How to Make Your First $100k Online: 20 Proven Methods for 2026

Let’s get this clear – the only easy ways of making money online are SCAMS!

You can sell shit courses to a few hundred people and make a few lakhs, but it’s gonna ruin your reputation FOREVER!

On the other hand, you can take the ethical route and then you’d have dozens of choices to make money online and I’m listing down top 20 ways I’ve used in last 20 years to make money online since 2005, and they work in 2026 too –

1. Micro niche blogs

1. & Google Adsense I made my first crore with micro niche

car

1. blogs and you can see a live case study and also real life example of a 5 page blog that generated $1/day consistently for me for almost 1.5 years with just 22 days of work

And, just to give you a perspective of the amount of money we’re talking about, here’s one of my Adsense accounts that had over $37,000+ in it

I had such dozens of them until google wiped 93% of my empire, and as they say “change is inevitable” so we pivoted to a digital agency, and heck – what does a kid who just made his first $100k in revenue know about building a real empire?

2. Freelancing – It could be content writing, logo designing, development or something else – you can make money as freelance by utilising your talent – you can get paid anywhere from $0.5/hour all the way up to $100+ depending upon your skill set and experience

About.com and similar sites pay as high as $100 per article (I was their global hosting guide from 2010–2015) and then entry level gigs on Fiverr and other platforms may pay you $5–10 for a gig which could require even 5 mins or 5 hours!

3. Amazon Affiliate Sites – Just like micro niche blogs, you can build amazon affiliate niche sites around a specific set of buyer intent keywords such as “best smartphones under Rs 5000” and generate commission from each sale that happens through your affiliate link

I used to build a ton of those way back in 2010–2011 too and I’ve restarted building them in 2026 again!

4. Dropshipping – It’s definitely dying a slow death in 2026, and in post COVID era, it’s really hard to make it work, but I did make my fair share of money from 2018–2019 and my business partner clocked over $4.4M from one store itself and we presented this case study at the biggest affiliate marketing conference in the world AWA 2019

5. Coupon & Cashback Sites – Everyone knows about success stories like CashKaro, DesiDime, CouponDunia and GrabOn. Of course, it’s easier said than done and building a coupon/cashback site in 2026 isn’t gonna be a cakewalk but still doable!

I’ve done SEO for many deals and discount sites and currently trying to build one too, but it’s much more laborious than micro niche blogs

6. Traffic Arbitrage – You can buy cheap traffic from native networks like Taboola Outbrain and divert it to viral sites and monetise it using Google Adsense and profit margins are around 20–30%

In simple terms, you’re buying cheap traffic from a network like MGID – say 1000 clicks for $10 in a country like India and then hope that 100 of those people click on Adsense ads and even with cpc or say $0.13 you end up making $3 profit per 100 clicks

And you can scale this unlike SEO, and add more zeros to those figures if you manage to stay profitable

You can do Facebook to Adsense arbitrage too

7. Whitehat CPL Affiliate Campaigns – If you know how to run FB ads, you can easily run FB ads for CPL offers like credit cards, property leads, car test drive, and many other campaigns from leading affiliate networks like Vcommission

8. E-commerce Stores in India on COD – It’s one of my primary businesses at the moment and once again I’d like to warn you that it’s not for the newbies and faint hearted

We launched an Indian store and suffered over a crore of losses in 2018 as we didn’t keep an eye on money leakage due to poor management of logistics, high delivery rates but eventually learned how to make it work profitably

Now we run a few stores doing few lakh rupee revenues every day!

Our aim is to build the biggest portfolio of bootstrapped d2c brands in India, and do the IPO by 2031 with a billion dollar valuation

9. CPA Blackhat Campaigns – There are many offers that you can’t run on Facebook without cloaking, and such campaigns are called blackhat cpa campaigns such as casino, Nutra trial offers and now even FB has banned corona virus masks!

With my partner I’ve again run thousands of dollars of CPA campaigns in past but in 2020, we paused it and decided to channelise our energy on long term things

10. Sell E-books Even if you’re an expert writer, you can hire ghostwriters and research low competition topics – to give you a perspective, I sold an ebook on how to get ex back (when I didn’t have an ex 🤣) for $3.99 a pop and made money and you can do it too!

Now we sell only value-driven e-books on NumeriqueAcademy.com

11. Taking Online Classes – If you’re good at doing something you can take online classes and teach thousands of people and make thousands of dollars every month. Since god has been kind enough to me, I’ve always helped people for FREE but I know the day I launch a paid course, minimum 1000+ people would blindly buy – that’s the kind of reputation I’ve built over the last 14 years, and I wanna keep it going and empower 1M youth through Numerique Academy & other companies under Webfosys Ventures

12. SaaS Subscriptions – You can launch any Software as a Service model, wherein you give access to your product/service on a monthly subscription model like Hootsuite or Canva Pro and generate monthly recurring revenues! You don’t have to necessarily build something out of the box – just something resourceful that solves a problem and people would buy it!

We’re building suite of AI tools & SEO tools in 2026, and we will be launching the first one next month

13. JvZoo Launches – Build a small product of your own and find some email marketers and launch that shit on JvZoo – I’ve friends who’ve done $100K+ launches in 1 week and I’m gonna do one in 2026 too!

14. Instagram & Social Media Branding Consultancy – Everyone wants to build a loyal follower base on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Tiktok and YouTube and if you know how to play the game right, then you can certainly make a lot of money online.

I started my personal branding from Jan 2, 2020 and now I’ve got

30k+ followers on my personal Facebook account

Almost 600k on my Facebook fan page

300k on my Instagram

10,000 on my LinkedIn, and 200k+ views on a single post

400,000+ views on Quora, and 150k+ views on one of my single answer with overall 2M+ views

I’ve now started building following on Twitter, and YouTube and hoping to cross 50-100k each in 2026!

15. MLM (Multi Level Marketing) – I started making money with Amway, way back in 2005 but now there are tons of online MLM schemes but the sad part is most of them are SHIT or SCAMS! Finding a reliable one isn’t an easy job, andit’s been a while I tried my hands at any of them, so I’m not gonna personally recommend anything

Give it a try to each of them to figure out your strengths and then play by them – good luck and make sure you earn $5–10 TODAY!

Feel free to drop me a DM on Instagram for any help and watch free tutorials on my YouTube

16. Influencer Marketing and Paid Shoutouts – If you’ve got over 10,000 followers on Instagram, and an active audience on social media platforms, you can become an influencer, and get paid gigs from brands.

There are also influencer marketing agencies like Skreem (co-founded by one of my business acquintances Harsha M V) that pay micro influencers for daily shoutouts on Facebook and other social platforms.

17. Personal Coaching Programs – Due to the whole Corona Virus outbreak thingy, online coaching programs are becoming popular than ever before. You can launch your own personal coaching program or release courses on platforms like Udemy to get started.

18. Become a VA (Virtual Assistant) – There’s a heavy demand for VA (Virtual Assistants) in the digital world, and if you’re an ecommerce store owner, you know the need (and pain of not having one, if you don’t) – as an individual, you can do the daily chores and make anywhere from $1-3/hour as VA.

19. Sell Stock Photos – I don’t do it personally yet, but we’ve now hired in house content creators, photographers, models, and video editors, so we will start doing that in 2026 as well.

20. Build an AI AGENCY
Yes last but not the least, there’s shitloads of money to be made, if you master AI – and when I say AI, I don’t mean the generic bullshit – I mean REAL WORLD application – if you can save my daily 2-3 hours of time, and automate something, I’d be willing to pay $10,000 for it, or heck perhaps even $50,000 and same is the case with most enterprises – they’re willing to pay millions!

I’ll personally build an example, and once we cross $100k in revenue, I’ll post a case study of this

You can also follow my latest free series on blogging and freelancing on my YouTube Channel [just crossed 10k subscribers]

Follow my FB Fan page 👉 Om Thoke, which is growing at 500–1000/day 🔥 [almost 630k now]

Connect with me on Instagram [300k+ now – inching towards 400k]
Now that you know the top 20 ways to make money online in 2026, go give them a shot – I know, everyone wants practical hand holding, so I recommend you get started as a freelancer

Top Freelancing Platforms –

Fiverr
Freelancer.com
Upwork
PeoplePerHour
Guru.com
Truelancer

Usually, when the new aspiring digital entrepreneurs start their journey, they usually falter in the area of keyword research, and more often than not, they fail to produce quality content too.

As a matter of fact, they usually copy a lot of stuff from existing resources, and totally underestimate the importance of original contents, and ultimately fail to create their mark with originality.

You can read this detailed ebook (link to https://superprofile.bio/vp/679c99893b00dd00130d3d26) to get started as a freelancer in 2026, and start your digital journey, keep reading my blog posts on Webfosys Ventures &OmThoke.com to stay in touch with latest trends of 2026