101 Ways to Make Money Online
by: Jeremy Zongker
We often recommend earning some extra income on the side as a method for paying off debt. Many people reply that they don't really have a means of doing so or their situation doesn't allow them any time away from the kids, etc to have a second job. Here is a list of 101 ways you can earn some extra cash online to help you out.
Like to Talk?
1. Blog for Ad Revenue – Start a blog on a topic you love, build up a reader base and make money from ads on your site.
2. Be a Forum Moderator – Keep out the spam and build a community and you can earn a little cash on the side moderating forums.
3. Write Articles for Websites – Content is King on websites. Keeping sites updated with fresh, high quality content is a chore for website owners and often outsourced. If you’re a good writer with experience in an area you can make a living off of it.
Debbie Dragon is a frequent contributor here and also teaches a class on
freelance writing.
4. Be a Guest Author – Some higher quality sites will pay between $50 - $400 for a solid article on a topic their readers are interested in. The results are never assured with this method, but the rewards are much higher.
5. Get Paid to Post in Forums – No one wants to post in an empty forum, so webmaster will hire forum posters to help kick start their forum and make it look active. Get paid between $0.10 - $0.25 per post to help get a forum started.
6. Start a Podcast – Basically the same as with a blog, but with audio or video. Talk about what you want and make money from the ads.
7. Get Paid for Forums You Already Talk On – Many forums offer a revenue share program where you can run your own ads on threads you create. This is something Destroy Debt offers. Take advantage of it.
8. Translate Documents – Automated translation is no substitute for humans. If you speak a second language, translate documents and get paid.
9. Be a Life coach or Counselor – Many people would rather talk to a counselor through the safety of the Internet. Offer your advice at an hourly rate.
Are You a Gamer?
10. Farm Gold – Regardless of which online game you like to play there’s always people selling in game money for real money. It may be against the terms of the game but it isn’t illegal. Just make sure you’re making more than your subscription fee.
11. Participate in Gaming Tournaments – If you’re good enough consider entering gaming tournaments. Several of them give away serious cash and prizes.
12. Buy In-Game Real Estate – This was popularized by Second Life. Buy and develop land in the game and it can fetch you cash in the real world. You could become a millionaire like
Ansche Chung.
13. Open an In-Game Store – Another one from Second-Life. Many people have made big bucks selling tshirts, pets, and just about anything else you can imagine in the game.
14. Be a Tester – A paid game testing job is hard to come by, since so many people will do it for free, but they do exist.
Would you Like to Be a Middle Man?
15. Put a US Face on an Overseas Business – People outsource overseas because it’s much cheaper. However due to communication problems and some bad experience people are also weary of it. Find some workers overseas you can trust who have a particular talent, and open a US store front offering that service. Charge the premium rates for a US company and “oversee” the overseas work.
16. Organize Forum Posters – When starting a forum many webmasters will hire posters to get it started. Paying 50 people $5 each is a pain and you never know the kind of work you’ll get. Put together a team and provide a one stop shop for webmasters.
17. Offer Client Referral Exchanges – Programmers often will get more projects at one time than they can handle and have to refer them off. Pay these programmers 10% to refer clients to you, and charge other developers 20% to send referrals to them. Pocket the difference. The same is true with other professions.
18. Be a Link Broker – Many people want to buy quality links for their websites while others want to sell them. Be the middleman to make these connections and make a profit on the price difference.
19. Sell Websites and Domains for Others – Some people have quality websites or domains but either don’t know how or don’t have the time to go about selling them. Provide this service and charge a 10% fee.
20. Refer Others to Jobs – Many firms will pay referral bonuses of $500-$1,000+ for referring the right candidate for a job. Develop relationships with recruiters and scour job boards for candidates that fit. Make the connection and pocket the cash.
Can You Program?
21. Write Software for Resale – I’ve personally bought tools on a number of occasions I knew I could write myself just because they were cheap enough to justify buying them instead of spending the time to write it.
22. Write a Web Component – I’m sure you’ve bought fancy drop down menus, charting, comboboxes, etc before. If not with your own money than for a project at work. Write a component like this and sell it.
23. Develop Websites for Others – This is kind of a no-brainer. Do some side work, you can probably charge 2-3x per hour what you get paid for your day job. Sites like
Rent A Coder and
Elance can put you in contact with buyers.
24. Automate Manual Jobs and Charge per Job – I’ve seen several people asking for forms to be populated from Google Maps or Yahoo Answers data. Write a quick app to do this, but charge per entry the same as if you were manually doing it.
25. Extend Existing Software – Create a plugin, build a storefront package on top of Amazon Web Services, make a bulletin board system more SEO friendly, or whatever you dream up. By extending the functionality of existing software, you can quickly build a user base.
26. Start Your Own Search Engine – Not from scratch, Google provides a great API for you to build your own custom search engine. Build one around a certain topic, provide a better design or give out random prizes. When people search from your site and click on the ads, you get credit.
27. Build Canned Websites for Resell – Create a website for a particular industry once, give it a descent admin and then resell copies of it over and over. Just swap out the logo, a few images and you’re good to go. This works especially well for affiliate marketing websites.
Ever Heard of Ebay?
28. Sell Your Junk on Ebay – The packaging and mailing is a pain, but it sure beats having a garage sale.
29. Buy Other Peoples Junk and Sell it on Ebay – Go to garage sales and resell for higher, or buy bulk discontinued items and sell them off individually.
30. Sell Other Peoples Junk on Ebay for Them – There’s a store on virtually every corner that does this now. Why not you?
31. Create a Virtual Store on Ebay with Drop Shipping – Create a wide storefront with tons of products. The beauty is, by working with a private label drop shipping company you don’t have to actually have these products. Just order one when you make a sale and they’ll ship it out for you, with your name on it. You don’t have to deal with the packaging either!
Don’t Mind Working in the Real World?
32. Take Stock Photos – Take clever photographs and sell them for stock photos on other websites. Sites like
iStockPhoto.com allow you to sell the same photo to hundreds of websites.
33. Make Stuff to Sell Online – If you can quilt, sew, work with wood or are descent at any other task, you can make it and sell it online.
34. Enter Data for Google Maps –
Google is currently paying people to take photos of businesses and enter basic data such as hours of operation. Go to the local business complex next to the grocery store and you can knock out 50 of these in a few hours.
Got Some Money to Invest?
35. Flip Websites or Domains – There are countless websites and domains for sell every day at places like
DigitalPoint,
SitePoint and
DnForum. Find the bargains and turn them around for a quick profit.
36. Buy Profitable Websites and Keep Them – The standard going price for a small profitable website is 10-12 months earnings. Buy some gems, hang onto them past 10-12 months and reap the benefits.
37. Learn the Art of PPC Arbitrage – Put up a simple website that has ads, affiliate programs or some other source of revenue. If you can find the right terms and buy traffic to the site cheap enough, it’s possible to make a profit on the difference on what you buy the traffic for and what you sell it for.
38. Become a Day Trader – Better know what you’re doing on this one because it’s just as easy to loose money with it as make it. But it can be quite profitable if you know what you’re doing.
39. Convert E-Currency – There are several forum posts everyday for people who want to convert some EGold money into Paypal money, etc. Offer this service and charge a 5%-10% fee for it.
40. Buy a Fancy Machine – Buy a high tech printer, engraver or automated sewing machine and charge people for the items you can produce with it.
Good with Photoshop?
41. Design Logos – Every good business needs a good logo. You may be just the person to provide it.
42. Design Websites – Why stop with the logo, entire websites need to be designed. I am horrible at design so hired
Evermark to design this site. Other webmasters are hiring too.
43. Design Ads – Webmasters still need design work after the site is created. Create banners and other professional ads for websites.
44. Draw Cartoons – You may have noticed our section of
debt cartoons. I can tell you I didn’t draw them, it was Dan from
GibbleGuts.com. Start your own cartoon business.
45. Design T-Shirts – Come up with a nice image or some interesting text and sites like
CafePress will help you slap it on a t-shirt and sell it.
46. Design a Seal – Here’s a little secret, most of those “authority seals” you see really don’t mean anything. They just look like they give a site credibility, so webmasters are willing to buy them because they improve the conversion rate. Create your own, make up some guidelines and charge $300 for websites to use it.
47. Create Digital Scrap Booking Templates – People love to scrapbook and some prefer to do it on the computer. Create templates for every occasion that allow your customers to just slide in their own photos.
48. Make Clipart and Icons – People still need these. Another option is comment graphics for sites like MySpace. Build packages of these, give a few away for free and sell the rest.
49. Create MySpace Backgrounds – Don’t stop at the comment tags. Myspace is a gold mine for selling simple customizations if you’re good at it. Create some nice backgrounds and cash in.
50. Make Photoshop Brushes and Filters – If you’re a true wiz at Photoshop, extend its functionality and you can make a fortune.
Have an Artistic Touch?
51. Edit Photos for Others – You can restore old photos, or give existing ones an artistic touch, nice frame, etc. My brother offers this service for kid’s sports pictures at
Zongker Team Pics.
52. Create Video Montages – Have people email you a stack of photos and put together a nice DVD to music for weddings, anniversaries, reunions, funerals, etc.
53. Create Photo Mosaics – You know those nifty pictures that are made up from 500 smaller pictures. Have customers send you the digital images they want to use and you can create these automatically with software like
Andrea Mosaic.
Got Talent?
54. Record Songs and Sell Online – That is if you don’t suck. With online downloads, record labels are becoming a thing of the past. If you got the goods, sell it online at palces like
Arkade.
55. Sell Artwork Online – If you can paint, draw, sketch, make caricatures, etc try selling them online. You may be surprised how many people are willing to buy it.
56. Compose Midi’s – Create either your own original creation or your interpretation of more popular songs and sell them as midi’s or ring tones.
57. Make Videos – Sites like
Revver and
Break will share ad revenue or even pay you for your videos. Make something clever and upload it.
58. Contribute to a Collection – Whether it’s a recipe, short story, poem or whatever. You may not be able to sell it alone, but could get royalties from contributing it to a collection.
Have More Time than Talent?
59. Submit to Social Bookmarking Sites – Just look at the
Digital Point Forums and you’ll see tons of people paying for someone to Digg or Stumble their site. You'll be considered the scum of the earth by the users of these sites, but will have a few extra bucks in your pocket.
60. Get Paid to Surf – You won’t make much, you’ll be giving up your privacy and possibly be installing malware, but this list wouldn’t be complete without the obligatory get paid to surf reference.
61. Take Surveys – A few sites will pay you to complete surveys. Not always in cash, but sometimes you can get free samples or points to buy products with.
62. Get Free Samples – You probably won’t find free cash, but hey stock up on all the free samples, mouse pads and other junk you can find! There are tons of freebie sites who’ve done the hard work of finding these freebies for you.
63. Enter Contests – If you’ve got some time to kill, enter a few contests. You may not win the beach house, but I’ve personally won free pizza’s, cell phone accessories and flowers from some local online contests.
64. Data Entry – Here’s ole faithful. People often need data moved from one type of document to another, or written/verbal notes dictated. It’s work pretty much anyone can do.
65. Become a Virtual Assistant – Occasionally people want research done on anything from finding a certain car but don’t have time to do it themselves. Provide this research service for them and charge by the hour. It's a real industry with it's own
organization.
66. Get Paid to Search – With sites like
Winzy you can win prizes for searching.
Do You Know HTML?
67. Make Blog/Forum Templates – Pick a popular blog or forum software, design some nice templates for it and sell them.
68. Create MySpace Layouts – This is essentially the same task as the blog templates, but an entirely different market. You may even be able to reuse the same template for both purposes.
69. Start an Online Store – Order products wholesale, or drop shipped and create your own storefront.
70. Start an Affiliate Website – Don’t want to deal with the headaches of selling your own products? Refer visitors to someone else’s products and earn a commission.
71. Open a Virtual Storefront – Building your own affiliate site is still too much work for you? Then don’t, open a virtual storefront hosted by someone else, using sites like
Art.com and
CardCommission.com.
72. Offer Paid Reviews From Your Website – Other website owners will pay you to review their website on your site or blog. Make from $10-$50 each or more by offering these reviews.
73. Start a Directory – Build up a
quality listing of sites on a given topic and get other sites to link to this resource. Then start selling premium listings in this directory.
Are You Tech Savvy?
74. Resell Web Hosting – You can find several sites offering reseller packages at
WebHostingTalk. You just rent the server space, split it up and resell it. Occasional support is required.
75. Host Game or Chat Servers – Set up a Linux box in a datacenter and you can run voice chat and game servers off of it that are available 24x7. People will pay to use them.
76. Host Forums – There’s software like
SebFlipper that will allow you to host hundreds of separate forums from a single web server. Charge your members to host a forum with you, or offer it for free and run ads on all the pages.
77. Install Applications for Others – People are constantly getting hung up and asking for help with installs on websites. Install software for them and charge a fee for it.
78. Answer Tech Questions – Sites like
ExpertBee provide a place for people to ask questions and specify a price they will pay for the answer.
79. Start an Uptime Monitoring Service – There’s software packages out there that will check a website for uptime, send alerts and provide reports. Buy one of these packages and resell the hosted service.
80. Offer Hosted Email – Setting up an email server, blocking spam and making sure it’s locked to relaying is a pain for most webmasters. Provide an easy way for them to outsource the whole service to you.
81. Provide Application Testing – Manually test websites on different OS and browser combinations and provide a report of your findings.
82. Provide Load Testing – Put a heavy traffic load against websites an provide a report of how it responded.
83. Offer an Offsite Backup Service – Rent a server and massive amounts of storage space from a datacenter and provide remote storage space via FTP or other method for a monthly fee per gigabyte of storage.
84. Start a Domain Registrar – Sites like
TuCows will let you create your own private label domain registrar where you’ll benefit from not only the initial sale, but from renewals.
85. Sell SSL Certificates – Another service offered by TuCows and others is the ability to resell SSL certificates.
Have a Knack for SEO?
86. Be a Link Builder – Someone who can find good quality links for a website is worth their weight in gold. Become a link builder and charge per link or by the hour.
87. Submit to Directories – Filling out the forms to submit to directories is a pain but important for webmasters. Most will gladly pay to have someone else do it for them.
88. Be a Consultant – Review websites and recommend changes to help improve search engine rankings. Slap it together in a professional looking report and you can charge several hundred to a few thousand dollars per website.
Know Something About Something?
89. Become an About.com Guide –
About.com will pay you a very nice percentage of ad revenue from the section you’re a guide of.
90. Write eBooks – These are hard to sell but if you really have the info others want you can make it work.
91. Teach an Online Course – Many colleges are looking for part time teachers for both their online and in-classroom courses.
92. Sell Instructional Videos – It’s got to be something people want, but if you’re truly an expert on a topic, others will pay to learn what you know.
93. Start a Subscription Website – Provide new scrapbooking techniques, recipes or any other advice on a regular basis and charge for a membership.
Are You Opinionated?
94. Review Software – Developers are looking for honest feedback on their work and are willing to pay for it. Use a site like
SoftwareJudge to get paid for providing this feedback.
Don’t Have a Conscience?
95. MySpace Blast People – Create an account, recruit all the friends you can and then send them bulletins with advertisements. You’ll loose a lot of ‘friends’ but you will make some money at it.
96. Do Homework for Others – It’s completely wrong of course, but you can get paid to do it.
Don’t Mind Annoying Your Friends?
97. Sell Products Via Email – Gone are the days of Avon, Tupperware and Arbonne parties. Just email your friends and family the the current specials and have them email back the orders.
98. Send Out Cards – Another great program for marketing to your friend and family is
SendOutCards. They send out physical Christmas, birthday and other cards on your behalf and pay for referrals.
99. Refer Them to Surveys – Not only can you fill out surveys yourself, now there’s a second tier where you can refer friends to take surveys and earn money and gifts for doing so.
Don’t Want to Actually Work?
100. Sell Unused CPU Cycles – Why do work yourself when your computer will do it for you? Sites like
CPU Share let you sell your extra computer cycles. Just make sure you’re making enough to cover the cost of electricity.
Want More Traditional Work?
101. Telecommute – Hit up your favorite online job board for jobs marked as telecommute. Most you can do entirely online from your home.
Surely from this list you can find something you can do to make some extra money online. If you have any additional suggestions we forgot, please let a comment.
So you want to ditch your corporate cubicle and join the ranks of web workers? But you have a mortgage, maybe a dependent or two, and a taste for Venti Mochas from Starbucks? You can make money in the new economy, though it might not be as easy or cushy as keeping your old economy job.
Posts
