Five Ways I Make an Extra £1000 A Month Online

Every writer needs a side earning, these are the best sources I have found

Unless you’re extraordinarily lucky, to survive as a writer you need to have side incomes. Luckily the online world is a great place to make a side income, and if you’re willing to put the work in there is good money to be made. With sites like Fiverr, Onlyfans, Medium itself, and much more there are endless options.

But the thing is to make money on most of these platforms you need to have a big following and a lot of what people want to buy. That means you need other people, whether that be through buying your content, reading your content, employing you, whatever.

These options are ones where you don’t need other people to make money. That means no marketing, no need for a following, no nothing. You just need yourself.

Surveys

Earnings potential: £50 to £150+ a month

I have been doing online surveys for years and though the pay rate is not great they are very simple to do, and if you’re willing to be consistent it is possible to make between a decent monthly income from them.

The one with the best pay rate I have come across is Prolific. They pay sometimes upwards of £10 an hour for surveys. However, you have to be on the ball if you want to do any of their surveys as they come and go so fast that it is easy to never get the chance to fill in even a single one.

For sites that offer surveys with a little bit more frequency, two decent UK-based ones are Panelbase and Surveybods. The pay rate — if you include the inevitable timeouts (where you start a survey, but they kick you out because they decide you are not eligible) — is around £4 an hour. Not bad for a survey site.

YouGov is another decent UK-based one. The pay rate is only around £3 an hour here, but if you like politics and contributing to the public perception of politics the surveys are interesting to do.

Note: If you’re not UK-based, simply Google “best paying online survey sites” and you should be able to find the best options for your jurisdiction.

Testing websites

Earnings potential: £100 to £200+ a month

In the online world, a rather unique way of making money is by testing websites. The best option for doing this in my view is User Testing. You get paid on average between $4 and $10 for each website you test, and the tests normally take between five and twenty minutes making for a pretty brilliant hourly pay rate.

To sign up you need to have a good microphone and have the capability of downloading their recording software. You also need to speak good and clear English. To prove you have these capabilities, before being allowed to make money you will have to do a trial test of a website.

It’s not difficult to pass just remember to speak clearly and properly follow the instructions. Also, make certain you do a little bit of research about what it is that User Testing expects from you.

Note: if you’re really good at the review process — and are willing to put in the time — it’s possible to make a lot of money testing websites, even a full income.

Matched betting

Earnings potential: £100 to £1000+ a month

If you live in a jurisdiction that allows online gambling, there is a high probability that you will be able to do matched betting.

Matched betting entails taking advantage of the free bet offers that bookies put out there. Basically, let’s say a bookie offers you a £10 free bet. By using a betting exchange — through methods of arbitrage — you can use that free bet to guarantee yourself a £7 or £8 profit.

Just to be clear here that means matched betting is not gambling. I would never recommend gambling of any sort as a means of making money. But matched betting is not gambling and despite it being frowned upon by the bookies it is also legal, it is just the bookies do not want you to do it.

Why would they, they want you to lose money with them not turn their free bet offerings into hard cash. This is why the moment they realise you are doing it you will get banned by the bookie you are doing with it.

Fortunately, there are a lot of bookies out there. Meaning so long as you understand how to do it and don’t take liberties with the bookies you can make very good money doing this.

A great option for learning about matched betting is Odds Monkey. Just be careful if you choose to explore this route, as do remember that the premise of matched betting is taking advantage of the fact that the bookies are trying to turn you into a gambler. So matched betting is only profitable so long as the bookies fail to achieve their goal.

Note: though this is not gambling there is risk involved, so if you’re not good with numbers and you don’t understand betting exchanges and you are not tech-savvy this is definitely to be avoided. But if you are all of the latter it can be highly profitable.

Stock photography

Earnings potential: £50 to £100+ a month

So long as you are willing to learn how to properly frame a picture and get the focus and exposure right, you can make money doing stock photography. All you need is a decent camera, that does not need to be a DSLR, most modern phones have cameras that create good enough quality pictures for them to be accepted by a lot of stock photography websites.

For example, iStock and Shutterstock accept photos from phone cameras, the former being perhaps the easiest to sign up to of all stock photography websites, the latter perhaps being the slightly better payer.

In terms of what type of pictures to take. If you live somewhere where there are a good number of local landmarks, taking pictures of those landmarks would be a good place to start. But the best bet is simply seeing what type of pictures that the site you wish to post the pictures to are looking for.

Note: if you are willing to put in a lot of time and effort you can make decent money from stock photography.

Cashback websites

Earnings potential: £100 to £200+ a year

If you do a lot of shopping online, it is amazing how much money you can save by using cashback sites. I frequently save hundreds of pounds a year using sites such as Quidco and Topcashback — UK based cashback sites.

Meaning cashback sites are not only a great way to save money on purchases, but they are also a great way to save up money. Due to the fact it takes time to receive the cashback, by the end of the year it is possible to have built up a decent amount. So I treat this almost like a Christmas bonus.

Note: If you are not based in the UK simply Google “top cashback sites” and if there are any in your jurisdiction you will find them.

That’s all from me, thanks for reading!

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