Genuine Ways to Make Money Online

People are always looking for ways to make easy money online and in the current economic climate (despite Trevor Manuel's reassurances that there is no recession) the idea is even more attractive. If you Google the concept, you'll find plenty of results, but most of them seem to be geared to US citizens. Despite this, some websites accept international workers.

Freelance Writing:

There are plenty of freelance writing gigs online and quite often they accept telecommuters from South Africa. The easiest way to keep track of the multitude of sites where these jobs are posted, is to visit a blog such as Freelance Writing Gigs daily (or track its RSS feed). The benefit of using that kind of blog is that users also report back when jobs turn out to be fraudulent.

The other way to make money writing online is to submit content to sites which either pay you for your articles, or pay you per 1 000 clicks on your content.

Associated Content - $1.50 per 1 000 views. I reached over a thousand in the first month easily and now even Melanie Lowe's doing it.

Helium - pays per click as well as giving you upfront payments per article depending on your rating there. $3 monthly to review other people's articles too. You can also write articles to compete for pay.

Triond - pay per 1000 clicks.

You can also use websites like Hub Pages, which simply share their advertising revenue with you, depending on how many visits your content gets and what sales are generated. You can generate your own income that way if you have a blog or website. You can either use an international method, like Google's Adsense, or one geared towards South Africans, like Afrigator's Adgator (see below).

Advertising:

There are countless ways to generate advertising revenue on your website or weblog. You find a scheme you like, install some simple code on your page and either get paid for view or clicks on them. Google's Adsense is tried, tested and reliable and many blog owners report that it's their top income stream. For South Africans, however, the fabulous Adgator scheme has just been launched by the AfriGreater Afrigator blog aggregator (try saying that when you're drunk) and in December I'll be able to let you know how it works - I've installed it on my Coming Out Stories blog, which is the busiest one in the stable.

Market Research Surveys:

There are a huge amount of sites that offer to pay you for completing surveys. What you do, is sign up, give them your demographics and wait to receive a survey you're eligible for. I've signed up for two and haven't had any surveys to do yet, so I'm not recommending any yet.

Referrals:

Most of the schemes mentioned so far also pay you for successfully referring other workers. They give you options like emailing invites and/or adding referral links to your own blog or site or forum signature. When you recruit someone else, you either earn a nominal fee or a percentage of that person's earning.

Amazon Mechanical Turk:

Part of amazon.com's Amazon Web Services, this is probably the most comfortable sweatshop on the internet, but it doesn't pay cash unless you're a US or Indian citizen. It pays you in amazon.com gift certificates. There's been a lot of uproar about the fact that Amazon will no longer ship to South Africa due to postal fraud. Actually, they will ship here, but only at the most expensive courier rate. You can make upwards of $5 an hour quite easily, but you have to spend it at Amazon. Jobs there are called HIT's (Human Intelligence Tasks) and the pay ranges from a cent to a few dollars. You could be asked to rewrite something into correct US English, tag images, review something, complete a survey, transcribe audio and many other simple tasks that computers can't do by themselves.

Merchandising:

Sites like Café Press, Redbubble and Zazzle let you upload your design to be produced on a range of products like shirts, mouse pads, posters, mugs etc. You get upwards of 10% of each sale - an average of $2.20 on a t-shirt, for example. You can promote your virtual shop on your own site, as well as on social networking sites like Facebook.

Paypal Donations:

Some sites and blogs ask for donations towards their owners' time and expertise. Paypal has even developed a little widget which says things like "Buy me a beer," which then links to your Paypal account. Popular blogs etc claim that this is a very good earner.