Are you looking to make money in your spare time, without having to do too much or in some cases, anything at all? That probably sounds a little too good to be true for most of us, but the world of the internet offers many opportunities to make money through very little effort.
From the straightforward of being paid to fill out a survey to writing your own eBook to entering the world of cryptocurrencies, there are all kinds of ways you can be making money from spending time simply on the internet.
Here are six of the best of them.
Fill out online surveys
Research companies are always on the lookout for new members to answer surveys and test new products. For your troubles, they will often pay you anything up to $5 for what can amount to five minutes of work.
Get paid to click
Similar to the online surveys, paid to click sites will offer you cash and vouchers in exchange for completing various offers or activities online.
Write an eBook
If you’ve ever dreamed of becoming a published author, then now you can. Anyone can publish their eBook on the Amazon Kindle store, and with the Kindle app available on virtually every device in the world, your global market is huge. You can set the price you charge for people to download your book and earn 70% of the sale. Take ‘The Martian’ for example – it was originally a self-published eBook by Andy Weir which was eventually bought by a major publishing company and then turned into an Oscar-nominated picture starring Matt Damon.
Review books and music for money
If you think writing a book might be beyond you, then you can get paid for reading them instead. There are several sites out there that will send you books from unpublished authors to read for free in exchange for a review. The revenue for writing these reviews at first is small, but it can grow to anything up to $100 a month if you read enough of them. A similar service also exists for new music if that is more your thing.
Start mining bitcoin
Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last year, you’ll have heard of Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that has exploded in value over the last year. To get your hands on Bitcoins, you’ll need to install some custom mining hardware, get a Bitcoin wallet, secure your wallet, download a mining programme, run the programme, keep an eye on the temperature of your computer (it takes a lot of power to mine Bitcoin) and finally, check your profitability. You can start mining Bitcoin cheaply with cloud mining discounts.
Stockpile Disney Movies
To keep demand high across generations, Disney Studios “rations” the release of its classic films in what is dubbed ‘The Disney Vault’. They’ll lock away special editions of the likes of The Lion King, Bambi, and Aladdin for anywhere between five and ten years at a time, and then release new copies onto the market for an unspecified period. If you snap up copies of these movies during that period, then you can then sell them on during the years Disney has them under “lockdown” as their scarcity drives the price up. In 2011, you could buy Beauty and the Beast for $25 online – a few years later once it was back in the vault, it was selling for $75!