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Tuesday 18 November 2008

5 New ways to make money online

Right, so you are tired of your office job, working 9 to 5. Tired of the rat race everyday and you want to explore some new ways to make money. The internet is one of the fastest growing phenomenons in history and it is ready for you to make money with it. Here are 5 newer kind of ways to make money with the internet and my perception of it.


1. Offer your professional expertise in an online marketplace.These days, you can do more than just sell your old books via Amazon and your old Coach handbags via eBay—now you can sell your professional capabilities in a marketplace. No longer are you limited to looking for a permanent or contract job on Web 1.0 style job sites like Monster or CareerBuilder. The new breed of freelancing and project-oriented sites let companies needing help describe their projects. Then freelancers and small businesses offer bids or ideas or proposals from which those buyers can choose.
Elance covers everything from programming and writing to consulting and design, while RentACoder focuses on software, natch. If you’re a graphic designer, check out options like Design Outpost or LogoWorks–you don’t have to find the customers, they’ll come to you. Wannabe industry analysts might sign up for TechDirt’s Insight Community, a marketplace for ideas about technology marketing.

Of course there is a lot of money to make by offering your professional expertise in the online marketplace, but the problem for many people would be that you actually need some professional expertise of some kind.


2. Sell photos on stock photography sites. If people regularly oooo and aaaaah over your Flickr pics, maybe you’re destined for photographic greatness or maybe just for a few extra dollars. It’s easier than ever to get your photos out in front of the public, which of course means a tremendous amount of competition, but also means it might be an convenient way for you to build up a secondary income stream. Where can you upload and market your photos? Try Fotolia, Dreamstime, Shutterstock, and Big Stock Photo.

This seems like a great way to make some money. Pros: If you already have great photos that they can use, why not try your luck and send it, maybe they find something useful and you can make some dough. Cons: If you dont have a good camera and you don't have some good quality photos that they are in need of, the chance of getting any money would be slim. I will submit a few pictures and see where it gets me. I will update you on this.


3. Blog for pay. Despite the explosion of blogs, it’s hard to find good writers who can turn around a solidly-written post on an interesting topic quickly. GigaOM is always looking for bloggers with great content ideas and solid writing skills. How do you get noticed? Comment and link to blogging network sites. Write blog posts that are polished and not overly personal (although showing some personality is a plus).

I can honestly say that this works. There are a lot of people making money with blogs with ads. I have a few blogs, and I make some money of some of them. Of course the real trick is to find something you are really passionate about and try to stick with that theme of blog. If you dedicate yourself to your work and your writing, you could make some decent cash. If you have some decent writing skills that is. Otherwise, there's also things like video blogs. I will go more into this at a later stage.


4. Or start your own blog network. If you like the business side of things–selling advertising, hiring and managing employees, attracting investors–and have the stomach to go up against the likes of Weblogs, Inc., GigaOmniMedia, b5media, maybe you should make an entire business out of blogs. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’ll get a lot of time to write yourself though.

To do this you would have to have the proper experience and expertise. It would take some time, but if you do have the skills you could make a small fortune this way.


5. Provide service and support for open source software. Just because the software is free doesn’t mean you can’t make money on it–just ask Red Hat, a well-known distributor of Linux that sports a market cap of more than four billion dollars. As a solo web worker, you might not want to jump in and compete with big companies offering Linux support, but how about offering support for web content management systems like WordPress or Drupal? After getting comfortable with your own installation, you can pretty easily jump into helping other people set them up and configure them.

You could also make money writing plugins and smaller kind of add on code for software like these that already exists.

(Information from Webworkerdaily)

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