ECG challenge: Can you earn money online?

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Since we’re a few months into the semester, a lot of college girls (myself included!) would love a way to boost their money situation a little. I’ve recently been hearing from friends and magazines about earning online, and although I’m sceptical, I’ve decided that I might as well give it a go since it’s essentially free money.

The only thing we have to lose is time, but we might earn at least enough to pay for a night out! I’ll be using the sites below, for now at least, as they’re the ones I’ve heard the most about, and I’ve done a little research on them all.

Site name: Microworkers
Type of site: “Micro jobs” – get paid to complete tasks
Minimum payout: $9 (starting bonus $1)
Payment dates: Place a withdrawal request whenever you want, it will be processed within 30 days maximum

Tell me more: Microworkers is a site on which individuals/companies can request tasks they want people to complete – anything from leaving a review, answering a question on yahoo answers, leaving a comment, clicking on an advert or posting about their site/project. You select individual tasks you want to complete, and once you’ve completed it they credit your account with the money. Once you reach $9 or more, you can request a withdrawal. They’ll need to send you a pin via snail mail first though, so I’d request that as soon as possible!

Site name: Mylot
Type of site: Paid to post
Minimum payout: $10
Payment dates: 15^th of every month

Tell me more: Mylot is a discussion site, which pays you for participation. For every conversation you start, or respond to, they’ll pay you. After hitting a certain number of posts, you can also upload photos, for which you’ll be paid. The pay is pretty poor – something like up to 3 cents per comment (and a mystery amount for photos), but you also earn bonuses for using the search engine, or completing tasks. I think this site maybe has the most earning potential for me, because it’s very very easy, just time consuming.

Site name: Helium
Type of site: Writing site
Minimum payout: $25
Payment dates: 15^th of every month, last day of every month

Tell me more: Helium is an article writing site, which pays you using the earnings from adverts they place on your article pages. You can search for titles they’ve suggested, and write based on those, or you can submit a title of your choice and write whatever you like. Articles do have to be a minimum of 400 words though.

Site name: Triond
Type of site: Writing site
Minimum payout: $0.50
Payment dates: 15^th of every month

Tell me more: Triond is another article writing site, where you can write about anything you like. This makes it seem more flexible than helium, but it does say you can’t post articles that are written anywhere else online – i.e. you can’t post a recipe that you’ve already posted on a blog. Triond pays you using their advert earnings, the same as Helium, and so far as I can see, there doesn’t seem to be a minimum length for articles.

Site name: Unique Rewards
Type of site: Multiple opportunity site
Minimum payout: $20 (starting bonus $5)
Payment dates: The Monday after requesting a withdrawal

Tell me more: Unique rewards has a number of different ways you can earn money – filling out surveys, using the cashback shopping section, using the cash offers section (which mostly seems to involve things like signing up for competitions and mailing lists) and the ‘click cash’ section, where you get paid for clicking adverts. They also apparently pay you to read junk emails “Open the email and click on the message to be directed to the advertiser’s website. You’ll earn cash just for confirming that you’ve read the email ($0.01) and you can earn even more cash when you complete the offer from the advertiser! This will be between $.25 cents and $50.00+, depending upon that particular offer”

What do you think?

Do any of you have experience with trying to earn money online? Will you be joining me on the challenge to earn some shopping money? If you have any online earning experience with other websites, feel free to share them below!