Online Jobs to Help Students Earn Some Extra Money
Living the life of a full-time student while you study for your degree (or other higher education qualification) is often said to be the best fun you’ll ever have. You are living independently, usually for the first time, and you are surrounded by your friends while you gain further knowledge about a subject in which you’re really interested.
However, the cost of higher education is increasing all the time, so that even those who can still afford to go to university are likely to find themselves saddled with considerable debts once they graduate. This may be the price you have to pay to earn a qualification which will significantly advance your future career, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if the financial burden didn’t have to be so large?
In that spirit, this article will look at ways in which students can undertake internet-based employment in their free time, allowing them the opportunity to work from home. Students also need the flexibility to choose their own hours to fit in around lectures, tutorials, etc and in order to allow them to ease off around the time assignments are due or revision needs doing. Here then, are a few suggestions for online jobs to help students earn some extra money.
Take part in market research projects and complete surveys online
This is one of the simplest ways to earn some money online and you don’t need any particular skills or qualifications.
Basically, you will sign up with a few different survey websites and give them some general information about yourself. This allows the survey providers to easily identify which people will potentially be most useful to them, for example, if their client was trialling a new line of baby products they would want to seek the opinions of those with young children. Don’t ever feel pressured into giving out any confidential information about yourself, however.
Legitimate companies will not ask for this and therefore if you receive such a request, alarm bells should start ringing. Similarly, no legitimate company will require payment from you in order to sign up, so avoid any that make such a stipulation.
Once you are registered, you will be emailed with links to surveys whenever you fit the profile for a particular market research project. Surveys can vary in length from a few minutes to over half an hour and the detail required in your answers can vary as well. The payment you receive for each one will reflect the time it’s likely to take you to complete.
You will not get a huge amount for any one survey - probably a couple of pounds at the most, but this all accumulates and if you register with a few different survey sites then you’ll maximise your earning potential.
You can often choose to get paid in vouchers which can be used at many major retailers, or you could be paid by bank transfer. If you select the latter option then you probably receive your money in increments of £10, rather than a few pence here and there.
One of the reasons people like completing online surveys is that it allows you to share your opinions on a whole range of different issues, so bright young students might find it’s right up their street!
Be a tutor - via Skype
As a student you may well have a decent amount of knowledge on certain subjects, so why not share that with others and make some money from it at the same time?
You might wish to invite people into your home to be tutored, but with your own varying schedule as well as that of your housemates, this might not be too convenient. Instead, you could harness modern technology and tutor people via Skype.
Before you get started, you’ll need to think about the following things:
- which subject(s) you feel you can teach well enough to enable others to understand them
- whether you are prepared to research current curriculums and methods in order to prepare yourself
- how much you will charge and how you will accept payment for your tutoring (PayPal might be a solution)
- how you will advertise your services - just through word of mouth, or by placing posters in local supermarkets, free papers, etc?
- whether you have access to an appropriate computer with a reliable wifi connection.
Once you have answered all those questions, you’ll be ready to get going.This blog post will help you along the way if you think tutoring is for you.
Creating YouTube videos
This is something that could be fun as well as potentially earning you some money. The most popular videos on YouTube get hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of hits, but you wouldn’t need to attract that many viewers before advertisers started paying you.
One of the trickier aspects of earning money this way is that it can be hard to predict what people will find engaging, so the best advice is to make videos that you enjoy and then promote them - via social media sites, for example - with gusto. You could post spoof videos, clips of your own performances, or even video tutorials on how to do certain things. The world is your oyster!
One thing to bear in mind is your ‘digital footprint’. It’s virtually impossible to completely remove things once you have posted them on the internet, so although it might seem overly cautious just take a moment to consider whether your videos are something that you will want to be associated with for the rest of your life.
Blogging
In a similar vein to creating videos, blogging is a chance for you to express yourself on the internet and there are blogs on literally every subject under the sun - just google the most obscure thing you can think of and you’re bound to find a blog post about it somewhere.
Again, if you feel that blogging would suit you, think about what you would like to write about and go with that. It’s not a certainty that a huge community of others will want to read it, but you definitely won’t attract many followers if you sound fake and disinterested in your subject matter.
Once you are blogging, you can join blogging networks linked to the subjects your blog covers, for example, many parent bloggers belong to tots100.co.uk. These networks will then allow prospective advertisers or PR companies to get in touch with you to offer you money for placing adverts on your site, or reviewing their products, or writing sponsored posts.
Two of the main blogging host sites are Wordpress and Blogger so take a look at those as a starting point and then go from there.
Do some freelance proofreading or copywriting
As students are likely to be in the habit of writing essays with detailed references, quotes, etc., some part-time work based on proofreading or copywriting mightn’t actually be too much of a stretch.
As a proofreader, you will be required to check the documents you are sent thoroughly for any spelling, grammar or common sense inconsistencies and then mark your changes in a certain style. As a copywriter, you will usually be asked to write a certain number of words on a certain topic set by the client, so you need to have a good standard of written English.
The best way to get started with this sort of work is probably to register with some agencies who can point you in the right direction, so check out these links:
For more general information, the National Career Service website site might be useful.
The internet really does offer endless opportunities for making money as long as you are prepared to spend a bit of time of researching and getting yourself set up properly - you could even start something that ends up being more than a summer job and actually influences your career.