Best ways to make money online and
offline for Students
No-risk matched betting
Hands down the quickest way to make a lot of money (well, without breaking the law). Lots of students have genuinely made £100s from this technique. It’s completely legal, risk free, tax free, and anyone can do it.It works by taking advantage of free bets regularly offered by betting sites (such as PaddyPower.com) through ‘matching’ them at the betting exchange Betfair.com. Matched betting eliminates the risk (you are betting both for and against a certain outcome).
This leaves you being able to squeeze out the free bet, which can be as much as £200! Multiply this by how many betting sites there are and you can quite easily come away with a profit of a few hundred pounds.
Owen walks you through how to make your first £15 profit (using a real life example) in this gem of a guide to matched betting. If you know of any better way to make £30/hr sitting at home, please let us know!
Online surveys
For a few minutes of form filling, you can make a couple of quid which is paid as cash or in rewards. You can make up to £3 for some surveys!
A few good ones to try are: Toluna, Pinecone, Vivatic, The OpinionPanel, MySurvey, Valued Opinions, SurveyBods, Global Test Market, Hiving, PanelBase, Harris Poll, iPoll, YouGov, New Vista.
Also sign up for Swagbucks.com which rewards you for surveys as well as simply surfing the web, watching videos and playing games.
Paid for searching the web
Interested in earning cash for doing what you already do online? This has to be one of the easiest methods of making money online without really any effort or change in your behavior.This innovative idea by Qmee.com rewards you for searching in Google, Bing or Yahoo. You just install a simple add-on to your browser and when you conduct a search there may be a few sponsored results alongside your normal search.
Each Qmee result has a cash reward attached – if you are interested in it simply click on it and collect your reward.
The best thing is there is no minimum to cashout – for instance we just wired 72p to our Paypal account. You also have the option to donate it to charity.
Social Investment Networks
The historically hard-to-break world of investing in stock markets and currencies has been cracked wide open. Today there is no need to be a fat cat or fund the yachts of Wolf of Wall Street style stock brokers. You can do it all yourself with the help of free online market trading platforms.Having spent many hours researching this new opportunity, I’ve been experimenting with eToro.com which has over 300m users worldwide. It was recently featured in the BBC 2 documentary “Traders Millions by the Minute” and the Financial Times.
One of the best things on eToro is the CopyTrader feature. This lets you literally see, follow and copy the investments of other top performing traders. There’s also lots of training material and videos to help you out, and it’s free to create an account and use.
Start trading with a reasonable deposit and learn the ropes slowly. I think $200 is a good amount to get the most out of the learning curve by trying out a few different markets. If nothing else you’ll learn a great deal about various investments and industries.
So far I’m up 28% on my initial deposit of $200, but of course it can be volatile and you can lose money, so don’t throw your life savings into it!
Mobile phone recycling
You can get some good money and help the environment by recycling mobile phones with certain companies listed on the comparison tool. Most phones are shipped off to Asia to be dismantled and we know of at least one student who received a £120 cheque in return.
‘Get Paid To’ sites
Similar to making money from online surveys, GPT sites reward you in cash and vouchers for completing various offers or activities online.
The most popular sites today are Toluna, Swagbucks.com, Bank of Offers, InboxPounds and PaidOffers.
Exciting update! We’ll soon be launching our own GPT service for our readers. Invites will be limited and UK only, please join our mailing list if you’re interested in hearing once it’s live:
The ‘Disney Vault’ secret
To keep demand high across generations, Disney Studios carefully restrict the supply of some home release classics. They are locked away in the ‘vault’ for 8-10 years before being released for a short unspecified time.Buy them in this window at normal retail price and you can turn a nice profit when they go off sale for another decade or so.
For example, in 2011 you could buy Beauty and the Beast on Blu-ray 3D for just £24.99. In just a couple of years it’s now on Amazon for a staggering £74.99!
Importantly, not all Disney releases are subject to the vault and only the true most popular classics will maintain such demand.
Right now there are just 2 titles out of the vault which I would recommend snapping up. They are Bambi Diamond Edition Blu-ray for just £13.50 and Cinderella Diamond Edition Blu-ray for £14.
Start your own website
And of course there are lots of stories out there about successful students who have started a site while at university, or even bought a domain name and later sold it for 1000s.
In fact, Save the Student is one such example of a website started at university by Owen Burek in his first year, which has since grown into a full-time and successful enterprise.
Read Owen’s 4-step guide to setting up a website if you’re interested in finding out more. It’s really not that difficult to get started and there are plenty of opportunities to make money online.
Write and publish a Kindle eBook
And the Kindle app is now available on almost any device (laptops, iPads, smartphones and yes, Kindles) so your global market is huge!
List your book for £1.49 – £6.99 and you earn 70% of the sale. Considering Amazon is the ultimate selling machine (and remember people are looking to spend), that is a fantastic deal.
The key to success with eBooks is to create value, and write non-fiction. Simply bundling information you have researched and complied on a common problem (eg. ‘secrets’ to finding a job) and then presenting it in an easy to digest format (an eBook) justifies someone spending a few quid on it.
Another big tip is to have a great cover designed so it stands out, and once your book is live on the Kindle store (approval takes less than 48 hours) it’s really important to get some reviews so it shows up higher in results. Encourage readers to leave an honest review at the end of your book.
The best thing about this lucrative idea is that once you’ve invested the time (say 20 hours), you’ll earn a passive income for years to come! For a step-by-step guide to publishing and earning with eBooks, see “How to write a nonfiction eBook in 21 days“.
Affiliate marketing
If
you’ve got a good presence on social media or perhaps you even have a blog or website,
you can start bringing in money immediately by promoting all sorts of
companies, products, services and offers online.
Sign up to an affiliate network such as Affiliate Window, check
their offers blog or browse the merchant listings to find something you think
your friends would be interested in, grab your affiliate link and share it. If
someone buys (can be within up to 90 days) using your link you’ll make a nice
commission.To take it a step further, set up a website (read our guide) or a topical Facebook page and invite all your friends to join it and post your affiliate offers on there.
