Make Money From Home

Trivago is an excellent travel web-site and internet community. It is however different to other similar web-sites in that they publish the amount of revenue that they have received (from the sale of accommodation via booking partners etc.) during the month, and how much of it you are entitled to. 50% of the money is given back to the web-site contributors and your total number of shares and the resulting estimated payment can be accessed from your account at any time.

Trivago issue shares for each activity you perform for them (at time of writing 1500 shares was worth approximately £1.00 or $1.50):

Add a photo to an attraction (about 75 shares)

Rate other peoples' photos (2 shares)

Rate an hotel or attraction review (2 shares)

Add hotels, attractions and external links to other reviews (about 600, 150 and 250 shares)

General web-site administration

As you gain more experience and more shares, your job title will change as you get promoted up the ranks and you will gain extra operations that you are allowed to perform and earn money for. The number of shares you earn during the month determines how much of the earned income will be received by you.

There is no fixed number of shares for writing a review or adding a photo etc. and the number depends on it's quality, but could it could be up to about 100 shares for a photo and a lot more for a review or attraction, although rating a photo or review gets you fixed number of 2 shares.

In a typical month you would require about 1500 shares to make £1 (i.e. more than 1000 shares for $1) so 20 photos or about 4 brief hotel reviews could gain you £1, but you would need to rate 750 photos or reviews for the same amount.

This is a good way of making money, it's fun and if you have a lot of digital photos easily uploadable to the web-site it could even pay a reasonable hourly rate. It can take a while to reach the minimum payout threshold.

Minimum payout Euro 25 approximately £20 or $30

Helium.com is an internet writing community. The emphasis is on enjoying writing good quality articles, getting them published and read. You can read and write articles on a wide variety of subjects and rate other peoples' work.

Here are a few examples written by me:

Rio de Janeiro: A Travel Diary

Classic Car Review: Ferrari 308 GTS

Car Review: Jaguar XJ12

Car Review: Jaguar XKR

Brazil Vacation

Savings and Investment Article

Bangkok (during a military coup)

Tiger Safari in India

Marrakech Morocco

Vacation in Cuba

African Safari: Namibia

Safari in Botswana: Okavango Delta and Chobe National Park

Investing in National Savings Premium Bonds

How to Reduce Risk of Your Investment Portfolio

Investing in Corporate Bonds

For reasonable earnings you will need to write a lot of articles, but they then stay there gaining royalties and you don't need to do anything (apart from rate a few other articles every 90 days to remain eligible for payment). The higher the quality, the more you earn. This initially will not make a huge amount of money for each article, but the revenue will build up and there is also a "Market Place" where you can compete to write articles for other publications for much larger amounts of money (e.g. a few hundred dollars, if you win the contract) You can also enter you writing for regular competitions.

Summary

A writing community, that allows you to publish your work and get paid small royalties in return, depending on the rating and popularity of your work. The emphasis is on writing quality.

See my separate article about creative writing for money

Minimum payout $25 (approximately £18)

dooyoo.co.uk is a U.K. price comparison web-site that pays you to write reviews. These can be product or holiday destination reviews, general discussions. If the review you want to write doesn't exist in the database you can request it to be added, which usually takes a few days.

The amount of payment for a review is very good: £0.50 straight away for a review over 150 words long and then pennies for each reading of the review, which can add up over time, although most of the reads will occur in the first few days after publication. If you get awarded a "Crown" you will receive more money (£1.50) Writing a good review could earn several pounds. When you have accumulated £50 you can request a cheque (or £10 for an Amazon voucher)

The £0.50 payment for an article does promote the writing of short articles of not much more than 150 words, but longer, well written articles are more likely to receive the extra bonus "Crown" payment. Being a part of the community and reading and rating the other reviews also will result in more people reading your reviews and therefore more money. Reading, rating or writing comments on other reviews, does not gain you any money, but if you rate someone's review they will probably rate one of your reviews, gaining you a small fee (1.5 pence)

Summary

A friendly internet community and product review site, with reasonable payment for writing. Typical earnings might be £1 to more than £5 per review depending on quality and length of the review and how much you participate in the community. An example of possible earnings below:

Example

500 word review which takes 30 minutes to write and submit, receives 60 member ratings, for each of which you read and rate a review written by the rater, half of which you leave a comment. This could take a minimum time of 2 hours or significantly more if you really read their reviews, for which you will receive between £1.40 and £2.90 depending on type of review and whether you receive a crown. So if you really participate in the community you may receive less than £1.00 per hour.

If you write ten 150 word reviews per hour and ignore the people who rate them, you won't get many ratings and no crowns, but could make more than £5 per hour. You will probably also be thrown off the site or at least be branded a "churner"

Typical earnings: approx. £1 to more than £5 per review

Payment per hour (min/max): less than £0.50 upto £5.00 (maybe)

Minimum payout £50 cheque (or £10 Amazon vouchers)

There are two main ways to make money from you own web-site or blog: use it to sell your products or services; or attract traffic to your site, on which you have sold advertising space (e.g. adverts from companies such as googleAds) The second method sounds too good to be true; just knock up a quick web-site or blog, put some cool stuff on it and wait for the visitors to click on the adverts. Usually you will get paid either per click or per thousand page-impressions. i.e. the more traffic the more money you get.

GoogleAds is the biggest player in this advertising market, but there are several other companies doing similar services, but none of them (that I have found so far) are interested in small web-sites. You need a lot of traffic before they will consider you as an advertiser, so you need to do a lot of web-site marketing either through social networking or by paying someone to promote your web-site.

Some famous bloggers make a fortune from their own web-sites. If you create a good web-site with excellent content and market it well so that you have thousands of hits a day you could give up your job and just watch the money roll in.

The alternative, of course is to put the content that you would have put on your own web-site, on to a Squidoo "lens" or "Hubpages" equivalent. This has the advantage that you will probably get far more traffic than you would from your own web-site although you could of course do both and use Squidoo to promote traffic to your other web-sites and blogs.

Ciao.co.uk is a price comparison web-site that pays you to write reviews (there is also a US based equivalent: Ciao.com). The reviews are on a wide range of topics including product and holiday destination reviews, general discussions or even politics and personal finance. If there review you want to write doesn't exist in the database you can request it to be added. The amount of payment is a bit vague, but does depend on the quality of writing and the rating received by other members of the community.

Payouts for this site are initially fairly low, in general unless you write a very high quality review, which gets rated by many other people. If however you are awarded a "diamond" you will receive an extra £15 prize there are also monthly bonuses and awards added depending on quality and number of visits to your reviews. Ciao is as much about the internet community than making money. Unlike dooyoo, detailed above, you will not make reasonable money by writing lots of quick 150-word reviews.

Summary

A good friendly internet community, with relatively low initial payout, that builds up if you persevere. There are some very good writers here, who are presumably not doing it just for the money, but consistently good quality writing could potentially make you as much money as writing for dooyoo

Payment per hour (min/max): less than £0.50 upto £5.00 (including time spent rating other people's work)

Minimum payout £5

I have actually made slightly more with Ciao, per review (mostly long, 1000 word travel reviews) than with dooyoo, but many people in the dooyoo think that ciao pays significantly less.

OnePoll.com is a survey site that usually pays just 10p or 15p for a survey, but they are really short, usually taking less than 5 minutes, which means quite a good rate of pay (about minimum wage at least, if your quick at clicking) and if you wait a few days, then log in there could be several short surveys to take.

Summary

OnePoll pays a good hourly rate, but for only a few very short surveys a week.

Payment per hour (estimated maximum): £5.00
($8.00)

Minimum payout: £40.00 (which could take months to achieve)
($60.00)

Ciao-Surveys.co.uk, which used to be part of the ciao.co.uk price comparison site, regularly emails with new surveys to complete, which pay anything from 10p to several pounds. Sometimes the 10p ones are a lot of work for not much money (e.g. 20 minutes) but some are quite well paid, so it is best to be selective about which ones you do. The more highly paid surveys can take a long time before you actually get paid, because they may collect data for several months, before actually paying out.

The first part of some surveys is just a test to see if you are eligible, and you may be rejected for a reasonable proportion, but if you fail you will be entered into a prize draw.

Summary

There are some reasonably well-paid surveys available from www.ciao-surveys.co.uk, but for best rate of pay be selective about which ones you choose.

Payment per hour (min/max): £0.30 / £5.00
($0.60 to $10.00)

Valued Opinions.co.uk is another good survey site with some excellent payouts of typically £1.00 or more for a 15 minute survey. The review invitations are fairly frequent and often the review can be done more quickly than the quoted time.

Payment per hour (typical): £4.00
($8.00)

More Survey Web-Sites Here..."

Global Opinions Panel haven't sent me many surveys and so far I have only accumulated a very small amout of money, but the rate, per hour looks like it will be good compared to some of the other survey sites. I shall update once I have more significant data.

More Survey Web-Sites Here...

Global Test Market Is another good survey site that has invited me to do quite a few well paid surveys. The surveys are paid in "points" where one point is $0.05 and a survey may pay 35 to 100 points on completion or 5 point if you don't qualify. This is probably the best survey site I have tried.

Payment per hour (min/max): $8.00 / $10.00

Minimum payout: 1000 points = $50.00

More Survey Web-Sites Here...

Home of Research is yet another good survey site, similar to many of the others and my points are adding up fairly quickly. There have been fewer surveys than from some of the other sites, but each is reasonably well paid (typically £1.00 or £1.50 for about 15 work) I have now received a couple of payments from them, which were handled quickly and easily, so I can certainly recommend joining this web-site in addition to some some of the others.

Saving the best till last. I discovered Its Your View more recently than some of the other sites and it seems to be the best survey site so far. The survey invitations don't come along very often, but when they do the payments are very good: typically about £1 for each 5 minutes of your time:

Payment per Hour: £12.00 (about $20)

Giving up a well-paid job to try to make more money from interacting with web-sites, may be a risky thing to do, and the amount of payment from a web-site doesn't need to be too high, because you are in competition with people of all ages around the world, many of whom would actually do the "work" for nothing, or are doing it at the same time as doing something else. e.g. these sites are popular with stay-at-home mums and people at work, during their lunch-breaks etc. so even achieving minimum-wage is quite hard, unless you really are working for the site or taking a risk, such as share or commodity trading.

From the methods described in this article, the best guaranteed payment, per hour of time actually logged into the various sites, comes from some of the survey sites. Generally this is rarely much more than minimum wage (e.g about £5 per hour in the U.K) although avoiding low-paying surveys improves returns and with practice they can be completed more quickly than the specified amount of time.

Writing and publishing on an internet community and review sites can result in reasonable payments per hour of writing, if you discount the time spent reviewing other peoples' work and interacting with the community, which is more time consuming than the writing; if you enjoy the community aspect these can be a good way to earn some extra money and have some fun, but including the time spent reading and reviewing other peoples' work they pay a very low hourly rate.

If you want to make big money on the internet then you either need some money to invest and you need to take some risk (see the articles in the next section) My compromise, is I trade shares, bonds and commodities (gold coins) over the internet and spend most of my time monitoring the markets, but simultaneously, during the breaks and when the markets have no obvious direction, I make a bit of extra cash from these other methods.

I also can be found at the following locations under the name of

AndyPo:

Tagfoot username AndyPo
Stumbleupon
Lensroll
Squidom
Squoogle username AndyPo
Isle of Squid
Squidoo Review
Delicious
Digg (AndrewPo)

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