Online Money

Well, the title here really should be, “Little Known Ways To Earn Money Online A Lot Easier Than What We Used To Do In Web 1.0,” but that would be a pretty long title. So for the sake of brevity, we will use the “…Earn Money Online Easy” title instead. So how do we do this?

Firstly, we discard all notions of affiliate marketing and article marketing from our list of things to do.

These are so passé. You can also ditch selling whatever junk you have in e-Bay, because almost everyone else is doing this right now and competition for your grandmother’s clunker boots is on the decline.

Although there are some people who still work in these money generating schemes, we can point you in the direction of somewhat easier ways of earning money.

One very good example is to offer consultancy services over the World Wide Web. It does not matter what field you are an expert in; somewhere out there, someone else is looking for Grade A advice within your scope of influence.

If you have specific fields of interest, you may want to sign up at Elance or www.elance.com. Here, you and your potential clients will be matched by the system. You could also try a more direct route.

Build or hire someone to build you an interactive website, or at least one with a running forum or message board that you can control. You can work out a running rate with your first few clients so that you know just how much to charge regardless of where the discussion takes you. (Some sites charge per minute.)

A note, though; you may need to spend a bit of time promoting your site to get your clients’ attention. You would also need to open an e-bank or a PayPal account in order to receive payment.

Also, your site would need an extensive communication network. You may need to invest time in putting in or installing most of the popular direct communication modes like IM and VoIP.

Emails are a given, so make sure you have a separate e-mail account for your work than the one you are using personally. Two very good examples of consultancy services would be online life coaching and software support for the numerous web content management systems.

Do not knock virtual assistance until you’ve tried it. If you have a great background in clerical and secretarial work, you could very well earn money online easy – as much as $20 an hour.

And we are talking about a per-client basis here. Because of the great market liquidity of the World Wide Web, more and more people are learning how to use it for business. As such, there are some solo entrepreneurs or small scale business owners who just might need the services of a virtual assistant.

Depending on your initial agreement, some of your work load may include: answering calls; responding to e-mail queries; setting up purchases and orders; paying due bills; tracking down packages; making travel reservations and even hiring personnel. Some employers need more specific and time consuming services while others simply prefer that you man the phones.

However, it is very rare that you get to be on a 24-7 stand by call when you work as a virtual assistant. At most you have 8 hours; but with this kind of job, it is common that your “employers” hire you 2 to 3 hours a day. You could have the rest of the day off doing other virtual assistance jobs.