A Guide on How to Make or Earn Money Online

So you want to make money using the internet as your means. Perhaps your are disabled or a stay at home mom or dad. Or maybe you just want to break out into working from home. Maybe you just want a small supplemental income. Well you can accomplish any of these things by following my guide on how to make money online.

The first step in this process is to decide exactly how serious you are about this. There are several questions you may need to ask yourself.

• How much time do you want to spend doing this?
• Do I think I can replace my full time/part time job with this or do I just want to create a supplemental income?
• Do I have skills or ideas that people will seek?

Just like in any job market, you will need the skills required for the work you will be doing. Whether that skill is translating, graphic design, being logical, or just being a decent computer user, there are tons of jobs or things you can do to make money on the internet. The hardest part is being tenacious. Stick with whatever you are doing and you WILL make money. No matter how "bad" you think you are at something, if you stick with it you will make money and you will do great. So here is my advice on making money online.

This was the first way I started making money online, so I thought it would be appropriate to post it here. There are several different strategies to making money on ebay.

• Sell the things you have and don't need. Sometimes you get lucky and have some things that sell really well on eBay. A few things that go great on there are video games, electronics, Shoes, Computers, etc. These things all go pretty well on eBay. Especially if it is rare or in demand.
• Find a things for a good deal and resell them. I used to do this once and a while, but I know a few people who do this as their job. The best way to do this is to find a niche that you know a bit about and stick with that. Go to pawn shops, thrift stores, flea markets and figure out what you can make a profit on. Always know what you are looking for, know your potential for profit, and know when to say no to an item. Try to never lose money buying and selling. Even if you break even sometimes it can still be very exciting.
• Drop Shipping. This is a tough one to break into as sometimes it can be hard to find a drop shipper that is trustworthy. Basically what drop shipping is buying some product from a supplier at whole sale prices in bulk and reselling them for a profit. This one is going to take the most time and most initial investment. I would only recommend this one if you have the time, money and space to run a small business out of your home. (Think an office room + a storage room)

With any of these tips I would recommend keeping track of your overall profit and sales. It is fun to watch your eBay business do well! It is not a hard thing to get into either. This can be a great income if you have a lot of stuff sitting around that you don't use, or if you have an interest in buying and selling a certain item or group of things. This is my favorite way to make money online.

This one is very similar to eBay. Craigslist works like the classified ads in a newspaper, except it is free. The key to Craigslist success is living somewhere near or in a larger city. If you live out in the boondocks you won't find many people to buy your things. But if you live in a city of 10,000+ you will probably find plenty of people to sell your things to. I have a few tips for using craigslist.

• Check craigslist to see if people are looking for what you are selling. See what they will pay and if it acceptable, take it!
• Always post pictures of what you are selling. You look less like a scammer and more like somebody who is trying to sell their old stuff.
• Big things go great on craigslist. Things you can't ship cheaply. Think vehicles, furniture, large electronics and appliances.
• If you are a handy person, look at the free listings. Sometimes you can find some old furniture or other things to fix up and resell.

Craigslist is a great way to make money on nearly anything you want to sell with no investment or money to put into it. (eBay has listing fees, end sale fees, and shipping fees) So if you want to make money selling your stuff Craigslist is a great way if eBay is out of the question for you. Or it can be used in conjunction with eBay.

Amazon Mechanical Turk is basically a worker program made by Amazon. How it works:

• You sign up as a worker. Businesses and researchers and other places will sign up to use these workers to work on their "Hits".
• These hits are how you make money. Each hit can be worth anything, but most are worth $0.01 to $1.00. There are some high dollar hits that are worth upwards of $5 each.
• In these hits you will do various things. You may be taking a survey for a research company, looking at a website and critiquing it, looking at a bunch of pictures to find their subject, translation, and many other things.
• Once you have completed and submitted a hit it will be submitted to the company for review to make sure you did everything truthfully. Once they have approved it you will get paid to either paypal or in amazon credit.

The best way to make money doing this is to learn which hits pay the best with the least amount of work. Some of the highest paid hits are scams sometimes, making you do lots of work and then get nothing, so try to figure out which ones look fishy or offer a lot of money for little work.

Note: This won't make you a ton of money. The most I ever made was $40 in one month, which took a little more work than I thought it would, but I had a lot of time to kill as a front desk worker and during class sometimes. This can be a good side income if you have some free time during each day to work at it.

This one is a little goofy sounding, and it can be a bit sporadic, but it is pretty fun once you do win! The goal to this one is to be persistent and patient. There are a few websites that offer sweepstakes all in one area. My favorite is Sweeps Advantage. There are others such as Online-Sweepstakes About.com Sweepstakes and Sweepstakes Today. I will outline a basic strategy for making money at sweepstakes.

• First, you will want to protect yourself from spam. I recommend setting up an email specifically for your sweepstakes-ing.
• Get an add-on or use google chrome to auto-fill forms. This is crucial to completing sweepstakes fast and moving on to the next one.
• Get comfortable with the website that you choose to use. Figure out how to access different types of contests and see how they organize them.
• My strategy is to start by entering contests that interest me that are expiring the soonest. After you have filled out quite a few of these move onto the newest sweepstakes. Keep track of which sweepstakes you entered, as some of them will cancel your entry if you try to enter more than once, some are daily contests that you can enter each day until it ends.
• Don't do so many that you get burned out. If you want to do 10 contests and get bored, do it. But stick with it. Do some each day. I try to enter about 100 each night. You will get much faster at it the more you do it.
• Always check your email after a session of doing contests. Some contests will require that you verify your email. Keep an eye on this email as some contests will require that you reply to an email to win. You don't want to miss that email!
• Collect your rewards! You may not win anything right away, but stick with it. I have one several things such as gift certificates, cash, and random items (books, cds, and doo-dads).
• If you win any big items you don't want or need, sell them or gift them! They were free anyway, right?

This is a huge topic that is all over the internet. There are tons of ways to make money writing. A few I have used and recommend are:

• elance - This website is pretty interesting and useful for freelance workers of nearly any field. You have credits that you use to apply for jobs. You have to present yourself professionally and sell yourself, just like any job. You get a certain amount of free credits each month, and with a paid account you can get more credits to apply for and work at more jobs.
• Guru - This is very similar to elance. It is a great free resource for freelancers of any field, but especially for writers.
• Hubpages - You're here. You should already know a bit how this works. You can make money writing for hubpages. Write things you think people would want to read. Get them to view your writing. Make money through affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing works through ad views and clicks and amount of time spent reading the article.
• Squidoo - Squidoo works essentially just like hubpages, except they handle their ad system slightly differently. If you want to go take a look, it is a great tool to utilize along with Hubpages.
• Your Own Blog - You can create a blog on any topic and do what you wish with it. Whether you decide to have your own domain and run a type of blogging software, or use another domain such as Blogger, this works with affiliate marketing too. People need to want to read what you have written. And they need to want to click on the ads.
• Textbroker - This is a website designed to help freelance writers find work. Essentially you can either look for writing jobs that are in your field or expertise or you can be asked to do jobs for clients who like your work. Either way it is a good way to make money writing online.

You can make money with any one of these or any combination. A combination seems to work the best as you can cross advertise and the more people you get to read one thing of yours, they will end up reading more things by you. And if someone likes your writing enough, you may get asked to write professionally for a company.

Fiverr is a great website to sell any service you can imagine, the catch is that you can only sell whatever it is for five dollars (thus Fiverr). If you are creative enough and offer a great service, you can make decent money. A lot of people will do a lot of things for five dollars, but if you can come up with something creative or needed people will buy what you are selling. This is an all around fun website to both buy and sell on.

Amateur photographer? Sell your photos on stock photo websites. These websites will host your photos and give you a commission on each photo sold. Several stock photo websites run the same way and here are a few you can try!

• Shutterstock
• iStockPhoto
• Dreamstime

These are three of the top stock image websites I have seen and I am sure there are many more that will buy and sell your photography.

Think you have an interesting design or slogan? Why not try selling it? Websites like Cafepress allow you to submit your design and you make a commission off of each sale. The more people you drive to your site and to buy your things, the more money you make. Think you can start a new great logo or design or slogan? Give these "design" websites a try!

• Cafepress
• Zazzle
• Wordans

No matter which of these strategies you choose to employ, or if you choose to employ a myriad of them, you will make money. The problem is, people go into one of these things thinking they will make fast cash, and that just isn't the case. Just like waiting for your first paycheck from your job, online cash flow works the same way. You have to put the hard work in before you will get paid. So stick with any of these, and I guarantee you will make money. Good luck and have fun!