Make extra money taking surveys

I know we’ve all seen the advertisements, make thousands of extra dollars per week taking surveys from home. Truth is I don’t really think this can be true. Maybe it’s been done before but I’m going to guess it’s similar to multi-level marketing techniques where the people who make that kind of money are on top of a large pyramid. Most of us will never find ourselves on top, but you can make a few extra dollars taking surveys.

My first paid survey experience happened in college, before I knew anything about Internet marketing. A research company visited campus and offered $5 to a set number of students who took the time to fill out a survey. As you can imagine they had no problems meeting the quota, the line was backed up all through the cafeteria with eager students wanting to make $5 for just a few minutes of their time. I didn’t really understand why they would want to give us $5 to fill out a survey or how where the got all the money to give away to the survey participants.

Now, years later I understand that market research is a very big business. Large and small corporations both depend on feedback and consumer research to better their products or to find needs for new products. Consumer opinions are very valuable to these companies and they are willing to pay a lot of money to research firms to gather this information.

There are hundreds of research firms that are willing to pay you a portion of their earnings for your time and opinion. How much money? Many times surveys only pay about $1, but there are occasions that you can easily earn $5 for 20 – 30 minutes of your time. Not a great income but you probably waste that much time as some point during the day, why not earn a few extra bucks.

Before you start a google search on paid survey companies, do some research. There are hundreds of paying research firms, however, there are also just as many that promise to pay you and never do. I can tell you about two that I use that have been paying me for years.

Epoll.com has mostly entertainment based surveys. They have a lot of questions about movies, television and celebrities. I seem to get a couple of surveys from there each month and they pay various points. The points can be redeemed for gift certificates and gift cards. Sorry, they don’t offer true cash rewards.

Mysurvey.comdoes offer cash rewards for completing surveys. Again they reward you with points that can be redeemed for cash or prizes. The cash is obviously the best deal but they do have some fun merchandise as well. Both of the programs are legit and do pay their members. I’m sure there are many others, these are just the two I am most familiar with.

If you have a few minutes of free time in  your day you may want to consider signing up for at least these two programs. It’s nice to get a $10 check in the mail unexpectedly or a gift card to your favorite restaurant.

Using Google Adsense and blogs to make extra money

This is the second part of my series about making some extra money using some of your free/spare time. Today I want to talk about using a very popular advertising program called Adsense by the ever so popular search engine, Google.

The Adsense program allows you to place small or large text or graphic advertisements on your website. Adsense in turn shares a portion of their profits to you the publisher, or the displayer of the advertisements. You will only get paid for “clicks” on the advertisements and advertisers will only be charged for those clicks. In theory you could show millions of advertisements on your website and never get an actual click, but from my experience this usually doesn’t happen. If you have a large amount of traffic to your site you will get clicks.

1. Create a blog. Your blog should be something you know a lot about, something you have a passion for, or something you really want to learn a lot about. You will have to try to post a new blog everyday or at least every other day, so it’s good to know what you are talking about.
2. Choose a blog template that works with the Google Adsense program. There are tons of templates designed for displaying Adsense advertisements. Just do a quick search on your favorite search engine.
3. Read over the Google Adsense policies and guidelines. Make sure you blog follows all their rules.
4. Apply for the Google Adsense publisher program
5. Setup your first google advertisement and put it on your blog.
6. Write, write write. Try to add a new blog entry every day. Try to write at least 300 word articles. This will keep search engines interested in your blog, and in turn bring you more traffic.
7. Follow the rules of Adsense or you will get suspended. The biggest rule breaker is not clicking on your own advertisements. They have ways of tracking this and will give you the boot.
8. Tell all your friends to follow your blog. DON’T encourage them to click the advertisement, but if something interests them they will probably help out anyway. Post your blog on social networks, forums and other websites. The more you expose your site the more visitors you will get and the more cash you will make.
9. Once you get an established blog repeat this process as many times as you want. It only takes 10 or 15 per day to write a post, especially if it’s something you are already familiar with or something you are passionate about.
10. Collect the extra cash every moth to your paypal account or checking account!

Need some extra money? Put your free time to work for you!

For those of you who know me, you know that my real job is “seasonal”. There are times when I am very busy and times when I have absolutely nothing to do during an entire day. I often catch myself playing games or browsing the Internet for more than 6 hours a day. I’m very lucky my employer makes enough money during the busy season to keep their entire work force employed throughout the year.

I’ve always had a few side projects: blogs such as this one and other websites to keep me busy, but lately I’ve lost interest. A few years ago I started an online game that kept me busy for almost a year. I created 4 or 5 blogs that I tried to post to regularly and I think I’ve spread myself too thin. I’ve lost interest in most of the projects and just recently realized how much time I waste at work.

I’ve decided to start planning out my day and I’m going start back up my blogs and websites. I think it’s possible, with some effort, to make a decent amount of extra money from my website ventures. My main project is going to be a new online game that I’m creating with a help of a friend over at sales tactics today. I also have the other game website, a house rental website, an online auction website, 2 car websites, this blog, and 3 more blogs. Just imagine if I could make an extra $10 per day from each of these sites. That’s about $100 per day from websites! Who couldn’t use and extra $36,000 per year income?

You too can put your free time to good use and start earning some extra cash from your desk. There are literally thousands of different things you can do on the Internet to make some extra money. Sure, there are a large amount of hoaxes, pyramid schemes and con artists, but there are also many legit ways to make extra money.

Over the course of then next few days I’m going to give you some examples of how you can make some extra money on the internet by using just a fraction of your free time. Since this is a blog today I’ll discuss the money making power of a blog.

I started this blog in June of 2006. I originally purchased the domain with intentions of a completely different website, however I never got around to developing the site so I turned it into this financial blog. Some Internet savvy people boast blog revenues of $1,000’s per month, unfortunately I’m not one of those lucky bloggers. I chose to use to promote my website.

basically rents keywords on your blog posts to advertisers. The price they pay depends on many factors, but generally averages about $5 per month for each keyword they rent. Right now I have 190 posts on this blog and currently have 10 keywords rented out to advertisers and make $50 per month from this blog. With these numbers, on average for every 20 posts I write I rent one keyword. If I can commit to write 2 blog posts each day for the next year that would be another 18 keywords sold for a total of 28. An average of $5 per post would bring my monthly revenue to $140. Not bad for writing 2 articles per day.

Now, imagine having 5 blogs and writing 2 posts per day using the same technique above. You could make around $700 per month just for writing articles on 5 blog sites. An average 300 word blog post, writing about something you enjoy only take about 15 minutes.  In about 2.5 hours per day you could write 10 posts in order to maintain your 5 blogs. It might not sound like a lot of money for your time, but you should maintain this income even if you stop writing posts. The more you write the more your income grows.

I’ll try to keep you updated on my progress with this website and this experiment. Creating a blog only takes a few minutes to setup and you can maintain it for just a few dollars per month. Subscribe to my blog and I’ll continue to provide more information about setting up a blog and how to replicate my experiment.