If you're anything like me, you spend a lot of time bored on the Internet with not much to do. Why not find something to do in your spare time that might net you some coin?
Page Links: Online Sales | Amazon Referrals | eBay affiliate | Advertisements | Domain Name Speculation | Stock Market | Surveys | FreeiPod deals | Random deals | Bug Bounties
This one is fairly simple. Find some stuff to sell, and post it on eBay or Amazon for sale. OK, so the hard part is, of course, finding stuff to sell.
If you're a student, put up any textbooks you're not using up for sale ASAP. Textbook publishers have a slew of techniques to stifle the used textbook market, so it's important to put your books up before they manage to come out with new editions. I recommend Amazon over Half.com or eBay for selling used books. Amazon just has a nice interface for books, and it's fairly easy to find buyers for textbooks around the start of school semesters (September or January).
If you want to take online book selling to the next level, keep an eye out for places that sell used books. Your local Goodwill can be invaluable for this, and also keep an eye out for used books at yard sales or public library sales. You'll have to realize that the majority of books are worth less than $5 used. After overhead and shipping costs, it's usually a waste of time and money dealing with books that you'll get less than $10 for. Hence all the crap at used book sales. You'll need to keep an eye out for books that look like they might be worth something — usually hardcover, recent textbooks are a good choice. Keep in mind that textbooks essentially become worthless the minute the publisher comes out with a new edition. Check the copyright date in the front of the book to make sure it's not more than a few years old.
There even exist some automated tools that can look up a book's ISBN number and tell you if it's worth anything. Software exists for Palm and similar handhelds, but buying all that could set you back a pretty penny. I actually wrote a script to let you use text messaging on your phone to lookup prices by ISBN. I don't have a server to run it on at the moment, but feel free to do so yourself.
The age-old stragey for any sale is buy low and sell high. With the power of the Internet, it's easy to jump in on deals that will let you buy something far below market price, and use eBay to sell it at a more reasonable price. To keep up with deals on a daily basis, I recommend SlickDeals.net, Fatwallet, and woot. If you're buying something with the intention of reselling it on eBay, make sure that the item is fairly liquid, that is that you should have no trouble getting a fair-market price for it new on eBay. Good choices are hard drives, PCs or laptops, or other expensive electronics. Also, be sure that you will turn a profit after eBay Listing and Final Value fees, Paypal fees, shipping extras, postage for rebates, etc. If you're using rebates to get a great deal, factor in a probability that you'll ever see the rebates. Perhaps a conservative 85% for a reputable company, and 50% for a disreputable one.
See worked out examples illustrating The Economics of Online Sales , where I go into the precise impact of the various overheads you'll encounter.
This is probably the most time-consuming of the options, although you can make decent money. Basically, you make money by buying and selling virtual items (in-game currency or other items) of MMORPGs. The book Play Money: Or How I Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot is a good read. Long story short, the author's best month netted him around $4k in profits. Not shabby, but it sounds like he had a great amount of luck, persistence, time, and skill on his side.
Amazon referrals are a fairly simple, unobtrusive way to potentially rake in decent profits. If you mention any items on your website, e.g. specific books, you simply provide a link to Amazon with your referral code embedded, and you'll get at least 4% of the sale price. The commission percentage goes up to 8.5% — you can see the exact chart of payoff levels here.
Link to Amazon page on referrals
Links: eBay affiliates Payment Structure
Basically, they'll give you $12 per person you get to create a new account with eBay. That person has to create an account and place a bid within 30 days in order for you to get your commission. They'll also give you a chunk of their profits if the user actually buys anything. Note that eBay also requests your tax info when you sign up. Interestingly, freeiPod used to use precisely this affiliate program to get people to earn money for them, but it appears eBay has since cracked down on websites that twist your arm to get you to sign up.
OK, this is a big section. Obviously, there's money to be made by displaying advertisements, most popularly these days contextual text advertisements, on web pages you run.
Contextual text ads are pretty simple. Almost everyone uses Google's Adsense, but Yahoo! has their own ad program (currently in Beta) and MSN will soon have theirs. When you perform a search on Google, they have a database of advertisements that they match your search query to. So when you do a search for wrenches, you'll get ads paid for by Black & Decker.
Since last year or so, Google has expanded their ads to allow web sites, such as this one, to display Google's text ads and thereby receive a small commission, paid per click (not per impression). Although the rates vary depending on what the ads are for (ads for lawyers earn more than ads for wrenches), most typically pay 10¢ to 20¢ per click. Interestingly, some people have determined which are the highest-paying keywords for Google ads. Obviously, if you can make a good website about, say, mortgage refinancing, you can make a killing off the related text ads. Of course, a number of people have already latched onto this idea, but there's always room on the web if you can put together a good new idea. Note you'll need to fork over your tax information (SSN, etc.) to Google for them to pay you.
Predictably, some people — a lot of people — have taken advantage of this easy web site hosting to create junk websites in the hopes of making a quick buck. The Motley Fool recently wrote an article titled How Google is Killing the Internet, noting the harm that these so-called Splogs cause to the web by diluting search results. Of course, Google is fighting back against these seedy sites, apparently quite effectively, so be sure any site you host with them is legitimate. Another growing problem are the so-called "MFA", or "Made for Adsense" sites. These sites place minimum bids for ad space with Google to sites with little to no real content. Once they get you to into their website, they bombard you with their own ads, using higher-priced keywords in the hope of making a quick buck. At the moment, Google doesn't seem to care about such sites, but webmasters have gotten pretty pissed about these low-paying junk ads clogging up their pages, and have resorted to putting them in the 'Competitive Ad Filter' Google provides for Adsense users. There's even an online Blacklist of these sites.
Of course, you might be wondering how difficult it is to set up your own website complete with a few ads. It's actually not that hard to create a website these days, especially with free services like Blogger (conveniently offered by Google themselves, mainly to fuel revenue from these very same text ads). A site with Blogger means you can be up and running in minutes, without having to learn anything about webpage design — and the layouts they provide actually look decent.
Google used to sneak their ads onto Blogger's pages without letting you get a piece of the profit, but they fortunately changed so you can choose whether to put ads and earn a profit on Blogger. Of course, there are literally millions of worthless blogs out there that practically no one visits. Naturally, the hard part is creating any content that's worth a damn. Problogger.net is a decent site, mainly targeted to the lucky bastards who have huge sites and are looking to make big bucks off of them. An article on the site called How Bloggers Make Money from Blogs is fairly comprehensive, going over most of the forms of advertising.
Google also has programs in place that let you earn $1 for every user you get to download Firefox with the Google toolbar installed, as shown here. This can give you the warm fuzzy feeling of promoting Firefox, while possibly earning you a few dollars.
The sale of domain names is a huge market. As you might have noticed, pretty much all the short and simple domain names have already been taken. However, there's money to be made if you can register a popular domain before anyone else gets to it.
First, however, you need to understand the legalities of domain name speculation. Generally, you're not allowed to buy domain names with trademarked names in them, e.g. "MyMicrosoft.com". Even a domain name that sounds like a trademarked name can be taken away from you by angry lawyers, e.g. "mikerowesoft.com". If Microsoft or any other big corporation thinks you're infringing on their trademarks, they'll send a lot of angry lawyers your way, and unless you can shell out for your own lawyers, you'll have little choice but to surrender. Holding trademarked domains hostage and attempting to extort big corps for the rights generally just pisses them off. Registering a similar name for a site meant purely for parody might be acceptable(e.g. Walmart-Foundation.org), but don't say I didn't warn you. See the Wikipedia article on Cyber Squatting.
A related technique which is becoming increasingly popuplar is Typosquatting. These sites typically take the domain name of a high-traffic site, figure out what a common misspelling of it would be, and then use that misspelled domain name as a parking page for popups, spyware, and generally as many ads as they can squeeze into a single page.
Anyways, you need to figure out a domain name that is likely to become extremely popular soon, but is currently unclaimed. One popular technique is to keep a close eye out on rising athletes, and buy up the domain names of the ones you think are going to become popular. This tactic works especially well for the Olympics, when amateurs can go from being completely unknown to internationally recognized overnight. See article by USAToday about a revival of interest, and money, in the domain name market.
Well, obviously this one's risky. The good news is that, despite some similarities, the stock market doesn't have to be as risky as, say, playing online poker.
There's a good reason I'm not including online poker in this guide -- Despite all the super success stories you might hear of people making a killing in poker, you don't hear about all the other players that are losing money. Poker is almost a Zero Sum Game, not including the overhead that the house skims, so unless you're really, really good, you will almost assuredly be losing money. At any rate, if you're smart enough to eke out a consistent profit at online poker, you're probably smart enough to be doing something more productive than whipping chumps for 50¢ a hand.
Fortunately, the stock market isn't a zero-sum game, and doesn't have to be like playing poker, where most people end up losing money. Over the last century or so, the stock market has yielded something like 11% annual returns. If you have reason to believe you can pick wisely, even simply following "buy low, sell high", you can do even better. Arguably, right now is still a pretty good time to get in the game, as the stock market's been pretty flat for the past few years. Respectable online brokers like Scottrade, which lets you buy and sell stocks for a flat $7 fee, have made stock trading a snap without having a real broker. Won't make you rich overnight, but much better than letting your money get eaten up by inflation sitting in a checking account.
These offers are almost always junk. They'll usually lure you in with, say, an offer of a free $10, but won't tell you that the minimum payoff level is $100 or something ridiculous, which will prove to be nearly impossible to achieve. Especially with the dot-com boom over, I recommend staying away.
Having said that, I have heard some people claim to make small amounts from surveys. This guy with too much time on his hands recommends a site called Survey Savvy. He also recommends some dubious offers that pay ½ cent per email. Again, there are far quicker ways of making a buck online.
When the Freeipod offer initially surfaced, most people assumed it to be a scam. Well, turns out it's not a scam, though apparently the offers that you and five friends will need to complete to net you a single iPod have gotten a bit harder. Most offers, such as signing up for AOL "free" for a month, require giving someone like AOL your Credit Card information, and then canceling after a period of time. (AOL has gotten in legal hot water already over their annoying attempts at keeping you from cancelling.) If you think you can convince five friends to complete such offers, the FreeiPod deal might be worth it. There are similar programs that give away flat screen TVs, PCs, and other goodies, most of which are run by FreePay, formerly Gratis Network.
Obviously, once you finally receive your free iPod or whatever, you can just put it up on eBay and make $200 or so. Be warned though, it takes a lot of time and aggravation to finally complete all those offers. It could easily take you 3 months from start to finish. That's a lot of effort for a measly iPod.
Right now, Bank of America is offering a free $100 when you open a checking account online with them. Sound too good to be true? Well, you have to be careful not to get sucked into paying ridiculous monthly fees to BofA for the privilege of their earning interest with your money. Their basic 'MyAccess Checking' plan is free with direct deposit &mdash note you have to have your paycheck deposited every month in order to escape the $6/month fee.
Another interesting idea that I haven't gotten around to trying yet are rewards programs from car dealerships for coming in for a test drive. These rewards are usually in the form of gift cards, e.g. for gas, and are usually for $50-$75. People say that if you just go into the dealership with the flyer, and explain you're not really in the market for a new car, they'll be happy to validate your sheet without worrying about the test drive. Here's an example from Suzuki, for a $50 gas card.
If you're a really clever hacker, there are various ways for you to earn bounties by fixing bugs, mostly in open source programs. The most famous bounty program is probably for Firefox, which will pay you $500 for any remote exploit you find in the code. I hear the codebase is pretty hairy to dive into, though you could get lucky. In addition, if you're good at discovering any other security vulnerabilities, a program funded by 3Com called Zero Day Initiative will pay you a negotiable amount for any exploits you discover and disclose only to 3Com.
Launchpad lists a number of other open-source bounties, some of which don't look too intimidating. Another similar site is Bounty Source.
More software bounties are available from open source projects such as Haiku OS (low level stuff), LimeWire (good for beginners), Horde (hard), and Asterisk (hard, but big bucks).
Another route you could take if you're any good at programming is doing some coding jobs on the side. Sites like Rent a Coder are popular with rich, lazy, college kids looking to pay someone to do their CS homework for them. Apparently there's significant downward price pressures from the third world to do such assignments, so make sure you'd be getting a decent hourly rate if you take on one of these jobs.
An alternative to sites like RAC is good old Craigslist. Under 'gigs'->'computer', there are usually a mish-mash of coding jobs. Most of them are usually for building web sites or web apps, but there's also a fair amount of DB stuff, and Java/C++ stuff too.