The Top 10 Ways To Make Money Online In 2026

After building a 6-figure online business, testing countless business models, and helping other coaches, creators, and experts monetize their knowledge online, I've learned that not all income streams are created equal. Today I'm going to break down the 10 most popular ways to make money online in 2026 based around your knowledge, skills, and expertise that are actually working. No dropshipping or day trading required here. I'll explain what each one is, the pros and cons, and who it's actually a good fit for. By the end of this, you'll have a much better idea of which online business model makes the most sense for your goals, skills and lifestyle. So our first way to make money online are digital products. Digital products are still one of the best ways to make money online in 2026 because you can create them once and sell them over and over again. There are so many tools online now that you can use to help you create your digital product and so many tools and platforms that you can use to help you sell them over and over again. If you want to know my favorite tool hands down that I use in my business to not just create my courses and digital products but also sell them while I sleep, it is Kajabi. Kajabi is amazing. It is an all-in-one platform, design, designed to help you monetize your skills, knowledge, and expertise in the form of coaching or digital products like ebooks, digital downloads, courses, membership sites, all that kind of stuff. If you want to try it out yourself, I'm going to link down a 30-day totally free trial right below this. And on top of that, I'm going to give you a course that I created that shows you everything I have done to build my 6-figure business inside of Kajabi. On top of that, you also get a free website and funnel review from me. Currently, these are one-on-one calls, but in the future I'm probably going to move them to just being like a Loom video that I sent you going over it. So if you want to take advantage of all of that, click the button down below in the description and you can try out Kajabi to start selling your own digital products and coaching online. Biggest shift right now with making money online and selling digital products in 2026 is that people are no longer looking for vague information. With ChatGPT, you can get a really good response, or at least people think it is, in the flick of a switch, just a couple seconds. If you want to make money online with digital products, you need to create something that's geared around a specific outcome and it's something that people can absorb and see results with right away. So if you can get people to take action and get people a transformation from point A to point B with your digital products, it's going to be pretty much an immediate buy. It comes down to how well you can communicate that message. So instead of saying something vague like how to start a business, you would say how to land your first $1,000 client in 30 days. Being specific is what's going to help you sell your digital product. My next way to make money online that I love is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing still works, but lazy affiliate marketing does not. With all With all the algorithm changes in Google and on social media platforms, you really need to have a strategy with your affiliate marketing content. Now affiliate marketing is when a brand that you work with gives you a unique link to share, like me with Kajabi. When you sign up for your 30-day trial, if you end up paying for Kajabi, I get a commission for that. People do this with Amazon. If you're an affiliate for Amazon, then you can recommend different things that people buy through Amazon. And when someone clicks through your special link, they go over to Amazon, buy the thing, you get a small commission for it. In 2026, the people making a lot of money with affiliate links are actually using the products and they really care about the products and believe in the products. And that makes selling the products so much easier. It's kind of just like word of mouth, but you're getting paid for sharing the products that you like. Like with me and Kajabi, I only recommend Kajabi. I don't do affiliate marketing for any other platforms and I get plenty of offers to do it, but I use Kajabi every single day and I have been for the last 5+ years and it's helped me build a 6-figure business. Also, I'm working with people on monetizing their knowledge and expertise, and this is the tool that I believe in that is literally designed for this. So yeah, I'm naturally going to recommend it to people because why not? But the cool thing is that you don't need to have a massive audience to make money with affiliate marketing. You just need to build trust. There are plenty platforms out there for you to build trust on. You can create a blog, you can have a podcast, Instagram, TikTok, a YouTube channel where you're showing people the value of this product or creating topics around the product. I'm not going to lie, making money with affiliate marketing is kind of a slow grind and it takes time, especially in the beginning. But over time it will compound. And for me personally, I have made over $50,000 to $60,000 in passive income from my Kajabi affiliates, and I get paid every single month. So the type of affiliate program that you're on does make a huge impact. Kajabi, it's not just a one-off payment. Every single month when a customer makes a payment into Kajabi through my link, I get a small percentage of that to me. So when you get, you know, 50 to 100 people inside of that, it results in a couple thousand dollars every month. And it's passive income. I make a lot of Kajabi tutorials that you can check out through my channel, and I have videos from over a year ago about Kajabi and other things that still bring in leads and sales to this day, which is pretty amazing. So the next way to make money online is by far one of my favorites, and this is online coaching or consulting. So if you have a skill, experience, or a transformation that you've already gone through, you can sell that experience and the knowledge that you have through the form of coaching or consulting. This could be business coaching, travel consulting, social media strategy, fitness, Wellness, spirituality, dating, love, anything like that. This is what I help people do every single day. And to the people who are starting from scratch trying to figure out what is their thing, I always tell them to think about the 3 big buckets of health, wealth, or relationships, and then start to find your niche inside of one of those categories. Coaching and consulting is one of the fastest ways to make money online because you are selling your own experience, your expertise, and essentially your brain. So you don't need to build some massive system upfront and crazy funnels despite what you might think. The thing that does take the most time is actually building a skill that is valuable enough that people would pay you for it. Coaching and consulting is something that you can literally package together and start selling this week as long as you have a computer or a laptop or even a phone. All you really need is a phone and a way to connect with people and know how to make a good offer. Usually coaching or consulting is sold in a higher ticket item in the thousands to multiple thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on what skill you have and how you can help other people. So unlike digital products where you have to build the digital product, create the funnels and the selling and all that stuff, which can bring you passive income, this is more of active income, but the reward is so much higher and you don't need to spend a bunch of time on the tech. So there are obviously trade-offs because it's not passive, but you can make a lot more money and still work fewer hours because you're charging a lot more. But if you're an expert and you want to be seen as an expert, then I highly recommend packaging your offer into online coaching or consulting. So if know that you have something valuable and you desire to get paid teaching it to people, you want to speak on stages, work with people privately, then I highly recommend that you sign up for my free 5-day training series called the Profit Your Knowledge Challenge. Once you sign up each day, you're going to unlock a new training that builds off of the last. You also have a complimentary workbook with a simple action step to take each day to help you actually take action and monetize your knowledge. So by the end of the week, you'll have a profitable idea, a clear and compelling offer, and you'll know how to consistently get clients paying you for your knowledge expertise. You can unlock the first training right now by visiting profityourknowledge.com/training. I'm also going to link it down in the description. So the next way to make money online in 2026 is content creation with a plan. Content creation by itself does not pay on many platforms, and if it does, it's not that much. So if you want to get started getting paid as a content creator, I would choose a platform like YouTube, or it could be TikTok as well, that actually pays you, or use content on Instagram to drive people toward your monetization streams, which could be like affiliate links, brand partnerships, or your own offers and paid communities. Content creation is powerful because even if you don't use it as a direct monetization stream, like getting paid from the platform like Google AdSense, you can still drive traffic to your products. And when you make long-form content, you can repurpose one piece of content like a YouTube video into multiple pieces across different channels. Opus Clips is an awesome tool for breaking up long-form content into short-form clips. Of course, as you're channel grows, you'll have more opportunities to monetize with ads or affiliate links or products or brand deals or anything like that. So you really do need a long-term monetization strategy if you want to make money from your content. Just because you're making content doesn't mean that you're going to make money. The next way to make money online are sponsorships and brand deals. Sponsorships and brand deals are when companies pay you to promote their products, services, or brand to your audience. So this could be through YouTube videos, podcasts, a newsletter, blog, social media posts, or even live events that you're presenting at. Many creators assume that they need to have hundreds of thousands of followers before brands will work with them, but that's not true. In fact, a smaller audience that actually trusts you is often more valuable than a massive audience that doesn't. And that's really what brands care about. It's reaching the right people, not just the most people. You know, I'd rather have 100 people that are my perfect client watching my videos than a million people who don't care about what I do. So if you serve a specific niche and have built credibility with your audience and you've built a little bit of a platform, sponsorship opportunities can come much earlier than you might think. The key is to only promote products and services that genuinely align with your audience and that you would actually recommend. Trust takes years to build and only seconds to lose. So authenticity matters more than ever when it comes to brand partnerships. You don't want to attract the brands that don't really align with you because it's just not going to feel as good. You're not going to put as good of energy into presenting the brand. When you really care about something, kind of like affiliate marketing, it's a lot easier to promote it. Like me with Kajabi, I think it's the coolest thing since sliced bread, so I'm going to promote it to as many people as I can. The next way to make money online is a newsletter business. So newsletters have become one of the most underrated ways to make money online. A newsletter is simply an email list that you consistently send valuable content to, and over time it can become a business in and of itself. So some creators monetize their newsletters through sponsorships, others recommend affiliate products, and some offer premium paid subscriptions or exclusive content for being on their newsletter. Now, what makes the newsletter powerful in 2026 is that you actually own the relationship with your audience. Social media algorithms change all the time and they don't tell you that they're changing, but nobody can take away your email list. And as AI continues to make content creation easier, trust becomes even more valuable with your list. So the people building successful newsletters aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest audiences. They're the ones who consistently provide value and build strong relationships with their readers. If you're already creating content, building a newsletter alongside of it is one of the smartest things that you can do. All of my content points to my email list. When you sign up for the Profit Your Knowledge Challenge or anything else, it puts you onto my email list. And of course you can unsubscribe, but by having people on my email list, that gives me a direct line of communication straight to them. So to make money online with your newsletter, you can either charge a monthly subscription for access to the newsletter or You can make your newsletter free to join and then sell products or services inside of it once people join in. The next way to make money online in 2026 is freelancing. As a creator and expert, ecosystems are growing rapidly. Selling a high-value service online is one of the best things that you can do, especially if you want to make money fast. So freelancing is a little bit different than coaching or consulting, as this can be about one specific skill that you are proficient in., and then you charge people to basically do that skill for them. So things like video editing, podcast production, funnel building, and email marketing are all in really high demand. And being really good at video editing means that you can just edit people's videos and think about this huge boom in the online content creation space. But a lot of people either don't have time or they don't want to put in the time to learning how to do video editing. So if you have the skill of video editing, you can reach out to content creators of all sizes. And say, hey, I'll do your video editing for you, and then you can start building a business just doing video editing for people. Businesses will always pay for things that save them time or make them money, and that's why services will never disappear. I always recommend high-value online services to any one of my clients, and I really try to help people build these high-value skills because these are usually things that you can learn, you can take a course in, or you can get better at just with time and practice. Online services are so awesome and necessary, and if you just invest some time, into developing any one of these skills, you can become an expert and then really help a lot of other people in their businesses. I have a whole separate video where I break down the 5 high-income skills to learn in 2026. I'll link it up here somewhere. Next way to make money online are memberships and paid communities. People keep asking you the same questions over and over again, either in general or in your own online business. That's usually a sign that a membership or a paid community could work for you. These are awesome because they offer access, accountability, and ongoing support. To people and you get to create a community. And yes, people are absolutely willing to pay monthly for this if you can create and deliver consistent value. These usually work really well if you're offering another product or service and people need accountability so that they can invest in continued support with you. Works really well in my business and with my clients is that we package a course with a community so that members can learn together and grow together, and then they know that they're not alone on this journey, especially when you're serving someone like entrepreneurs. They are typically building business by themselves and they don't always have a big support group around them. It's kind of like they make their first sale and they're like, oh cool. So to have a community of like-minded people is really awesome. And I love being a part of communities myself. Again, it's all about getting your customers and clients that transformation and having ongoing support with other people they can connect with and collaborate with is a really awesome add-on or addition to your business. The next way to make money online is not really around monetizing your knowledge, but it's print on demand. So print on demand is a business model where you can create custom designs for your products like t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, posters, and other merchandise, and only produce them when someone places an order. So even if you are monetizing your knowledge and expertise, like you're building a, a coaching business and you sell books, then those can be print on demand. You can do that with books. But also if you want to start selling merch in your business, like for me with Profit Your Knowledge, I could sell Profit Your Knowledge merch where people could buy t-shirts or hoodies or hats or whatever it is that they want. And I can connect with a company where they can print on demand. So if you buy my hoodie, they're gonna get notified, create the hoodie, and then send it over to you, and I don't have to deal with any of it. So this means you don't have to buy inventory upfront, you don't have to worry about storing anything around your house or shipping products yourself. All that is taken care of for you. The biggest appeal of print on demand is that it's relatively low risk and it's really easy to get started. So while this can be a cool addition to your business, it can be your whole business. You can upload designs, connect them to an online store, and potentially generate sales without handling any physical products. So if you have a strong audience, a personal brand, or a niche community, it can be a great way to monetize your content and create an additional income stream within your business. The biggest challenge with print-on-demand as a full-blown business model is that profit margins are often lower than people expect. So much competition. Successful print-on-demand businesses usually have a clear niche, a strong market, and an audience that already knows, likes, and trusts the creator behind the brand. So in my personal opinion, print-on-demand works best as an additional revenue stream that complements your existing business rather than being the primary way you make money online. The next way to make money online in 2026 is by licensing your intellectual property, a.k.a. your IP. Most people think that the only way to make money online from their knowledge is to sell it directly to customers with like an online course or coaching program. But another option that is highly overlooked is licensing your intellectual property. So this is where you allow other people or organizations to use your content, your systems, your frameworks, certifications, your templates, and your training materials in exchange for a licensing fee. Instead of selling your knowledge one customer at a time, you are allowing others to use your knowledge in their own business. This can look like licensing a curriculum to schools, could be allowing coaches to teach your specific framework or frameworks, creating certification programs, or maybe even giving businesses permission to use your training materials with their employees. This is great if you're like a leadership consultant and then you pair up with bigger businesses that want to use your training material for their employees. Well, this isn't usually the easiest business model to start with. It can be one of the most scalable because you're leveraging assets you've already created. The real key is having a proven process or system that consistently delivers results, and that alone can take a long time to develop. But you might be a person who's been consulting for the last 20+ years, and now you're kind of thinking about, ooh, maybe I can do this with the past clients I've worked with selling my intellectual property. So once you've built something really valuable and you've tested it over time, licensing can create an additional revenue stream without requiring you to personally deliver the training every single time. Now here's the real secret. Most people making serious money online are not just doing one of these things. They're usually stacking 2, 3, or even 4 income streams on top of each other. Like me. So this might look like content plus affiliate links plus digital products plus courses plus coaching or services that you deliver. This is what creates real stability and freedom. And personally, I recommend doing this because when you create your own business with multiple income streams, you can adjust as needed depending on the season of life that you are going through right now. Let's say that you're thinking about having kids. Well, then you can lean more into the more automated passive income streams instead of just the more on-demand coaching or consulting. For example, I've been able to take multiple 2-week-long trips to Sweden to visit my family out there. On these trips, I've decided that I just don't work at all when I'm on them because the last 2 times that I've gone out there not working, I've made over $10,000 while I was on each trip, again, not working at all while I was away. But that money didn't come from just online course sales or selling a PDF. It came from course sales, affiliate payouts, and calls being booked booked for private coaching once I got back. So I pretty much get back, the call's on my calendar, boom, it's done. Because I have systems where people can discover me, get into my world onto my email list, and then learn about my offers. And if they make sense, they can sign up for those offers. But this is all happening in the background. So it could be a course, it could be affiliate program, or people decide, I want to sit on a call with this guy. But by the time they get on the call, they already know what I'm all about, what I'm offering, all that kind of stuff. So really it's just like a, is this a good fit kind of conversation? And that's a lot easier of a sell me trying to pitch you and convince you stuff. So if you are starting from scratch in 2026, my recommendation is to focus on one income-producing skill, use one solid platform like Kajabi, and then create one solid offer. Simplicity is what sells. You do not need to, and you shouldn't, try and build everything all at once and multiple income streams like a course, an affiliate program, coaching program, all that kind of stuff. Just focus on building one thing at a time. Because when you try to take on too much at once, you end up getting overwhelmed. And then even if you do build everything, you're not going to produce as good of a result from the work you put in. So focus on doing one thing well this year. Get good at it. It could be coaching or consulting. That's what I always recommend first, because you don't need to build a bunch of stuff. You can just start working with people and then next year we can focus on the next strategy and expand from there. Maybe it's introducing a course or a membership or something like that. If you want to see the exact plan that I would take step by step If I had to start my online business over again in 2026, watch this video next. If you got value from this, please like it, share it with someone else that you think would get value from this. It really helps my channel grow. And if you have any questions, leave a comment down below and I will do my best to get back to you as soon as possible. Take what you learned here, get out there, make something happen. I'll see you in the next one.