Start a blog. Start an affiliate program. Start a marketing agency.
If you want to get paid to post ads online, these may be the first ideas you heard about. You may think you need a website to make money from ads. Or that you need thousands of followers to make it work.
While that’s ideal, many Internet marketers right now are getting paid to post ads online without an audience. No product, no skills, no investment. And if you think it takes years to reach big numbers, think again.
There are many ways to get paid to post ads online. And pasting offers on TheFreeAdForum isn’t one of them. You’re going to learn real ways to make living advertising on the Internet.
Can You Get Paid To Post Ads Online? (Why Most Won’t)
Who wants to get paid to copy and paste ads? You have no idea of how many people have tried it, many of which never got any results. If you don’t want to end up like that, you need to avoid the common mistakes and set the right expectations.
Nobody says you can’t make $5K online the first two months. It’s just not as simple as following a step-by-step guide. There’s a market research skill involved that determines most of your success.
No worries, you don’t need to be a business expert. Avoid the following mistakes and you’ll be on the right track:
1st Mistake: Targetting Broad Niches
For context, we’ll assume you’re an entry-level marketer with little to no money. You’d like to make money online and might be thinking of starting a business. Maybe it’s about supplements, apparel, e-learning, marketing services, software.
Whenever you start an online business, most marketing strategies depend on algorithms. You need to rank on Google to run a website, Amazon to sell a product, and social media platforms to get views.
While it’s good to target more traffic, it’s easy to underestimate the noise of the market. Many marketers with more resources than you are competing for the big niches.
Guess what happens when you enter these markets: zero traffic.
All you need to do is find a specific niche (e.g., 3-word keywords or longer) with demand. And if you’re wondering what’s the best niche to get traffic, you’re already making the next mistake!
2nd Mistake: Following Instructions Literally
People make money with ads because they find the right people to offer value. “Value” stands for the inverse relationship between what the market needs and what solutions are out there already.
This means you can’t sell well when there are a dozen other sellers doing it already. It eventually turns into a price war where nobody wins. You’d need to risk more money to improve your offer.
Imagine there’s an optimal way to get paid to post ads online. There’s also one niche everyone should do. How long do you think this model would last?
All newbies would flock into this niche and kill the opportunity. Instead, you should use variations of the recommended method.
When choosing the niche, read different guides to find different tools. Find your own combination.
Advertising products for free involves more work. Which leads to the third major mistake…
3rd Mistake: Quantity Over Quality
When trying to get paid to post ads online, you may get no traffic at first. You may think that you’re not promoting enough. You try to post your ads everywhere and hopefully get those first sales.
It’s not that people don’t see you. Most of them skip the ad because:
a. You targetted the wrong person
b. You look just like everyone else
Let’s say you’re listing on ClassifiedAds.com. According to SimilarWeb, they seem to receive millions of views every year. But how many of those people are buyers? Do you know anyone who Googled classified ads to buy something?
That’s the first problem.
Then there’s the lack of entry barrier. With thousands of daily advertisers, it doesn’t matter how many times you post. Low-quality traffic will ignore your ads, whether they’re free or paid.
After you find the right traffic source, you’ll need to differentiate your offer (more on this later).
Getting Started
This is what it will take to get paid to post ads online, assuming you seek the highest chance of success.
But what strategy should you follow?
Below, you’ll find the four “levels” of advertising. They’re called that way because each one takes a completely different approach. Each level is right for different people.
The lowest level, ad manager jobs, ensures fast money but limited opportunity. The highest one, personal branding, allows you to earn “easy” big money after months/years of building an audience.
While you could all four at once, we recommend you start with one at a time.
Level 1: Freelance for Traffic Sources
SPEED = ⚡⚡⚡⚡ MONEY = 💵💵💵 OPPORTUNITY = 🔥🔥🔥
Need money fast? The simplest way is to find a job that pays you to post ads online. It doesn’t require any business knowledge: you get out there and show it to potential clients.
Literally this week, you could collect your first payment if you land a client. It’s fast enough to pay the bills when your main job isn’t cutting it.
It doesn’t earn as much as an ad business, but it’s more than enough for starters. You could turn it into passive income if you built an agency around it.
When it comes to opportunity, there are always clients looking for ad services:
- Virtual assistance: Follow up on existing ad campaigns
- Ad Designer: Create high-converting ad banners and copywriting
- Promotional Writer: Promote products for free by answering questions in social media threads
- Email Marketer: Post retargeting ads to existing customers and get recurrent purchases
While you may benefit from a marketing college degree, most positions only require a minimal portfolio.
Keep in mind the three common mistakes. We’re not selling skills, but results. Find business owners that could do better in digital marketing (locals typically). You can pitch them on the phone, Freelance sites, or contact form (if there’s a website).
How it works:
Before you start, you’ll need to choose a specific niche (e.g., Pinterest ads for herb shops in Florida). If you’re working on freelance platforms, you first need to fill up your profile and get some five-star reviews. You can get these fast by accepting entry-level work.
Once you’re ready:
- Choose what method you’ll use to find clients and reach out to them
- Start searching for gigs/websites and bookmark potential clients
- Send them a custom pitch where you offer to discuss their business (calls & meetings convert better)
- Review the offer. You can accept and send them a Stripe invoice, or you can repeat the process until you find the right client
Major Issues
Getting recurrent clients.
Even with a good portfolio, it’s not easy to prove that your service will get them more sales. It’s possible that they want to minimize risk with the following:
- Pay in sales commissions instead
- Run a free-trial period
- Request case studies
It makes sense if you’re gonna be the one who designs their ads. But when it comes to management, you don’t need that proof. Clients aren’t looking for talent, but someone to delegate their advertising.
If you find too many objections, chances are they’re the wrong client. But if it’s the best one you’ve found, you could win their trust with a trial period and see where it goes.
To make sure you keep getting paid to post ads, deliver the best results possible within the first month.
What Everyone Is Doing:
Selling work/skills, not results.
Besides the big three mistakes, there’s a reason business owners ignore requests. Freelancers focus too much on showing their skills, and not addressing clients’ priorities.
Simply compare this:
To this:
Advertising services are no different. The second example gets clients’ attention, while the first one is skipped over.
How To Get It Right?
- Be specific with the ad service you offer
- Customize your pitch when talking to clients
- Overdeliver to get testimonials and contract renewals
Level 2: Promote Digital Products
SPEED = ⚡⚡⚡ MONEY = 💵💵💵💵 OPPORTUNITY = 🔥🔥
AKA affiliate marketing.
For many, affiliate marketing is the default strategy to get paid to post ads online. You don’t create the product, don’t promote it, not even process payments. It’s only about positioning yourself in front of people who already believe in the product.
That’s why we believe you can make fast money with affiliate marketing. The question is, can you make it work when there are so many affiliates with similar offers?
No. If you do what others do, you’re not adding value to the market. Your options are:
a. Improving your offer
b. Research for better products
But if you succeed, affiliate income could quickly reach five to six figures. Unlike sales jobs, affiliate systems make money on autopilot.
Major Issues
Finding the opportunity.
You can spend hours emailing customers, creating pitches, building sales funnels. If there’s no market opportunity, your marketing strategy won’t do much. So if you start posting 10X more ads, it’s not really affecting your sales.
Opportunity means:
- People are already buying the product
- This product has better quality than any alternatives
- Not many affiliates are promoting the product (the exact same way)
While there are opportunities everywhere, some niches have more than others (health, money, relationships). To manage competition, make your campaign more specific for the audience.
Suppose you’re selling an SEO program, and you believe every website owner should buy it. For every campaign, you can change the perspective while selling the same product:
- SEO program for Seattle orthodontists
- SEO program for commercial realtors in Minnesota
- SEO program for NYC life coaches
Assuming all these examples have market demand, you just need to create a different sales funnel addressing each groups’ interests. You’re no longer an SEO guy, but a specialist.
What Everyone Is Doing:
Quantity over quality.
Everyone is aware of how popular affiliate marketing is. So they try to stand out from the noise by “talking louder,” promoting more aggressively:
- Add more campaigns
- Post more often
- Find new ad platforms
When the offer isn’t valuable, however, over-exposure causes the contrary effect. Nobody wants to buy from that annoying salesperson. We like to buy, not to be sold.
Especially on the first cold outreach.
The key is to put more WORK on the funnel to make it as smooth as possible:
- Create a lead magnet where people get a gift for their email
- Interact with people for higher conversions (e.g., phone, Zoom calls, webinars, video reviews)
- Place your affiliate offer at the end of the funnel sequence
Still, most people won’t buy when they click your ad:
a. They may not want to spend that much
b. It may be the wrong time to buy
c. They’re just browsing
You lose these people unless you turn them into leads.
How it works:
- Create a valuable email sequence. Validate that you have their attention
- Offer a micro-product under $20 with a guarantee
- Escalate to $200, $2000 with those who trusted you enough to spend $20
It’s more realistic than getting a one-click sale. And if it still doesn’t sell, at least you built your email list. Free quality traffic that you can use anytime.
How To Get It Right?
- Work on your sales funnel to increase conversions
- Gain customer’s trust with small purchases first
- Collect emails to get repeated sales
Level 3: Promote Goods & Services
SPEED = ⚡⚡⚡ MONEY = 💵💵💵💵 OPPORTUNITY = 🔥🔥🔥
AKA dropshipping/drop servicing.
If you’re not a fan of affiliate marketing, the opposite approach also works. You see, there are two ways to get sales:
a. You find the right people to buy the product
b. Your product is so good that it attracts buyers and sells itself
Option B is drops-servicing/drop-shipping. It’s finding something people already buy and reselling it somewhere else. Once you find that thing, it keeps selling on autopilot as long as there’s demand.
How It Works:
You visit an online store and find a product selling well for an average of $30. It’s out of stock most of the time, and there are not many sellers in the market. You then visit other stores and find the same offer for $15.
To validate your idea, first:
- Ask the $15 seller whether the offer is active
- Check if the $30 store allows you to sell that product
If so, you can start dropshipping:
- List the $15 product on the $30 site for any price between $15 (break-even) and $30 (for more sales)
- Wait until a client finds your ad and orders the product. You then receive the funds and the customer’s address
- Use the money to order from the $15 seller and ship the product to that address
That’s it. You can make money as soon as you find that product. If you have big profit margins, you can sell cheaper to get sales faster.
Once you list this product, it keeps selling over and over again. No investment. Now, suppose you sell 20 products instead of 1.
Passive income.
The difficulty is, you have to be the first (if not the only one) to find the opportunity.
Major Issues
Low-Profit Margins.
Price differences aren’t that big. If Store A is close to Store B (e.g., same country), prices may barely change. If they are far away, you pay more for shipping.
Even if a manufacturer offers cheap delivery, it can be slow and unreliable. To find a dropshipping opportunity, you need to have luck and skill in looking for products and manufacturers.
However, it can help sellers test the market. If a product is viable for dropshipping (even $1 profit), it’s probably worth investing in a large order. You’d ship hundreds of units to a warehouse and then distribute them to local customers.
Profit margins are better with drop servicing, although you still need to consider the competition. The best way to generate consistent cash flow is to run a sales funnel, just like with affiliate marketing.
What Everyone Is Doing:
Everybody is using the same research method.
- Choosing products based on X number of sales, sellers, and reviews
- Using the same suppliers and selling platforms
- Calculations are based on optimistic estimations
- Go for the attractive niches (electronics, sports, apparel, pet supplies, games…)
- Pick whatever product you find first that matches the criteria
But why?
Market research isn’t attractive. Nobody pays you for it. You may feel that you’re not making progress unless you just pick a product and promote that listing.
When entrepreneurs get impatient, they underestimate research, look for shortcuts, and follow one-way methods.
The solution? Broaden your research to get as many options as possible. The more you test, the better you know:
- Try different research tools and techniques (e.g., Helium10)
- Create research groups and share your results with others
- Explore trends on social media and alternative stores
How To Get It Right?
- Personalize your research methods
- Build funnels and websites to improve trust
- Find at least 3 potential products to improve your chances of success
Note: eBay’s ad program charges you only when the customers buy your product!
Level 4: Become a Traffic Source
SPEED = ⚡ MONEY = 💵💵💵💵💵 OPPORTUNITY = 🔥🔥🔥🔥
AKA starting your own business brand.
One of the biggest challenges in advertising is intrusiveness. Someone who doesn’t know you will probably skip your offer, even if it’s the deal of the century. Hence the importance of branding.
Imagine you had an email list of 10,000 people. At least 500 bought something from you in the last month. How long would it take to get sales if you sponsored a product you believe in?
Influencers can sell for almost no effort because they leverage social capital. So while it takes a while to gather followers, once you do, it’s even more valuable than money. It’s not just about how to get paid to post ads, but WHO promotes it.
All the time it takes to create a brand also increases the entry barrier. You have less competition the more you grow. And while big profiles get more opportunities, anybody can get paid to advertise, whether you have 500 followers or 1 million.
Major Issues
Consistency.
While it sounds brilliant in theory, the reality is a different story. For most of the time, these “personal brands” don’t see much success. Because it takes ridiculous patience and persistence to build a quality audience.
Even when you have lots of followers, it still takes some work to stay relevant:
- You need to keep creating content or interact with people on social media
- You should only promote products that represent you
- You still need to offer some value. “Being yourself” isn’t enough to create a brand
Are you willing to wait 1+ years to build a traffic source? Maybe not. What’s sure is that there’s never a right time to do it. It’s a long-term thing.
Some brands take years to establish. Others get +1M followers the first year. If you want to grow fast, learn how to leverage for traffic:
- Collaborate with other creators with bigger audiences. Most people love being featured (interviews)
- Pay an influencer $50-$150 to promote you on social media/video
- Create a lead generation system to get recurrent traffic
What Everyone Is Doing:
Gaining followers for the sake of it.
How many popular profiles are out there? Most of them don’t have anything to sell, and if they do, they may earn less than what you think. Why? The answer is Quality.
Small brands use tricks like:
- Asking “Follow 4 Follow”
- Re-use posts across platforms to fake activity
- Gating digital content for subscribers only
- Doing giveaways for the followers
- Chasing trends to create viral posts
Chasing traffic is a linear strategy. If you instead engage your community, it becomes exponential. When the right people find your profile, what do you do to keep them around?
- Answer comments as early as possible
- Have content variety (a rule of thumb is 40% promotional, 40% educational, 20% entertainment/miscellaneous)
- Encourage interaction (make questions, do surveys, upload video “shorts”)
As you start getting more traffic, it becomes easier to get paid to post ads online. Besides getting better conversions, people will start asking for your ad service.
How To Get It Right?
- Leverage other people’s traffic to save time
- Once you target the right people, give them a reason to keep coming back
- Just like you choose your target audience, choose what sponsors represent it better
Best Money-Making Alternatives
As you see, there’s a lot more going on than you see on the surface. Everybody knows how to start any hustle, but few tell you how to make it successfully (without selling you a course).
When you get paid to post ads online, not only you’re making money but also learning how to market your own projects in the future. If you’re confident that you can earn with any of these models, then you probably have what it takes to start a digital business.
No matter which level you choose, they will all require work. So why not pick the one that offers the best rewards?
Here are some alternatives to advertising:
1. Agencies / Drop-servicing
Here’s what it looks like running an agency:
- As a marketer, you gather a group of freelancers
- You promote the service and look for clients
- When you get clients, you pass the instructions to a freelancer
- When the freelancer completes the work, the client reviews it and pays
- You pay your freelancer the agreed rate and keep the rest as your commission
Freelancers join agencies because of work consistency. As long as you get clients and choose the right team, there’s no income limit.
If you don’t like managing other people, drop-servicing also works. The difference is, you’re buying low from independent freelancers.
2. Digital Products
You may spend money on creating a digital product. But once it’s finished, you can sell unlimited “units.” All the money goes into marketing.
A direct sales page wouldn’t do much without an audience. If you want better conversions, you’ll need a progression strategy:
- Start free to get reviews/testimonials
- Raise from $0 to $1000+ based on demand
- Create an email sequence, from free (lead-magnet) to micro-products (<$40) to high-ticket (+$1K)
But how do you bring people to your funnel?
- Invest in low-cost Facebook Ads
- Run +75% affiliate programs
- Help people on comments and promote it naturally
3. Lead Generation Services
Whether you sell affiliate products or yours, lead-generation is a must for high conversions. It works better than cold-email sales, and it creates recurring customers:
- Offer a premium-level gift for their email. Otherwise, they will unsubscribe right after
- At the end of the magnet, give them more stuff to look forward to
- Keep offering value while introducing your offers (e.g., one ad for every 3 value emails)
- If someone buys, sell a pricier product next time. If they didn’t, find a lower one
At the very least, you get recurrent traffic for the business. You can use lead generation for yourself or get paid to advertise for others. In particular, local businesses benefit the most from habitual buyers.
You don’t need to make a sale to get paid to post ads online.
How Can You Get Paid To Post Ads Today?
If you’re already getting paid for advertising, you already know where you can improve. But if you’re about to start, it’s time to choose our adventure:
a. Are you looking for fast money and build advertising skills? Go with Freelancing.
b. Would you rather make passive income from selling products? Choose Affiliate Marketing.
c. Do you want to focus on market research over sales? Dropshipping.
d. Looking for a long-term project? Build a brand.
Which one will you choose?