How to make money on the internet

CASH FOR QUESTIONS
YouGov (www.yougov.com/uk/panel), the pollster, pays 50p-£1 for every survey. Ciao!, the shopping advice portal, pays £1-£5 for each questionnaire and payments are made by bank transfer after £5 has been earned. If you are a Ciao! The web is festooned with sites that promise the moon on a stick if you complete surveys or browse a website.

The Market Research Society – the trade body for UK market research companies – enables you to check whether a firm conforms to its code of practice at www.rbg.org.uk. If you don’t want to restrict yourself to UK firms, the pan-European equivalent is Esomar (directory.esomar.org). To check a US-based market researcher visit www.casro.org.

RECLAIM MONEY

Close to £1 billion is in dormant bank, building society or National Savings accounts that people have forgotten about or omitted from a will, according to the new MyLostAccount service ( www.mylostaccount.org.uk).

This site aims to reunite these accounts with their owners. Determined to reclaim excessive bank or credit-card charges? The crusading MoneySavingExpert.com has a regularly updated guide at here. Due to a recent Competition Commission ruling, consumers can claw back chunks of cash, plus interest – up to £24,000 says a recent Times Online feature.

MOONLIGHTING

The smartly designed Elance ( www.elance.com) enables you to pitch your skills for various freelance gigs. Workers and employers are both rated on the site. Some Elancers have earned hundreds of thousands of pounds.

For something less formal, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk ( www.mturk.com) will pay all-comers to take on tasks that computers can’t handle. Your expertise may be better rewarded by About.com ( beaguide.about.com), which pays people hundreds of pounds a month to become “guides” on their specialist subjects.

Part-time expert geeks or moonlighting mechanics who want to let prospective customers check availability or reserve appointments online should flit over to www.mybookingcalendar.com.

MAKE YOUR PASSION PAY

If you run an amateur website (or blog) on, say, local town history or beauty treatments why not turn this passion into cash? WordPress ( wordpress.com), its rival, is slightly more complex but free.
Your blog provider should provide instructions on setup – see Typepad’s step-by-step video at here.

If you blog about products readers may want to buy, Pricerunner, the price comparison engine, can show the cost of these items on your site. If a visitor clicks through to a Pricerunner advertiser, it will pay you 10p-33p a pop . An alternative here is Kelkoo’s TradeDoubler
Join Google’s AdSense and it will search your webpages and show relevant test-based ads alongside, say, your paean to vintage toasters. If the readers click, you get paid.

If you can swallow your pride, Blogsvertise ( www.blogsvertise.com) will slip you up to £12 for each favourable 100-word mention of one of its clients. Tempted?

The obvious destination for sales is eBay but serious sellers should separate themselves from the throng by creating an eBay shop using the free tools at here.

The Mr Site Takeaway Website provides everything you need – a .com web address, simple design software and a secure payments service – in one box. Many website hosting services such as 1&1 (www.1and1.co.uk) provide free tools for quickly designing a classy web store – and then you can even link it to eBay.