Easiest Online Money

Recently, because of changes in my life I decided to explore working at home.I came across and awesome website that listed real work at home jobs - a kind of craigslist of at home employmet. That site led me to a blog, and in the blog the author mentioned how easy it was to make money on hubpages. After looking at more online jobs and realizing that I was a poor candidate for any of them, I decided to explore the idea of blogging for money.

I signed up on Hubpages and published my first hub, Crisis Intervention, based on my experiences as a psychiatric crisis worker. I published hubs on the Winter Holidays, which is a passion for me. I wrote a hub about a Writing Group I was in, and finally I started writing hubs about Asperger's. Within a few days my score had soared to 93, and I was hooked. I didn't even care about the money. However, by this time it had become obvious that if I were to make even pocket change, I would need more sources of income. So, with nothing more than my ability to surf the internet for hours at a time, I set out in search of venues.

There were some mistakes, like signing up for a service selling PLR - private label rights articles. I also took a chance on a site that paid nothing, but had a contest to pay $10,000 to the most popular blog. I also explored a lot of places that promised to pay money for everyone referred to their site, or promised that I would be making thousands of dollars if I bought their proven sales creating product. I also saw an awesome number of sites that promised to help me market my product successfully.

My only product is my writing, at this point. I don't know if my colloquial knowlede of things will suffice. But I decided to keep it simple and try a few sites at a time, sites that focused on writing as the product. Here is what I found: a few sites that seem reputable and easy to use. 

Thevideosense pays from adsense clicks, but it does something other sites don't do - the site owner works to drive traffic to the site! You can click on your account and see right away how popular your videos are, and how many clicks you've gotten. Although you can't tell where the traffic comes from, you can see how much there is and also look at others' videos to see what is popular. It is a bit like a pyramid scheme in that the most money comes from referring others to the site. On the other hand, you can use it to collect all your favorite videos in one place and get paid for it at the same time!

Today.com pays you a dollar a day for each day that you post to your blog. You are supposed to post daily and when you reach $50 you get paid. However, after 30 days they evaluate your blog and you might get paid even more! I haven't figured out how to see if I have any hits at all. I am using this site to write an autobiography - again, I am doing something I want to do and getting paid for it. By the time I make my first $50, I will have posted over 10,000 words. So I am also training myself in the discipline of writing and making deadlines and getting paid for that too!

This is probably as far as I am willing to go in terms of effort. It is easy and therapeutic for me to write either researched or colloquial articles. However, I am likely one of the world's worst entrepeuneur's - I can't even spell it! But what that means is that I need sites that make it easy for me to earn money by just writing. For this, I am testing a few different venues:

HubPages was the first site I discovered. The benefit of this site is that I don't have to be a great social networker to get traffic to my hubs. I am not able to go hunting on social networking sites for friends to add me. The site is also search engine friendly - I get lots of hits from both Google and Yahoo. Unfortunately, this site is blocked at my job because of the adult content here. So on my lunch break and if I have free moments, I write and save my articles on a jump drive and load them when I get home. But it's hard waiting until I get home to see how my hubs are doing! 

Another site I discovered was Squidoo - it has a similar structure to HubPages with some  important differences - they are more established, they allow you to put your revenue straight to charity and they have several different venues for commenting - one is for debating issues. I like that idea because I am committed to creating hubs that are popular without drama. Debating an idea gets people's blood running and interest stays high. Another nice thing about Squidoo is that they have a content filter that filters out adult content, thus I can access it from my job where adult content is blocked. 

Finally, I am working on Knol - Google's answer to Hubpages - it is a brand new community and literally just launched - the started in November. You can be sure that with a giant like Google backing the project, it isn't going to be closed down. The other benefit of Knol is that you get all the revenue from the Adsense clicks. I can access this one from work too.

Needless to say, these aren't a lot of sites and I won't be buying a house with the income. So I welcome more ideas and connections! Please comment! Share your secrets to success!