1. Several jobs exist on a pay per hour basis but the better paid ones are probably contract jobs. Some examples of both: Copywriting; proofreading of web content/ebooks/newsletters etc. (elance, guru,rentacoder, graphicdesign,more).
2. Email or phone answering: Be one of the first line support staff manning a company's phone or email answering service. Filter out the easy questions by pointing the user to relevant sections of his manual and escalate those that seem genuine problems. You are saving the company's engineers' time and providing a valuable service - that they pay for. A variation of this is chat help where you actually sit at your PC and text chat to users who've reached a firm's website and clicked the help button. Sometimes a bit of training is involved.
2. Email or phone answering: Be one of the first line support staff manning a company's phone or email answering service. Filter out the easy questions by pointing the user to relevant sections of his manual and escalate those that seem genuine problems. You are saving the company's engineers' time and providing a valuable service - that they pay for. A variation of this is chat help where you actually sit at your PC and text chat to users who've reached a firm's website and clicked the help button. Sometimes a bit of training is involved.
3. Good at web design, HTML, CSS? Create designs (templates) and flog them. You can sell each one multiple times to webmasters who don't have the time or patience to get familiar with the intricacies and quirks.
4. Monitoring Wikipedia/ forums/ blogs for mentions of a particular name, brand etc. A recent expose showed that several Wikipedia entries were being manipulated by a US political party who had several stooges signed up for just this purpose. Wouldn't their opponents want to know each time they're manipulating some facts? Find someone who needs some news "managed" or needs to know when news is being "managed" and get paid for it. You need to be "proactive" as these jobs aren't "advertised" but the fact that they aren't advertised means that others don't know about them, you have an advantage. And there are opportunities in almost every language.
5. Directories: start one. Webmasters pay to be listed in your directory. The better your directory the more you can demand. Niche, hand compiled directories are a million times better than the SERPs dross and both companies and users know that.
6. Filling in surveys. True, there are a lot of duds around but there are still some programs that pay you for doing mind-numbingly dull tasks like filling in surveys. If you aren't fussed about privacy and are willing to disclose all your personal details (or fictional personal details) there's usually someone willing to pay you, From YouGov to Ciao. This - and some of the next few - are called IFW or Incentivised Freebie Websites, more here.
7. Get paid to read email. Why would companies pay for that? Plenty of reasons, not least that a human eye can spot SPAM that even the best program doesn't catch. Even the best anti-spam program has some false positives and some companies can't afford to have any.
8. Do other filtering. There are people who'll pay money to have you filter through those millions of ebay listings to find them the specific objects/ curios/ stock/ book that they really, really need. Another filtering idea: Businessmen looking to buy sites regularly visit the Site Buying/Sellin
gforums and trawl through thousands of listings a week. Get talking to one or two of them, offer to get familiar with what they are looking for and to do the looking for them.
gforums and trawl through thousands of listings a week. Get talking to one or two of them, offer to get familiar with what they are looking for and to do the looking for them.9. The web has allowed easy access to industrial quantities of free stuff. For example, in 2007, a major manufacturer of cricket bats had a problem. Cricket bats can't have knots in them so most of the wood from the willow tree has to be discarded as scrap. Not a few bin bags full but 70 tons. Per week. Yes, lorry loads per day! Free. They listed it on the eastex.org.uk site. Opportunity: Find a company that sells bark mulch for gardens. Find out how much they are paying to buy wood. Offer them 70 tons of fine willow a week at 50% of their current costs provided they pick it up themselves. Or contact manufacturers of chipboard/cat litter/use-your-imagination. OK, eastex may not still have that particular opportunity... but there are others. And on other sites.
10. CPA = Cost per Action. Apart from filling in surveys people pay for all kinds of other things. Like clicking on links (though you may want to check that you're not participating in click fraud).
11. Posting in Forums: Like hanging out in forums and chatting to other people? Owners of new forums have a problem. If there aren't a lot of conversations going then people don't stop to talk. So they get the chat flowing by paying for posts. So, jump in, start chatting and get paid.
12. Do something silly. The milliondollarhomepage guy got famous for selling worthless pixels on his page. But, because he was in the news/having his 15 minutes of fame people focused on that and paid money for what they would normally have realised was fairly worthless links. Yes, people are stupid. ClickHereYouIdiot. But some of these "stupid" people are millionaires today.
13. Do something more useful and less silly. Find a need in a niche and fill it. People complaining in forums about how they can't find replacement parts for a certain type of car? Find someone who'll make it and be the broker. People complaining about limitations in a particular niche software? Find a programmer to design a solution and start selling it.
14. Have expertise in a particular subject? Write regularly on that subject and give away your knowledge for free. People will bookmark your blog and visit regularly. The money is in allowing companies to advertise their products and services to your very eager audience. There are third partieslike payperpost, blogvertise, creamaid, Blogitive, reviewme, loudlaunch etc., who handle the finding of advertisers.
15. Don't have expertise in a particular subject? That doesn't stop bloggers. Some of them blog on the most mundane things - from what they had for breakfast to how they spent their day. And still the advertisers come. So, don't blog to demonstrate your expertise. Blog to demonstrate your camera obsession and show all the stupid pictures you take everyday. Or blog about breastfeeding your kids.
16. Join the myspace bandwagon, build up a lot of "friends" and bulletin advertise (what?!) the hell out of them. Send them to pages where you promote affiliate programs and you could walk away with five figures every month. There are people who make a lot more.
17. Or use tools like myspace to promote your offline activities - like the music you create. The Arctic Monkeys were record label/ talent scout/ music agent free.
18. Sell trinkets to myspace users. They love them. Especially shiny ones. Myspace backgrounds, templates, animations, scripts, icons and other "myspace resources" are a multimillion dollar industry.
19. Writing a newsletter. Building a mailing list is a long term plan and it pays dividends but don't expect immediate results. If your newsletter is good and you promote it well you can collect hundreds of thousands of subscribers (who all get the newsletter for completely free). The more subscribers you have on your list the more advertisers pay to feature in your newsletter.
20. Find something that won't sell, let your imagination run wild. Be willing to think the most outrageous thoughts, the most impossible items to sell. Who would have guessed there'd be an active market for urine. Yes, that stuff you flush away. No, I'm not taking the ... mikey. Start selling youroutrageous item and you may find that a market already exists. You can also sell your hair, your blood, your eggs, breast milk and body parts... and rent your uterus.
21. Build a community. While some webmasters see lower returns from forum-type sites it's probably because they're using contextual programs like Adsense. One of the biggest webmaster communities (forum) is free to join and free to
use though it's very busy, uses massive bandwidth and costs its owner a bomb. Yet, he makes a very profitable income fromorganising conferences/tradeshows. His "community" ensures every one is a sell-out.
use though it's very busy, uses massive bandwidth and costs its owner a bomb. Yet, he makes a very profitable income fromorganising conferences/tradeshows. His "community" ensures every one is a sell-out.22. Be a link monkey. Webmasters want people to link to them. It makes them feel loved. And it helps them rank higher with search engines. But they don't have the time to go begging. You do that for them and get paid per link. If you're smart you'll find shortcuts and charge people a lot of money for identifying and approaching possible link "partners".
 |
23. Related to the link idea above - start a directory submission service. There are lots of directories around like the ODP. Many take free submissions but you have to do these by hand. When you're familiar with the submission process at a few of the top ones it takes you a lot less time to make submissions. Webmasters have to register, wait for a reply, jump through other hoops etc. They'd rather outsource it to someone who can do it faster and has the time.
24. Another flavour of link-building: Dropping mention of your client's site in forums, blog comments etc. Yes, clients pay for it. There are spamming ways of doing it and some more decent ways. If you can make relevant posts, posts that contribute to the discussion and provide only those links that are beneficial to that thread, you'll be in high demand with webmasters looking to spread the word about their good content. For example, if you genuinely feel that this list of 101 ways to make money is the dog's testicles - and you participate a lot in webmaster forums - you're bound to come across threads where dropping a link would help your forum mates. Some website owners pay for that. (Update: I've now got a detailed article on how you can make money from blog commenting.)
25. Press release websites often need people to screen user submitted releases for profanity etc., before running the "news". Well known blogs often require the same kind of vetting service for user submitted comments to blog articles. Niche directories that take automated submissions need to prevent against SPAM so could use a human review of each submission. There are numerous such opportunities. Spamming site owners with offers of your service may not get you anywhere. The key is to identify a site that looks like it could use this service and make a personal approach.
26. Write an ebook. It's as easy as falling off a chair. Know something about something? Whether it's about growing cabbages, writing PERL, plucking nose hair or being a good cop - if you're a good marketer, or pay a good marketer, you can probably sell a few thousand copies of your ebook. People pay online and download it, no publisher, printer, book shop or other cumbersome details to worry about. In fact, you don't even need to do the selling. "Affiliates" do it for you (on commission). And, there are ebooks telling you how you can write and sell ... ebooks!
27. Become an expert in a particular niche, perhaps affiliate programs for kids' products, or mailing list services ..and charge for your advice either at online webinars ... or even at local business events. The great news is that this is the internet and becoming an expert in a niche often requires nothing more than spending lots of time (online) reading and absorbing. No school to attend, no fees to pay.
28. Data sorting and other mundane jobs usually pay by the hour. This is the online version of envelope stuffing except that there really are opportunities to do these jobs online. It's a matter of looking in the right places and avoiding all those scammers looking to part you from your money by asking for upfront fees.
29. Good at graphic design? Design and offer logos and iconsdownloadable for free (and without watermark on payment of a fee). Good icons sell for several hundred dollars a set. And each set can be sold again and again.
30. MMORPG, or multi-player online role playing games are virtual worlds where otherwise sane humans lose all perspective and all sense of reality. Or they pretend they do. They spend money on invisibility cloaks, virtual machine guns, characters and even virtual money! It's hard to explain how it works but Be The Seller, there's a thriving economy there worth millions of dollars every year. Whether it's WoW or SecondLife.
31. Adult entertainment: Like dressing up kinky? Do it front of a webcam and adult webcam sites will pay you. (John Prescott need not apply.) Like chatting dirty? Are you a balding man who likes pretending to be an 18 year old blond, female model? The online equivalent of the premium rate phone lines is where you can earn money all day just having fun. I won't provide links - use a search engine and find them yourself.
32. Or get paid for promoting other adult sites. This is like other affiliate programs except that you get to give away stuff on your site (usually cut-down/lower quality versions of videos and pics) for free. These entice visitors to click through for the larger resolution version which requires a small subscription. So, free content for you and - if you can get enough visitors to click through and subscribe - a healthy commission cheque at the end of the month.
33. Mystery shopping: Shopping on behalf of firms to see how staff on the floor are treating customers. Buy products, have holidays, eat at restaurants and have the tabs all picked up by your employers... as long as you provide them some feedback on what the service is like in-store. There are worse ways to earn a living. Some sceptics say they have fun but don't earn a great deal. Others disagree.34. Spend your time entering competitions. Despite the name "competitions" rarely require skill, they are nothing but glorified lotteries/ sweepstakes. The most challenging question they are likely to ask you is, "What's 1+1?" Try searches like "competition entry" and "win a prize".
35. Or enter contests of skill. Good at SEO? There seem to be a lot of SEO competitions around. Good for nothing? I tried Google on a search for Good for nothing competitions and I get a lot of results. :-) Weed out 99% as junk and you should still have some good 'uns there. Good at taking or editing videos and have a good idea? Video sites like metacafe pay you if your video is popular enough (this guy made $100K). See, also, this NYT article for inspiration.
36. Good at poker? You can make a living from playing it all day long (or go broke).
Like surfing?
37. Become an estate agent. Not a real one; in places like the US that's too much effort. No, you can act for buyers without all that formality by being a buying agent. Clients have a clear idea of what they want but you have the time to keep hitting rightmove -or wherever your local listings are - to find them that special property. In the UK "buying agents" charge 1-3% of the property value.
38. Concierge services: If you know the exact type of bra you want but can't find it would you pay someone a few dollars to find it for you? You'd be surprised how many busy people would. Whether it's a list for the supermarket delivery or a bathroom tap unavailable locally - for some people the hour or two hunting is not worth the $10 you'd charge. Maintain preferences for your signed up customers - so they can tell you to order "milk" without having to specify semi-skimmed, 2 litre, cardboard packing etc. - and close relationships with local businesses and even I'd sign up. Example
39. Perform domain hunting services for businesses and
then send bill them (even if they've never heard of you). Some businesses will pay up. A 0.01% success out of a million could be worth $100,000 (at a modest $10 each). For example, you could setup a program to extract company names from a Yellowpages database, run them through a misspelling generator and automail each company a list of domains you've identified that it would be in their interest to register as these are very similar to their company name. That's a service, right? The UK authorities have been clamping down on a lot of these operators... but that's only the UK based ones!
then send bill them (even if they've never heard of you). Some businesses will pay up. A 0.01% success out of a million could be worth $100,000 (at a modest $10 each). For example, you could setup a program to extract company names from a Yellowpages database, run them through a misspelling generator and automail each company a list of domains you've identified that it would be in their interest to register as these are very similar to their company name. That's a service, right? The UK authorities have been clamping down on a lot of these operators... but that's only the UK based ones!40. Exploit people's soppiness. Once upon a time there was a site with lots of lovely pictures of a beautiful little bunny who was very, very happy. And his owner loved him very much. But he needed money so he asked for money on the site and promised that if he did not reach his target he'd eat the bunny. He provided graphic recipes with bunny dish mock-up pictures. Donations followed, fast and swift.
41. Relationship Marketing: Who said relationship marketing was about companies building relationships with 
their customers? It's about marketing to relatives. About pimping products to your friends. Whatever the "network marketing" opportunities there ever were offline - from Amway to selling water filters - there's always a lot of stuff you can "personally recommend" to your friends online. People who don't open junk mail will open mail from you, because they trust you! And you can get paid for endorsing all manner of rubbish. (Till you lose all your friends, of course)
their customers? It's about marketing to relatives. About pimping products to your friends. Whatever the "network marketing" opportunities there ever were offline - from Amway to selling water filters - there's always a lot of stuff you can "personally recommend" to your friends online. People who don't open junk mail will open mail from you, because they trust you! And you can get paid for endorsing all manner of rubbish. (Till you lose all your friends, of course)42. Become a volunteer editor in places like DMOZ and then take bribes to list sites. Is it illegal? In many parts of the world it probably is not, and so it does happen a fair bit. But, the less said about this bribery the better..
43. Petitions: People are constantly petitioning their bosses, their politicians, the rest of the world. Some of those petitioners pay for people to join their cause. Signing up again and again and again has proven lucrative for some, particularly those who know how to proxify their IPs.
44. Email SPAM. Nobody likes it, it's illegal in some countries, ISPs get very upset, recipients get even more upset but no list of how people make money online can be complete without a mention of this. What do you sell when you spam? Have a look at what type of spam YOU are getting, it will likely give you an idea of what pays. And the stock tips that seem to "accidentally" land in your inbox. But that's about all the help I'm giving you on the subject.
Or up your SPAM game to something more sophisticated. Plenty of ideashere - it's a simply awesome read.
Arbitrage/brokerage
49. Example of a pure arbitrage opportunity: For a while buying traffic via Google Adwords and sending that traffic to pages of little content and Google Adsense ads generated reasonable profits when done astutely. Sure, Adwords and Adsense are two sites of the same coin. But I did say you needed to be astute to recognise where the opportunities were and you need to test, test, test. There are still lots of contextual arbitrage opportunities about. Especially when you work across programs (e.g., buy traffic from MSN, sell to Yahoo).
. There are a lot of arbitrage opportunities in the finance world as discussed below but if economics and finance talk bores you to death, there's sports arbitrage. Different online bookmakers may offer different odds on a sporting event. By taking the better odds at each bookie you could come out ahead irrespective of the actual outcome of the event. If you're really clever you could make a program to do this for you. Why don't the bookies adjust their odds based on what their competitors are offering? Because they have to balance their own books. Their prices are decided based on how their own punters are betting.
45. Hosting: You don't need to buy a lot of server hardware to provide a web hosting service. Many big hosting 
companies allow "reseller" accounts where you sell hosting plans to customers and the hosting company will host them all for you under your Reseller account umbrella. You get to charge customers as much as you want. Some Resellers provide value added services and charge more for these. At places like WHT you'll find that resellers sometimes sell their customers as a "bundle" i.e., you can pay some money to buy a reseller "business".
companies allow "reseller" accounts where you sell hosting plans to customers and the hosting company will host them all for you under your Reseller account umbrella. You get to charge customers as much as you want. Some Resellers provide value added services and charge more for these. At places like WHT you'll find that resellers sometimes sell their customers as a "bundle" i.e., you can pay some money to buy a reseller "business".46. Related to the above is free hosting where you provide small website owners free hosting and in exchange you serve ads to all their pages to make the revenue to pay the hosting company and yourself. Early pioneers of this model are well known names like Geocities and Angelfire.
47. Being a broker can be done in a thousand different ways. There are some entrepreneurs making healthy profits just by bidding for projects on places like elance and guru (and others) and farming them out to a bank of writers/programmers they use on a regular basis.
Finance
48. Trading from home is really catching on in many parts of the world. You don't need to be an expert on stocks & shares. You can trade on commodities, currencies, lots more. Trading futures allows you to leverage even small $100 amounts of capital into huge fortunes (or bankruptcy).
49. Gambling is a far cry from trading futures but a route to riches for many. No, not the traditional horse racing type of gambling where the only long term winner is the bookmaker. I'm talking gambling against other gamblers, I'm talking the numerous ways of gambling online (search). And there are a million books and ebooks that claim to "teach you how to win".
50. HYIP, or High Yield Investment Programs are just what 
they say on the tin. They are also highly risky. You invests your money and you takes a chance, but some pay as much as 100% per day. How do they do it? A very few are putting your money into investments with even better rates of return. Others are simply going to keep paying out the first few customers with investments collected from later ones.... and then they go bust. Pyramid style. Maybe the ones who make the money are the ones who get in early... or actually start HYIP programs.
they say on the tin. They are also highly risky. You invests your money and you takes a chance, but some pay as much as 100% per day. How do they do it? A very few are putting your money into investments with even better rates of return. Others are simply going to keep paying out the first few customers with investments collected from later ones.... and then they go bust. Pyramid style. Maybe the ones who make the money are the ones who get in early... or actually start HYIP programs.eBay/Amazon etc.
51. What's it with eBay? You just can't get away from them. Their bulk "dictionary purchase" of ad terms from the Google Adwords/Adsense system means you find ads for eBay no matter what you're looking for, even if it's for toenail clippings or dead pets. Whatever the reason for their success you can join the bandwagon and sell your rubbish on eBay and convert a garage of old junk to hard cash.
52. And when you've acquired a fair amount of experience with selling your own rubbish, start selling others' rubbish. How to get your hands on enough trash? Place an ad in your local paper to do house clearances, or just buy stock from wholesalers in - yes, you guessed it - eBay itself. You can get anything from unused toasters to umbilical cord containers. A lot of ebay sellers are actually shopkeepers; they buy stock new from wholesalers and sell them in eBay instead of a physical bricks and mortar shop... and make a healthy living doing so.
53. You've now got a lot of experience buying and selling in eBay. It's time to write a book or ebook on how to use ebay to generate millions. It doesn't matter that you haven't made millions yourself. People still buy these books even if it's just to learn their way about ebay which can be quite daunting for some. And you can sell it on ... you guessed!
54. Don't fancy writing? Then set yourself up as an eBay assistant. eBay itself will send you people who need help with their complicated system. And you can charge them a commission.
55. Alternatively, setup a shop to accept goods from those who can't list them themselves. Yes, a physical shop. There are lots of them springing up all in big cities. The operation is simple. You take something in from somebody, sell it on ebay and retain a percentage for all your efforts.
56. Think building an ebay business is too much like building a normal business? If you've got the capital you can take the easy route. A lot of ebay "shop" (businesses) come up for sale in site-for-sale forums and withbusiness brokers. The ebay username and feedback generally accompanies the business so you continue to benefit from accumulated goodwill (though the "transfer" is something that eBay may not approve of).
57. Opportunities to make money in eBay are limited only by your imagination. There's money in everything from making connections (putting people in touch with other people) to coming up with or commissioning software to make the average ebayer's life simpler or more productive (thousands of such programs already exist). There's even a business model involving just searching for and finding items that have been misspelt in the listings.
58. It's not just eBay. Any merchant big enough or third party affiliate manager program - from Commission Junction to Clickbank - has opportunities. For example, you can create an Amazon affiliate site.
Others
59. Set up a proxy (example). People seem to want to surf at work AND access sites their IT system blocks them from viewing. A proxy allows them to get around that restriction. Some proxy services get by just on the advertising (as it's easy to get enormous page views in the proxy business). A very good one will even have people paying a few dollars each. There are several ways to monetise a proxy.
60. Enjoy networking? Social networking Web 2.0 style? Make money with it. If you build up sufficient reputation in places like Digg people will start approaching you to start some buzz on their company or their new product. At one point Netscape offered top "Diggers" a sweetener os $1,000 to move over to their competing service.
61. Selling databases of parts/directory listings/modified or value addedDMOZ data/ email lists. The DMOZ directory is a massive directory put together by volunteer editors. And they give away their content for free. Kind of. You can download their database and combine it with other information - like phone number and postcode from Yellow pages- to add value / enhance those listings. You could then sell the enhanced product.
62. Find jobs for your friends. An easy way into the personal recruitment business. Know a friend who's just
right for a particular job? Make the connection between friend and employer and you could get up to $5,000 for a few hours work.
right for a particular job? Make the connection between friend and employer and you could get up to $5,000 for a few hours work.63. Get paid for your unused computer cycles. Is your computer sometimes on while you aren't actually sitting at it? Then it's using electricity but not performing "work". Joining a distributed computing group likeSETI lets you use that computing power to help reach some worthy/unworthy goal. However, you can also use those cycles to earn money by selling them to companies who have large computing tasks then can't do completely in-house.
64. Take the cap around: Do something nice. Provide some information that helps someone, perhaps someone grieving for a lost partner. Or info on how to volunteer to help orphans in Africa, or find an internship. Make it useful. Or just make it very funny. Then stick a donation button on there for people to support your work. You'll be surprised at how well a donation button works on the right type of site. No, it won't work on this page - or any page promising to make you a millionaire.
99. Start an article directory. Giving away free articles (with embedded links) is one way for webmasters to build incoming links to their sites. For other webmasters these free articles are a great way to fill out their otherwise bare sites. Be the middleman. Popular article directories make a lot of money from the contextual ads they post on all the free articles they are displaying on their site.
65. Start a content site: The most common way webmasters earn money is probably contextual programs like YPN and Adsonar. But mainly Adsense. It's simple, quick, doesn't involve any complicated new skills. You simply put up a website with useful/informative content and some Google provided code, get a few links to the page and wait. Traffic will start flowing to it. The volume would depend on the topic and quality of content. Visitors would see ads served by Google and related to the content of the page. Each time they click on an ad you get anywhere from a few cents to several dollars. I personally know at least 20 webmasters who earn in excess of $10,000 per month this way. There are thousands of others.
5. Other local opportunities: Apart from hobbies and skills there may be openings in your local area for a particular type of service that is not currently being met. And, the laws of supply and demand dictate that if there's no competition people are likely to be willing to pay you a high price for your services. Some ideas: