The Truth About Making Money Online

(And Why Everyone Lying To You About It Is Also Broke)

I’m tired.

Tired of the screenshots. Tired of the Stripe dashboards showing £47,000 in revenue (but never the refunds, never the ad spend, never the fact that £46,500 of it went to Facebook). Tired of the webinars that promise to reveal “the secret” before trying to sell me a course for two grand. Tired of watching people who’ve never made a penny online except by selling courses about making money online.

And I’m tired of pretending this is all normal.

So here’s the truth about making money online, delivered with the kind of honesty that’ll probably make me no friends and zero sales: it’s possible, but not in the way you’ve been told. The internet isn’t broken, but the conversation about it absolutely is.

The Big Lie (Or Rather, Several Big Lies)

The biggest lie isn’t that you can’t make money online. You absolutely can. The biggest lie is that there’s some hidden system, some secret method, some underground strategy that the “gurus” discovered and are generously sharing with you for three easy payments of £997.

There isn’t.

Every single method that works is boring, well-documented, and has been written about extensively by people who aren’t trying to sell you anything. The reason you haven’t made money yet isn’t because you don’t know the secret. It’s because the actual methods require work you don’t want to do, or time you’re not willing to invest, or skills you haven’t developed yet.

The second big lie is that “making money online” is somehow different from making money anywhere else. It isn’t. The internet is just a tool. A distribution channel. A way to reach people you couldn’t reach before. But the fundamentals haven’t changed: you still need to provide value, solve problems, or sell things people actually want.

Putting “online” after “make money” doesn’t suddenly exempt you from basic economics.

The third lie, and this one’s more insidious, is that passive income is actually passive. It’s not. Every single “passive” income stream I’ve ever seen required months or years of active work upfront, ongoing maintenance, customer service, technical troubleshooting, and constant adaptation to algorithm changes, platform updates, and market shifts.

Passive income is just income that’s slightly less active than a normal job. That’s it.

What Actually Works (The Boring Truth)

Right, let’s talk about what actually works. Not what worked in 2015 when some bloke started a Shopify store and accidentally went viral. Not what might work if you’re lucky. What reliably, consistently, boringly works right now.

Selling things people actually want

This is commerce. You find something people need, you sell it to them, you keep the difference. Revolutionary, I know. The “online” bit just means you’re using the internet to find customers instead of renting a shop on the high street.

You can sell physical products, digital products, services, your time, your expertise, your taste, your curation… it doesn’t really matter what it is as long as people want it and you can deliver it.

The catch? You need to actually find those people, convince them you’re not a scam, deliver what you promised, and do it all over again tomorrow. This is a business. It requires business things like inventory, customer service, marketing, accounting, and all the other stuff that makes business boring.

But it works. And people do it. And some of them make decent money doing it.

Building an audience and monetising attention

This is the YouTube/newsletter/podcast/social media route. You create content, build an audience, and then convert that attention into money through sponsorships, products, services, or subscriptions.

Here’s what nobody tells you: this takes years. Not months. Years. The people who “made it” in six months either had an existing audience somewhere else, went viral through dumb luck, or are lying about the timeline.

You’re competing with Netflix, TikTok, video games, porn, and every other dopamine dispenser on earth for people’s attention. And attention is finite. And most people, statistically speaking, will fail at this because they’ll give up before they see results.

But if you can stick with it, if you genuinely enjoy the process, if you’re patient enough to play the long game… it does work. I’ve seen it work. But I’ve also seen a thousand people quit after three months because they uploaded twenty videos and got twelve views.

Arbitrage and flipping

This is just trading. Buy low, sell high. Find inefficiencies in markets and exploit them before they disappear.

Some people do this with domain names. Some with limited edition trainers. Some with Amazon products. Some with vintage furniture they find on Facebook Marketplace.

It works, but it’s not passive, it’s not scalable beyond a certain point, and it requires capital upfront. You’re essentially running a trading business, which means you need to know your market, move quickly, and accept that sometimes you’ll get stuck holding inventory that won’t sell.

Also, most of the easy arbitrage opportunities disappeared years ago when everyone else cottoned on to them.

Skills-based freelancing

This is the least sexy option, which is probably why it works so well.

You get good at something people need… writing, design, coding, video editing, marketing, whatever… and you sell that skill to clients who need it done. You trade your time and expertise for money.

It’s not passive. It’s not automated. It’s just work. But it’s reliable work, and if you’re good at what you do, it pays well.

The internet just makes it easier to find clients, collaborate remotely, and work with people anywhere in the world. But the core transaction hasn’t changed: someone needs something done, you do it, they pay you.

Boring? Absolutely. Effective? Also absolutely.

What Used to Work But Doesn’t Anymore

Let’s pour one out for the methods that died so the gurus could keep selling courses about them.

Dropshipping

This was a real thing in 2015. You could set up a Shopify store, list products from AliExpress, run some Facebook ads, and actually make money. The margins were thin, but it worked.

Now? The market’s saturated, the margins have been competed away, shipping times from China are a customer service nightmare, Facebook ads cost ten times what they used to, and every product has fifty identical stores selling it.

Can you still make money dropshipping? Maybe. If you’re exceptional at marketing, have deep pockets for ad spend, and enjoy constant stress. But for most people, it’s a losing game.

Affiliate marketing (the old way)

There was a time when you could rank a blog post on Google for “best electric toothbrush,” stick some Amazon affiliate links in it, and make passive income forever.

Google killed that. Not all at once, but slowly, through algorithm updates that favoured big brands and actual expertise over affiliate content farms. Amazon also slashed commission rates, making the whole thing barely worth the effort.

Affiliate marketing still works if you have a genuine audience who trusts your recommendations. But the “build a niche site and collect affiliate cheques” model is mostly dead.

Blogging for ad revenue

Remember when people said “start a blog” like it was legitimate business advice?

Ad rates have cratered. Google’s algorithm changes have destroyed traffic to independent blogs. AI-generated content is flooding search results. And even if you do manage to rank, the ad revenue from display ads is embarrassingly low unless you’re getting millions of pageviews.

You’d make more money working in Tesco.

Kindle publishing

For a brief, beautiful moment, you could pump out low-content books on Amazon, rank them through black-hat tactics, and make bank.

Amazon shut that down. Hard. Now the platform’s full of AI-generated slop, margins are terrible, and unless you’re writing actual books that people actually want to read, you’re wasting your time.

Why Most People Fail

Here’s the bit where I’m supposed to blame you for not having enough discipline or focus or whatever.

But that’s not quite right.

Most people fail at making money online, not because they’re lazy or stupid, but because they’re being sold a fantasy that doesn’t match the reality of the work required.

They want passive income, but they’re not willing to do the active work up front. They want to “make money online” without committing to a specific path long enough to see results. They want the freedom and flexibility without the uncertainty and grind.

And I get it. The marketing is incredibly compelling. Who wouldn’t want to make money from their laptop while travelling the world, working four hours a week, living the dream?

But that’s not what it actually looks like.

What it actually looks like is sitting at your desk for twelve hours trying to figure out why your website won’t load, or why your Facebook ad account got banned, or why your product supplier just disappeared, or why nobody’s opening your emails, or why your best piece of content got three likes and a spam comment.

It looks like working weekends. Missing social events. Spending money you don’t have on ads that don’t work. Questioning whether you’re delusional. Wondering if you should just get a normal job.

And then, if you’re lucky and persistent and good at what you do, it starts to work. Slowly. Then a bit faster. Then maybe, eventually, it becomes something that looks like success.

But most people don’t make it that far because they weren’t told it would be this hard.

The Uncomfortable Truth

If you want to make money online, you probably need to do one of three things:

Sell something genuinely useful
Get exceptionally good at a skill people will pay for
Build something people actually want

Everything else is either gambling or a very slow grind with diminishing returns.

Notice what’s not on that list? Get-rich-quick schemes. Secret systems. Hidden strategies. Magic funnels.

The uncomfortable truth is that making money online requires the same things making money offline requires: providing value, building trust, solving problems, and doing it consistently over time.

The internet doesn’t change that. It just gives you access to more people, which means more opportunity, but also more competition.

And here’s the really uncomfortable bit: you might not make it. Most people don’t. Not because they’re failures, but because success in any endeavour requires a combination of skill, timing, persistence, and luck. And sometimes you just don’t get all four at once.

The End (Sort Of)

So, what now?

You could ignore everything I’ve just said and buy another course. You could convince yourself that this time will be different, that this guru has the real secret, that this strategy is the one that’ll finally work.

Or you could accept that making money online is just making money, with all the difficulty and opportunity that entails.

You could pick something that actually interests you, get good at it, stick with it long enough to see results, and stop waiting for permission or secrets or the perfect moment.

The opportunities do exist. People are making money online right now. Real money. Life-changing money. But they’re doing it by building actual businesses, developing actual skills, and putting in actual work.

Not by buying courses from people whose only income comes from selling courses.

The truth is both worse and better than what you’ve been told. Worse because there’s no shortcut. Better because once you accept that, you can stop looking for one and start doing the work that actually matters.

And maybe, just maybe, it’ll work out.

Or maybe it won’t.

But at least you’ll know I’m being honest about it.

Until Next Time