I'll chime in on this one.
In my experience, if you want to make money long term then you have to create assets that either produce income on a regular basis or assets that increase in value over time so that you can sell them one day.
There are only a handful of different assets I can think of when it comes to doing business online.
1) Lists
2) Funnels
3) Websites
4) Service Businesses
5) Information Products
6) Physical Products
7) Digital Products
Lists - When I say lists I mean an email list or a list of prospects' contact information. Without turning this forum post into the length of an ebook, let me just say that you can have a small list that is very valuable or you can have a small list that is worthless. You can have a large list that is very valuable and you can have a large list that is worthless. And obviously you can have a list that falls anywhere in between those groups.
Funnels - A funnel is a systematized business process that takes a large group of somewhat targeted prospects and extracts various amounts of money from each prospect according to that prospect's willingness and ability to pay for more value. Typically the funnel starts out by getting prospects (people) to opt-in to some kind of offer in exchange for their contact information. Then it makes a relatively inexpensive offer to those people and gives those people a chance to buy a product. Then it makes a more expensive offer to those people and gets a smaller percentage of them to buy a better product that offers more value than the cheaper product. Then it makes an even more expensive offer to those people and gets a smaller percentage of them yet to buy another product that offers the most value of all. If you have a funnel that is proven to extract profits from a specific target audience, then you have an asset. It is like a machine that makes money. You simply feed it more targeted traffic and it turns that traffic into cash.
Websites - When I say websites, I am talking about building high quality websites that provide real value to a specific audience they are intended to serve. If you build high quality websites that actually provide real value to people, then those websites will usually increase in value over time as their audience grows. And typically the amount of income generated from the website also grows as long as the market for that website's "benefit" remains in place. As long as the demand remains for whatever value that website provides, then that website should continue to grow in value. There are numerous business models for different websites that can be profitable or even lucrative. It can include anything from information based authority sites (those are what I typically build) to public forums like this one you are visiting to ecommerce sites that sell products to membership websites to traditional personality based blogging to whatever else you can think of.
Service Businesses - This is just as it sounds. You create an internet based business that provides a service to people via the internet. This could be anything from being a freelance writer to a virtual assistant to a web designer to a link seller to a social media promoter to whatever else you can think of. You can sell your services through your own website or through one of the many freelance websites out there such as upwork.com or fiverr.com.
Information Products - Information products can be very valuable assets because you typically only have to engineer the product once and build it once. Once the product is built you can then sell it to thousands upon thousands of people. And you can sell the product for years as long as the product stays relevant to the market for years.
Physical products - Many of the more seriously dedicated entrepreneurs make their money by running businesses that sell physical products to people via the internet. This can be done with an ecommerce website as previously mentioned. It can also be done through other selling channels such as Fulfillment By Amazon or Ebay or Etsy.
Digital Products - This would include things like premium Wordpress themes, Wordpress plugins or software programs. Just like information products, you get to engineer the core product once and then sell it a million times if you can. Many of these types of products require a lot of support and updates though. But it is still a great business model because the core engineering only really has to happen once.
So, if you want to make money in the long run, I suggest you focus on creating assets for yourself in one of those forms. Many people have built impressive sustainable businesses through every single one of those methods I mentioned. Many people have failed trying to build a business using every single one of those methods I mentioned.
If you are new to the field of making money online, then I can't offer you any good advice on how to make a few hundred dollars in a few weeks right off the start. I simply don't know of any. All of the methods I know of about how to make a few hundred dollars in a few weeks require you to have some kind of asset up front like one of the ones I mentioned. If you owned one of these assets then there are many possible ways you could do a short term event that raised a few hundred in a few weeks. But if you are starting out from ground zero with no assets at all then I don't know how you would do that.
My advice would be to put yourself in a position where you have income coming in from somewhere else that can support you. Then work on building one or more of these assets for yourself in your spare time. That is a path to success.
