Ways to Make Money Online

Posted:Abigail Andrews – Tuesday, June 26th, 2007

There are so many free and easy ways to make money online. In the following section I will list as many as I can currently think off. This article may highlight some online money making schemes you never even knew existed. It may trigger a great idea, sat in the corner of your mind, waiting to be discovered.

Through the internet thousands of people are earning themselves extra pounds of spending money a month, some are earning several hundred pounds a month and some earn enough to quit their 9 - 5 job and become their own boss working from home.

More and more (and in many cases non technical) people like you are jumping on the bandwagon to make money online. You don't need to be a technical whizzkid or a programmer. Some of the biggest online earners were simply full of ideas and enthusiasm, but had no or little technical knowledge.

So have a read and take it all in, think about what you could do to make money for free. Each idea is discussed very briefly so where possible I have provided links for your own further investigation. Here goes, enjoy....

Build a Website / Become and Affiliate

You don't have to have web-design skills to have a website today (though it is always a bonus if you do), you just need to come up with a simple idea and then add affiliate adverts to your site, to earn a little cash. My Make Money with Affiliate Marketing section will tell you how to make money from affiliate websites and my How to Build a Website section will help you build you own site.

You never know that little idea you had for a website might grow into something like www.friendsreunited.co.uk and net you a million!

Buy An Existing Website

Browse sites such as www.buysellwebsite.com for an established internet business to take over and run. People looking to sell their sites actually tell you how they make money! Pick one that suits you. Research it a bit, buy and start your own business.

Buy and merge old websites

How about cornering a little market? There are so many sites all over the internet (sites that have been listed for many years) which aren't being updated. If you can pick up a few sites in the same category and merge their content, suddenly you "own" that niche. That opens a lot of possibilities. Again use sites like www.buysellwebsite.com but make sure you do some research though and don't pay out for a DUD!

Trade in Website Names

Buying domain names is one of the very best ways to make money on the Internet. It's easy and takes a very low investment with huge profit potential. You could make a living from just buying existing domains and reselling them. Businesses and webmasters will pay you big money if you have the name they want.

Its not as easy as it once was but there are still some winners out there if you look hard enough. There is a myth circulating that all the good domains are taken already, however, there are still good names waiting to be found.

Put your thinking hat on, buy a famous word, a funny or rude domain name for a few quid and put it up on the domain selling sites. Futhermore, look for larger companies or sites that have not yet bought up all there name extensions such as .org or ,uk etc, thought these will be very hard to find.

The best way to find great domains is to subscribe to expired domain lists. These are compiled lists of the thousands of repossessed domain names that have been put back into the domain pool every day. Some useful sites are BizMint.com or ExpiredDomains.com

Ok, that's enough I don't want to get to in depth here, so for further more detailed information read about buying domain names here.

Search the Search Engines

Use a search engine to find ways to make money online, not just google, msn and yahoo, try find some other less popular ones or search some directories like Jayde. There are some good websites out there that are just not able to get to the top of the top search engines. Be more inventive with your search and use advanced search features which are often forgotten about. Look for small business franchise newsletters. Or for home jobs in your particular niche or hobby.

Paid Surveys and Reviews

Now this is easy money, you can earn money while making a difference with your opinions. If you have a computer, access to the internet and an opinion then you could make a few £'s doing surveys. Companies need your opinions to improve their products and services, and in return you get paid for surveys in your spare time. Simple as that. Be careful though there are some scams out there.

I would recommend signing up for as many survey sites as possible to increase your chances of getting paid. I have had varying success with survey sites, read my reviews and sign-up to my recommended survey sites in the Online Paid Surveys section.

Get paid to Read Email

There is another way apart other than surveys to make money in the internet. You can get paid to read email. Why would companies pay for that? Plenty of reasons, not least that a human eye can spot SPAM that even the best program doesn't catch. Even the best anti-spam program has some false positives and some companies can't afford to have any.

Online Auctions

You would be surprised what people sell, successfully, on eBay. Those books gathering dust in the loft, that old painting you got sick of seeing, the old Christmas tree you replaced with a new one this Christmas, them old CD's your sick of hearing, all of which could net you ££££'s of extra cash.

You could take it a step further and start building your own ebay business or you could take the easy route; if you've got the capital a lot of ebay businesses come up for sale in site-for-sale forums and with business brokers. The ebay username and feedback generally accompanies the business so you continue to benefit from accumulated goodwill.

Useful sites:

Many of you have heard of eBay but there are other sites that offer free auctions too, search for free online auctions' on the internet or try these:
www.QXL.com
www.eBay.co.uk

Pay:

There is no limit - but unless you're selling something rare or valuable, don't expect to make a fortune. You will also incur costs delivery and packaging so the price of the item you are selling will have to take this into account.

Internet Researcher

I bet you didn't know this... there are still many people who don't have access to, or don't even know how to use a computer, let alone the internet. You could make money out of a skill you take for granted. The fact that you can easily search the internet and find information about anything you want can be something you can get paid for. If you're skilled at extracting information from a web search, you can hire yourself out as a researcher for people like lawyers and writers.

At places like www.answers.com people pay for you to go research an answer to questions they don't have time to answer themselves. Like, "How do I choose an SLR camera?" and "What's do was the UK number one song on 8th June 1990?"

Pay:

Around £10 an hour

Useful sites:

Find thousands of freelance writing, research and editing jobs...fresh jobs daily at www.gofreelance.com
www.emindsourse.com

More info:

Look for notices on student job boards or contact likely clients in your area, even search the web.

Actual Work

Several jobs exist on a pay per hour basis but the better paid ones are probably contract jobs. Some examples are: Copy writing; proofreading of web content/ebooks/newsletters etc.

Useful Sites:

www.gofreelance.com
www.elance.com
www.writingcareer.com

Sell your web design skills

Good at web design, HTML, CSS? Create designs (templates) and flog them. You can sell each one multiple times to webmasters who don't have the time or patience to get familiar with the intricacies and quirks.

Again, if you are good at graphic design, design and offer logos and icons down loadable for free (and without watermark on payment of a fee). Good icons sell for several hundred dollars a set. And each set can be sold again and again.

Useful Sites:

www.rentacoder.com
www.guru.com
www.freelanceswitch.com

FREE Industrial Waste

Now this is a funny one that perhaps many of you are not aware of. The web has allowed easy access to industrial quantities of free stuff. For example, in 2007, a major manufacturer of cricket bats had a problem. Cricket bats can't have knots in them so most of the wood from the willow tree has to be discarded as scrap. Not a few bin bags full but 70 tons. Per week. Yes, lorry loads per day!

So what did they do to meet there legal obligations with regard to waste disposal, well, they listed it on eastex.org.uk in an attempt at least to get rid of some in an environmentally friendly way. If you can find a use for it its yours. For example, find a company that sells bark mulch for gardens. Find out how much they are paying to buy wood. Offer them 70 tons of fine willow a week at 50% of their current costs provided they pick it up themselves. Or contact manufacturers of chipboard/cat litter/use-your-imagination. OK, eastex may not still have that particular opportunity anymore... but there are others take a look: www.eastex.org.uk

Advertising without a website!

Ok, we are not all experts in web design and may even feel very intimidated at the thought of even trying to set up a website. So DON'T! Join the myspace bandwagon, build up a lot of "friends" and bulletin advertise the hell out of them. Send them to pages where you promote affiliate programs and you could walk away with five figures every month and there are people who make a lot more!

Sell the un-sellable

This will make ya laugh. Find something that won't sell, let your imagination run wild. Be willing to think the most outrageous thoughts, the most impossible items to sell. Who would have guessed there'd be an active market for urine. Yes, that stuff you flush away. No, I'm not joking.... Buy wee here. So start selling your outrageous item and you may find that a market already exists and you can actually make money from it!

Link Dropping

Yes, people will pay you to drop a mention of there website on forums, in articles, etc. why, well because it helps them build up links to their site and thus improve their search engine ranking by making there site popular. There are spamming ways of doing it and some more decent ways. If you can make relevant posts, posts that contribute to the discussion, and provide only those links that are beneficial to that thread, you'll be in high demand with webmasters looking to spread the word about their good content.

Online envelope stuffing

Data sorting and other mundane jobs usually pay by the hour. This is the online version of envelope stuffing except that there really are opportunities to do these jobs online. It's a matter of looking in the right places and avoiding all those scammers looking to part you from your money by asking for upfront fees.

Paid to play/surf

Like playing computer games? There's money in gaming. Top players get paid handsomely for participating in tournaments, attending gaming fests and endorsing products.

Or do you spend countless hours in front of your computer surfing the net, doing homework, writing email or working? Feel like your time at the computer is not rewarded? Now, here is the good news. With Cashfiesta you can earn easy cash while using your computer.

Enter Competitions

Spend your time entering competitions. Despite the name "competitions" rarely require skill, they are nothing but glorified lotteries/ sweepstakes. The most challenging question they are likely to ask you is, "What's your name?" Or enter contests of skill. Good at SEO? There seem to be a lot of SEO competitions around.

Useful Sites:

www.myoffers.co.uk

More info:

Try searches like "competition entry" and "win a prize". Or take a look at the advert panel on the right side of this page.

Hosting

Anyone who has a website, or Internet Site uses Web Hosting. When you sit down at a computer, and bring up a website using a web browser, how does that page get from wherever it comes from, to your screen? How did your computer know where the page was? To cut it short, this is what people who sell Web Hosting partially control. A Web Hosting company would ensure that anyone else who wanted to view your website actually could. That's all you need to know, anything further is getting too technical....YAWN!!!......

You don't need to buy a lot of server hardware to provide a web hosting service, that is beyond most of us financially and technically, however, many big hosting companies allow "reseller" accounts where you sell hosting plans to customers and the hosting company will host them all for you under your Reseller account umbrella. You get to charge customers as much as you want. Some Resellers provide value added services and charge more for these.

If you are technical you could go down the route of actually setting up your own free web hosting where you provide small website owners free hosting and in exchange you serve ads to all their pages to make the revenue to pay the hosting company and yourself. Though i have to point out, most website owners do not like the idea of forced advertising all over their site especially when there are lots of cheap hosting plans out thereto choose from! However, if you get it right, you never know it my grow into a big business over time, but remember it can be expensive at start up as well as expensive to run!

Useful Sites:

www.hostgator.com

Online Gambling and Arbitrage

Gambling is a far cry from trading futures but a route to riches for many. No, not the traditional horse racing type of gambling where the only long term winner is the bookmaker. I'm talking gambling against other gamblers, I'm talking the numerous ways of gambling online. For example, games which require an element of skill, like poker. Games where you have some control over the outcome, unlike horse racing where it could be suggested there is a great deal of, well, ermmm, corruption! You don't have to go to Las Vegas for the big tourneys and big money anymore, you can enter some pretty good ones online, win a few quid and perhaps qualify for a free trip to Vegas to enter a major tournament! You can make a living from playing it all day long online (hmmmmmmmm, or go broke)!

What's Arbitrage then? Well, different online bookmakers may offer different odds on a sporting event. By taking the better odds at each bookie you could come out ahead irrespective of the actual outcome of the event. If you're really clever you could make a program to do this for you. Why don't the bookies adjust their odds based on what their competitors are offering? Because they have to balance their own books. Their prices are decided based on how their own punters are betting. There are a lot of arbitrage opportunities if you can be bothered hunting them down! If you can be bothered using sites like Betfair will help you compare all the odds from loads of different bookies at a glance.

High Yield Investment Programs

HYIP, or High Yield Investment Programs are just what they say on the tin. They are also highly risky! You invests your money and you takes a chance, but some pay as much as 100% per day. How do they do it? HYIPs typically accept deposits as low as £1 while promising astoundingly high returns. Online HYIP schemes rarely last for the long term.

However, overwhelming, a number of cases suggest that HYIPs are Ponzi schemes. A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that involves paying abnormally high returns ("profits") to investors out of the money paid in by subsequent investors, rather than from net revenues generated by any real business, named after Charles Ponzi, in which new investors provide the cash to pay a profit to existing investors, which they typically then withdraw. This approach allows the scam to continue as long as new investors are found and/or old investors leave their money in the scheme, known as compounding (because even higher profits are promised).

Maybe the ones who make the money are the ones who get in early... or actually start HYIP programs as eventually the "dodginess" o the investment is found out and the scheme shuts down! However, there are some really high investment programs out there, even so, high investment means high risk so.......

Be wary, be very wary!!!

Set up a Proxy

People seem to want to surf at work AND access sites their IT system blocks them from viewing. For example, ebay, and sites like friends reunited are blocked where I work. A proxy allows you to get around that restriction. Some proxy services get by just on the advertising (as it's easy to get enormous page views in the proxy business). A very good one will even have people paying a few pounds each. There are several ways to monetise a proxy read more here

Distributed Computing Groups

Get paid for your unused computer cycles. Is your computer sometimes on while you aren't actually sitting at it? Then it's using electricity but not performing "work". Joining a distributed computing group like SETI (read more here) lets you use that computing power to help reach some worthy/unworthy goal. However, you can also use those cycles to earn money by selling them to companies who have large computing tasks then can't do completely in-house.

To be honest, I struggled to find any worthwhile ones but I hear they do exist. Though with he cost of electricity going up as it is it would take careful calculations to establish if payment does out weight the cost of leaving your machine on, unless it would be on regardless of participation!

More Info:

Search the engines for "Paid Distributed Computing Groups" or the like. See what you can find, and if you find a good one please email it to me :-)

Currency Exchange

Making money with currency exchange is the perfect example of how the Internet has managed to open up to everyone money making opportunities that were the preserve of experts or ‘gurus’ pre Internet. Now if you want to make money with currency exchange from your own home you only need a good command of the English language, an Internet connection and less than 30 minutes of your time a day. The fact that the transfer of money is all done electronically means it makes no difference if you live in the USA, Europe, Asia or even an igloo in the North Pole! This opportunity to make money using this method is truly global.

Cash Back Shopping

Cashback shopping enables you to gain discounts on your online shopping in the form of Cashback. Membership is FREE and takes just 30 seconds so don't lose out, start earning cashback today!

More Info:

www.freefivers.co.uk
www.trolleycash.co.uk

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