How to Make Money Online as a Teen

Being broke sure doesn’t help with the uncertainty and confusion of being in that vague place somewhere between childhood and adulthood. And you are not alone if you find yourself wondering how to make online as a teen.

Out of all the methods to make money online, the methods that are carried out over social media are generally the most suitable for teens today. Because if you are a teenager in 2024, chances are you are still pretty social media savvy even if you are not an internet expert.

You can leverage your social media acumen to make money online as a teen through Youtubing, promoting job openings online, affiliate marketing, and even drop shipping and email marketing.

1. Promote Job Openings Online

Passive income is the latest obsession among money-minded teens of today and sharing job openings through the Synkdup Headhunter Program is probably one of the laziest ways to make money online out there.

The only limitation is that you need to have a U.S based social media network for it to work for you. And, earning about $100 in passive income daily is only one of the benefits.

How it works

• You go on the website and sign up to be a headhunter.
• Once you have been verified and registered, you are provided a headhunter dashboard initializing you as a headhunter.
• On your dashboard, you can find web links to new job openings across America every day which you are expected to post on your social media accounts.
• You get a commission of about $25-$50 for every legitimate job applicant who applies through your link, whether they get the job or not.
• You post as many links available on your dashboard, as often as you want in the purely commission-based model.

It is ideal for teens looking for a low-responsibility, high-returns gig online. Because unlike other recruitment marketing programs, with Synkdup, you are not concerned with actually recruiting the job applicants. A headhunter only boosts the visibility of the job openings online without being responsible for any other recruitment functions.

2. Try YouTube

According to a new Pew Research Center survey of American teenagers aged 13-17 years which was conducted to determine the popularity of various social media platforms among teens, YouTube tops in popularity, being used by 95% of the surveyed teens.

The next most popular platform, TikTok, is being used by 67% of teens, making YouTube the most popular platform among teens by a large margin.

So, if you are a teen, I think it is safe to assume that Youtube is the social media platform you are most adept at and comfortable with. And if you are, it would make a lot of sense to consider the platform if you are looking to make money online.

There are two main ways to make money with your youtube channel - with and without monetization.

If you have 1000 subscribers on your youtube channel or more than 4,000 public watch hours in the past year, you can monetize your channel by linking it to an approved Google AdSense (or equivalent like Adbuff, AdRev, and Fullscreen Media) account and joining the YouTube Partner Program.

The two simplest ways to earn money if your channel is monetized are:

1. Ad revenue: If you make engaging, non-controversial, and advertiser-friendly content, advertisers will want to run ads on your videos. And every time an ad appears in or before one of your youtube videos, a fraction of whatever the advertiser is paying Youtube will go to your account.
2. YouTube Premium Revenue: Whenever a youtube premium user watches a video of yours, you automatically get a fraction of their subscription fees.

If your channel is not monetized, the simplest ways to make money with your Youtube channel include:

1. Donation Solicitations: It is very common for YouTubers today to ask viewers/fans for monetary support for the channel. The most popular platform for receiving donations from viewers is Patreon.
2. Affiliate Links: You can join an affiliate program related to your niche and post the affiliate links in the descriptions of your videos
3. Sponsored Posts: You can partner with brands and promote their products or services in your videos in return for money. If you have got a niche audience, seek out a brand that would want to target that audience and see if they are willing to pay you to talk about their products in your videos. You can either take a minute or half to explicitly talk about the product in the middle of your video before returning to the original topic or you can do implicit advertising where the whole video is actually an ad for the brand disguised as entertainment.

3. Affiliate marketing

This is a tried and tested way to make money online without spending a penny and I would suggest this for teens because they tend to be the target demographic for many online scams.

It is based on a purely commission-based payment model involving no real responsibility, which is ideal for a teen.

You ought to check out these programs:

• Amazon Associates
• eBay Partner Network
• DFO Global
• ClickBank

Requirements

• A significant social media following.
• A marketable niche like skin care, travel, food, fashion, health and fitness, personal finance and investing, etc. related to your online image.
• To find a business in the niche that offers an affiliate program

If you meet these requirements you can market something the affiliate way with very basic social media marketing through posts and reels and stories and so on. And your niche may be based on any kind of perceived or actual expertise or authority based on profession, personal interest, or personal experience.

How it works

• Once you find an affiliate program for products/services related to a niche you could target with some confidence, you get enrolled in the affiliate program.
• The program provides you web links landing users to a web page of the business where they are prompted to make a purchase. Every affiliate marketer has a link to the page with a unique extension for themselves that acts as a tracking id for the purchase by storing cookies on the user’s device.
• You upload these links with your social media posts or in your blogs or in the descriptions of your youtube videos etc. You also create and publish content promoting the business.
• For every customer who makes a purchase after landing on the page by clicking on your link, you get a commission either as a fixed portion (4%-50%) of the sale or at flat rates.

If the specified action that makes you entitled to a commission is taking a paid subscription instead of making a purchase, you may be paid on a recurring basis till the subscription continues instead of a lump sum commission.

Affiliate programs may come with widely varying attribution periods ranging from 24 hours to several months.

Amazon’s affiliate program, for instance, comes with a 24-hour attribution period which means you will still get your commission if :

A user lands on a particular Amazon page through an affiliate link you shared and leaves the page without making a purchase and returns to the page sometime again in the next 24 hours without using your link, and makes a purchase.

In contrast, the affiliate programs that run on the last-click attribution method only pay you when the purchase was made on the same visit to the company’s page that the user made through your affiliate link.

4. Email marketing

There has never been a more vocal generation of teens than this one - you guys have a word for everything from ghosting to hangriness. You can leverage this richness of urban slang very profitably through e-mail marketing.

If you are a teen you are probably very good at conveying crisp messages in writing without even realizing it simply because of how much you guys text on social media. The playful brevity you intrinsically find cool in texts and Twitter posts is very appreciated in the email industry as well.

You don’t have to have the writing skills of a blogger and can write decent promotional emails with very basic English writing and a general sense of advertisement tone.

Anyone with very basic writing skills can learn all about how to write for email marketing by reading up on it on the internet. And if you do that and team it up with your knowledge of trends, memes, and pop slang, you are in for an online earning adventure.

General best practices for Email marketing

• Try to create a 6-8 word subject line preferably with a sense of urgency.
• Avoid run-on sentences and try to keep them crisp in the body of the mail.
• Try to make the heading and call to action unique.
• Strike an optimal balance between formality and casualty in tone.
• Make the email mobile friendly.
• Make an informed decision about the time you choose to send your email.

You should also consider prevalent practices like these after discussing them with the client:

• Cross-Selling: You try to sell a related product/service in the same email in somewhat the same price range.
• Up-selling: You also offer better or exclusive versions (usually costlier) of the product/service on the same email.

If you have got a product or service to offer of your own, you can use these tips to market your own brand using your own email list.

5. Dropshipping

Dropshipping is probably one of the methods you least expect to come across while researching how to make money online as a teen, but, just hear me out.

Teens today are particularly knowledgeable about technology and gadgets like phones, cameras, speakers, and computers. At least way more than I was as a teen.

If you have some money on your hands and can reach an agreement with a supplier to ship orders out to your customers, you can make decent money selling online through drop shipping.

The supplier or drop shipper may be a wholesaler of, say, mobile phone batteries, earphones, chargers, accessories including body covers, or any small item you want to sell online.

How it works

• The wholesaler never sends you the inventory you buy from him/her and holds the stock for you, saving you warehousing costs.
• When someone places an order on the pictures of products you promote on your marketplace online, you send the order confirmation to them and forward the order to the wholesaler.
• The wholesaler has the order delivered to the customer, relieving you of order fulfillment costs altogether.
• You don’t even need to set up a website to promote your products, you may very well use your existing social media accounts as your online marketplace for now.
• It can be as simple as posting four photographs of a product from different angles and sides as slides on your Instagram and Facebook with a caption like ‘’Send Hi to ABC page or XYZ email id to place an order.’’

I’d suggest you redirect the user to a page of your collection on the same platform as you posted on. Because the platform would not push your posts forward as much if they prompt users to leave the platform and go to another.

So, even if you have enough cash to purchase only the minimum quantity the wholesaler sells of a product like, for example, protective tempered glass screens, and are able to strike a deal with the wholesaler, you should definitely consider drop shipping.

Final Word

If you are anything like a typical 2024 teenager, you have probably got yourself an online network of many people on social media. And this social media following might be a goldmine you are sitting on without realizing it.

There are countless other ways to make money online as a teen, but I’d say you should consider using one of the listed methods first if this is your first time. Though, you are more likely to end up using a combination of some of these methods rather than using any one method exclusively.

You need to take into account your personal assets and limitations while considering your options rather than deciding on a method based solely on the returns it offers.

And remember to save money once you start earning online, trust me, you are going to need it in your early twenties. Hope you found the article helpful and best of luck!