Good ways to make a few bucks online

Let me share a great little secret (or maybe not so secret) with you all. There are a number of ways you can make money online through blogging and even via twitter. There are tons more ways but I will talk about the programs that I have experienced with.

Paid blogging. There are a number of different paid blogging websites. For a Canadian like myself, I like signing up for these as they don’t require your SSN number like they do in the USA. Some sites I recommend you stay away from, however a few are really good and pay out on a regular basis and always have opportunities to choose from. I know a lot of people dislike reading blogs where you can tell that they’re not being sincere about a post, or having a paid blog post put up live on a website. If you haven’t noticed already, I have been blogging and getting paid for some posts ever since this spiffykerms.com has been in existence. Often times I earn enough monthly for my biweekly grocery budget. I don’t cash in my earnings into my  bank account, as I like to accumulate it to over $150 so I can withdrawal my funds from PayPal and not hit a service fee (I think it costs $.50 if you withdrawal funds under $149 or something). It’s the best way (for me) to make money online! A lot of paid blogging sites require your blog to be a few months old with an archive of posts in order to qualify for their paid blogging, and also a few advertisers also like to see bought/owned domains (so not freebies like blogspot.com / wordpress.com) websites.

Sponsored Tweeting. Sponsored tweets is a quick way to earn cash. Depending on your followers you can probably earn a lot of money. You can set your own price, but I let the system recommend my price for me and it was $0.95 per post. Often you get advertisers offering a ridiculously low amount say $0.02 per link. You can accept or reject any offer. You can get an e-mail notification when a sponsor has an opportunity for you to tweet a message for their company. Again, sponsored tweets makes you wait until you have earned $50 to cash out. It’s going to take me a while to build that up. But it’s kind of fun really, and it’s free money for me. So I don’t mind the wait. (Follow me on twitter!)

Selling ads on your site. Making money by selling ad spots on your blog is pretty sweet. You can set your own price and  — advertisers first contacted me asking if they could reserve a spot on my website. Honestly, until then I hadn’t thought about putting ads or links on my sidebar. You can do whatever you want really! When the advertiser contacted me, I offered her a package bundle of buying three months instead of paying me monthly for her text advertisement to stay up on my site.  Remember, people aren’t mind readers, if it’s not shown on your website they may not know to ask whether or not you accept paid advertisements on your blog.

I know Google Adsense is another way to earn a few bucks by having their ads coincide with what you blog about on your website. I have yet to figure out how it exactly works. Since my blog isn’t one topic related, I’m not sure that it would be successful on my blog.

Most sites make you wait until you have earned $50.00 to cash out into your PayPal account, which can take a number of frustrating months. Always spell check your posts and check for grammatical errors. Nothing speaks unprofessional like a blog posts with a lot of errors. Ew.

I recommend you sign up for a PayPal account, it’s how most all companies will pay you. It’s free, and very secure. It’s how I buy a lot of things online (like lululemon now accepts paypal, I shop on Etsy and Ebay with my PayPal account all the time). It’s so secure because if your item does not arrive, you can file a dispute claim through PayPal. It has happened to me before with an online store that I bought a hair straightener from! I ended up getting ALL of my money back, because I just threatened the company that I was going to file a dispute with PayPal.

Finally, I’d like to hear what you all think about earning pocket money (or even a fortune, if you’re lucky!) online. Do you unsubscribe from blogs that you know are being paid for a link or review (I never get paid for a review, but I do get paid for links) or do you not mind it and go with the flow? I’d really like to hear your honest opinions!

If you would like more information about what I blogged about today, feel free to ask me in the comments or even e-mail me personally at spiffykerms at gmail dot com