$100 in 3 Hours? The 7+1 Easiest Ways to Quickly Make Money Online

If you’re a frequent follower of MakingMoneyOnline.com, you know that generally we advocate legitimate, sustainable approaches to generating passive cash flows on an ongoing basis. But sometimes you just need to make a little money fast.

One of the most common questions we receive is: “What’s the easiest way to quickly make money online?” As in, by tonight?!

The Scenario: Faithful MakingMoneyOnline.com reader Walter has a problem:

Dear Making Money Online,
I know that slowly building my reputation, giving value before I take, focusing on a niche, etc. etc. is the right way to go about making the big bucks online in the long term. But what about today? I don’t have the cash or the time to spare building my online empire: I just need to put some ka-ching in my pocket NOW. Please hook me up with some suggestions for things I can do today to earn a little extra cash without having to wait for months?
Muchas gracias,
~Walter

The Solution: Can we help Walter earn $100 in just 3 hours working online? Can we help you make $100 in just a few hours? For each technique, we’re going to assume that you have access to a computer with internet access, basic writing ability, and a healthy dollop of enthusiasm, but no existing website/ blog/ or mailing list with 10,000 subscribers (which, by the way, would make this whole endeavor quite a bit easier!).

Our Suggestions for the Easiest Ways to Get Started Making Money Online:

1. Become an Expert

   

   Everyone's an expert in something. Might as well get paid for it!

   Just Answer is about as simple as it gets: someone posts a question they need help with, and if you can answer it you’ll earn anywhere from a few dollars to $25. Perhaps the only downside to Just Answer is that it is difficult to get accepted as an expert (hence the 2 stars out of 5 for “chance of success”). If you’re interested in trying it out but would like help getting accepted as an expert, use the form to contact me and I’ll send you instructions for how to get in.

   Ether.com is a similar service focused on helping you sell your expert advice over the phone.
   MiNeeds allows bidding on a variety of tasks that need done.

   Earning Potential: $$$$
   Chance of Success: **

2. Create the new Viral Sensation

   

   If you're going to embarass yourself in front of millions of people on the internets, you might as well get paid for it.

   The bad news is that online video advertising is still relatively young, and with most revenue sharing programs you’ll only earn a fraction of a cent every time your video gets viewed. The good news is that some videos can get a LOT of views. Viral hits like the JK Wedding Entrance Dance or “LonelyGirl15” rack up tens of MILLIONS of views, which means those pennies could add up pretty quickly!

   YouTube only offers revenue sharing once you get big, so instead you might want to try http://revver.com/ or http://www.break.com/.

   Earning Potential: $$$$$
   Chance of Success: *

3. Do 20 Tasks on Fiverr

   

   A measly five bucks and she can be your (fake) girlfriend (on Facebook)

   Aye, these are desperate times, my friends. The things that people will do for a mere five bucks simply blows the mind: PSD to HTML website conversion, Joomla setup, even be your Facebook girlfriend. At rates like that, my advice would be to skip trying to earn money doing tasks on Fiverr, and instead set up some sort of task arbitrage scheme whereby you accept jobs from Craigslist for $25, and then hire someone from Fiverr to do them for $5. Yeah, now we’re doing it making money online style!

   Earning Potential: $$
   Chance of Success: ****

4. Test 10 New Websites

   

   You can get paid to test websites, as long as you can make a pensive face.

   Usability testing is when companies hire random people to tell them what they think of their website. Think you could be that random person? If so, you can earn up to $10 a pop by completing a few simple tasks on the website, and filling out a report on your experience. Each test should take about 10 to 20 minutes, which means that this may be one method where you actually can meet our goal of $100 in 3 hours (while still having time to make a sandwich).

   Some sites to try include:
   http://www.usertesting.com/betester.aspx – Appears to be the most generous, and the most professional.
   http://www.usabilitysciences.com/contact-us/recruiting
   http://www.testarmy.com/app/view/more-tester/
   http://www.userfocus.co.uk/panel/index.html
   http://www.usabilityexchange.com/uehowitworks5.php – UK based, for disabled users

   Earning Potential: $$$$
   Chance of Success: ****

5. Pimp Out Peoples’ iPads/ iPhones

   This one is inspired by a story on the founder of HungryPod, who (at least at one point) was making over $100,000 a year uploading CDs to peoples’ iPods. In my mind there’s a similar opportunity to profit from the iPad and iPhone craze: who has the time to wade through the Appstore to find all the most useful bits? If you know iPhone backwards and forwards, why not offer a “Pimp my iPhone” service to get peoples’ iPhones set up with the very best apps (along with music, photos, videos, or anything else the customer wanted on there). This one might be easier to work if you live in New York, where people have a lot more money than time.

   Earning Potential: $$$
   Chance of Success: **

6. Come up with 4 Cool Domain Name Ideas at PickyDomains.com

   A good name is hard to find– and especially so when you need to find an available .com domain name to match. If you’re one of those people who just has a way with names (eg, you’re so clever your cats are named “José” and “Hose B”), then you may find your money-making niche at PickyDomains.com. All you have to do is come up with name ideas, and if your suggestion wins you’ll earn somewhere around $25.

   Earning Potential: $$$
   Chance of Success: **

7. Flip a Domain Name

   OK, this one might be difficult to pull off in just 3 hours, but you also have a good shot at earning a lot more than $100. Here’s the gig: every day thousands of domain names expire and are auctioned off at sites like NameJet.com, SnapNames.com, and TDNAM.com. Although some auctions go in to the tens of thousands of dollars, most start at $60 (or just $10 at TDNAM.com). Since we’re just interested in making a quick buck, rather than getting serious about domain investing, you just want to find an opportunity to flip a domain for an easy profit. The best way to do that is to look for domains that offer a better version of an existing website’s domain. For example, if my website is YogaDVDs.net and you grab the domain YogaDVDs.com in an expiring auction, there’s a good chance I’m going to be willing to pay you something for that domain. Ditto for singular/ plural combinations, and hyphenated/ non-hyphenated domains. Most small businesses and website publishers don’t even know that expired domain auctions exist, so you’re actually doing them a favor if you sell them the domain at a fair price and prevent it from ending up as a permanent parking page in a mega-domainer’s collection.

   PS: Make sure you only apply this strategy for generic descriptive domain names, not brand names like “Yahoo” or “Microsoft”.

   Earning Potential: $$$$$
   Chance of Success: ***

8. Help 10 Students at StudentOfFortune.com

   

   Textbook Rockstar? You can make money online helping out students.

   I saved one of my greatest finds for last. There are many variations on the “get paid to answer questions” theme, but StudentofFortune.com seems to be one of the more promising ones. After all, who is more desperate to answer questions than students? It might help to be a bit of an academic, but hey when questions pay up to $150 each, that’s a lot of inspiration to hit the books!

   Other sites where you can earn money online by tutoring students:
   http://www.ehomeworkhelp.com/tutors.cfm
   http://www.tutorandmentor.com/careers.html
   http://www.tutor.com/apply/why-tutor-with-us

   Earning Potential: $$$$
   Chance of Success: ***

Now Go Get Started Making Money Online!

Did you find any of these suggestions helpful? Any additional ideas that you would like to add? Please let me know if you found this tutorial useful or how you would like to have seen it done differently, and next time will be even more valuable for you!

Tags: beginners, easy ways to make money online, Getting Started, Making Money Online

Two EASY Ways to Make Money Online

June 11, 2009 by Doug Dillard  
Filed under Other, Tutorials

8 Comments





I was reading a post of one of my favorite bloggers the other day and he was writing about how to save money registering domains at Godaddy by searching for online coupons. That made me think about two of my favorite ways to make money online.

Now making money online does not always mean bringing in cash. I believe if you can find a way to save money when purchasing something that you need, you’re actually making money. That’s why they say, “A penny saved, is a penny earned”. So here are two ways that will definitely save you money if you always try and put them to use.

1) Before you purchase anything online, do a search for a discount coupon. MANY online merchants offer discounts all the time on different products they are selling or discounts on entire orders if you purchase at least a certain dollar amount. You will notice that many merchants have a special box at the end of their order process asking if you have a coupon code. That means that there quite possibly is a coupon out there waiting for you to save money. All you have to do is find it.

Just last week I saved money when purchasing some business cards I had printed, and another $20 on my office supplies I ordered from Staples. Now I believe I only saved $5 or so on the business cards, but 5 bucks is 5 bucks. That’s not bad when you consider it only took me about a minute to find the coupon code on Google.

2) The second way to make money online (ok… save money) is to just ASK! This actually works offline even better, but it works on both, as I use this all the time. I owe this great tip to my brother’s ex-Father-in-Law. He was this little old grumpy (and very wealthy) man and everywhere he went, he ALWAYS haggled at the price. He treated every shop merchant, restaurant server or service provider as a garage sale operator, and tried to get a better deal than they were offering. Now it didn’t work all the time, but he told me he saved a TON OF MONEY over the years just asking and that has always stuck with me.

I have used that method many times myself over the years, but not to his extreme. I cannot tell you how much money I have saved, but I am sure if I totaled it up it would considerable as well.  I actually used this method last week as well to save money on some software I wanted that an internet marketer was selling. I remember he had it on sale several weeks before “For a Limited Time” and I missed the cutoff date by at least a couple of weeks. So I sent him a heartfelt email explaining that I really wanted to purchase the product, but at the time he had the sale I just didn’t have the extra money (which was the truth). So I ASKED him if there was anyway I could still get that sale’s price. The next morning I got up and had an email from him saying that he usually does not do this sort of thing, but he would make an exception in my case, but not to let anyone else know he gave me that deal. He then gave me a special link to make the purchase at the discounted price. Now that saved me about $50 and all I did was send a very simple email.

So the lesson here is to try to SAVE MONEY wherever you can and that will keep more money in your pocket! I have couple great stories of how I got some really EXPENSIVE services for free for just being a nice guy, but I will save those for another post.

If you have some money saving tips, please add them to the comments below so our other readers can benefit as well.

Tags: easy ways to make money online, Save Money