How I Make Money Online

Image by DavidDMuir via Flickr

I realized recently this blog has me writing about making money online, but I haven’t actually explained how I do it. This is just a run-down of the programs and systems I use for getting active income (I have no passive income sources, other than AdSense advertisements and affiliate sales, of which there are few).

Paid Surveys

Surveys are the bulk of my online income. I usually make anywhere from five to 15 dollars per day taking surveys through various websites for about one or two hours of work. This is similar to any other part-time job I could get, and I can do it at home with little effort other than checking email.

I have enjoyed surveys for about two months now and have received a lot of payouts so far. I have a lot pending, as well.

I will post my totals for each website in the near future, and probably update it monthly, as others have done. I just need to add up totals first.

Article Marketing

Many, many websites will pay you to write for them, and perhaps I will write a list sometime soon of all the sites I have used and continue to use to get a passive and active income. The majority of my payment has been through Associated Content (view my profile), adding up to around $100 over the past year. Articles can pay either performance or both up-front and performance payments, which is a nice little bonus. The trick to being happy with Associated Content is to treat performance as your main income and any up-front payment as a bonus. That’s how I keep myself writing.

I have also been enjoying Review Stream, which pays you $2.00 to review just about literally anything. I am only half-way to their $50 minimum payout threshold, so I will not post a full review for a while (I usually do two or three per day for a few days, and then get burned out for a week).

Playing Games

I don’t really do this nearly enough to post a thorough review, but I have a little bit of experience. The major source of free stuff is Club Bing, which is run by Microsoft to promote their new search engine.

Also, for cash, there is Moola, which pays cash for successfully beating other players. I’m not very competitive (rather, I should say, I don’t like losing), so I have not played much, except for against a friend a few times.

Reading Emails

Another new way, which I have little experience with so far, is using MyPoints. The site pays you points to click on links within emails, in addition to shopping through their site and completing surveys. I haven’t got nearly enough points (they usually send about one email per day), so I cannot vouch for them. My friends have said good things, though.

Amazon’s mTurk

Amazon’s mechanical turk is a service provided by Amazon that is dedicated to crowdsourcing. Workers are paid to complete simple tasks which are unable to be performed by computers for a rather small payment set by the requester. Usually, the payment is only about a penny, but I have seen some tasks which were simple and paid $0.08 per hit. I made $30 in around an hour doing that, though the task is only one day per year. Transcription tasks are also fairly simple to do, and if you can type quickly and have a good knowledge of English grammar and spelling and can understand broken recordings, you can easily make a reasonable amount for a moderate amount of work.

That’s about all I do to make money online. There are efforts in the works, like this blog and the One-Year Tightrope, but other than that, I have done very little. I think making money online tends to take a lot of up-front effort with very few returns for a while. If you want to see quick returns and have a lot of patience, I recommend you try surveys. It may take a while to figure out what’s going to work best for you, but it is worth it in the long run.