Let’s face it we all need to make money. Since we are in a technology driven age, there are lots of ways of making money online. Some of those ways are less legal than others, such as spamming, and selling Viagra and other prescription drugs online. However there are actually legal ways to make money online. I will list the ways that I have made money online, and if anyone has other ways to make money online please comment.
Google Adsense – This is my most preferred way of making money online, not only do I get to brag to people that I get paid by Google, but it is also hassle free, and keeps paying. Google Adsense is a advertisement platform for website publishers. This means if you have a website and are willing to allow for advertising space you can make money. The way it works is advertisers pay Google money (they use Google Adwords to do so) to direct web traffic to its site for various reasons. These advertisers select keywords that they would like to associate with their campaign. Google webcrawler has probably already crawled your site and continues to do so. This crawling allows Google to pick up keywords from your site, which might let the crawler know that your site is related to Photography for instance. Then Google decides to place photography related ads on your site in hopes that people will click on them and go to the advertisers site. This explanation is simple, and hopefully you get the point however in reality it could be more complicated. To make money using Google Adsense it is hard at first, and then gets easier. First you must have a website, after that you just sign up for an Adsense account (you can use your current Google account). After that you only need to create the styles of the ads, and then place the code in your website. If you are not experienced with HTML, or coding this may be a bit hard, however there are many tutorials online, and I’m sure you probably have a friend who can help. Google’s minimum payout though is $100 so it might take you some time before you make some money online. Finally I suggest that your website have real content, because that attracts more people to the site, which in turn helps your Google Pagerank, which in turn will make you more money. Setting up a blog or website and just posting rubbish will not get you far, in fact setting up a site just to make money is against Google’s TOS and will get you quickly blacklisted. Let me tell you this, you do not want to mess with Google, they are very smart when it comes to these things.
Filling out surveys online – Who knew giving your opinion on anything from products to economics can get you paid. Not only do you sometimes get to be involved with formulating a product or marketing campaign for a large company, but you get to know that you also have a say. Watch out though there are many sketchy sites on the internet claiming to pay for your opinions. I deal with two well known sites for surveys. Harris Poll offers packages at different point intervals, so it might not be money, your time is rewarded. They also offer sweepstakes that sometimes pay out $10,000 dollars, however this is a raffle. The second site I use is Angus Reid Forum, they actually offer money for each survey filled. I have only been using them for about a year now, but their surveys are nice. They will email whenever they think there is a survey that might be right for you, and let you know how much they will pay, and an approximation of the time commitment it will need, which is great if you are short on time. I really think filling out surveys is neat, because I get to see the inside of companies and the marketing world and how its cog wheels work. This is not a fast way to earn money, however with that said sometimes these online survey site will call you for a physical focus group study or survey that pays well, however I was not eligible for any because most were in French (I live in Quebec), or my schedule didn’t permit it.
Sponsored Tweets – Sponsored Tweets is a nice and easy way to make money online. If you live in the States or Canada, you may have a better opportunity than other regions. All you need to do to use Sponsored Tweets is have a Twitter account and at least 100 followers. Once you have those criteria fulfilled just sign up (you can sign up prior also) and wait for opportunities to come to you via email. The higher your follower ratio is, the more they (advertisers) are willing to pay. A lot of celebrities use Sponsored Tweets and they make a lot of money using it. So if you have a large following this is the method for you. As I warned about Google Adsense I will warn here too, don’t set up an account just to spam, eventually you will lose out.
Chitika/Infolinks in text ads – These type of advertisements add hyperlinks to words in your site/blog and when the user hovers over them it shows an advertisement. I currently use Infolinks, however I’m thinking of removing it because these type of advertisements are very intrusive and annoys a lot of people. This works pretty much the same as Adsense, however for me Adsense is King.
Affiliate Marketing – A lot of companies offer affiliate marketing throughout the internet. If you have an expertise or are related to a specific topic or industry it can be very lucrative. Since my blackberry unlocking post has been doing well thanks to Google, I signed up for a company I actually use to unlock Blackberry devices. I have not made so much money from them, but any extra bit helps.
As of now these are the ways I make money online, while it may not be much it’s still exciting for me, if you liked this post please follow me on twitter: @kushari