Kavita Kukday (The Times of India) looks at some innovative ways to make money from the internet
Money money money must be funny in a rich man’s world’, sang the famous Swedish pop group Abba in 1976, when they rocked the world with a simple advice—the easiest way to get rich is probably marrying someone rich. But today, thanks to the internet, there are easier ways to make money than lying in wait for a rich spouse. Some of these methods are intelligent, some are sneaky and complex and some even downright silly. And the best part is you don’t even have to work hard—just a couple of hours a day from the comfort of your couch and you are good to go. Here are some assorted simple but smart ways to make the proverbial quick buck.
Help a friend get a job
Job referral is a well known concept in the offline world, but there are some sites that are extending this concept to the online world. Traditionally a referral meant, connecting an employer with a prospective candidate. If the candidate makes it through, you get a percentage of his first month’s pay for referring him. The concept remains exactly same here too, the only difference with sites such as yello jobs (www.ndtv.yellojobs.com) is that you refer people to prospective employers online.
You can make money ranging from a few thousands rupees to a couple of lakhs if your referral makes it through. Although the concept is fairly recent in India, you can already find people making steady money with these sites.
Rachana Shastri, for instance, makes a neat Rs 10,000 on an average every month by helping her friends find a job.
In her second year of engineering, Shastri has made tons of friends working in various technology companies. “I work extensively with the placement and training cell in our college, where we invite professionals from various companies to come and train our students. That’s how I got to network with professionals in different places,” says Shastri. She regularly refers a perfect match for companies hiring on these websites and makes a cut on it.
“The best part is not only do I make a good amount as pocket money, but I have also become the most wanted girl in college since I am the one they have to come to when they need a job,” says Shastri. So if you think you are great at networking and are well connected, get cracking.
Get paid to have an opinion
Everyone has an opinion, be it on movies or a particular product or maybe even some service you used recently. How would you like to make a quick buck for having an opinion? No, we are not kidding. There are actually websites that offer to pay you just to express your opinion on anything under the sun.
Confused? Well don’t be. It’s like this: good reviews and testimonials for your product increase sales; bad ones for your competitors also boost your sales. And what better for a company than to have these reviews come from actual users? This means that these companies will be ready to part with money to buy these reviews. This is exactly what websites such as ReviewMe (www.reviewme.com) and Pay Per Post (www.payperpost.com) trade on. These connect users to companies and play the middleman.
It’s a win-win situation for companies as well as for you—you get paid to have an opinion while the company attracts more buyers for their products!
Make money by being at your wackiest best
Know something about a subject and love to talk about it? Or is it that you don’t know anything but would still love to file away your ignorance? Well, either way, you will love blogging. A blog is basically an online diary where you write about some topic and write in a manner that attracts people. The idea is that advertisers want buyers to know about their product. So when you blog about say your recent experience with your new LCD TV, people dropping by at your site to read this snippet might be interested in buying a new LCD for themselves. Now this is a great opportunity for LCD manufacturers to put up ads on your site so that they can instantly buy the product. So they pay you money every single time your readers click on the ads they have placed on your website. And you can make a decent packet on this one
Take for instance Jimmy Wadhera from Chandigarh, who despite of being grounded for health reasons, earns about $400 a month, just by displaying advertisements from Google AdSense on his blogs. Wadhera runs a website called india4deals and advertises AdSense ads on all his pages to support his family.
Some of the best ways to connect with advertisers is by going through Google’s Ad-Sense program (www.google.com/adsense) or affiliate programs from the likes of Amazon (www.amazon.com).
If you are new to blogging, you can try sites such as Blogger (www.blogger.com) that give you free blogging software. Remember, it doesn’t matter if you are writing about serious topics such as the ups and downs in the stock market or everyday tasks such as your plans to lose weight or even wacky blogs about astral projection. Your blog doesn’t have to be true, it just has to be interesting and gather readers—the money will follow.
Surf to earn
Rudra Pratap, a self-confessed surf-aholic, spends almost 12 hours every day surfing various websites in search of the trivialities of the world. And guess what? He gets paid a decent amount for that. Yes, he makes a decent buck just to surf online, thanks to a new concept, Algoco (www.algoco.com).
This is another example where advertisers pay you money to seek out buyers. Only in this case, the buyer in question is you. Established by a group of Stanford graduates, Agloco comes with a refreshing mindset, which says that if they want you to read about their product they better pay you for it! “Advertisers, search providers and online retailers are paying billions to reach you while you surf,” says the website. “How much of that money are you getting? You deserve a piece of the action.”
Agloco is based on a browser plug-in that tracks users’ online activity and then uses this information to allow advertisers to target people with specific interests. Say you are interested in photography. Agloco will give this information to camera companies and such so that they can come to you with their wares. Agloco promises to return 90% of ad revenue, sales commissions and other income to its users. In a further twist, there is even more money for those who recruit other users, as you get a cut of the revenue, so there!
Cut the spam while you make money
Yet another new twist that pays you good money to connect with advertisers while cutting down on your spam is Boxbe, founded by Thede Loder. The idea for Boxbe grew out of his graduate research into the economics of communications, and of spam in particular. It is common knowledge that everyone hates spam. “One would rather read about stuff they are really interested in, so instead of suffering random toothpaste or Viagra ads that bulldoze your inbox, Boxbe gives you an option to pick the one’s you want to read.”
Boxbe suggests that users set a price of $0.15-0.25 per message to allow companies to contact them. Users can fill out a personal profile and the idea is that Boxbe will have a chunk of user profiles to offer a critical mass to advertisers. Who in turn will pay to send messages to the users most likely to be interested in their products or services. This way advertisers can target their messages more effectively and you will receive fewer irrelevant emails—and even get paid. An average user could make over $100 a year, reckons the website.
Article courtesy: Times of India (20th August Bangalore Edition)
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