10 Free Ways to Make Money Online

Well, it had to be first! Writing articles about anything you're interested is completely free at Hubpages - and you can get paid for it through what is called a "revenue sharing" system with Adsense. Put simply, that means that the more popular your writing is, the more you can earn because Hubpages share the advertising revenue with you. There's also an opportunity to earn further money with moe advertising revenue options.

With Hubpages you simply write about things you know, things you hate, things you like. There's a whole section of questions that I find invaluable for writing hubs as I simply go to the questions section, find something I know the answer to, then press a button to create a hub about it - usually about 30 minutes later I've created the whole thing, including research and finding some nice photos to go with it! This article is typical of a Hubpages article: http://hub.me/a3MVx

I write about all sorts of things that interest me. What makes the most money varies depending on the subject, how popular the subject is and how well you've written it - but once you've written anything you can pop back in and make changes, so you can learn to improve your writing to make it worth more to you.

When I first started with Hubpages I didn't really get it ... and it took me about 3 years to suddenly realise I'd been missing out on some great cash. Just one of my very first hubs I wrote (written in a hurry) has already made me over £50/$80 - and it's still there earning me a bit most days.

Hubpages is a long-term game. You won 't make instant money from it, but what you do is build up a stock of great articles that each have the potential to earn you some money every day... which means it builds into a growing residual income. Ideal for people who are wanting to perhaps build up an income they can rely on in the future. If you're in short-term, casual, seasonal or temping work, then you can smooth out those boom and bust times by writing steadily on Hubpages, improving your writing over the months, then reaping the growing rewards as a residual income.

Other free genuine websites for writers to earn money online are listed below. The success you have will depend on how well you write, how many articles you write and how much traffic gets to your article.

Other Good Writing Sites Like Hubpages

There are many free genuine websites for writers to earn money online like Hubpages, some better than others. As a writer you will find your own feet and discover the best sites to write for. Here's my favourite list, these are the ones that are most highly regarded among people who write short articles online either paid in fees, or on a revenue sharing basis:

• Bubblews was an easy to get started site, but it closed down. I personally received about $2,000 over just a few months.
• Wizzley - very similar to Hubpages' layout and system. Uses a variety of income streams to generate long-term residual income.
• Constant Content: write articles, set the price, wait for them to be sold. There is an option to submit articles against specific requests too.
• Associated Content: best for US residents as you can get paid an up front free plus a smaller residual amount based on page views. Those outside of the US cannot be paid the up front fee, so can only earn the $1.50-2 for each 1000 views of their article.

Other sites you might investigate:

• ArticleIncome.com: purely revenue share, starting at 50% and rising to 75% when you've become established and your rating is high.
• DemandStudios.com: this is for serious writers, in the US only. To join you have to upload a resume and examples of your work.

Qualified

If you are qualified, you can teach an academic subject online. Most of these organisations are well known, large companies. Nearly every University and College these days offers courses online, or partly online - as do private training companies. All of these classes need teaching, so there is a growing demand for online teachers and online tutors.

Not Qualified

If you are not qualified, but just have some specialist knowledge or a skill, you can even create your own online classes to teach and be paid based on the number of students that enrol on your class. The way this works is you'd devise an online training module or class that you choose to create, you pick how much it will cost people to do the class, then the site will advertise your course on their website, they handle all the enrolment and you get paid when you deliver the class.

Check out these resources to learn more:

• Work Online Teaching Classes

YouSayToo makes it easy to blog - easier in my opinion than Wordpress or Blogger - and there's no set up to do, no settings or fiddly bits.

The money you earn from YST is a revenue share, based on the advertising on their site.

But what if you have an existing Wordpress or Blogger blog and don't want another one? YST make it easy for you because as part of the sign up process they ask you if you have an existing blog and you simply choose 'Yes', tell them where it is, copy/paste a small link code they give you onto that blog (to prove it's yours) and they're automatically linked and you only have to update one of them then - yet you can make money through this site. Ideal for those of you who have an existing Wordpress.com blog where you can't monetize it.

With this site, graphics designers get to subm it graphics to contests. The prize money is quite high and if you win the contest then you're paid for your design.

How it works is companies and individuals who need graphics doing will create a prize contest, they will write their brief and the one they pick to use gets paid the prize money. For buyers of creatives this means they get a wide choice of graphics to choose from that match their needs, rather than spending time working with one designer who might not come up with something they like.

• You own the copyright to your designs
• Only use images you are legally allowed to use, this means you can't steal images from the internet, but must obtain them legally - most designers will use stock photography services, with most of these you can obtain a low res image free to work with, so you would simply download the low-res images to work with, then if you win the contest you re-work the design by buying the stock images you need with the legal licenses and pass it back to your new client.

There are two websites where you can submit your designs to win cash prizes: Check out the full guidelines here:

1. http://99designs.com - Guidelines
2. http://www.crowdspring.com - How it Works

If you have any skills in using a word processor, Excel spreadsheets, accounting software, graphics packages, or just being a good organiser, you could become a virtual assistant and make money offering your services either locally, to small businesses, or by picking up your jobs via freelance websites.

There are a number of well-known and reputable companies that enable you to open up an online store for free, design products and make them available for sale through their website.

You earn money every time somebody buys a T shirt, a mug, a photograph ... and many other products - even though you never see the items. You just receive money when one is sold.

The way to turn this into a good income is to promote your online store and get people to visit it. There are lots of free ways you can do this too, each of the sites will be more than pleased to share the lists of where to advertise for free with you - and most have a very active community/forum of people helping each other.

Here is one well established company where you can get a free online store and make money online:

Open a free T Shirt Shop with Spreadshirt. You can open your own online T shirt shop for free. Design and sell T shirts easily without it costing you anything. It's all online so you don't need space or supplies, just a bit of spare time. Hit the right markets, get the right slogans and T shirt sales can be surprisingly lucrative.

Online gaming isn't something I've ever got into, but hundreds of thousands of people across the world are - and there are many ways you can make money online by playing games ... but ... you really have to be good at them.

In a lot of online games you can make/sell products, that the people can pay for with their virtual money.  You can then cash in the virtual money for real money.

If you're into gaming and want to do it full-time, then you probably are already switched into the fact that you could earn money with it - so check out the games you're using already to see if there are ways you can make money from them, or investigate which ones you can.

There are ways to make money online doing all sorts of peculiar and odd-sounding things, ideas that couldn't exist before the Internet gave access to so much media/multi-media opportunity. here are a few other random oddities and miscellaneous ways to make money online:

http://www.expotv.com - make money doing video reviews

http://www.zoomandgo.com/contributionguidelines - get paid to upload videos you have made of your local area, places you have visited, interesting things

Well, if you've got this far maybe you need a few more ideas, so why not check out these other resources:

• How To Make Money Working From Home

I hope the ideas above have helped you to realise that increasingly today there are genuine ways to make money online for free.  You don't have to pay to join things, you don't have to pay to do things.  People are literally looking for people just like you to contribute your input and to join in - and pay you for it.

This is not an exhaustive list at all.  Check out some other resources on the list to the right to find more ideas.

Thank you for reading!

Photos by Tracy_O