is quite similar to dropshipping, the only difference is that there’s no physical product involve just services.

How Can You Get Started?

Below are the few steps required to set up a profitable drop-servicing business.

Step 1: Choose Your Service Niche

Just like every other business out there you need to choose a service you understand or at least know how it works.

Think about it, would it make sense selling services you have no idea about how it works? How would you be able to know if a work done by your freelancer is actually good or not?

So choose a niche you know well and look for clients that might need your services. Examples of these services might include:

• Web Development
• Digital Marketing
• Graphic Design
• Programing
• Content Writing
• Ghost Writing

Step 2: Find Your Freelancer (Service Provider)

Now that you’ve identified the services you want to sell the next thing you need to do is lookout for a freelancer that can get the job done for you.

With Freelancer websites like Upwork and Fiverr, you can get a freelancer just about anything and they’ll do a perfect job.

However, you do have to be careful too by taking your time to check out their reviews and be sure they are up to the task before trusting them with your service.

Once you’ve found the one you like, contact them and tell them what you want to get done and ask if they are open for a long term relationship.

Step 3: Create a Website for Your Services

Some believe having a website is optional but I do believe you need to have one to make you look professional.

Using Bluehost, you can set-up a simple WordPress site to showcase the services you’re selling and let others easily order your service online.

Once this is set up, you can then begin reaching out to the client on social media or using cold email to get clients to your business.

My favorite place for this is Facebook groups and LinkedIn.

Step 4: Deliver Your Service

Finally, the last step, now that you have everything figured out the next thing you need to do is to deliver the service to your client and keep the change as your profit.

The good thing about this business is that you can easily get a referral from your previous clients. Once they find your service authentic they can easily tell their friends about it and you get to be in business for a long time.

Where Do You Start Now?

Hey, it’s time to decide which of these ‘make money online South Africa’ methods should you start with.

I wouldn’t want you to ponder much over this. Just choose which you think will make you more money and make impacts on the lives of others.

You can work from home – at your own convenience doing any of these things to make money online.

If you ask me – I’d advise you to start with blogging.

Why?

Because when you start blogging about anything – with time, your experience expands in the online marketing space and you begin to notice other JUICY deals and make money opportunities.

Remember that blogs are needed for:

• Affiliate marketing
• Course creation
• Freelancing services
• Digital marketing agency
• Marketing of your e-commerce business

You gain valuable skills and experience when you decide to start blogging and it never really ends there.

• Get your own free domain from Bluehost and start blogging

Final Thoughts on How to Make Money Online in South Africa

Now it’s your turn. Go ahead and choose any of your preferred means above to make money online in South Africa.

With the explosion of online businesses, there has never been a better time to look for ways to make money online.

Maybe, you’re still on the fence on which to implement OR finding it difficult taking action – I’d admit that everything you read here all works!

Talk about:

• Starting your digital marketing agency (helping businesses acquire leads)
• Launching your e-commerce websites
• Joining affiliate networks and making money from your website
• Monetizing your skill by building an online course
• Offering Freelancing services

Or signing up with an affordable hosting service + free domain to create your own blog

There’s no magic involved here. It all begins by taking the first step and watch how your life could change overnight.

You can reach to use if you need help or guidance implementing any of the strategies in this guide.