As families continue to dig themselves out of the rubble of the economic collapse, many students find themselves in the tough position of having to work a job while maintaining full-time status at school. If you're one of these students, you're facing the seemingly impossible task of juggling your classes with a full or part time job.
Fortunately, the Internet has made it possible for many people to earn money online. No longer is "working at home" synonymous with multi-level marketing schemes and other dubious money-making endeavors. Most work that you can get paid for online is work that you do as an independent contractor. While working for yourself has its own drawbacks, it does allow you to create your own work schedule, a major plus for students. Here is a sample of some of the jobs that you can find online:
Freelance writing
If you enjoy writing there are plenty of online opportunities to make money online using your writing skills. The type of writing most commonly sought after online is article marketing. Article marketing involves writing non-promotional pieces closely related to the marketer's target niche. For instance, a dog trainer selling her services may need articles written not only on dog training, but also on dog care, dogs in general, and different breeds of dog. Like any opportunity, you want to be weary of scams. While experience is always valued, you can get started as a freelance writer with none whatsoever. You can either advertise your services on online classifieds sites like Craigslist or you can go to any one of the sites on the Web where people and companies post listings for freelance writers. Some websites that feature freelance writing jobs are:- Textbroker.com
- Elance.com
- ODesk.com
- Write.com
- Freelancer.com
- BidHire.com
Crowd Sourcing
In the last few years a new style of hiring people to do work has arisen. It's based on the theory that a business can divide up some of the smaller tasks that can't be automated and hire people to complete those tasks on a per diem basis. Workers can accept as many tasks as they like, work out of their homes, and set their own hours. The downside of crowd sourcing is that in most instances, the per diem rate paid for each task is very small, usually on the order of a few cents. However, you're able to do as many tasks in one sitting as you want and if you're fast enough, it can add up to a substantial hourly rate. Examples of crowd sourced tasks are tagging images, proofreading ad copy or online descriptions of merchandise, or filling out short forms. Some crowd sourcing companies are:- Amazon mTurk
- CrowdFlower.com
- CloudCrowd.com
Blogs/AdSense
Another way you can make money as a college student is to start up a professional blog. The way you make money from a blog is to monetize it with AdSense advertising as well as advertising from other sources. You'll start your blog around an idea of interest and create content about that general topic. Once you have enough good content and some visitors, you can put your ads up. How you get visitors is beyond the scope of this article, but having good content is the starting point. AdSense pays you for every click generated by the ads on your blog. The ads are topic sensitive and the more highly related the ads are to your blog content, the better chance you have of people clicking them. You do have to apply to AdSense and be approved before you can run the ads, but it's not hard to do. You can also run different kinds of ads on your blog and it's recommended that you do. You can advertise space on your blog for image and text ads and there are other companies, similar to AdSense where you can apply. Some good forums to learn about blogging for money are:- Digitalpoint.com
- Warriorforum.com
- Google AdSense
- Chitika
- AdBrite
