Who doesn’t like or need more money?
These days everyone could do with a little more it seems thanks to the constantly increasing living costs of modern life. Trying to make some extra money can be harder than you think once you look into it. It doesn’t look as easy as you first hoped. There is often equipment to buy, vehicle and travel expenses and storage costs to take into consideration.
But not all hope is lost. There are still plenty of good viable ways to make money and with many of those opportunities being online many costs such as travel expenses are removed completely.
Many online jobs can be started today without any start up costs whatsoever. Some may require specific software tools but on the whole most people have access to these tools like an arts package or a word processing software already.
The following 5 free to start money making methods which are outlined below are written from the perspective of a person owning a laptop or tablet which should come with a good collection of basic programs already installed.
1. Earn Money Writing For Paying Clients
Writing is easy to get started with. If you can write and spell correctly or at least use Google well to learn and check then you can start earning as a writer today. The internet is awash with website owners looking for written content. This content can be in the way of articles, email newsletters, ebooks & reports and audio transcripts.
To start as a writer you can join several websites online and open free accounts. Upwork.com is one of the biggest freelance marketplaces around and they generally favour top notch writers. You can earn good money from Upwork but you can find yourself bidding against other workers for jobs.
Fiverr.com on the other hand is a great website where you create gigs like I Will Write 1000 Words In Any Niche For £15 as an example. Potential clients will see your gig and if it is what they are looking for they will either buy the gig or contact you to ask questions.
Both Upwork and Fiverr use feedback scores so it is very beneficial if you get a good feedback score as that will determine how much work you do in the future and ultimately how much you earn. And to do that you make sure that you deliver what you promise. Write what you said you would write, deliver when you said you would and communicate effectively so that your clients know if there are any issues.
There is nothing to say that you couldn’t be writing for money the same day you open up your account and there are no start up costs with this one. If you don’t have a word processing software then you can easily use the excellent free online system called Google Docs which you will have access to if you open up a free Google/Gmail account.
2. Make Money Promoting Sunfrog T-Shirts (Including Designing Your Own)
Sunfrog are an American company which specialise in printing T-shirts and hoodies. They have since started printing other products like mugs and posters. They have a great affiliate network which allows anyone to join and promote their products.
You can create a designer account and design your own T-shirts which Sunfrog will print and post for you but you don’t need to do that to make this work.
As a designer you earn 10% of the sale price whereas an affiliate can earn upto 40% of the sale price. An affiliate simply shares T-shirts designed by other people.
For selling one T-shirt at $18.95 an affiliate will earn between $7 and $9. (£5-£7)
With free social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and Instagram you can soon be sharing pictures of T-shirts along with your own unique affiliate link. When anyone purchases a product from the Sunfrog store after going to it through your link you earn money. They don’t even have to buy the actual product which you were promoting.
For this to work well you would need a big pool of people to promote to. So you would need to start building up a big following on your social media platforms. With Facebook groups and pages you can develop collections of people who are into specific niches like zombies for example. When you have a nice big following of people who are into zombies you can promote T-shirts along with your Sunfrog affiliate links.
However with Twitter, Instagram and to a lesser degree Facebook you can use hashtags to target people who are also interested in the subjects which you want to promote T-shirts too.
You can build a large number of followers and users on Twitter and Instagram who are interested in specific niches by using hashtags and checking out the followers and following lists of people you are following.
For example if you found a lot of great yoga T-shirts you would start to follow people who liked Yoga in the hope that they follow you back and so that you start to build an audience of yoga lovers who might buy the yoga T-shirts and mugs you promote.
This will cost you nothing to start but may require time to build up followers and some discipline to keep at it to build up profits but remember, when using hashtags you can start promoting T-shirts to people as soon as you setup your Sunfrog account.
3. Get Paid For Sharing Content On TopBuzz
TopBuzz.com is a new social media platform created by a Chinese company who are trying to muscle in on Facebook’s stranglehold. But unlike Facebook TopBuzz pay you when your content starts to go viral.
Why TopBuzz pay people to share viral content is yet unclear but we think it is so that they can grow a big user base similar to Facebook and attract paid advertising by big companies with big advertising budgets. Afterall, a social media platform sells people. It’s users are its commodity and they are selling leads and traffic.
Forgetting all of that for now though, what is important is that you can open up a free account and start to share content such as pictures, stories and videos. The more you share the greater chance you have of your content going viral and that means you make more money.
When you share content it is shown on the websites main page and mobile app. If enough people see it and like it then it may get shared and go viral.
Like Facebook you can follow people and they can follow you. Within no time you could be sharing funny and interesting content in front of a large following helping to send your content viral.
There is no other social media platform that I can think of which pays the user for uploading and sharing content. It is free to join and you can be sharing today meaning that you could be earning money today too.
4. Earn Money Offering Funny & Unique Fiverr gigs
This is a great one. We mentioned Fiverr.com as a great place to go to find writing work but there are so many other services available on Fiverr. From writing gigs to designing ebook covers Fiverr is the home of all kinds of creative online work.
This includes some very bizarre and fun gigs which anyone could do and they could start today as soon as they have opened up an account.
People will spend money on all kinds of strange stuff which is why several people on Fiverr.com are making thousands of pounds singing happy birthday in their undercrackers on a video or dancing to music with fruit hanging around their necks.
Sounds very surreal but people are doing it. Just look at the screenshot above!
Singing a personalised rendition of happy birthday dressed as a bowl of fruit on video may not get you a lot of repeat work like article writing but there might be thousands of people who would happily buy your fun and wacky singing gig for a friend. They may do it for a couple of people, so it might be possible that you get some repeat business from this especially if the first purchase had the desired effect.
It is free and easy to set up an account on Fiverr. All you need to figure out is what service you can offer people. Maybe you can write a unique one off song or poem for people and perform it on video for a small fee.
Maybe you could dress up as an alien or in a superhero costume (check copyright for that first) and sing a song or do a specific dance for people for $5 -$10 per video. If people love what you do then it will show in Fiverr’s feedback system and that will help drive more sales.
There are so many different wacky things that you can offer on Fiverr which I believe can be profitable.
The hardest part of all this is figuring out what you want to do.
5. Earn Money Offering Virtual Assistant Services
There are a lot of online entrepreneurs who have more than enough tasks to deal with without having to do the mundane administration work and that is why there is a thriving virtual assistant industry.
Doing admin jobs like going through email accounts answering and deleting emails is growing with many companies and entrepreneurs outsourcing these tasks to virtual assistants.
A lot of the admin work is the online equivalent of paper shuffling. We are talking tasks like data entry and data recording which are the bane of website owners, online business owners and creative types.
Noone wants to spend their precious time doing that kind of admin work when there is money to be made elsewhere in their business so they opt to pay people to do it for them and that is where you come in.
Using one of the many free online platforms like Upwork.com, Freelancer.com and Fiverr.com you can offer your services to online businesses and companies and start earning today.
Yaro Starak started an online business offering email management services because he used to outsource the work to a virtual assistant. He was too busy to manage his own business email accounts so he paid for someone to filter through the emails answering those that could be answered, delete those which were spam and forward on any that were really important. He realised that if he needed that kind of support then so did others.
There is a big demand out there for people to make those time consuming dull jobs disappear and that is a job which can be done online from home and started today for free.
So there we have it. 5 great ways to make money online today with little or no investment. Did any of them appeal to you and when are you going to get started?
