This guide lists 10 ways to make money online in Sri Lanka. These methods are now called Passive Income methods, because you can make money via internet with little investment of time and effort on your part.
While there are no successful get-rich-quick schemes, many people have found success earning money online. Here’s a list of ideas to earn Passive Internet Online Income, you’ll be able to select at least one or two that will work in your situation.
#1. Start your own website/ Blog
If you need to earn money online, first step is to start your own blog (website to deliver contents). If you are a student or if you are out of the school one of the best things you can do is to start a blog and put your resume on it. If you are applying for a Job, having a blog is impressive and it really makes you stand out from the crowd.
Follow these steps to start a Blog:
Step 1: Decide what to blog about. If you’re part of a business, company or organization, this step will be easy to determine.
Step 2: Choose a blogging platform. WordPress is the most common blogging platforms today. You can download WordPress free and host your own blog. https://wordpress.org/
Step 3: Find a host. Or you can host at wordpress.org or blogger.com by Google for free.
- Blogger by Google https://www.blogger.com/
- WordPress Blogs https://wordpress.com/
Step 4: Pick a domain name. Or you can start with a mysite.wordpress.com or mysite.blogspot.com free domain name.
Step 5: Install WordPress.
Step 6: Design & use your blog!
Check here to read more on how to start a blog https://amylynnandrews.com/how-to-start-a-blog/
#2. Blogging with Pay per click Advertising
With a blog, you can earn money by placing pay per click advertising such as Google Adsense. It will take some time to begin making money. First, you need to have interesting content on your blog. Then, you have to build your audience. You need to attract traffic by search engine optimizing your blog. To do this, use keywords that get a lot of hits from search engines, mainly Google to your blog.
Once you begin to attract traffic, you can place ads (from adsense, Text Link Ads, Yahoo Advertising or other Ad Netwroks) on your blog and begin to make money from those ads.
Google Adsense is the most effective method to make money from your blog (monetize your website). All you need to do is add a script from Google to your website and start displaying ads. Google handles displaying relevant ads on your web pages and taking money from the people that are advertising. You will get paid for every time a user clicks on the ad. These are called CPC or cost per click ads.
But still Google still does not display ads on Sinhala medium sites, if you need to run Adsense in your blog all articles should be in English only.
Blogger has the Google adsense program, which enables bloggers to earn money from ads placed on their blogs.
- Google Adsense https://www.google.com/adsense/
- Yahoo Adverting https://advertising.yahoo.com/publishers?destination=publisher
- Text Link Ads https://www.matomyseo.com/r/products/text-link-ads
#3. Become a freelancer and sell your skills
If you have a skill, you can earn money by freelancing. You can do freelance writing, graphic design, web design/ development, writing software programs, accounting, social media marketing, data entry or a variety of other things.
One option is you can create websites for people and companies and charge money. There are so many businesses, such as hotels, doctors, tuition teachers, small companies, furniture shops, electronics shops, gyms in Sri Lanka that do not have websites. You’d be surprised at how much people are willing to pay for you to set up a simple WordPress site.
Popular freelance sites are fiverr, freelancer and elance..
- Fiverr https://www.fiverr.com/
- Freelancer – freelancer.com
- Odesk – odesk.com
- Elance – elance.com
#4. Online Surveys
Find survey sites by searching for “paid survey sites” on google. Register with an email address, and check your email often so you can respond quickly to survey offers. Most surveys pay from $1 to $3, and the surveys generally take up to 45 minutes to complete.
You can also earn money by Testing Websites (participate in remote usability testing). You are getting paid to navigate a website for the first time and giving feedback to the website owner. Most tests take approximately 15 minutes, and you can get paid up to $10 for each test.
- cashcrate.com www.cashcrate.com/
- Clixsense www.clixsense.com/
#5. Invest in Colombo Stock Exchange
Investing in Stock Market is a great way to earn extra cash. You can do stock market trade as a self employment, or, if you are a student, then you can do this while studying for higher education to save for future or to cover your education expenses.
Read our post on Guide to Investing in Colombo Stock Exchange CSE, where we explain how to select a company to invest, how to select a Brokerage company and start investing.
#6. Affiliate Marketing
In this method you place ads from different companies (eg Amazon.com) on your blog or website, and get paid every time someone buys a product from that ad.
You can apply to these programs, and if you’re accepted, they supply you with a special link. That link is able to be tracked, so whenever anyone clicks that link, the company knows that it was you that supplied the link that the person clicked. If the person purchases, then you are credited with that purchase, and that’s how you’re paid.
- Linkshare www.linkshare.com/
- Amazon Associates affiliate-program.amazon.com/
- Kapruka Affiliate Program in Sri Lanka kapruka.com/referrals/
#7. Forex Trading
The foreign exchange market (Forex, FX, or currency market) is a global market for the trading of currencies. This includes all aspects of buying, selling and exchanging currencies at current or determined prices.
However this may be risky, hence please read all the aspects of Forex trading before your start. You can get more details on Forex trading here.
Forex Tutorial: What is Forex Trading?
www.investopedia.com/forexmarket/
Forex Sri Lanka site explains this trade in Sinhala – www.forexsrilanka.com/
To start trading you need to start an account with a Forex Broker Companies. We cannot recommend any companies here, but visit pages above to check a good company.
#8. Sell your Photos or Art
If you love photography and a good photographer, then you can sell your exclusive photos online. Designers need photos for their projects and one of your pictures can be sold to many authors.
Shutterstock to sell images, footage and illustrations. submit.shutterstock.com/
- iStock by Getty Images workwithus.istockphoto.com/en
- Sell your work at Envato Market Photodune photodune.net/become-an-author
#9. Selling Your Stuff Online
You can open sellers account and sell items on eBay, Alibaba, ikman.lk or facebook selling group. First research selling prices of items similar to yours. Look up completed sales or current listings of items similar to yours and decide on items you can sell and the prices you can set.
Books, CD’s and DVD’s, Collectibles, clothing and small electronics, mobile-phones can be sold this way.
- Post your ad at ikman.lk https://ikman.lk/
- eBay http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/sell-getstarted.html
- Alibaba https://seller.alibaba.com/learningcenter/quickstart.htm?language=en
- Facebook Sale Groups https://web.facebook.com/help/Sale Groups
#10. Teach students online – Start an online course
You can start online course and earn money by publishing your course in a platform where they charge a commission per student. Following are common platforms that offer free course creation and hosting tools to empower you to teach online.
- Udemy – https://teach.udemy.com/
- Teachable – https://teachable.com/
How to receive your internet money to Sri Lanka?
Though you can send money through internet by Paypal still you cannot receive pay pal money to Sri Lanka. (There are websites and YouTube videos explain illicit ways of creating PayPal account as Malaysian account, but we cannot recommend those methods to you here.)
However, you can make following alternate arrangements to receive money.
- Receive Money by Check – Google adsense , Amazon affiliate program send your earnings by posting a bank check to your home address in Sri Lanka.
- Payoneer Prepaid Debit Mastercard
- 2Checkout account (Vijitha Yapa online bookstore uses this method)
- Skrill (MoneyBookers)
- If you want to know How to pay online without a credit card then read this. https://studentlanka.com/2017/04/16/how-to-pay-buy-online-without-a-credit-card-in-sri-lanka/
Problems/ Issues in Earning Internet Money in Sri Lanka
Beware of some of these methods, as there may be some websites that are scams. Never pay to participate in any of the above programs. Look for a privacy policy displayed on the site so you know that they are not selling your personal information.
In Sri Lanka, still many people do not buy online or afraid of buying online. Therefore you cannot earn huge amount of money by some methods such as affiliate marketing in Sri Lanka.
What the tested methods in making internet money in Sri Lanka?
I have used following methods described here to earn money online:
- #1 Maintaining a Blog,
- #2 run Googe Adsense on this website,
- #5 invest in Colombo Stock Exchange with online account and
- #6 run affiliate marketing by selling Amzon.com books & items, and offering online courses through Udemy and Coursera.
My affiliate links – If you purchase anything through these links, I will get paid.
- Coursera – Take the courses by Top Universities in the World. https://studentlanka.com/coursera
- Udemy – Top online courses from US$10 – www.studentlanka.com/udemy
- Amazon.com – World’s largest online store www.studentlanka.com/amazon
Though I have not used, I know few people use following methods:
- #3 Becoming a freelancer at Fiverr and Freelancer
- #7 Forex trading.
- #10 Teach online at Teachable
Select one or two methods that suit you and start making online. Please comment below on your experiences and share your blog sites for others to visit and learn.
akalanka says
thank you very much brother make me understood
Wasantha de Silva says
This article has given guidance for me to leverage my skills in writing towards the best way of earning money. You have used simple words which help the reader with fast reading with interest. I also learnt that your writing style could be followed by any writer to improve their popularity accordingly.
Kuppiya Jobs says
Good Post. Thank You for publishing This contant..
Nishan De Silva says
Hi Hiran,
Great post. Very informative. I have one question. How did you join Amazon Affiliate program? Can Sri Lankans join? If so how?
Hiran says
Yes. Sri Lankans can join Amazon affiliate program. Check here.
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/welcome/getstarted
Atheeb says
How are you receiving payments from adsense?
Hiran says
Google sends cheques to your Sri Lankan address or you can instruct google to pay to your bank (ad-sense has control panel where you can control all these).
Atheeb says
Can we get the payments directly to our accounts here because we do not have an iBan number? Also if so which banks allow it? Also how to cash the cheque if we receive it in $.
Hiran says
You can set up to any bank in Sri Lanka. eg. Sampath Bank
https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1714397?hl=en
Have you got approved Adsense account? If you have approved account google will pay you. Not only Google other affiliate markeing sites also send cheques directory to you home address. You can deposit these cheques in your Seylan Bank account (May not be able to cash)
Atheeb says
Yes my account is approved, I have been receiving my payments to an account in another country but I need to get them to my account here in SL. Is the swift code enough to get the payments to my account here or do i need an iBan number as well.
Dimuthu says
Great ideas. I’m going to try some of these options.