Make Money Online (Without Spending a Dime)

Making money online used to pretty much require you to have your own Web site, products to sell and some marketing savvy. But a new generation of dot-coms have arisen that will pay you for what you know and who you know without you having to be a web designer or a marketing genius.

But it's hard to tell hype from the real deal. I did a search on "make money online" and "making money online", and much of the information out there is just promoting various infoproducts, mostly about Internet marketing. I see why people sometimes ask, "Is anyone making money online besides Internet marketing experts?"

So I put together a list of business opportunities with legitimate companies that:

* Pay cash, not just points towards rewards or a chance to win money
* Don't require you to have your own Web domain or your own products
* Don't involve any hard-selling
* Aren't just promoting more Internet marketing
* Give a good return on your time investment

In the interest of objectivity, none of the links below are affiliate links, and none of them have paid or provided any other consideration for their presence here. These are legitimate companies with business models that allow you to get paid for a wide range of activities.

Help friends find better jobs.

Sites like ReferEarns, Zyoin, Who Do You Know For Dough?, Bohire and WiseStepp connect employers with prospective employees, many of whom are already employed and not actively job-hunting, via networking - the people who know these qualified candidates. Rewards for referring a candidate who gets hired range from $50 on up to several thousand dollars - not chump change. If you know a lot of job-seekers (and who doesn't these days?), this is a great way to break into the recruiting business with no overhead.

Connect suppliers with buyers.

Referral fees are a common practice in business, but they haven't been used much in online networking sites because there was no way to track them. Sites like Salesconx, InnerSell and uRefer now provide that. Vendors set the referral fees they're willing to pay (and for what), and when the transaction happens, you get paid. uRefer also allows merchants to set up referral programs for introductions and meetings, as well as transactions.

Write.

A growing number of sites will pay for your articles or blog posts. Associated Content and Helium will "pay for performance" based on page views for just about anything you want to write about. Articles on specific topics they're looking for can earn direct payments up to about $200. The rates are probably low for established writers, but if you're trying to break into the field and have time on your hands, they're a great way to start. Also, a lot of companies are looking for part-time bloggers. They may pay per post or on a steady contract. Our Weblogs Guide posts blogging jobs weekly in the forum.

Start your own blog.

You don't have to have your own Web site, or install blogging software, or even figure out how to set up the advertising. At Blogger you can set up a blog for free in less than five minutes without knowing a thing about web design, and Blogger even automates setting up Google AdSense so you can make money off your blog by displaying ads and getting paid when people click on the ads. To make even more money from it, set up an affiliate program (see below) for books, music, etc., and insert your affiliate links whenever you refer to those items. You'll have to get a lot of traffic to become a six-figure blogger, but pick an interesting topic, write well, tell all your friends, and you're off to a good start.

Related: Monetizing Your Blog

Create topical resource hubs.

Are you an expert on a particular niche topic? Can you put together an overview of the topic and assemble some of the best resources on the topic from around the web? Then you can create topical hubs and get paid through sites like Squidoo, HugPages and Google Knol. Payments are based on a combination of ad revenue and affiliate fees. You'll get higher rates doing it on your own, but these sites have a built-in supply of traffic and tools to make content creation easier.

Advertise other people's products.

If you already have a Web site or a blog, look for vendors that offer related but non-competing products and see if they have an affiliate program. Stick to familiar products and brands - they're easier to sell. To promote those products:

* Place simple text or graphical ads in appropriate places on your site
* Include links to purchase products you review or recommend in a blog, discussion forum or mailing list you control
* Create a dedicated sales page or Web site to promote a particular product

They all work - it just depends on how much time you have to spend on it and your level of expertise with Web design and marketing.

Related: How to Really Make Money on the Internet With an Amazon.com Affiliate Site

Microstock photography.

You don't have to be a professional photographer to sell your photos for money. People are constantly in need of stock photography for websites, presentations, brochures and so on, and are willing to pay for the right image. People generally search for images on stock photography sites by keywords, not by photographer, so you have the same chance as anyone else of having your image picked. Just be careful that you don't have images of trademarked brands, copyrighted art or people's faces that are readily identifiable (unless you have a model release), but just about anything else is fair game, and I promise - you'd be amazed what people need pictures of, so don't make any assumptions. If it's a decent photo, upload it. Some sites to get you started include Fotolia, ShutterStock, Dreamstime and iStockphoto. The great thing about this is that it's truly "set it and forget it".

The above list is by no means comprehensive, but it highlights some of the new and interesting ways to make money online without investing any money, without having a product of your own, and without having expert sales and marketing skills. Most of all, unlike taking surveys or getting paid to read e-mail, the potential return on your time investment is substantial.

How To Make Money Online

Fifteen billion smackers: That's the value Microsoft recently slapped on Facebook when the computer giant invested $240 million for a 1.6% stake in Mark Zuckerberg's online social-networking site.

You could seethe with envy--or you could chase your own fortune on the Web.

Some online businesses require only a few hundred dollars in equipment, while others demand significant hardware and perhaps even a warehouse. Some might make you rich; others might just cover beer money. And all involve various levels of time, capital and technological skill.

In Pictures: Eight Ways To Make Money Online

"Some people have dreamed about owning their own business and have not followed through because of the investment in resources," says Jim Griffith, head of eBay University, for those aiming to set up shop selling goods at the online auctioneer's site. "The Internet allows people to at least try without making a large initial investment."

Army veteran Brandi Ramos of Springfield, Ill., did it. As a single mom in need of extra income, she started her online retail career peddling "big and tall" men's clothing on eBay.

Three years later, Ramos, 32, makes a good living working online out of her 600-square-foot basement packed with hanging displays and baker's racks piled with tupperware containing underwear and belts. Ramos aims to offer quick service, answering all e-mails within four to six hours. She claims to net $25,000 on $100,000 sales a year, and even earns a few bucks per order on shipping.

If managing inventory seems too big a chore, play virtual landlord and charge other retailers monthly fees (or per-transaction fees) for the opportunity to market their products on your site. Amazon.com (nasdaq: AMZN - news - people ) nabbed 28% of its revenues this way in 2006.

Craigslist is another take on this model: The 25-person company, worth a reported $2 billion, charges businesses to post help wanted ads in San Francisco, New York and L.A.; it also collects fees for apartment listings in New York City. Total page views per month: about 5 billion.

Then there's every pajama-clad blogger's dream: producing content supported by advertising dollars. Selling advertising is how thousands of established online media outlets pay their electric bills. They charge advertisers two ways: by the number of overall Web pages (called "impressions") served up, and by the number of people who click on the ads.

Setting up a blog requires not much more than a basic publishing program, a server and software to track ad clicks. The hard part, though, is attracting enough eyeballs to make it worth someone's while to pay to advertise on your site.

To have any prayer of attracting large advertisers, sites need to attract at least 500,000 unique visitors per month, says David Hauslaib, publisher of Jossip.com, a media and gossip blog that counts Coca Cola (nyse: KO - news - people ) and Sketchers among its advertisers. Sadly, even if you do generate enough traffic, the "click-through" rates on ads tend to be quite low--in the neighborhood of one half of 1%.

Subscription-based models are even harder to crack. Unless your site fulfills an urgent need (for tangible investment ideas, a potential mate, etc.), users aren't likely to pay for the content.

One way to garner subscription revenue is to run a virtual marketplace. These sites collect by allowing buyers and sellers easy access to each other. Many of these marketplaces flamed out in the dot-com bust, but some persist. Mfg.com, for instance, matches equipment manufacturers with smaller component suppliers. Dating sites like Match.com charge subscription fees for access to their members. And H2Bid.com links municipalities with wastewater-equipment vendors.

As with tangible real estate, you can buy virtual plots (URL addresses), flip them and make a buck. GoDaddy.com sells unused domain names for under $10 dollars apiece. To attract buyers, run tests to determine how often certain key words are searched so that you can demonstrate the likelihood that your URL will show up in a Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) or Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) search. One tip: The best domain names are short, sweet, specific and easy to remember. (For more on this model, check out "Meet Noah Of The Internet" and "The Most Expensive Web Addresses.")

As Internet usage grows, so too will the sophistication of online business models. Take 3-year-old Yoonew.com, which sells futures contracts on sports tickets.

Fans buy the right to take delivery of tickets if their teams make it to a coveted playoff game, perhaps months away. Given the uncertainty of the bet, those contracts sell for a fraction of the future market value of the underlying tickets. If your team makes it to the big game, you've locked in a cheap seat; if it falls short, you lose that insurance premium.

Yoonew makes money when the revenue it collects from selling all those contracts exceeds the cost of delivering a small number of very expensive tickets on game days. The danger: If ticket prices spike, or there are no seats available, the company could suffer a loss or alienate its customers.

Sure, you can make money online. But no one said it was easy.