Helping people with debt problems every day! 4 Easy Ways to Make Money on the Web
Nidhi Dugar
If you spend a bit too much of your free time online, you may be pleased to know that you can actually make some money out of your surfing addiction. Although you'd need to devote quite a sizeable proportion of your time to Internet money-making activities in order to actually make a decent living from them, the below suggestions can easily work as secondary revenue streams.
Blogging
Fancy yourself as a bit of a writer? Start a blog. The beauty of blogging is that you can write about anything from cats to new cars, and unlike more traditional forms of journalism you have plenty of freedom to express your personal writing style. One suggestion is that with the sheer tidal wave of content that has hit the 'blogosphere' in recent years, you're more likely to distinguish yourself online if you can target a particular niche audience.
This is all well and good, but how can you make money from blogging? The first step is to build up a community of followers. Familarise yourself with other bloggers in the same space as you, comment on their posts and encourage them to do the same. When you have built up a reasonable following (and you can use a free, simple tracking service like Google Analytics to monitor your site visits), you can start looking at monetising your traffic.
There are various methods for doing this, and the one you choose will depend on the content on your blog. If you operate a review site and give your opinions on new products in the market, you can join an affiliate network like TradeDoubler, OMG or Commission Junction and earn money by referring your site visitors to their websites.
For example, if you want to rave about the latest Dell latop, join the company's affiliate programme, get a tracking link for your site, and if someone follows that link on your recommendation and buys the laptop, you earn a commission. As a word of warning, it's a valuable thing to have a trusted review site - search engines love them and people will keep coming back before buying new product - but if you just use it blatantly to sell products, you'll not keep your visitors for too long.
Photography
This hobby could generate enough money online to buy your drinks every weekend. Whether your medium of choice is a camera, Blackberry or iPhone, if you have a keen eye for an interesting or newsworthy frame, then lots of photography agencies scattered across the web will give you a decent sum for your photographs.
Flickr has been doing it for quite some time. It is important to take high resolution pictures, because there are usually strict eligibility criteria for images. Upload them onto Flickr, with appropriate tagging and clear description, so that photo users find it easily. For instance, if you uploading pictures of a farm, tag it appropriately as "Farmhouse" or "Farm in Newcastle".
Then obtain a Creative Commons licence. Creative Commons helps you publish your work online while letting others know exactly what they can and can't do with your work. They provide you with tools that let you add licence information to Flickr or a number of other partner sites.The users will then get in touch with you via email or Flickr and offer usage fees. The amount may not be huge but good negotiations can be made.
Of course, to increase the chances of making a sale, you have to market your photographs well, whether though special interest groups on social networks like Twitter, or via a fan page on Facebook. There's so much competition out there that simply putting your photos online and hoping they will be spotted is not enough to guarantee you sales.
istockphoto helps photographers and buyers connect, striking good deals over the web. These picures can be used by anyone on the web and are royalty-free. To be able to contribute to them, you need to be an istock member, but don't worry, it's free. The manual will help you understand everything and once you've learned the ropes, you just have to take a quick quiz and you are good to go.
Social websites
Making money while you stalk your boyfriends 'all-boys' trip to Barcelona may sound a bit too good to be true. But Yuwie an new social networking enterprise, offers to pay its users every time you scan a friend's profiles, upload or share pictures or recommend Yuwie to somebody.
Essentially, you'd be getting paid for something that you are already doing. Yuwie offers emailing, photos, personal profile, videos, message boards, clubs and a whole lot more, just like Facebook. But here, you get a share of money for every page view on the service. The more people visit your page, the more page views you get a percentage of. Yuwie then pushes the envelope further with referrals, letting you get a percentage of money from the activity of any friends you've invited to the service, along with their friends.
Surveys
More than likely you have seen ads like these all over the internet. And like most people you are probably wondering if they are true. They are quite a few scammers out there, but a lot of companies genuinely pay you to take their surveys. A survey site gives people the opportunity to take part in market research surveys for a range of products and services, and in return they receive either points which can be exchanged for vouchers or a direct cash payment.
ValuedOpinion offers surveys on local businesses. By comparing and rating and reviews for businesses near you, you could earn some quick cash. You can receive numerous prices for a survey ranging from 25p - 5 GBP, not a bad return for a few minutes' work - although the quicker the survey to complete, the lower the payment. Once you get to 10 GBP you can then exchange this for a voucher. The vouchers are for places like HMV, Tesco, John Lewis, Amazon and even charities as well like Oxfam. Vouchers take around 2 weeks to arrive.
Ciao is one of the better-known survey sites. Payouts will vary hugely, you can earn 10p for a survey which can take nearly an hour to complete and 1 GBP for another one which requires 10 minutes' work. Once you reach the 5 GBP barrier Ciao will carry out a transfer to your PayPal account. Respondi-Panel.com currently offers a decent return. Check out their upcoming election related-forms.
Blogging
Fancy yourself as a bit of a writer? Start a blog. The beauty of blogging is that you can write about anything from cats to new cars, and unlike more traditional forms of journalism you have plenty of freedom to express your personal writing style. One suggestion is that with the sheer tidal wave of content that has hit the 'blogosphere' in recent years, you're more likely to distinguish yourself online if you can target a particular niche audience.
This is all well and good, but how can you make money from blogging? The first step is to build up a community of followers. Familarise yourself with other bloggers in the same space as you, comment on their posts and encourage them to do the same. When you have built up a reasonable following (and you can use a free, simple tracking service like Google Analytics to monitor your site visits), you can start looking at monetising your traffic.
There are various methods for doing this, and the one you choose will depend on the content on your blog. If you operate a review site and give your opinions on new products in the market, you can join an affiliate network like TradeDoubler, OMG or Commission Junction and earn money by referring your site visitors to their websites.
For example, if you want to rave about the latest Dell latop, join the company's affiliate programme, get a tracking link for your site, and if someone follows that link on your recommendation and buys the laptop, you earn a commission. As a word of warning, it's a valuable thing to have a trusted review site - search engines love them and people will keep coming back before buying new product - but if you just use it blatantly to sell products, you'll not keep your visitors for too long.
Photography
This hobby could generate enough money online to buy your drinks every weekend. Whether your medium of choice is a camera, Blackberry or iPhone, if you have a keen eye for an interesting or newsworthy frame, then lots of photography agencies scattered across the web will give you a decent sum for your photographs.
Flickr has been doing it for quite some time. It is important to take high resolution pictures, because there are usually strict eligibility criteria for images. Upload them onto Flickr, with appropriate tagging and clear description, so that photo users find it easily. For instance, if you uploading pictures of a farm, tag it appropriately as "Farmhouse" or "Farm in Newcastle".
Then obtain a Creative Commons licence. Creative Commons helps you publish your work online while letting others know exactly what they can and can't do with your work. They provide you with tools that let you add licence information to Flickr or a number of other partner sites.The users will then get in touch with you via email or Flickr and offer usage fees. The amount may not be huge but good negotiations can be made.
Of course, to increase the chances of making a sale, you have to market your photographs well, whether though special interest groups on social networks like Twitter, or via a fan page on Facebook. There's so much competition out there that simply putting your photos online and hoping they will be spotted is not enough to guarantee you sales.
istockphoto helps photographers and buyers connect, striking good deals over the web. These picures can be used by anyone on the web and are royalty-free. To be able to contribute to them, you need to be an istock member, but don't worry, it's free. The manual will help you understand everything and once you've learned the ropes, you just have to take a quick quiz and you are good to go.
Social websites
Making money while you stalk your boyfriends 'all-boys' trip to Barcelona may sound a bit too good to be true. But Yuwie an new social networking enterprise, offers to pay its users every time you scan a friend's profiles, upload or share pictures or recommend Yuwie to somebody.
Essentially, you'd be getting paid for something that you are already doing. Yuwie offers emailing, photos, personal profile, videos, message boards, clubs and a whole lot more, just like Facebook. But here, you get a share of money for every page view on the service. The more people visit your page, the more page views you get a percentage of. Yuwie then pushes the envelope further with referrals, letting you get a percentage of money from the activity of any friends you've invited to the service, along with their friends.
Surveys
More than likely you have seen ads like these all over the internet. And like most people you are probably wondering if they are true. They are quite a few scammers out there, but a lot of companies genuinely pay you to take their surveys. A survey site gives people the opportunity to take part in market research surveys for a range of products and services, and in return they receive either points which can be exchanged for vouchers or a direct cash payment.
ValuedOpinion offers surveys on local businesses. By comparing and rating and reviews for businesses near you, you could earn some quick cash. You can receive numerous prices for a survey ranging from 25p - 5 GBP, not a bad return for a few minutes' work - although the quicker the survey to complete, the lower the payment. Once you get to 10 GBP you can then exchange this for a voucher. The vouchers are for places like HMV, Tesco, John Lewis, Amazon and even charities as well like Oxfam. Vouchers take around 2 weeks to arrive.
Ciao is one of the better-known survey sites. Payouts will vary hugely, you can earn 10p for a survey which can take nearly an hour to complete and 1 GBP for another one which requires 10 minutes' work. Once you reach the 5 GBP barrier Ciao will carry out a transfer to your PayPal account. Respondi-Panel.com currently offers a decent return. Check out their upcoming election related-forms.