How to Make Money As a College Student

So, you want to learn how to make money as a student? Well, you are not necessarily need to work part time outside the college. There are lots of opportunities that you can find online to make extra income right from our computer. Being a full time online entrepreneur, I can tell that there are tonnes of opportunities that you can make online. Below, I listed some of legitimate opportunities online:

Becoming a freelancer. For a student, I think it would be best if you start as a freelancer. You don’t need to learn extra marketing skills or selling something. All you need is to implement whatever skills that you learned at college online. There are lots of websites where you can post your services for free and get paid. Here’s a step-by-step system on how to do it.

1. Find out what your specialty is. Usually, people are looking for English writing skills, translation, web and graphic design, Adobe photoshop.
2. Post your services to websites like Craiglist, Elance, or forum like Digitalpoint. For start, don’t charge your customers too high. If not, people might don’t hire you and find someone else.
3. Browse also websites related to freelance services to find if anyone interested in hiring you. My suggestions are Guru, Elance, Rent-A-Corder. Search at Google for keyword “freelance services”, “freelance job online”, freelance programmers”.
4. Usually people want to see example of your work as well. Therefore, I recommend that you provide the sample once you get a client.
5. Provide a payment processor. Usually, people would pay using PayPal. You need a debit card and create a free PayPal account.

Becoming an affiliate marketer. Affiliate marketing, in my opinion is still the best way to start an online business. I am an affiliate myself and I don’t think I would switch to other business model. The job of an affiliate is to sell other people’s products. Think about it as an agent for certain companies. No need to create product on your own. Lots of affiliate programs are free to join. These are the benefits:

• You can test one market, understand your online potential customers carefully by selling other’s products first.
• You can implement and getting used to common marketing practices before start selling your own product soon.
• No need to handle payment processors, create your own affiliate programs and create convincing a sales copy.
• In most cases, all affiliate programs are free to join.
• Once you understand the methods, you have the ability to sell products to anyone on the web.

However, for student who looks for extra income, selling as an affiliate might not suitable for you. Although it seems simple, but actually there are lots of things to learn before you start making steady income online. In the mean time, you need to concentrate on your studies as well. Which is why, if you have certain skills, I strongly recommend that you start with freelancer above. Otherwise, you have no choice but to jump into affiliate marketing. There are thousands of affiliate programs all over the internet. These are the common ones. Enter the network’s name in Google for more information:

• Commission Junction. Want to sell a digital camera, printer, video camera? Register as a Commission Junction affiliate and you’ll be able to sell thousands of products from giants like Dell, Yahoo, eBay and Sony.
• Amazon Associates. This is another popular network for marketers. Amazon marketplace not only consist of books, but also electronic, gifts, jewelry and hard goods. There are lots of tools that you can use, like Amazon Astore, and widgets.
• Clickbank. By becoming a Clickbank affiliate, you are allowed to sell thousands of eBooks and digital products worldwide. What makes Clickbank so special is that commissions are paid up to 75% to affiliates. That’s right. If you do it correctly, you could be richer than the product owner himself. Plus, information products like eBook is a great market on the internet, since people browse the web to look for information.
• Paydotcom. Same concept as Clickbank, however, payments are paid via Paypal account. No need to wait months for cash.

One way to market products as an affiliate is by using article marketing. Write a product review, or tips and then post to article websites like EzineArticles or eHow.

Becoming AdSense publisher. For affiliate marketing, you’ll get paid only when customers made purchases. However, for AdSense publisher, you make money when your visitors click on your ads link. No purchase needed. There are lots of companies provide such programs these days and the famous one is known as Google AdSense. This program is from Big G itself, with lots of advertisers and ads matching to your website content. Of course, you cannot click on your own ads, or ask someone to click it, including your visitors. You need to put your ads in such position that your visitors would click it on his own. The payment for each clicks is not as much as from every affiliate sales you made. Again, one way to make lots of money from Google AdSense is by using article websites, like Hubpages. You can easily get visitors and clicks by posting articles to Hubpages. However, your AdSense revenue will be shared with Hubpages itself.

Personally, making money from Google AdSense is not my favorite. For one thing, is that the revenue is not as much as affiliate marketing above. Plus, getting traffic to an AdSense website is no different than getting traffic to an affiliate website. You work hard to get every single traffic, so why do you want to get paid a few cents for one click? Isn’t it worth the effort if you get paid up to $20 for every sale?

Selling at eBay. If you have something that is no longer needed, why not sell at eBay? For example like your old printer, digital camera, cell phones, laptops. Such items are hot selling at eBay marketplace. The key to success at eBay is to build credibility. The more people trust you, the more customers you’ll get. However, unlike affiliate programs above, you need to provide your own hard good products and payment processor.

Some advices and suggestion

I have been online for so long that I can tell what really works and what isn’t. Let me make your path clear by giving you advice from experienced:

1. Be careful of make money scams. From my experience, other than money making models above and selling your own products, lots of money making models are scams. This includes data entry jobs, get paid to click, get paid to read emails, autosurf, paid surveys.
2. Be careful of traffic scams. This is another popular scam. Some companies might claim they would send thousands of traffic to your website for a price. Too bad, the traffic is untargeted – either from non-buyer people or robots.
3. Be careful of product scam. Like the old saying : “If one thing sounds too good to be true, it usually is”. There are lots of eBook products claim that their system guarantee to make you rich, easy money, make money on auto-pilot, but finally all you get is just some basic information with crappy software. I have bought such products times before and I don’t want you to follow my mistakes.
4. Don’t start by promoting make money online products. This one is a killer. Make money online niche, could be profitable, but also competitive. Plus, the demand is not as high as any other niches. You could be taking long to start making money by promoting such products, compared to others.
5. Don’t fall into MLM and pyramid schemes. There are lots of online and offline MLM companies these days. While some of them are legit, to be frank with you, it is not easy to get a downline. This is my experience as a former MLMer. If you still want to try MLM, you need to consider a few things. First, the product price. If it is too high, over $100, forget it. Second, the product demand. Make sure the company that you joined sell high demand products which people would buy at least once per month. If something that is in low demand, it would be hard to market the products. Third, try offline MLM only, from reputable companies. It’s not easy to find online MLM that really pays.
6. Stick to just one model until you already see good result. Make money online, just like everything else, requires learning and effort. If you keep switching from one model to another, in the end, you’ll get nothing. Just stick to one model, if it didn’t work, learn what’s your mistakes and improve. No one would ever get good result in the first attempt.
7. Study comes first and make money second. While making money online could be profitable, that doesn’t mean you need to ignore your study at all. Plan your time wisely between your classes and online business. In my opinion, it would be best if you spend at most 2 hours per day for making money online.

Author: Mohd Azlan Bin Ab Rahman
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Digital TV, HDTV, Satellite TV

Tags: affiliate, Amazon, becoming a freelancer, english writing skills, free paypal account, Marketing, Online