101 Easy & Free Ways To Earn

Finding business ideas:
1. Spend all day browsing Site For Sale forums (like the list we have here) for the myriad ways people earn money online. People looking to sell their sites actually tell you how they make money! Pick one that suits you. Research it a bit, and away and start your own business. Or use a search engine to find ways to make money online. It seems to be so easy that it's almost impossible to find someone who doesn't know how to do it. (But why stop at one search engine (SE)? Most people get to less than 1% of the top qualify info they're seeking because they use just one SE like Google, don't have the vaguest of ideas of the advanced search features available, and don't know the benefits to be had using specialised SEs, local SEs etc. )

2. Bundle the two above to tell other people how to make money online. They always want to know. It doesn't matter if you don't know yourself, you can still charge them for it. I obviously don't have a clue as I'm giving it all away. You can now ignore everything else I say. But don't go spending money on internet cons promising to make you a millionaire and here's how to spot them.
3. Be more inventive with your search. Look for small business franchise newsletters. Or for home jobs in your particular niche or hobby. (And check point #2 above for those specialised SEs). You can also go through the appropriate DMOZ categories (examples: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12)
But using "search" is just the start of the game. There are simply so, so many ways. We hope you hang around to find out.
4. Like the guy you can pay to stick a message in a bottle for you and throw it into the sea. He's made tens of thousands of dollars already. And there are several others like him in all parts of the world. Do you live near a sea or river? Or join the cleanup of those bottles and get your council to contribute.

Domains
5. The dot com gold rush made many millionaires but there's still plenty of money in domain real estate and still some good catches available. A good dot com may be difficult to find now. But there are a lot of gTLDs and ccTLDs from the .info to .eu to .tv to .co.in and they all present opportunities being discussed in several good forums. Put your thinking hat on, buy a famous word domain for a few dollars and put it up on the domain selling sites.
6. Lost your thinking hat? Hang out at SEDO. DNForurms, Afternics and other places where domains are bought and sold. Provided you learn enough about the market to recognise bargains you could make a living from just buying existing domains and reselling them.
7. If you're smart you'll run dictionary checks against available domain names and auto-check them against search volumes (using OST, Wordtracker etc.) for that term and Pay Per Click (PPC) rates in the major ad networks (example) to work out which ones are likely to be more profitable. If you can pick up the domain for a profitable term that's searched for often you can use a domain parking program. Or post a little bit of relevant content and get a link or two ... and the search engines will start sending you traffic. If the phrase people are typing in coincides exactly with your domain name it gives you a great head start with SEs.

8. If you're smart AND a linguist you'd be doing that in multiple languages. And not paying for any domain till you've tried it free for five days to see if it does indeed get any type-in traffic (and how well that traffic converts). After you've tried it for five days and dropped it there's nothing to stop you immediately picking it up again for another five day trial. Strange, but true. It's not kiting, it's legal.
9. Misspellings. Massive opportunities still exist in the misspelling/typo market. People trying to get elsewhere land on your site instead ... and you sell them stuff (or use the domain parking idea). Some even tempt fate by making PPC opportunties out of typosquatting on trademarks. Finding typos has never been easier. There are many tools that will find misspellings for you. How easy can it get?
10. Domain parking and type-in traffic: People sometimes guess at URLs. If they want a plumber they may try plumber.com though they've never used that site themselves. Find terms that people may be typing in (I will provide a detailed guide to this when I get a chance), buy the domain and populate it with ads. There are several ad programs to monetise your parked domains. Or combine this with the previous idea to buy plummer.com or similar typo domains to make money online.
11. Drop catches. People sometimes forget to renew their domains and these expire. Picking them up will give you some remnant traffic from sites that link to this domain/people who've bookmarked it etc. In some cases the traffic can be pretty high. Provided you're fast enough to replace the copyrighted content that was there with something else you can make quite a profitable business from doing nothing else but this.
12. A variation on the above. Sell the domain back to the previous owners. Note that you may want to tread carefully and get familiar with the rules for that TLD before you start sending off ransom notes. For example, with ICANN (domains that end in .com, for example) the moment you send the previous owners an email saying you've got their domain and you'll give it back for $10K... you've lost. It can't look like a ransom demand. Be reasonable and read the small print of the UDRP. No UDRP required if you're sitting hostage on myspace.com/theircompanyname or the equivalent at blogger, mybloglog, or other big destinations. LOL, watch them kick themselves and sack their web advisors who told them about taking the "dot info" but omitted to mention the importance of protecting the brand by owning the associated myspace directory (and others)! And it costs you nothing!

13. Run a domain management service. Hundreds of thousands of webmasters (or more) have a large portfolio of domains. A lot of them would like the boring bit taken out of their domain management. You can run their DNSes or just a service reminding them when each domain comes up for renewal. Or an automated monitoring service to tell them when one of their domains/sites is inaccessible.
14. Start a directory to list domains for sale. That's what people like SEDO do. You can get money just for allowing domains to be listed in your directory.
15. If you're running a service putting buyers and sellers of domains/sites in touch with one another you could get money for add on services (like providing escrow facilities). For ideas have a look at what existing domain intermediaries offer.
16. Run a domain research service. Wonder what happens when a manufacturer is looking to name a new model car? Or starting a new range of clothing? They need trademark and patent research but now they also need some domain research. Which of the literally thousands of combinations and misspellings (+ sucks.com) are taken and which do they need to buy? With a few of the free domain tools discussed on this page and one or two more - like free DNS tools - and a little time you could provide them a service they'd pay a lot of money for.
17. Start your own country: Whoa! yes, you're reading it right. If you've heard of Sealand (what is Sealand) you'll know that starting your own country is not that far fetched. Once you have your own WhackyCountry you can apply for a .wc (yuk) TLD. Sell millions of domains. Keep some for yourself. Ever wanted a Google.___?
18. Perform domain services for businesses and then send them a proforma (even if they've never heard of you). Explain that it's free this time but you'll gladly keep acting for them for a small fee. For example, there are thousands of big businesses whose half-wit webmasters/ developers didn't put in a redirect from the non-www to the www versions of their sites (or vice-versa). One entrepreneur made a few thousands just from pointing out to businesses how they were losing hundreds of customers every year who were landing on http://xxx-companyname.com and finding nothing there.
I'll talk about domain opportunities some more on this page when I get a chance.

Buying and selling internet businesses
19. Many sites runs on "auto-pilot". A common price these sell for in site-for-sale forums is 12-24 months' worth of net earnings (silly price, but it's true). Provided you don't mess the site up you can recover your capital in as little as 12 months and then ... sell the site to recover your capital again. Double your capital every year. 100% return. Sack your stockbrokers. It really is a crazy world!
20. Site flipping doesn't require as much capital and expertise as many people believe. Like property flipping, you buy one that needs a bit of TLC. Do it up, then sell it on for a whacking great profit. And, the beauty is you never have to deal with tenants!

21. How about cornering a little market? There are DMOZ categories with grandfathered sites (sites that have been listed for many years) which aren't being updated. If you can pick up a few sites in the same category and merge their content suddenly you "own" that niche. That opens a lot of possibilities.
Actual work
22. 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).

23. 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.
24. 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.
25. 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.
26. 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.
27. 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.
28. 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.
29. 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/Selling forums 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.
30. 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.
31. 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).
32. 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.
33. 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.

34. 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.
35. 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 parties like payperpost, blogvertise, creamaid, Blogitive, reviewme, loudlaunch etc., who handle the finding of advertisers.
36. 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.
37. 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.
38. 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.
39. 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.
40. 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.
41. 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 your outrageous 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.
42. 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 from organising conferences/tradeshows. His "community" ensures every one is a sell-out.
43. 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".
44. 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.
45. 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.
46. 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.
47. 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!
48. 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.
49. 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.
50. Good at graphic design? Design and offer logos and icons downloadable 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.
51. Create an award and some fancy logos to go with it. The more credible they look the better. Award them to websites you like ... provided they pay you an "admin" fee every year to continue using the logo. Giving awards used to be a useful way to get backlinks. But when people's egos are sufficiently stroked they'll pay to continue boasting about how good the "rest of the world" thinks they are.
Work, but not as you know it
52. Affiliate programs can be great fun and very lucrative. The trick is learning to generate traffic, funnelling it to your merchant and hiring expensive accountants to handle your massive tax returns. It has made more millionaires than you'd believe and I've personally met many of them. I hope to write a lot more about making money from affiliate programs in the months to come.
53. But if fine-tuning ad CTRs and monitoring ROI is too much like hard work ... be your own affiliate customer. Credit card companies, mortgage companies etc., pay anywhere upto $100 per form filled on their site (per valid lead). Go apply for some credit cards and mortgages BUT do them through your own affiliate links and make a few hundred dollars per day. Sign up in as an affiliate in your wife/husband/dad's name to get around the occasional restriction that applications in the affiliate's own name don't generate the commission.
Pure fun
54. Like playing computer games? There's money in gaming. Top players get paid handsomely for participating in tournaments, attending gaming fests and endorsing products. OK, Tiger Woods does make more but does he have as much fun? I mean, have you ever seen him happy? Like deliriously happy ... and shouting for joy? No. Because his golf club don't have no buttons. But it's not just for big hitters. Anybody can make a few hundred bucks a week.
55. 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.
56. 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.
57. 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.

58. 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.
59. 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".
60. 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.
61. Good at poker? You can make a living from playing it all day long (or go broke).
Like surfing?
62. 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.
63. 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
64. Be a researcher. At places like answers.com people pay for you to go research an answer to questions they don't have time to answer themselves. Like, "How do I choose an SLR camera?" and "What's the name of the theme song to the TV program A Bit of Fry and Laurie?" Note: Google has now closed the answers.google.com service but if you're that good at hunting things out you'll find that there are other places where people pay for answers. And, I'm not just talking paid homework help.
It smells
No, I'm not endorsing any of the plans in this section but this article wouldn't be complete without mentioning these unmentionables.
65. Has someone has violated your online rights? Perhaps they don't have a privacy page on their site as required by law. Or haven't made their site disabled friendly (illegal in some parts of the world). Sue them. Particularly if you can get one of those no win-no fee vultures to act for you. A guy called André-Tascha Lammé kept getting calls from salesmen selling him stuff. He sued them in the Sacramento, CA, small claims court (easy to do). Guess what? Apparently the law in the US awards you $500 each time a telesales person makes an unwanted call to you. Lammé walked away with $6,000. What's the law where you are?
66. They haven't violated your rights? Sue them anyway. Why do you think so many people sue Google on the most unlikely pretexts: giving them incorrect results, showing anti-Christian sites in the results, having advertising, being racist, not being racist? Find something unusual enough to sue them about and some dumb tabloid editor somewhere will pay you for an interview. Even if they don't you'll generate publicity, get column inches, get people to your site...Ka-Ching.

Or be the scum that sue companies for small amounts just because it's be cheaper for them to settle than defend. Even if the grounds for the case are petty and silly.
67. Sell photographs: Live in a big city? Hang around at celebrity watering holes, click some photos. There's always someone online willing to pay for interesting ones - there are sites specifically for the buying/selling of photos like these. Get "lucky" and click the UN Secretary General picking up a hooker and you can buy that dream home in the Bahamas quicker than he can say United Nations Secretary General. Find Paris Hilton in another compromising video and.... you can buy Bill Gates. More mundane photos will get you money in places like these: 1, 2, 3.

68. 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!
69. 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.
70. 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)
71. 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..
72. 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 (what is a proxy?).
73. 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.
74. (But wherever there's a big problem there's an opportunity: Run an free email service like Hotmail etc., but with a good SPAM filtering system. High startup costs, sure, but if you get enough people signing up you could be worth a few million very quickly. Google tried this with gmail and got about 4% of the market without advertising the service at all; accounts were given by invitation only)
75. Start a HYIP and do a runner. See page 5 for more details on what this is.
Arbitage Opportunties, Brokerage, Finance businesses, miscellaneous

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May money just flow to you. If finances are tight right now, take heart - money happens, it's easier than you think. I feel very privileged to live in these interesting times, times full of opportunity, times where I've been able to give up my day job, work at my leisure, enjoy my kids growing up, retire decades earlier than I normally would, and spend time writing this drivel instead of running the usual rat race. God bless the Internet and Good Luck. You CAN do it.