Besides using the Internet to grow your fanbase and promote your projects, you can also use it to directly make money from your comedic talent. There’s a lot of different ways that you can monetize your ability to be funny online, but relatively few comedians actually take advantage of these opportunities.

Here’s a breakdown of five things you can do to start making money online from your comedy…

1. Enter A Commercial Video Contest

As you probably know, there’s tons of brands and businesses these days that put up money to fund contests in which they’re looking for people to create funny content for them online. What you may not realize is that relatively few people actually enter these contests and the people that do are rarely “professionally” funny. This means that if you actually enter these contests, there’s a decent chance that you can win them and win some money.

To find contests to enter, there are several contest websites that regularly feature a variety of new contests such as Online Video Contests and Tongal. You can also be on the lookout for promotions from specific brands such as Doritos’ annual Super Bowl commercial contest.

And there’s contests for more than just viral videos – for example, if you have artistic ability you may want to check out 99 Designs, where people run contests looking for creative artwork, logos and design.

2. Get A Freelance Writing Gig

Another easy way to get paid for being funny is to track down a job as a freelance writer or blogger for a website that’s looking for funny writers. Just about every major comedy website accepts submissions, and while they may not all pay initially, most will typically pay at a certain point after you’ve proved the quality of your work.

You can also find lots of freelance writing jobs on various job boards such as Problogger, Blogging Pro, Freelance Writing, and of course on Craigslist.

3. Place Advertising On Your Blog Or YouTube Channel

If you’ve built up some traffic to your blog or YouTube channel, one of the easiest ways to make some money from it is to place ads on the site or join the YouTube partner program to get paid for your video views. You won’t make a lot of money from advertising unless you get a good amount of traffic or views, but you will make something and it may serve as another incentive for you to create more content and promote that content if you know you’re getting paid for it.

While the easiest way to place advertising on your site is to do it through Google Adsense, if you’re a little more industrious you can actually approach an advertiser yourself that you think would like to reach the audience that views your content. If you can do that, you’ll probably wind up making a lot more money than you would through Google, because Google takes a large percentage of the revenue from the ads it runs on your content.

4. Create Funny Merchandise To Sell

Here’s another simple thing you can do to make money. It used to be that if you wanted to sell t-shirts or merchandise, you had to make a significant investment in producing the products and then hope that you could sell them. Well, the Internet has changed all that.

Sites like Cafepress now allow you to upload a design for a shirt (or other merchandise) and sell it through their store without actually producing any of them until somebody buys one. This means it literally costs you nothing to launch your own t-shirt company and you’ll get paid based on every shirt that you sell. Plus, those sites handle all of the order fulfillment, so all you have to do is come up with a great concept/design, promote it, and collect your money when people purchase your creation.

5. Get Creative With What You Sell

Perhaps the most interesting way you can get paid for being funny online is to get creative and come up with some amusing service or product that nobody else has thought of and try to sell that. For example, this guy decided that he was going to offer to create custom 30-second videos of himself doing a crazy dance with whatever you want painted on his hairy chest for $5 per video. Sure enough, he’s sold more than 500 videos to people because it’s cheap, fun, and people like the gimmick.

If you want to sell something for five dollars (like the dancing guy did), you can post your offer/product on Fiverr, which is a popular website featuring people selling all sorts of things for $5 a piece.

Remember, you can use things like Paypal to easily collect payments from people so it’s really simple for you to try to “sell” whatever you want – and if you come up with something that people value (even if it’s as ridiculous as a guy dancing with his shirt off), you can make yourself some money.

As you can see, there’s a lot of ways you can get paid to be funny online so, what are you waiting for?