Showing posts with label blog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blog. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

How to Make Money Online

Whether you're too young to hold any job other than baby sitting, too busy with college to land yourself an internship, or just want to make a little spare cash on the side, options for making money via the Internet are become more and more available. There are even people out there who are making six-figure incomes with online revenue! All you need is a little bit of creativity, patience, persistence, and some luck.

Paid Surveys

The title says it all: people ask you questions, and you get money for it. So if you have a little extra time on your hands, set up a separate e-mail account (to avoid spam getting forwarded to your real account; no matter what the sites say, they will sell your address to third parties) for your survey-ing needs. However, you probably won't make much cash from signing up for just one company, so sign up for as many as possible. Your 2 Cents is a start, as well as Savvy Survey. (The latter was mentioned in Seventeen Magazine, so I'm pretty sure it's a good one; but then again, Seventeen sells phone sex ads in the back of their issues, so...)

Blogging

That's right, you don't even have to go through all the motions to get published in order to make money off of writing. Blogging is a great way to have fun, express yourself, and get paid for doing so. This is done through Google AdSense, a program you can add to your blog that places advertisements on it. Whenever a visitor clicks on one, you get paid! Try blogging about a specific topic like fashion, fitness, movies, or anything else you may be passionate about. Also, make sure to make your blog known. Traffic = cash! Sites like Blogger have tutorials and templates to get your started, so there's absolutely no HTML knowledge needed.

Print on Demand Sites

Sites like CafePress offer a unique opportunity for those of you who are more artistically inclined: creating custom t-shirts and other products. The beauty of the process is that you don't have to deal with the mess of actually making the stuff. Instead, the site does it for you. All you have to do is create and upload the designs. Zazzle and Printfection are also good companies to try.

Other Things to Keep in Mind

SEO Marketing - It's a confusing concept at first, but if you can master SEO advertising, generating traffic becomes a cinch. And for most sites, traffic is the only way you're going to make money!

IRS Form 1099 - Yep, taxes don't just shrivel your real-life income to 2/3 of it's worth, but they also take a chunk out of any large revenue you make online. Many websites such as CafePress and Savvy Survey will ask for your social security number, since they're required by law to file a form 1099 for any income generated by their sites over $600 in a given year (that's like making $50 a month). These sites might also ask for your address, credit card number, or Paypal information in order to send you your monthly check. Because of this you should make sure that you have your parents look over the site before using it; giving away important personal information to any old site may lead to identity theft, so do some asking around beforehand!

Thursday, July 10, 2008

These Crossroads is Born

Teenager.

A word underestimated by some, worshipped by few (okay, very few), and feared by many.

So what's one to do if you just happen to be locked in that infamous age group?

I was browsing through Barnes & Noble the other day, and happened to notice a "teen nonfiction" section. The books were surprisingly interesting, and contained (what I thought to be) some very accurate and helpful articles on common teen issues such as stress management, winning a school election, making the right friends, etc. The only disappointment I found was that the selection was very limited; it only covered maybe a shelf or two.

Once I got home, I began Googling the kind of content I had just discovered, but from a teenage perspective. To my surprise, there were almost none. It didn't make sense to me. After all, who knows how to get inside a teen's head better than, well, a teen?

Two and a half hours and many Google searches later, These Crossroads was born.

I can't promise that my writing will be press worthy or inspire a revolution. In fact, I can't promise anything. All I can really do is write, and hope that maybe someone might walk away having learned something that could make their life a little easier. Maybe.

Hey, at least I can say I tried.