Creative Ways to Make Extra Money

Everyone could use a little extra money, especially these days. It's impossible to turn on the TV or pick-up a newspaper without reading how the economy is getting worse and worse. It seems the only entity oblivious to this news is Wall Street, but isn't a lot of what they did have us all in this situation to begin with? However, I'll save that subject for another article.

Today I want to focus on some creative or at least little known ways to earn some extra money. Please keep in mind none of these methods will take the place of a "real" job, but they can lead to a little extra cash or other perks.

Many of us these days spend a lot of time on the computer. We surf the Internet, play games or just read emails. If you find yourself on the computer a lot why not let it help you make a few bucks? There are a lot of companies out there that make what I feel are false claims that you can make "hundreds of dollars" taking surveys. Personally, I haven't found any survey taking companies that are legitimate. I have found two companies that offer some monetary rewards that I think are worthwhile: Mypoints.com and Send Earnings.

Mypoints.com sends you emails tailored to the way you answered your profile questions. The emails are usually offers of one kind or another. If you read the offer and do nothing else you'll normally earn 5 points. If you respond to the offer you could earn from an additional 10 points to thousands (personally the most points I've ever seen advertised on an offer was 5000 points). These points are saved to your account and as you accumulate them you can redeem them for all kinds of "rewards." The rewards include gift cards for all kinds of merchants both online and brick and mortar. Participating merchants (at time of this writing) include: Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, CVS Pharmacy, Home Depot, Starbucks, Wal-Mart, and many others. You can redeem as few as 1400 points for a $10.00 gift card for most merchants.

Another great way to earn extra points from Mypoints.com is to shop online via links from the site at your favorite merchant. Many popular merchants offer points for shopping with them via Mypoints.com. For example, right now if you make a purchase online from Avon, they'll give you 1000 points, and all orders over $40.00 are shipped to you for free. Another great offer is from Blockbuster. You'll get 1000 points, and 2 weeks for free to their online movie plan. Other merchants will give you from 2 to 4 points per dollar that you spend at their site. These are just a few examples on how you can rack up points and get some cool freebies.

Send Earnings have a similar program, only their program is cash based. Each email you receive is worth .02 cents to you just for reading it. If you respond to an offer you may earn anywhere from .25 cents up to $8.00 (at least that's the most I've been offered). I'm a big fan of the Entertainment Book. I received offers via Mypoints.com and Send Earnings. If I remember correctly, the Mypoints.com offer was going to give me 500 points and free shipping. The Send Earnings offer was free shipping, a discounted price for the book (only $20.00 instead of $45), and $8.00 cash into my send earnings account. All in all in this example I felt the send earnings offer was more lucrative. So, it pays to belong to both plans. You never know what offers you're going to receive, and you could get offers from the same merchant like I did. This way you can choose the best and most lucrative option.

Another way to earn money is signing up as a worker via a program that's powered by Amazon. It's called Amazon Mechanical Turk. It's billed as a marketplace for work. Again, you will not get rich, but the sweet part about doing this work is it's available 24 hours per day 7 days per week. So, while you're sitting on the sofa with the TV on for company you could be making a couple of bucks. The jobs pay anywhere from .01 cent for a task up to about $5.00. In all honesty the $5.00 jobs are hard to come-by and usually very complicated. The one cent jobs usually have you visiting a website and harvesting information like an email address or cutting and pasting the link to a website's contact page.

Some jobs on Amazon Mechanical Turk require you to take a test in order to qualify to accept the "hit" (jobs on this site are referred to as hits). Also most jobs require you have an acceptable "hit" score. Once you submit a hit for payment the company who requested the work will either accept or reject your work. If you followed all the directions, your hit will be accepted and you'll be paid. To illustrate how the scoring works, if you submit 100 hits and 5 are rejected your score will be 95%. Many companies want your hit score to be 95% or better, others are willing to accept workers at 90% or better and I've seen a few that basically will let anyone who's "breathing" do work for them. They have no minimum score requirements.

Again, not a method to retire on, but it is a way to earn a few bucks with little effort. I earned $15.00 in one week, just doing hits "here and there" when I had an hour or two to spare. $15.00 may not sound like a lot of money, but over the course of a month that's $60.00...for me that pays my electric bill for the month. It's also food for a single person for 2 months, if purchased from Angel Food Ministries. Over the course of a year that $60.00 becomes $720.00. If you were to put aside that "measly" $60.00 each month at the end of the year you could take a "free" vacation. I say "free" because that money didn't come from your normal earnings or day to day budget.

If you are good at finding information on the Internet, have good grammatical and spelling skills, then you might consider becoming a Special Agent for a company called KGB. KGB is a mobile search engine system. People text questions to KGB, that question is routed to an available "Special Agent," and the agent sends an answer to the person via text. The pay, depending on your classification at KGB is .05 cent to .10 cents per answered question. You can find out all the qualifications and how to apply to be a Special Agent at the KGB Home Recruitment page.

Times may be tough, but there are always ways to increase your earning power. Above are just a few easy ways technology has made finding a little extra cash easier. Have fun reading, surfing and racking up the cash.