40 Ways to Make Money Online

Facebook, Myspace, Bebo… you know what these are. But have you ever thought about making money with them?

If you have a large amount of friends on your profile, you have the ability to send messages and bulletins to all of your friends. People will pay you to send messages to your ‘friends’, things like promoting a new site or affiliate program.

DigitalPoint forums are a great place to find this sort of activity. Some people do nothing but set up accounts, add everyone they can find to their friends list, then sell the profile at a later date for a few bucks. Not exactly being a good friend, but it *does* help raise a few bucks and more often than not, these sites themselves spam you with stuff you don’t want to see, so your friends are probably used to it. Quite often you’ll see people selling accounts boasting 10,000+ ‘friends’.

If you use stumbleupon.com or digg.com, you can also make money for using your accounts. Check out subvertandprofit for more info.

There’s also a site called piqq.us (formerly diggboss) which basically allows you to build up diggs and stumbles for a rainy day in return for digging and stumbling other people’s links. A little unethical perhaps, but now you know why all of those seemingly ordinary/average articles somehow make their way on to the digg frontpage

If you don’t have cash but need it, ask for it. Recently, a guy was able to visit his sick wife who was in another country, thanks to a huge number of small donations from the internet community.

Now ok, the last thing we want is fake stories about this sort of stuff, but if you genuinely need cash and are prepared to pour your heart out or work hard for it and be honest, there are people out there who will feel for you and perhaps think to themselves “what if I where in his position?” or “that happened me before, I know the feeling”.

If you say something like “look, I’m broke, I need $500 cash by next month and am prepared to do anything for it…. Then list your skills and experience, people will quite often give you little jobs which may all add up. I’ve seen this done loads of times on digital point forums.

The key is honesty. Don’t try and lie or make up some stupid story as experienced webmasters and browsers will just see right through you. If you need money, don’t be afraid to let it be known. If you’re prepared to work for it, nobody can criticise you.

Got an idea for a site you think might work? Great. Got cash to put in to it? Didn’t think so. Unfortunately, the cash part is where most of us average joe’s fall down… I know because I’m one of them.

I have all sorts of ideas and inspirational moments but most of them come to nothing as I simply don’t have the cash to get them off the ground and I don’t have the skills to do it all myself.

That’s why partners are so great. I’m working on one or two projects where the bills are split and the work is spilt. It’s great as not only is it 50 % cheaper and 50% less work, but I also get to build up a relationship and hopefully make a friend and solid contact out of it all who I may be able to do business with in the future.

The downside of course is that profits are split 50/50 but as I always say “Half of something is worth more than all of nothing”.

You’ll find investors/entrepreneurs on webmaster forums like youngentrepreneur and sitepoint.

Don’t try and tell me you don’t have an old phone or computer or cd player lying about the house. LIAR!!

Get you’re ass in gear, get that stuff on ebay or craigslist and sell it. It only gathers dust and takes up space otherwise. Unless it’s a collectable or has sentimental value, the only thing stopping you from getting rid of this stuff is pure laziness. I know because I’m just like you, but I do my best to sell any junk I don’t want.

Not only can you get rid of it on ebay/craigslist, you can also make money from it! Everyone’s a winner – you get rid of the stuff, you get paid, the buyer is a happy and ebay take a small cut of the dosh.

First of all, you can’t sell vouchers if you don’t have vouchers, right? So we need to get vouchers.

Google Adwords often give away $20 vouchers or $50 vouchers… so do Yahoo and Msn. There are certain sites/links who will give you a voucher for free;

http://services.google.com/marketing/links/awo-fr-oa-jdn07-mktg1
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/en_GB/arp/sponsoredsearch_v1.php?o=GB0283&AID=10396887&PID=2494994&SID=QualityNonsense
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/arp/choose.php?o=US2258
http://startadcenter.com/inexpMar%5Faff/

*note: all links were working when this ebook was published, they tend to change/re-direct to homepage every few months.

Webmasters have ‘contests’ to encourage traffic and build up hype. They also have to offer prizes to encourage people to read their blog or sign up to a newsletter etc…

Here are a few contests I’ve come across recently with pretty decent prizes on offer. Most of the major bloggers will have some sort of contest every month.

• http://www.tylercruz.com/vote-for-me-win-100/
• http://www.shoemoney.com/2007/10/31/game-set-match-rss-contest-over/

It’s usually pretty simple to enter and as the old saying goes, “You’ve got to be in it, to win it”. Keep an eye out for all of these contests and eventually, you’ll win something on the law of averages. On Smemon’s blog he has held one or two contests giving away free adspace and sometimes he’d have 4 ads slots, with 5 entrants, so the chance of winning would be pretty high.

How often have you linked to a site in a forum or blog or offline and thought to yourself – I should be getting paid to promote this site?

That’s what affiliate programs do – they pay you if you earn sales for them. Some sites, like LunarPages or Thinkhost for example, will pay you up to $97 for a single referral.

So if you tell people about a good host you recommend and they use you’re affiliate links (like I have added above) and sign up, you can earn mega bucks for simply telling people about a site.

Clickbank and Commission Junction are just two affiliate networks who display a list of sites that run these types of programmes. Big sites like ebay and amazon also run their own affiliate programmes who’ll pay you for giving them sales.

I guess you are in effect, getting paid on commission, just like one of those salesmen, going around ‘door to door’ selling bibles. The more doors you knock on, the more books you’ll sell

Check out wickedfire which is an affiliate marketing forum where you’ll find all sort of interesting people and programs.

There are tons of paid survey sites out there who will pay you to fill in forms. Again, you’re not going to become a millionaire doing this type of work, but if you’re stuck for cash and need a few dollars then this is a really easy way of raising a few bucks.

Some survey sites are limited to US only, others are international, so be careful and read the terms before you signup and complete surveys. You don’t want to be working for nothing. Here’s a few of the  better known survey sites;

• Cashcrate
• Treasure Trooper
• Rewards Central (formally Email Cash – is a popular Australian website)

If you’re in any way tech savvy and know you’re servers from your scripts, then you may be able to help those who aren’t so tech savvy.

Loads of people don’t know how to move sites and databases from one site to another or install a script they’ve bought.

It can be tough work and complicated at times if all isn’t as easy as it’s been described, but again it’s easy money if you know what you’re doing. In some cases, it’s just a matter of transferring stuff from A to B using your broadband connection.

You can advertise your services or keep a lookout on the major forums like DP & sitepoint.

Forums are one of the most difficult types of sites to drive traffic to. Why? Because nobody wants to look at an empty/dead forum. Forums need members, they need content, they need to be active to keep people coming back.

So with this in mind, it’s not surprising that forum owners actually start off by PAYING members to post and create threads. This is of course all done on the down low – nobody knows apart from the person getting paid and the forum owner.

It’s perhaps a bit naughty, but believe it or not this is how a lot of forums get going. And so, this is where you can profit. You’ll find threads like paying $25 for 50 posts one from time to time paying forum members to join and post. Easy money for creating an account and making a few posts.