5 Digital Assets that You Can Use to Make Money In 2020

Do you want to succeed and secure a comfortable future for yourself? You’re not going to do it by making money the way your parents or grandparents did. The world is changing fast.

A new economy is emerging, and it’s based on information, social capital, and digital assets.

To find the next Amazons, Apples, and Bitcoins of the world, you need to identify what defines your generation and invest in the future.

And the good news? The future is now. There are a number of promising assets of the future that are budding and blossoming (aka, making a lot of people a lot of money) even as you read this article.

Here are just a few that are worth your time and money in 2020.

Social Media

Social media can be turned into a great asset if used correctly.

Trailblazing digital platforms like Facebook arose because of how it can easily connect people and ideas in a short amount of time.

Other social media sites have built on that, and now, one of its many uses is to help establish your brand’s visibility.

When I say “brand”, I’m not just talking about businesses.

Your personal reputation is considered a brand, and this brand will give others an idea of who you are and what you can offer.

For example, you can:

• Create a page dedicated to your advocacy
• Post updates about certain products, services, projects, etc
• Express your opinions and create a dedicated follower base followers
• Promote your products and/or services

Popular social media sites allow you to make a profile or a page for free. The numbers you have on those – such as followers that engage with you – have actual business value that potential sponsors look for.

It explains why pretty people on Instagram with about a million followers and multiple comments per post can afford to quit their day jobs and live entirely on sponsorships that keep coming.

In the digital age, your existence and reach are heavily dependent on whether you have a social media account or not.

When people hear of a brand, they do a quick check on the activity of their social media page. If the latest update was 3 years ago, it gives the idea that you’re not in business anymore, affecting the potential of making a sale.

Here’s a quick rundown of what each popular social media site can do for you and your personal brand:

• Facebook – With more than a billion registered users, Facebook is one of the best places to create a business page and reach a varied type of audience.

As a social networking site, this allows you to form a human connection because you can engage with your followers in real time. You can easily reply to comments, make a live video, create an event, and so much more.

• Instagram – Just like Facebook, you can create business pages and connect with your audience.

The difference lies in the demographics and purpose – most Instagram users are aged 34 years old and younger and respond more to visually-appealing marketing collaterals.

• LinkedIn – Lets you build your professional profile and make connections with professionals in your industry.

Most websites that accept guest contributions require your LinkedIn profile along with your submission where they check your professional background before endorsing your ideas.

• YouTube – Lets you share ideas and build your Google EAT – Expertise, Authority, and Trust.

The more you learn and share what you know in a relatable way that most people find convenient (in the US alone, 85% of internet users watch video content, preferring YouTube over other video-streaming sites), the higher your EAT ranking will be.

An important tip to remember is that you don’t have to establish your presence on ALL the popular social media sites. Just know and understand who you’re making content for, and set up in places they would expect to see you.

Website

If you’ve got an active engagement of friends and followers on your social media sites, you can take it one step further by linking back to your website.

Websites serve as a platform for visitors to get to know the information they’re looking for; it serves as the heart of your offers and online presence.

In other words, it’s the equivalent of real estate in the digital space.

You can use websites for various purposes that can make you money:

• Build your brand presence – If you have an established business/ brand, then you can use websites to reach out to more people and potentially boost your revenue.
• Sell products as an eCommerce site – If you don’t want to reinvent the wheel and market your own stuff, then create an e-commerce website and sell products that have a proven customer base!
• Use it for affiliate marketing – Don’t like the idea of selling like what you do in a market? Are you good with words and can write persuasive lines of text?

Then try dedicating your site to affiliate marketing. Just write some content that will encourage users to click on an affiliate link, and if they go down the funnel, then you make money!

• Build it from scratch and sell it – One way to make money from a website is by making a site that can be used for e-commerce then sell it to interested buyers. You can think of it like building a market stall then selling it to people who want to sell some products.
• Sell an existing website with a good number of traffic visitors – Another tactic you can try is to build a website that generates a lot of traffic (news sites, lifestyle blogs, etc.) then sell them for large amounts of money to willing buyers.

When you own a website, it’s a good idea to pair it with a social media page. As explained above, social media pages help establish your online presence and reach your target audience for marketing purposes.

Websites, on the other hand, are assets that you can fully control and greatly helps improve the credibility of your offers.

Think about it: When there’s a business offering that presents itself as someone with a big budget yet does not have a working website (or worse, no website at all), how does it affect your perception?

Social media is great, but you can never be too sure of the security of your business page. If the terms and conditions change, your business page is at risk of getting removed.

With a website of your own, you can build and solidify your online presence, authority, and do basically whatever you want.

Content

Content is a broad term that can mean articles, infographics, videos, images, and other types that people can see and use to propel them to take action.

Producing strong, high-quality, and well-targeted content regularly can pull in valuable traffic and active engagement.

This helps if you’re trying to stand out in a particular niche since it can greatly boost people’s perception of you as an authority in that field.

If you manage to balance this out by engaging with your followers as well, they’ll view you as more human and relatable, making it easy to capture their trust.

Once you’ve garnered a strong following or frequent site visitors, there are various ways to monetize this:

• Lead generation – You can give out free and useful content in exchange for their subscription to your email newsletters
• Direct sales – After giving out lots of good content for free to a responsive audience, squeezing in an offer every now and then has a higher potential of being sold
• Affiliate marketing – Once you’ve established yourself as a person they can trust, your recommendations will be valued more than some random internet stranger

Also read: Top 3 Lessons I Learned from Growing a $100K+ Business

Online Shop

The shift to digitalization and the convenience that online shopping offers will surely favor you in the future if you create an online shop.

People are also becoming smart shoppers where they like to do their research for product and service reviews before a purchase.

It’s advantageous to your business in many ways:

• The potential to make a profit is available 24/7
• Lesser operational costs needed (depending on your business, online shops can be managed by one person, compared to physical stores where you need to pay for rent, light fixtures, store personnel, etc. )
• Can be managed anywhere – You can be checking your sales or selling online using your mobile phone in a resort!

But with the current pandemic leading to an increase in the number of online shops, it might be a little harder to stand out.

The solution is to ensure a smooth shopping experience for your customers – from the first time they hear of you, when they visit your website and view your offers, the payment process, and all the way to what happens after they purchase.

Customers appreciate transparency and responsive customer support to make them feel like you’re a business who cares.

Cryptocurrencies

Cryptocurrencies are a viable alternative to fiat money and it comes with its own set of features you can use to your advantage.

One, it’s decentralized which gives you full control over your money.

This requires more research on how cryptocurrency works and ways to secure it, but the new knowledge you gain can be used for other means, like content production.

You can make money with cryptocurrency and share all about it in your blog, for example. It’s like hitting two birds with one stone!

Second, its volatile nature due to its budding industry offers much potential for people to buy low and sell high.

Bitcoin, the first working type of cryptocurrency, started off being valued at less than a dollar back in 2009. If you owned at least one Bitcoin back then and kept it until today, you already have around $10,000 worth of money.

Imagine how much more money you would own if you invested in other types of cryptocurrencies—Ethereum, Ripple, Monero, to name a few—and just held on to them after a decade.

An easy way of becoming a millionaire in the digital age!

There are plenty of ways to make money with cryptocurrencies, but here are the best ones if you’re starting out:

• Trading – Buying low and selling high
• Investing – Choosing cryptocurrencies with the great value or potential and holding on to them for a long period of time
• Do microtasks – Simply look for online tasks that pay you in cryptocurrencies

Once you’ve acquired enough cryptocurrencies, you can then go to an exchange platform like LocalBitcoins to trade in your crypto for fiat.

Alternatively, if you believe that crypto will eventually replace cash, then you can hold on to your assets and profit in the long run.

Also read: The Top 10 Digital Process Automation (DPA) Tools

So, when are you gonna get started?

If you spend a lot of your free time hanging around on social media sites, you can use the time to figure out how to make it make money for you.

If you like writing or drawing, you can easily find a way to turn it into a sought-after service during the digital age.

Invest in your skills and invest in the foundational tools of the digital age, and you’ll be on your way to becoming rich in the future!

Christoffer Ravnsborg

I’m Chris! I started making money online back in 2013, after coincidently stumbling upon affiliate marketing through a friend. During my 7 years in the field, I have built a marketing agency and more than 50 successful websites. Today I live in the Philippines, where I work with more than 20 smart people. I know a lot about making money online, and today I help others, like you, with getting started.

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