Making your first dollar online may seem hard for some people and easy for others. It depends on which platform you choose to earn money online.

There are thousands of platforms on the internet that genuinely pay people for their work. For example, you can earn money from YouTube by sharing your knowledge through videos. On Fiverr, you can offer your skills to help businesses or individuals, and they will pay you for your services.

As a student, I earned my first $1 from gaming apps — yes, apps where two or more players compete in online games and earn money by winning. But those apps can’t fulfill your dreams or help you earn big. You need a consistent source of income.

I tried YouTube, but the algorithm didn’t like what I was doing. So, I started blogging part-time in mid-2021. In January 2022, I bought my first domain. Before that, I was using a free Blogspot domain on the Blogger platform (by Google).

Within a few days, my blog was monetized with AdSense. I started making $0.20 to $0.60 daily. After 4–5 months, I received my first $100 payment from blogging. Before this, I had earned my first $100 from a gaming YouTube channel. Later, I left that channel as it had become inactive.

I joined college in August 2022 for a BA.

By December 2022, I had made my first $1,000 from blogging. Studying and blogging—what a life. But sometimes, things don’t go as smoothly as expected.

Google started releasing many algorithm updates after the rise of AI-generated content. Even though I didn’t use AI content that much, my site still got de-ranked by Google.

Google’s AI Overviews were another pain for publishers. Even when your blog content appears in the AI Overview, you earn nothing. The user is satisfied, but the publisher gets absolutely nothing in return.

2023 and 2024 went by building new websites. I’d write content, see the article rank for a few days, then watch it get de-ranked without any clear reason. This happened to 4–5 of my blog websites over those two years.

Now it’s 2025. I realized what actually works. Google has been focusing on content-based websites—but what about websites where the user’s intent isn’t to read an article, but to perform a task? That’s when I started building tool-based websites that help users complete specific tasks.

Example: PNG to JPG image converter, EMI Calculator, etc.

Currently, Google’s AI Overviews can’t copy and paste those tools directly into search results. They can only scrape and display text content.

Also, tool websites don’t require frequent content updates. That’s a huge advantage.

From June 2022 to June 2025, I earned more than $3,000 from AdSense. Plus, I received some guest post opportunities that brought in over $500.

I write all my code on a mobile device and rarely use a laptop, except for complex tasks. In today’s AI-driven world, you can start building websites that fulfill specific user intent—and earn money doing it.