How to make money online through social networking, blogging, e-tutoring, designing & video content development

Atul Kulshreshtha recognised the lacuna in this field in 2007 when he decided to venture into online teaching. The Noida-based chartered accountant is a serial Web entrepreneur, who started two advisory services portals in 2000. A few years later, he launched a BPO company, Cleave Global E-Services, which he sold last year. As he was comfortable with the Net and had the technical expertise, Kulshreshtha invested almost Rs 10 crore in setting up infrastructure, buying equipment and hiring teachers, before he finally launched Extramarks.com in 2008.

However, the going was tough initially. "Parents were sceptical at first, so we decided to charge lower fees of Rs 30-50 per hour, whereas they were paying Rs 300-500 for an offline session," says Kulshreshtha. Today, Extramarks.com has a support base of around 150 teachers and has 7 lakh students enrolled in various programmes. It has nine offices in different parts of the country and had a turnover of Rs 60 crore last year.

Creative angle

JOBS: Photography, singing or playing music, video content development, designing, voice-over options, editing and film-making

SKILLS: Expertise in any of the arts as well as good marketing, advertising and networking skills

INCOME: You may have to start for free, but sky is the limit once you establish yourself

Graphic designers, animators and Website developers have been using the Net to market their skills for years. However, the virtual world seemed to be limited to the artists who were technically empowered. What changed the status quo and provided the greatest impetus to the creativity of amateur artists was the launch of YouTube. Suddenly, you didn't need to have any expertise to be famous. Even a three-minute video clip shot with a pocket camcorder could get a million viewers, enough for serious professionals to wake up and take note of this medium.

If you couldn't make it to a reality show or a music company's illustrious office, you could compose your own songs and play it on YouTube. Gather enough eyeballs and the music industry would be beating a path to your home. Whether it was a favourite recipe, learning salsa or repairing a hard disk drive, you could make and market original content, and more importantly, earn money from it.

Hitendra Merchant joined this bandwagon in 2008 only as a means to get viewers for his online portal, desimad.com, which he had launched a year previously. However, within 5-6 months, he began receiving a sizeable income through the YouTube Partner Programme (YPP). The YPP lets you host YouTube channels and pays you from the ads that it puts up there. Realising the potential of this medium, he started various channels (similar to a Facebook page) on YouTube.

Merchant's 11-year experience across various media and entertainment companies, including Times Music,Nimbus, Idream Production and Saregama India, helped him with both ventures. "I started desimad.com to create spoofs of various developments in the country. I launched the portal only after I found a venture capitalist to back me," says the 39-year-old Merchant.

He hired scriptwriters, animators and voice-over artists to produce the spoofs. "I wasn't receiving enough traffic, so I decided to put up a video on YouTube, along with a banner for desimad.com, in the hope that people would like the video and visit the site," he adds. "I added more channels such as those on Bollywood and Hollywood by approaching stringers and paparazzi to provide me with exclusive content," says Merchant, who now has 30 channels on YouTube and 25 fulltime employees.

Exclusivity is essential as you won't get paid for copied or plagiarised content. The YPP pays about 55% of the revenue earned from the channel to the content developer and the balance to YouTube. Merchant's channels receive 25 lakh viewers a day and has a turnover of Rs 45 lakh a month.

An area that amateur photographers are leveraging is microstock photography, where you can sell your photographs and get paid according to the number of times they are downloaded. Some of the popular sites are iStockphoto, Fotolia and Shutterstock.

For instance, you can contribute photos for free on Shutterstock and can earn $0.25-28 (Rs 12-1,361) per image download. To attract potential customers, you must add keywords, titles and descriptions to your photos, which can be time consuming if you upload the pictures on various sites. The bigger your portfolio, the more you will earn. However, you will need to upload hundreds of photos for making a substantial income.

 Run a virtual office

JOBS: Data entry, medical transcription, virtual assistance, online research and hosting online forums

SKILLS: Freshers can start with basic data entry and virtual assistant jobs, but you will need more experience as well as knowledge of the subject for the more skilled jobs

INCOME: Rs 1,500-1 lakh a month, depending on the working hours and experience

How to make money online through social networking, blogging, e-tutoring, designing & video content development

As new mediums open up, you need to adapt and leverage these. Hrish Thota did so when he evolved from blogging to Tweeting. Thota has been blogging for almost a decade and joined Twitter when it was launched in 2006. He is now a professional Tweeter, who has 4,500 followers and earns about Rs 1 lakh a month. The 31-year-old, who is a former employee of consulting firm Capgemini, began his Twitter career by writing about events and computer hardware in Bangalore.

Within a year, as his network of followers grew, companies began to approach him to Tweet about their products. "They were paying me to do this job, so I needed to apprise my community of followers about this. It's essential to maintain your integrity in this field," says Thota, who has done brand campaigns for Tata Nano, Lehar Kurkure and Royal Challenge.

Recently, he was involved with a campaign for Ford Figo for around a month-and-a-half, where he had to do a road show from Chandigarh to Chennai, Tweeting and photoblogging about the events in real time. "I usually spend about 2-3 hours every day on Twitter, but if I'm involved with a brand campaign, this can go up to six hours," he says. On an average, he earns Rs 30,000-40,000 a month per brand. 

As important as your writing skill is your ability to network, a point that both Khare and Thota emphasise. "Before you begin to post your views, you need to create a community. You should go to various meets and events to develop contacts," says Thota.

Though writing seems easy at first glance, if you want to earn money from it, you will have to work hard. Professional bloggers put in about 2-5 hours every day and constantly strive to write on topics that provide updated information. You need to be regular and prompt in answering your readers' queries.

If you have honed your skills and are confident about what you write, you could even publish a book a lá Anupam Mukerji, who became famous for his blog, the Fake IPL Player, written cheekily about the IPL's second season. In March last year, he published a book, The Gamechanger. However, if no publisher seems interested in the physical realm, don't despair. You can write a virtual bestseller.

Ebooks are in high demand across the world and many people are writing exclusively for this segment. In June this year, crime novelist John Locke became the first independent author to sell more than 1 million e-books through Kindle's ( Amazon) direct publishing programme, under which you do not need an agent or a publisher. Each e-book was sold for $0.99 (Rs 48), of which Locke pocketed 35 cents (Rs 17).

Global classroom

JOBS: E-tutoring

SKILLS: Domain knowledge and good communication skills

INCOME: Rs 15,000-50,000 a month (for 8-hour sessions) depending on the subject and region (India or international)

When Shyamila Rana's husband got a job in Dehradun in 2007, the 42-year-old school teacher began applying for a post in various schools in the city. Unfortunately, not many were willing to hire her, citing age as a factor. Rana was unwilling to waste her experience and time, so she began looking for other opportunities. She soon found hundreds of overseas students, who were eager to learn science from her. "One of my husband's colleagues told him about e-tutoring and I sent an application, along with my resume, to one of the Websites," says Rana, who now teaches science for four hours to students based in the US.

For Rana, the job is interesting as she shares her knowledge with students, who are keen to learn and are not forced to study by their parents. For this, she is earning better than she would in a traditional school.

E-tutoring is a process in which a teacher educates a student or a group of students on a particular subject through online technology. This can involve the use of Webbased programs and includes data, voice and video communication. The tutor can send questions, receive completed papers, provide results and recommendations, clarify concepts, assist on assignments, etc. To begin in this field, you can sign up with some established names such as TutorVista.com.

Says Alok Bansal, chief executive officer of Gurgaon-based Alethia Education Services: "To start a career as an online tutor, you should know the content well and be conversant with technology.

Though you don't need advanced degrees to teach school children, it's preferable if you have teaching experience." Another aspect you need to consider is the working hours, especially if you are teaching international students. The difference in time zones may make it difficult to work for long.

Food and Travelling

You can join a writers' community, where people freely dispense tips on improving writing or increasing readership (see How to increase blog traffic). Girish Khare, a part-time blogger, discovered the benefits of this when a member of his community put him in touch with a journalist, who then published some of his blogs in the newspaper that she worked. Khare started blogging in 2006 after he suffered five heart attacks in a year and decided to opt out of the corporate rat race. He took a sabbatical and spent months travelling to exotic locations, from underground rock churches in Lalibela, Ethiopia, to the tropical rainforest of Borneo.

"Food and travelling are my two passions, so I began writing about them in my blog. After I had penned my experiences in Borneo, I received an invitation from the government of Malaysia, which asked me to visit the country along with some journalists and highlighting it as a luxury destination," says 55-yearold Khare. The same year he joined a friend's travel & tour company in Mumbai.

In 2007, Khare's casual writing became serious business when he did some work for Cox & Kings and his blogs were bought by travel and food magazines and portals. "You need to offer novelty in your blogs.

I have written about the cuisine of the Bedouins of Africa as well as how to cook food in banana leaves," says Khare. Currently, he writes eight blogs a week and earns Rs 50,000 a month from his articles.

Once you find your literary footing, it may be better to have your own Website and domain name. This gives you a specific identity, and if you submit your blog's URL to search engines, it will become more noticeable on the Net. Each search engine has Webmaster tools that can guide you through this process. The charges for a domain name usually range from Rs 300-1,000 a year. The main source of income for most bloggers is GoogleAdSense, which places contextual ads on Websites.

Write way to earn

JOBS: Blogging, micro-blogging, Tweeting, freelance writing, editing, e-authoring and translating

SKILLS: Comprehensive writing skill and expertise in any field

INCOME: Rs 500 for a 300-word article to Rs 1 lakh a month for full-time blogging

Your thoughts are worth more than a penny now. Your scribbles and musings can earn you big bucks, if you know how to market them well. If you are unsure of your talent, start by writing a blog. It's easy to begin—just join a blogging site, such as Blogspot or Wordpress, and start writing. There is no training institute for this and only through trial and error will you discover what appeals to readers.

However, bloggers are flooding the virtual world and if you want to stand out and get noticed by readers and advertisers, you will need to provide information or advice that no one else can, or provide it in a way that is better than others.

How to make money online through social networking

You never had it so good. Access to a client list that runs into hundreds of millions, a reach that spreads across the world, hardly any infrastructure cost, and no need to impress anyone with a wall full of framed qualifications. Welcome to the virtual bazaar, a marketplace that encompasses the world while shrinking it to a small screen.

The biggest shopping mall, where everything is on sale, from technical advice to tattered childhood comics. A region where every boundary is blurred; no one cares about your age, no one is interested in your race or religion, and no one needs to know whether you live in the boondocks or a plush penthouse. The anonymity that the virtual world provides has been the biggest boost to equality for small entrepreneurs and job hunters across the globe.

It's a treasure trove full of opportunities for anyone with guts and gumption. If no publisher is interested in your writing, pen a blog or publish an e-book. If you can't afford to rent a shop, sell online. You will need less space than the local kirana store and reach a wider customer base than the brick-and-mortar mall near your house.

The World Wide Web has a solution for everything, and for everything, a customer. All you need to do in order to step into this vast land of fortune is to get a computer and a broadband connection. If you don't know where to start, do so by joining a popular network.

Let the numbers convince you: a staggering 150 million users on Facebook and 200 million on Twitter. Each and everyone is a potential customer for anything that you have to sell: your skills, your thoughts or even your junk.

We take you through a list of professions that you can venture into and introduce you to people who have leveraged the Net to earn a comfortable income. By no means is this a comprehensive list. In fact, it is not even an indicative one since the virtual world is continuously evolving and new opportunities are cropping up every day. After all, some of the biggest platforms that people use currently didn't even exist a decade ago—Facebook was launched in 2004, YouTube in 2005, and Twitter in 2006.