Ask For Donations

Assuming you have a website providing a valuable service to your visitors, why not ask for donations to help fund it? Hosting is not always cheap, especially if your site is popular and you have to buy more bandwidth to support the traffic.

Paypal could well be the answer, which serves another purpose other than being the main buying and selling medium for eBay. By upgrading your free PayPal account to the Business/Premier version, you can generate a chunk of code for a donations button which is pasted directly into your site.

Earn Revenue from Your Website or Blog with Google Adsense

If it’s a bit of cash on the side you need during the tough times – or any time – consider becoming an affiliate using Google Adsense. An affiliate is the middleman between internet surfers (potential customers) and the merchants (sellers) plugging products and services online. 

A large percentage of businesses now advertise and sell online which is fantastic, but conversely, fuels the dilemma of saturation and overcrowding – just where should you go to shop on the internet? If you were to go back several years and take a look at online advertising methods, you’d see that large banner adverts and obtrusive pop-ups advertising cars or bingo, for example, appeared on totally unrelated sites, meaning sales success rates were hit and miss. Whereas now, a car advert will appear on a car enthusiast’s blog, or a bingo offer is shown on a gambling website, increasing the chances of attracting clicks and sales from interested surfers.

Work From Home as an Internet Assessor

A popular question I’ve seen on many forums is whether legitimate opportunities to work from home via the internet exist. In a word, yes, such jobs do exist but there are only a few I know of that aren’t scams and are definitely worthwhile.

For a couple of months I held the position of “Internet assessor/quality rater” with a company called LionBridge Technologies who are contracted by a well known search engine to carry out various tasks. 

Since all search engines are based on algorithms and keyword filtering, real people are often drafted in order to manually check, configure, optimise and analyse data.

Make Money Through Cashback Shopping Sites

Cashback shopping sites fall into an advertising loophole scenario where you, the customer, are rewarded for signing up to products and services without actually spending money. It is possible to make a few hundred pounds a year this way or even more depending on what you do. The general ideas outlined in this article apply to most cashback sites, and hopefully will help you gain some understanding. It's up to you who you sign up with. I personally suggest signing up with all of them, keeping a log of all usernames and passwords. You can then decide which cashback site you prefer as you begin using them.

Sell Your Art

Quite simply, if there's an ounce of creativity within you, make the most of it and sell your work. I’m talking about painting, drawing, sculpture, design, photography, or anything else you have in mind which you think could be lucrative.

Craft fairs, markets, car boot sales and of course the internet are all great places to sell and get known. The art market will always exist, and on a global scale you can more or less name your price as there’s always someone prepared to pay it.

Creating something of global appeal is a good idea if you plan to advertise to the whole world through the ‘net. For example, a piece of quirky abstract art might actually sell better than a flawless landscape of the town you live in because certain subject matter will just cross the international aesthetic barrier.


We’ve all heard of eBay, but what about specialist sites where the traffic exists specifically to buy art? ImageKind sells prints, canvases, greeting cards and does much on your behalf, such as printing and production as well as taking care of shipping costs. All you have to do is upload your digital files. This is perfect if you have created a 2D piece of art and have photographed/scanned it, as it is the equivalent of doing the work once and being paid many times over.

Another site is ETSY, which specializes more in crafts and 3D objects – great for anyone with a cottage industry inclination but all in $U.S. at the moment. Currency conversion is coming soon.

One thing to note is that most “shop” style sites will have a commission structure in place and will always take their cut. If you’re especially confident in selling by yourself you can always set up your own site and a shopping cart system but you'll need to be prepared to do some serious work. For this reason, I would first recommend taking the "ready made" shop approach as there already exists a community of artists and the traffic for the site is already established.

Setting up Myspace and Facebook accounts to drive viral traffic to your artist profile(s) is a good idea. You can reach hundreds of thousands of potential customers by displaying water marked samples and photographs of your work on a social networking page with a link to wherever your art can be purchased. Get creative and get your work online. It won’t cost you anything to set up these art profiles, and even if no one buys anything, nothing’s been lost.

Useful links

ImageKind
Caters for prints, canvases, custom framing and greeting cards. Just upload your images at the desired size.
ETSY Crafts, ornaments, objects etc. Shipping and packaging is your responsibility however.
eBay You may be pleasantly surprised with bid wars over a piece of artwork, especially if its an original.