If you're serious about making money online, start a blog. Blogging is one of the easiest and most sustainable income sources. As long as the blog is setup the right way, in the right niche, with the right content targeted at the right audience, and the offer is complementary to the content, you could make a tremendous amount of passive income from a blog.
The money is most certainly in the list. If you're at all interested in online marketing, setup email software and create a lead magnet that you can use in your sales funnel. Then, build up that list. It's often said that you can expect to earn about $1 per subscriber per month. If you have a list of 10,000 subscribers, that means you can earn roughly around $10,000 per month. You will need to deliver value and not pitch them on every email, but it is a very achievable goal in a short period.
I need to be more regular in my donating / giving so I wanted to tie a specific dollar amount that I’m looking to accomplish. I know it’s kind of odd that I’m including this goal in a blog post as most people are pretty private about what they give to charity, but it’s on my white board so I guess it’s on the blog post lol. Throughout this year I will occasionally release products or software and state in the sales material that (for example) the first $5,000 purchased worth of this software will be going directly to Charity Water. Continuing with charity water as an example, after I would reach that sales figure I’d then make a donation to a Charity Water campaign as well just to prove that I was actually making the donations. You’d have to be pretty evil to say you were going to donate money and not actually do it though.
If you don’t mind doing other people’s chores, then TaskRabbit is a great option for making money online. Earn extra income by walking your neighbor’s dog or mowing Mr. Smith’s lawn. It might seem like not the most lucrative option, but the top taskers reportedly earn as much as $7000 a month, making this a full-time way to make money online for some.
If you’re looking for inspiration, my friend Michelle Schroeder-Gardner of the website Making Sense of Sense has become the expert on all things affiliate marketing. Michelle earns more than $100,000 per month from her blog and the bulk of her income comes from affiliate sales. Michelle has had so much success with affiliate marketing that she even has her own course called Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing.