ALT-3 Can you really Make Money Online
The biggest misconception people have about making money online is that you can earn a lot with minimal effort. The truth of the matter is, if you're serious about making money online, you have to treat it like a full time job. You're not going to earn thousands by clicking around for 10 minutes a day.
If you dedicate enough time to earning online, you will make a decent amount of pocket change. I'm sure you could make a job out of it, but most people aren't that dedicated.
One important thing to remember is that you should not put all your eggs in one basket. You should always use more than one website to make money because there usually isn't constant work on any one site. So if you split up the time you spend on different sites, you can usually substantially increase your income.
So what websites are there? If you find yourself bored with nothing to do, you can always join Amazon's Mechanical Turk. On there, you can spend anywhere from a few cents to $50 at a time depending on how lucky you get. How it works is people post tasks on the site, called hits, as a Turker, your job is to accept the hit and complete the task. Usually tasks that are one or two cents, are repetitive and you can do a lot of them in a short period of time. If you frequent the site enough, you can snap up a few of the hits with the higher rewards. These will usually go quickly and can range from writing a few articles, to organizing an excel sheet. There is also a lot of transcription work on Mechanical Turk. You have to listen to a podcast and transcribe it. The better transcriptions get bonuses. This site is good because it gives you a wide variety of things you can do and the choice is yours.
Other websites like this are the survey/email reading/offer accepting sites. These sites, like inboxdollars.com are usually profitable at first but eventually plateau when you've filled out all the surveys and done all the offers you're willing to do. You can make a lot of money on websites like these but you have to be careful or you'll end up spending some too. The big money-earning offers usually require you to sign up for free trials of things which you have to cancel before you get a permanent subscription that you're automatically charged for. Other than that, you basically just have to check your email a lot and you get a few cents for every one that you open. A hint for those of you that want to try this: set up a brand new email that you use specifically for offers and daily emails, because otherwise your inbox will be spammed for all eternity, even after you are no longer a member of the site.
If you want a more narrow task and you like writing, you can join any of the article-writing websites like Helium and Associated Content. These sites will usually pay you depending on how many views your articles get. The more you write, the more you will earn. The good thing about this, is once your article is published, it is there for life. So you could potentially be earning a little bit of cash every year, providing that your articles can stand the test of time. It's a tradeoff: If you're looking for long term earnings, write something that will be relevant now or in 20 years. On the other hand, if you want more earnings right now, you should probably write about current news items. These will get you more views since that's what people are currently searching for online, but they have an extremely short shelf life.
If you're not the writer type, you can sell online. A lot of people make money selling the old junk they don't want anymore on Amazon or Ebay. Again there is a tradeoff here depending on your money-making goals. If you want to sell something right now, you're better off with Ebay, since you can set your auction for any number days you choose. The problem with this is, you might not earn what you wanted on your item. On the other hand, websites like half.com and amazon.com allow you to set your own price, but it might take months or years to sell something. You might never sell it at all.
There are other options that require an investment, no matter how small which lot of people shy way from. However, some people make a good living on ebay, buying things in bulk, like DVD's and selling them back individually for a higher price. This could be profitable but it takes an immense amount of effort on your part. Another good way to make money on Ebay is to capitalize on people's misspellings. A lot of times people misspell brands which makes them not come up in a search. So if you can think of a lot of common misspellings to brand names like Abercrombie and Fitch or Juicy Couture, you can sell them with the correct name and make more money since it will come up in searches for the brand.
Another way to put your entrepreneur sense to work is on Cafe Press. If you have good ideas for a design that can go on shirts, hats, mugs etc, and you have some artistic skill, you can make the design and sell items at whatever mark-up you choose. You pay a small monthly fee and the company automatically keeps a base rate of the item your design can go on, but you set the price of the item so you earn the difference. For example, a T-shirt on Cafe Press has a base rate of $8.99. If you set the price of the shirt with your design on it to $15, you make $6.01 every time your shirt sells. In order for this to really be profitable, you have to make sure your designs are unique and desirable.
One final note on making money online. There are a lot of scams out there. If a website asks you to send in a starter or materials fee for any kind of online work, you're probably going to end up losing that. Most of those sites are illegitimate. Remember, you should never have to pay for work your doing. So join a few websites and make a couple of bucks. Just don't quit your day job...unless you make this your day job.
