What are some scam free ways to make money online fast?…
I get a lot of emails from readers of BlogStash.com who ask that question. They say they have been trying to work online for years but haven’t been successful, and what’s more is that they have fallen victim to a lot of scams over the years.
Try Swagbucks, the famous rewards program that pays you for watching videos, taking surveys, shopping and more.
They are really tired of scams and understandably are fearful of lots of online money making ideas. They just want a simple and legitimate way that they can use to make some cash without being scammed and spammed to death.
So, I decided to write a post and list a few legitimate methods that I myself and many other people use to earn money fast. These are methods that are easy for beginners and don’t require a lot of skills, know how and capital investment.
Of course, there are lots of other ways to make money on the Internet as well. But the following 15 methods are suitable scam free ways that almost anyone can use to make some change.
1- Use Craigslist with a twist!
I know, you must be thinking “oh here we go again with that find free stuff on Craigslist, clean them up and sell them back on Craigslist for a profit thing”, but this is different. Although, there is nothing wrong with that Craigslist money making method either. It really is a great way to make some fast cash.
But with this method you are leveraging other people and their skills to profit. Here is what you do, go to Fiverr and find trusted sellers who offer the kind of services that small business owners can use, like creating quality promotional videos, testimonial videos and etc.
Then go and register with Craigslist to get your free account (if you already don’t have one) and post ads in as many cities as you can in the correct section, offering the same service for a profit.
On Fiverr, you can get lots of quality services for just $5, but most small business owners are more than happy to pay you $100 or more for a good promotional video or a nice looking logo or what have you.
If you have to only sign up for one paid survey site to make money with, I recommend Ipsos-iSay. Ipsos is the most fun and well-paying panel. Give it a try to see how you like it. It is free anyway!
It’s a great way to not only make some fast cash for yourself, but also to help Fiverr sellers to make money while at the same time helping local businesses promote their business without breaking the bank.
2- Take Paid Surveys
When it comes to making money online, paid surveys are almost synonymous with scam. That is because it’s a huge lucrative industry and lots of scammers have learned how to milk the cow.
On the other hand, real and legitimate paid surveys are conducted by real and legitimate market research companies who help manufacturers and companies conduct surveys and market research to learn about their consumers and their behavior, which helps those companies and manufacturers to improve their current products or come up with new products and services that according to the opinion of their customers (expressed through paid surveys they participated in), are likely to be on demand.
So, if you can find legitimate survey companies who conduct real market research for actual companies and manufacturers, you will not get scammed. In fact, you stand a good chance of making a decent amount of money by participating in their paid online surveys.
Though, let be clear, you will not, I repeat, you will not get rich taking surveys. You can however, make some extra cash. Here is a list of legitimate free survey sites you can work with.
3- Become a seller on eBay
You may be tired of hearing about selling on eBay, but consider this, if it wasn’t working, you wouldn’t be hearing about it that often. Start by selling things you already own but have no use for anymore. Once you got it going and learn the in and out of selling on eBay, you could perhaps hit the thrift stores, garage sales and even wholesalers to buy items for cheap and sell them on eBay for a profit.
Remember to do your homework before you invest money in buying an inventory for selling on eBay. Find out whats hot and whats not so you don’t end up with a bigger pile of junk in your garage than when you started it all.
4- Work on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
Mechanical Turk is owned by the Amazon corporation and it is basically a marketplace for businesses and online freelancers to find and work with each other. Mechanical Turk is really a great way to make some extra cash online. There are lots of tasks to choose from and the majority of these task can be completed under a minute or tow.
But, the downside is that you can not make more than few bucks an hour, unless you are a good writer. There are tons of online business who use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to hire quality freelance writers and they usually pay good money for quality content.
5- Sell services on Fiverr
Fiverr.com is the latest success story in micro freelancing job filed. You can offer any kind of service for $5 and because the price is cheap, people do not mind paying for things that other wise wouldn’t make any sense. For example, there is a guy on Fiverr that charge $5 to make a decision for people! And he has sold over 40,000 gigs! Yeah, it is unbelievable, but people are doing it.
Find something unique that you can offer and posted on Fiverr. Make sure whatever you are offering won’t take more than 10-15 minutes to be delivered. You don’t want to spend 1 hour to make $5. The secret to making money on Fiverr is finding something that is in demand, yet it can be done in a few minutes.
Offering the right service on Fiverr, can actually help you earn a full time living just as it did so many other people.
6- Sell Stock Photos
There are many stock photography sites that will allow you to earn money from your photos. Simply upload your phonographs on sites like BigStockPhoto and ShutterStock and every time someone buys one of them, you get paid.
To make the most out of this opportunity and really excel at it, If you rally want to make some decent amount of money, you should do some research to find out what kind of photos sell better and perhaps you can take similar photos and sell them.
Make sure before you register with them to have 3 killer photos ready as you will have to provide them when you sign up. Give them your best photos to ensure you can get in.
7- Do Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing has been around long before the Internet come along, but offline it is known as middle man business. Basically, as an affiliate marketer, you are selling other people’s products and services for a commission.
These days, almost every product and service out there has an affiliate program tied to it. So it is not hard to find a good quality product or service to promote. Singe up with one of many affiliate networks like Commission junction and MaxBounty and find a product to promote.
You can create a site around the topic and include your affiliate link inside the content, you can even create interesting videos and upload them to YouTube. There are lots of ways to promote a product as an affiliate, you just have to be creative and commit yourself to it.
8- Help small business owners with their social media campaigns
With the way our economy is going, many small local business owners are really struggling to stay afloat. One of the best ways to give them some momentum is through online presence. But, not every local business owner knows how to do that.
You can help them do that for a fee. For example, lots of local businesses don’t have accounts with social networking sites like twitter or perhaps they have an account, but don’t know how to use it properly or don’t have the time to tweet once a day.You can do that for them.
Not only you make some extra money suing your skills, you will also be helping your local economy grow which in turn brings you even more clients that you can help to grow their online presence.
9- Become a Virtual Assistant
Virtual assistant jobs have been around as long as the Internet itself. There are tens of hundreds of books and step by step guides on becoming a successful virtual assistant. That goes to show that there is money to be made as a virtual assistant.
The good thing about becoming a virtual assistant is that it’s not just about one particular skill that if you don’t have that skill, you are out of luck. No, there are lots of different things you can do as a virtual assistant, so almost anybody can offer virtual assistant service in some way or another.
You can use online forums where webmasters and online business owners hangout to find clients. You can even contact websites directly and ask them if they need a virtual assistant.
10- Make money as a Freelance Writer
Thousands of new websites and blogs are build every single day and all of these sites need content, quality content that is! The demand for freelance writers keeps increasing and it really seems there is no end to it. If you can write well and enjoy doing it, why not make it work for you.
There are many ways to make money as a freelance writer. You can write articles and sell them as packages, you can write exclusively for blogs and websites such as eHow and AssociatedContent (now known as Yahoo Voices), or perhaps you could use online forums and freelancing job sites to offer your article writing services to bloggers, webmaster and other online business owners who need fresh content.
11- Build small Niche websites
Another great scam free way to make money online is to build small niche sites. A niche sites focus on a specific tiny topic. For example, health is a big niche. Fitness is a sub niche of the health niche. Then workout is a sub niche of the fitness niche. Workout for pregnant women can be a sub niche of work out niche. The reason it is a good idea to go for dipper smaller niches is that the competition for those niches are much smaller than the main niches.
There is much less competition for workout for pregnant women than say health or even workout. That makes it easier for you to rank your site in the search engines which in turn brings traffic to your niche site which you can monetize that traffic to earn money from your niche site.
Find a big niche then dig down as much as you can to find a small niche within that market and build a site around it. Then when you start to get traffic, monetize your site with related ads and products.
12- Transcribe audio files
Although transcribing audio files is not a well paying gig, it is however very easy to do and it can be fun. Where to find clients you ask?… Freelancing job sites such as on eLance or oDesk are your friend and partner in hooking you up with potential clients. Simply register with them and put up and nice portfolio and a detailed note about your skill and what you can do for your clients.
Of course, to succeed in this gig you got to have a good command of the English language or any other language that the files being transcribed is in.
13- Write an eBook
Writing an eBook is one of the easiest ways to make quick money online without scam. Find a problem that a group of people are having, do some research on it and find solutions and answers to solving that problem. Put your findings in an eBook and sell it to the targeted audience.
Your eBook can be as short as a 1 page eBook or as long as a 100 page eBook. It doesn’t matter, as long as you are providing a solution and answers to people’s problems, people will buy it.
Once you have written your eBook, use a free PDF converter to transform it into PDF (the standard form of eBooks) and submit your eBook to eBook directories. You can also promote it on your own blog or website if you have any, if not, perhaps you could create a blog on the topic of the eBook, where you give useful tips and information to readers. But, keep the best for your eBook, so people can have an incentive to buy your eBook instead of just finding all the info on your blog for free.
14- Offer WordPress installation and upgrades
You would be amazed how many people don’t know how to install WordPress or install plugins. Even if you don’t know how to do that, you can learn it in a few days or so by reading a few tutorials and blogs. then you can offer to install WordPress for other people who don’t know how. It takes a few minutes and you can charge $10 or so to do that.
You can charge more for installing plugins as well. Since the fee is relatively low, lots of people actually would rather save time and pay you to do that for them, instead of them trying to spend a few days leaning how to do it.
Remember those local businesses we talked about above, when they need to build a website, you can offer your WordPress installation service to them as well. The best thing is that with WordPress, you can build entire websites and blogs very easily, so you can even build sites for your clients without much knowledge of HTML and web design.
15- Website and blog submission
Submitting sites and blogs to website and blog directories and social bookmarking them is one of ways in which webmaster and bloggers grow their sites and get them to rank highly in the search engines. However, site submission is a time consuming work that’s why lots of webmaster and bloggers would rather pay someone else do it for them.
You can offer to do that for them for a fee. Register with a few webmaster related forums such as WarriorForum and start posting a service thread in the appropriate section.
In the beginning you may have to offer a few free or cheap services to get yourself noted and trusted by people.But once you get the ball rolling, you will start to receive more jobs that you can handle. There are also software that can help you speed up the process. but you have to make sure you use them the right way.
Final Thoughts
The above methods may not be the best and most profitable methods for making money on the web. But at the and of the day, you can be sure that you are not scamming anyone and you are earning money with honesty and integrity.
Please feel free to leave a comment and share any other scam free ways that you use to make money online.