Best Ways to Make Extra Money

Even though the economy has taken a bit of a nosedive in the last few years, there are still a lot of quick and easy ways to make extra money. You don’t need to be very intelligent or have any special skills to take advantage of most of these opportunities: you just have to want to make extra money and be willing to give up a little bit of your time.

Something a bit Different!

One of the most fun (and strange) ways to make extra money I’ve ever encountered is to be an online juror. This may seem strange, but law students and aspiring law students like to practice a little outside of the classroom or library, and there are one or two sites online where they stage mock trials. Just by agreeing to join the jury pool and pay attention to the case, you can get paid anywhere from a few dollars to $50 plus. Of course, you will need to actually pay attention to the case, just like if you were really selected for jury duty. Luckily, mock trials are usually shorter than the real thing, so you won’t be sequestered at your computer for six days.

Blog About Your Interests!

Another of the best ways to make extra money online is to blog. It seems like everyone has a blog today, but if you’re an expert in a particular area, or just have a real passion for something, you can become one of the top five sites in that area and make a little bit of extra money. The key to successful blogging is having good content and using good keywords: that way you’ll show up high on search rankings and give people a good reason to keep coming back. Free blog sites like Blogger and Word press offer you the opportunity to “monetize” your blog with clickable ads without doing any work on your own.

The drawback to trying to make money blogging is that, even if you do fairly well and has a few dozen hits each day (which is harder than it looks), you might only make pennies a day. Generally, revenue is tied to the number of clicks on an ad, which means that 52 visitors might only give you 8 cents because only 8 of those visitors clicked on an ad. This can be frustrating at first, but if you try hard, you can make a little extra money with your blog.

Freelance your Skills!

While we’re on the subject of writing, if you have the basic ability to write, you can make a little extra money online without too much trouble. There is a lot of content that needs to be written online, and web designers aren’t always able to create their own content. This means that you can make some money as a freelancer creating web content for websites and blogs. A lot of the writing for these sites is basic, driven by repetition of keywords and key phrases rather than by brilliant writing. As long as you can write grammatically and use spell check, you can make a few dollars through freelancing.

All of the different ways to make extra money online outlined above have one thing in common: you have to make the effort. It can be as simple as clicking on a link or as complicated as applying for a job, but in either case you have to take the first step.