Earning Extra Money

Are you looking for a little extra income to help you pay for an extra special holiday?

Are you looking for essential cash to pay the monthly bills?

Do you want to fire the boss and work independantly?

These are just a couple of the reasons why people decide to try and earn a little extra in a way that is different from their usual daily employment.

DECIDE why you want to earn extra cash and how much you would like to earn. When you have thought carefully about this and have sensible answers you are ready to start looking at the different ways of earning the extra cash that want or need.

Right, so you have had a think about the reasons why you want the extra cash.

The next thing to realise is that there is very little in this world that is free. There is a price with everything.

You may get lucky and hit a nice free flowing income stream, but these are very few and far between.

Expect to have to put in some hard work, expect to have to spend a good deal of time earning the extra.

Remember that most people do their 9 to 5 for an average salary, if you expect to get more than that for less effort you will most certainly be disappointed. However, If you are clever the amount of hard work you have to put in will provide you with an income for very little extra effort for a long time to come.

SECRET 1

Put your efforts into creating what is known as a residual income.

RESIDUAL INCOME: This is something that once put in place will continue to generate an income stream as long as nothing significant changes.

A lot of financial advisors earn big money through residual income. They sell lots of life insurance policies which each provide them with a small amount of commission each month. As long as the customer keeps on paying their premium the commission payments continue to roll in.

Keep this in mind when putting in your efforts to earn extra cash.

Having said that if you are prepared to put in the time and effort the rewards are there to be had. You just have to find which works for you.

The sections below will go in to more detail about some of the many schemes that you can try, I will also try and give an opinion on what skills you need to be successful and the level of reward that you can expect.

Honestly - Squidoo will give you a reward for the effort you put into creating a lens (just like this).

How much REWARD? This, like most other things, will be dependant on the effort you put into creating your lens or lenses.

SIMPLY:

The more good quality lenses you have the more REWARD you will get.

The higher the ranking of your lens the more REWARD you will get.

The more visitors you get the better your ranking.

Create a lens of good quality will help you attract visitors.

ADVANTAGES:
SQUIDOO is free to join.
You can create as many lenses as you wish.
You can decide the payout threshold.
You can take cash or donate to charity.

The BIGGEST ADVANTAGE:
You can promote and sell things on SQUIDOO. Each time you sell something you will get a commission. The lens MODULES make it easy to add items to sell, or you can create your own affiliate links.

HOW EASY IS IT?

If you have managed to find your way to this lens and you can come up with a little bit of creativity you can create you own lens.

You do not need anything special other than an Internet Connection, you can even do this from somebody elses computer as there is no software to install. HOW EASY IS THAT!

Want to create your own lens click this link:

Create Your Own Lens

The Google ADSENSE program is probably the most popular around.

If you are not familiar with Adsense, it is basically a pay-per-click (ppc) program. Advertisers pay Google each time somebody clicks on their advertisement. Google ADSENSE is one of the tools that SQUIDOO uses to provide the income that you hope to earn from SQUIDOO LENSES.

HOW DO THE ADS APPEAR?

You paste some code into a webpage of some description. This may be a website you own, a blog, or some other place where you enter content to be published on the Internet. Google has programs that look at the content of the page and selects advertisements appropriate to the content.

DO I HAVE TO HAVE A WEBSITE?

No you don't. Having your own website is only one way to utilise Google ADSENSE. If you do have your own website and have the skills to create the webpages on it then you will find it easy to include Google ADSENSE on your site.

If the site is created by somebody else for you, then you can ask them to include Google ADSENSE for you. Just make sure they use your Google Account and not their own!

If you have a blog you can usually include Google Adsense in your blog. This is however dependent on any restrictions put in place by your blog host.

HOW DO I GET GOOGLE ADSENSE?

Go to the normal Google page and scroll to the bottom if you have to. Below the Google search box there are a few clickable links. Click on Advertising Programmes and follow the link to Adsense.

REWARDS?

Like most of these programs the rewards are reflected by the amount of effort you put in. However by creating content to attract certain ads you can increase your pay-per-click rate. If you look through the ADWORDS part of Google you can find out what the current bids are for different keywords. The higher bidding words are the ones you should target if you want a higher return. Remember that the ADWORD Rate that you can see is what Google charges the advertiser, as an ADSENSE user, you will only get a portion of this.

The other thing with ADSENSE is that the more traffic you get, the more clicks you should get, which in turn means more rewards. So by creating good quality content that people want to read you should attract the search engines and consequently attract the visitors who will provide the clicks.

You can expect to have a click rate up to about 5%. This means that for every 100 page views that have ADSENSE content showing, you should get about 5 ADSENSE clicks.

Pay-per-click rates can vary quite a lot, but for general keywords you can expect to be paid about $0.10 per click. Some will be a lot higher with many words and phrases exceeding the $1.00 per click. If you look you can find ADWORD rates in excess of $50.00 per click quite easily. Remember this is not what you get paid.

So do the sums. 100 pages views will give you about $0.50. If you want a decent return you have to get the visitors. If you want $100 per month, it means you need about 1000 clicks which equates to 20000 page views. Can you generate this much traffic? Choose the right topic and you should be able to. Choose multiple topics and create multiple channels (websites, blogs etc) and you should be able to exceed this easily. When you have a fix on the ones that are performing you can then concentrate your efforts on these.

REMEMBER these are example figures, what you achieve will be different depending on how you go about it.

HOW EASY IS IT?

It is not difficult if you have a little bit of HTML type knowledge. Give it a go.

COST:

GOOGLE ADSENSE is free to join.

ADVANTAGES:

Once set up your Google ADSENSE ads will keep on earning you rewards until you take them away. Remember RESIDUAL income!

GOOGLE ADSENSE is a reliable way to monetise your content.

DISADVANTAGES:

DO NOT be tempted to click your own ads to generate a little extra. Google are extremely clever, how do you think they got to where they are? If you click your own ads GOOGLE WILL recognise this and your account WILL be terminated and you will struggle to get a new one. If you use GOOGLE ANALYTICS you will see just how much information GOOGLE are able to collect on the clicks to your content, and this is only what they show you. So once again DO NOT CLICK your own ads.

PAYMENT is only made when the payment threshold is met. This is currently $100 so if your click rate is a bit slow you could be waiting a while.

Who doesn't know about EBAY? There are thousands of people making good money on EBAY everyday. However remember that there are a lot more who only make a tiny amount. The difference? It comes back to the amount of effort you are prepared to put in.

The successful EBAYers are the ones who run it like a business. After all at the end of the day that is what it is. Most have an EBAY SHOP. This allows many, many, products to be offered up for sale in an online shop.

If you want to sell stuff on EBAY be sure to check out the costs before you dip your toe too deep. IF you are selling low cost items, your profit will be severely dented by EBAY charging their insertion fee and then the commission on the sale. If you then use PAYPAL (another EBAY Company) you will also have to pay PAYPAL a charge for their service. This leaves very little change out of a low selling price.

Many EBAYers will make a little bit 'extra' on the postage charge. However when you take into account the cost of packing and then the time taken to take the item to the post office or other courier, the potential to make good money starts to dwindle.

Many people, however, do make a good living out of EBAY. This is usually to supplement an existing business or as a little sideline to their regular employment.

If you want to make good money on EBAY be prepared to put in a lot of work and think carefully about what you want to sell on the site.