Five Ways for Teens to Make Money during Summer 2014

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Summer is a great time of the year for kids all over the US. Most students in those districts that have not gone over to year-round schooling get to take nearly three months away from book learning. Summer is a great time for teens to go to the local pool, golf course, tennis court, or mall. Of course, all of these things take money. It is not too early to start thinking about ways to make money this coming summer.

The question then comes about, who should pay? Many parents have enough to fund their kids’ fun during the summer, but with aftereffects of the Great Recession, many families have budgets that are quite tight. There are several ways for teens to make money to pay for their fun and (hopefully) save some money for college, a car, or a home. Here are just five ideas for teens to make money in the summer of 2014

1. Sign up for a GPT Site or Two

There are many sites up online that will allow any American over 13 to fill out surveys and watch videos to make money online. Most jobs require an employee to be at least 16 or to have parental permission if 14 or 15. These sites can let younger students start to get an entrepreneurial start.

A couple of the more common GPT sites are CashCrate and Treasure Trooper. Both have a long history of paying literally millions to users. Of course, most people will only earn about $50 or $100 per month if they work at these sites, but they pay without having to go out and work for someone else. They can also be used in free time in conjunction with another job.

You can sign up for CashCrate here. I have a more extensive review of the site here, as well to show how easy it is to make money on CashCrate. You can also sign up for Treasure Trooper here. I have reviewed Treasure Trooper here. Join the blog to get updates.

Also, there is a relatively new site that works much like a social media site that pays. The site is Bubblews. The site pays when users get views, likes, comments and shares on their posts. I have already cashed out for $25.60 and reviewed Bubblews here.

2. Sign up for SwagBucks

One final way to earn money (or at least gift cards) is by signing up for SwagBucks. This site is open to anyone who is at least 13 years old. Users can perform tasks like searching the web through the site and earn virtual currency known as SwagBucks, which can then be used to purchase a number of items including gift cards or actual cash in a PayPal account.

Gift card redemption options are at great retailers and restaurants. Among the leading options are Amazon.com and WalMart. e-Gift cards from the latter can be used in the stores, so they are just as good as cash. Also, there are options to redeem a few SwagBucks for discounts at local attractions like golf courses. I have a more lengthy review of SwagBucks here. For the month of July 2013, use the code “earnmoney70″ in the box that says I have a code to earn 70 additional SwagBucks when signing up. Those who earn 100 for the month in addition to any bonuses will be entered in a drawing for a free $100 e-gift card.

3. Get a Part-time Job

This recommendation can sometime be easier said than done. Many businesses have cut back on the traditional summer hires. What are some good part-time opportunities for students? Many local retail outlets or fast food restaurants might be in the process of hiring for summer.

Those who like to play golf or swim might be able to land a job at one of their favorite places of all. These establishments are frequently seasonal, so they hire specifically during the summer. Those with a full-time job are not likely to apply, so students have a great opportunity to land their first paying gig.

4. Start a Business

One of the best ways to make money doing something you like is by starting a business. High school students can start summer jobs and make decent money in the process. Cutting grass and babysitting are two great methods for teens to make money during the summer. Many of the kids who need babysitting only need it during summer months. Make sure to charge the going rate and do a good job so that you can get repeat business.

5. Sell Lightly Worn Toys or Games

Online businesses like Amazon and eBay allow just about anyone to set up an account and sell items to the world. Most teenagers have no need for the toys that they had in their earlier years. People also start to like different types of video games as they get older. It is very easy to set up an account on an online dealer like Amazon or eBay with a parent and sell these items. While you will not get the full retail price, you can get some money that can go to something more desirable for a teenager.

Get Started Now in Planning to Make Money during the Summer of 2014

There are tons of ways for teens to make money during the summer. Some of the options allow people to actually make money in pajamas without leaving home. Some of the opportunities listed above are seasonal. Others, like CashCrate, Treasure Trooper, and SwagBucks can earn some money year-round. The sooner one signs up, the more quickly they can start to earn money.

Hubpages gets a sign

Source: Hubpages blog

EDIT! - It is only fair to point out that this site has suffered somewhat in the recent Google algorithm changes and the information here - although true at the time of publication - probably no longer applies. Sorry - that ship has sailed. :(

Useful resources to learn how to make money online

Blogging tools
How to set up a blog what tools will you need to make it a success? If you are serious about making money blogging, there are a number of tools that are indispensable, a few tools that are nice
How to make money blogging
A step by step guide to making money blogging If I have been asked the question, how on earth do you make money blogging ? once, I have been asked it a thousand times. There is an awful lot of
Link Building Software
Great list of link building tools to promote your website.

Best and Easy Way to Make Money on the Internet?

You think I am kidding when I say that opening a hubpages account is the best and easiest way of making money online? But I am not. In this article I am going to explain why, share how much money I make here, and - more importantly - show you several ways how you can make money online with hubpages. Before you go any further though - it will take work. I have no magic bullet, but I can - and will - show you several different ways of making a living with a hubpages account.

I see an awful lot of people arrive here, open an account, write a couple of articles and immediately hit the forum to start whining about the fact that they are not making any money. They assume that because they are not making money by the fifth day that it is not possible to make money here. Apart from religious people sharing the word of god and political people attacking whichever party they think is stealing their freedoms - this is probably the most- often raised subject on the hubpages' forums.

As to the first two - they are easy questions to answer. There is no god and all political parties steal your freedoms - that is how they make their living - Robin Hood in reverse if you like. How to make reasonable money online is a far tougher question. And to the question every one seems to ask when considering hubpages is - how much money can I make? I cannot tell you that exactly, but what I can do is tell you how much money I make here and point you at several methods you may want to try for yourself.

Hubpages 2010

Every year, I do a hub about my year on hubpages. This is last years if you are interested - 2009 on hubpages. This year I decided to include it in this one and enter the hubpages "Personal Finance," competition - this is the last day to publish and this is my only entry.

First bit of free advice - use the hubpages competitions and "hubmobs" as ideas for subjects to write about. They pick the subjects carefully with an eye to the bottom line and the community aspect tends to bump your page views up instantly. Use their knowledge - hubpages know what they are doing so I recommend taking their advice when they suggest subjects to write about.

Stats for 2010

Statistic	Totals
Page Views 2010	1,968,008
Total page views	3,436,777
Hubpages Income 2010	$27,831
Most viewed hub total page views	522,314
Least viewed hub total page views	26
Most comments on a single hub	676

So, there you have it - money-wise, just short of 2 million page views - for me - equals almost $28,000 and most of that was in the latter half of the year. I assume hubpages made a proportionate amount of money, and if you check my last year's stats, you will see I have doubled my income over 2009. I plan on more than doing that this year also.

I don't know where you live, but here in Europe, the tax man cometh, and fully 50% of my income goes to pay the Government Inc to pay the Central banks to pay the bankers to buy luxury condos in London, and yachts that sit in Monaco harbor all year long - and that is not including sales taxes. So this figure becomes a lot less impressive when you take taxes into account and the fact that a gallon of fuel now costs around $7.50. I don't know where the breaking point is, but my only option at the moment is to make more money to appease the hungry tax man. We have seen riots or political unrest in Greece, Ireland, the UK, France, Algeria and Germany, so I see this getting worse, not better and I am too old to go throwing bricks at the police. Even if I thought it would do any good - which I don't.

Anyway - enough of that negativity. To the meat of the matter. How to make money from the internet using a hubpages account and why I think this is the easiest way of making money on the internet. There are several different ways to make money online with hubpages and I am going to suggest two basic models. I genuinely think that a hubpages account is the easiest way to make money online. Especially if you are just starting out. Understand this first - Hubpages take 40% of the page impressions that your pages make, which means they take 40% of the income (give or take.).

Trust me - this is absolutely worth it from your perspective. You will waste at least 40% of your time trying to do the technical things hubpages takes care of automatically and the site's authority means you will get your pages ranked far quicker than your own site's pages (there are a few exceptions). I took a good look at hubpages business model before investing a great deal of time here and I trust they are here to stay and are making money - all to the good. They get rid of the crap and the spam and - odd as this may sound - I am impressed that they invested in a sign on the building they inhabit, because it means they are in it for the long haul - and so am I. Sure - there are risks: the tax man may make it impractical to do business online, Google might go broke, hubpages might sell themselves, the internet could collapse under the mountains of garbage being dumped into it, or any number of other disasters, but - for the foreseeable future - I think this is a safe bet.

Resources

Amazon Removes Colorado Affiliates and Why
Be aware of this if you live in the USA and are considering using Amazon to make money.
Write on HubPages and earn!
Sign up for a hubpages account here
HubMob Weekly Topic
HubMob Weekly Topics are announced here
Official HubPages Announcements Forum on HubPages
HubPages FAQ

Making Money on Hubpages Model 1

I call this the Nike model - just do it.

Seriously - get your head down, write about a wide variety of subjects and be prolific. There is money in just about every subject under the sun and you are bound to hit some profitable ones, especially if you take my advice and use the hubpages' suggestion tools and enter as many hubpages competitions as you can

But - you need to be prolific. I mean very prolific. Write a bare minimum of 3, 500-800 word articles a day - day in, day out for the next 6 months - 5 a day if you can. Add them all to groups using the groups tool so they are linked together, add at least 1 photo and be mindful of the ones that absolutely do not work - and by not work, I mean generate no traffic and make no money. Lose the ego - some things you try will not work. It is genuinely hard to turn some subjects into 800 words, (simple recipes for example) but this is the target I would set. Don't shoot yourself if you only hit 650 words.

By the end of the 6 months you will have 500-800 articles and some of them will be making money. Take a week off (you will need it) and spend it looking through your articles to determine the ones that are making money for you. To determine which ones are making money you will need a google analytics account, a google adsense account (you will link these 2 accounts together to tell you which pages are making you money) and probably an Amazon affiliates account. You can find how to do this in the hubpages FAQ which I have added a link to here. You can sign up through your hubpages account to all of these if you do not already have them, but by far the most-used income source is adsense. Adsense is also the safest. The reason being that the tax man cometh in the USA as well - and he is looking for sales taxes on Internet orders, which means Amazon is under threat and some states have already enacted laws which mean Amazon has been forced to eject affiliates from their program. The google adsense earning model is not currently threatened by this - and google has a lot of clout.

Then spend the next 6 months writing 3-5 articles a day on the subjects that are working for you. This is a simple approach that requires nothing other than you having some knowledge to share - that is all. If you can type - you can do this and you will earn money. What are you waiting for?

I would guesstimate that you will make somewhere around $18,000 in your second year - assuming you can string a sentence together, are able to determine which subjects work for your style of writing and are prepared to be prolific. I make this guesstimate based on the fact that this was the approach I took when I first started and I know how much money I was making from writing around a third of this many articles on basically random subjects in my first year. You will continue making money from them if you have chosen "evergreen," subjects that will not go out of date. A meatloaf recipe will still be a meatloaf recipe in 10 years time whereas a political analysis of a current event will go past it's sell-by date very quickly.

Making Money on Hubpages Model 2

The "Considered," approach.

This model requires a different approach. Instead of the Nike scatter gun "Just do it," model, this one requires some forethought, relies on properly researching high value or high traffic potential (or both) subjects in order to develop a search engine optimization strategy, producing well thought out articles targeting specific keywords and subsequent promotion of those articles. It takes longer to produce the content and does not come with the immediate satisfaction of producing lots of work, but - should earn you more money in the long run. There are three components to this model.

Keyword research to determine the subjects you will write about and the specific keywords you will target in your articles.
Properly researched content which is factually accurate, useful and targets the keywords you have chosen.
Promotion of those articles using a variety of approaches also targeting your chosen niche and keywords.

Step 1 - Keyword Research and Keyword Analysis

This is the most challenging part of the process as far as I am concerned. Beginners will get lost in a morass of possibilities and lose sight of the goal - which is to find the most profitable niche and keywords which it is possible to rank for in the search engines. I am not going to teach you how to do this in this article - it is far too large a subject, but I am going to suggest a keyword tool that will do the heavy lifting for you, supplied by a company that will teach you how to use it as well. This is my current favorite keyword research tool, and I have used quite a few of them.

Market Samurai Keyword Tool

Market Samurai takes a few minutes to download and install and is free for a trial period which is long enough for you to learn how it works and use it to start finding niches and keywords that you then target with good quality content. Seriously - good content is vital. You must research not only the keywords you are going to target, but the subject itself in order to provide value. I am not going to do a huge Market Samurai review - the proof of the pudding is in the eating which you can do by using the free trial.

Once you have downloaded it and the trial is over - you are almost certainly going to want to buy it. It is not expensive either. The full price is $149 - but there is usually an offer to buy when you download the free one that saves you money - I suggest you take it. Market Samurai is a fantastic keyword analyzer which will provide you with a substantial keyword list which you can then base your search engine optimization strategy on. Probably the most cost effective keyword software I have used so far. You start with one top keyword and it provides up to 800 semantically related words to analyze. This is their sales video. Watch it - then go download the free version and try it out.

Step 2 - Content

I meant what I said about providing useful content. No matter the subject - do some in-depth research and answer questions people are asking. You will find many of the questions during the keyword phase - now you need to answer them.

So - let's say you have decided to write an article entitled "How to Crochet Underwear." When a visitor comes to your web page - show them how to crochet underwear. Use photos, embed some videos, link to other resources, add some Amazon capsules with crochet materials for sale in - go to town - write an authority page on the subject. I go into more detail about exactly what should be on the page here - how I got my hub on google's front page, but I use the hubpages' flagship hub guidelines:

A minimum of 1500 words, of your own, purely original writing
A minimum of 3 relevant video capsules (YouTube or Google)
A minimum of 5 relevant non-copyrighted images
At least 10 relevant, helpful links to other sources, each with your own 30-50 word description
A news capsule (or highly-relevant RSS feed), or eBay Capsule if your topic is product-related
15 relevant tags, including 2-3 common misspellings or spelling variants (if any)
Maximum 150 word succinct description of the utility of your Flagship Hub in the Summary Text (uncheck the Calculate Summary Automatically box)
Excellent thematic and aesthetic organization

Coincidentally - that hub is my most-commented on hub and I am changing my tune a little after learning more about how to research and promote a hubpage. This is an example of a page created to these guidelines:

Example of a Hub Written to These Standards

Top Ten Best American Recipes and Food
This is my salute to the good ol U.S. of A. food wise. American foods have a reputation as being junk foods. This is simply not true - some companies may have turned them into junk food, but the...

Step 3 - Promotion

How to go about promoting your hubpages is a contentious issue. I used to think it was un-necessary - and in some cases - it is un-necessary. That collection of American recipes for example has had almost no promotion. I added I think one link from my personal blog and linked to it from a few of my hubpages and that is all. It has had over 72,000 views and now gets more than 150 visitors a day.

But - if you pick subjects which are higher paying than recipes - you are going to discover, unless you do fantastic keyword research and find high paying subjects that do not have a lot of publisher competition (The "Holy Grail" of Keyword Research) that you cannot get visitors to the page without doing some promotion - and by promotion I mean building links to your pages, sending emails to your friends that you have written a new page, submitting your links to social bookmarking sites, and article marketing. Article marketing is simply writing articles related to your page and submitting them to article directories with a link to your site. I go into more detail about how to do these things in these articles, so I am not going to go into great detail here, but I will say you need to not cross the line into spam.

No Spam Please

Leaving spurious comments that do nothing to add to a discussion on some one else's page is spam. Using automatic software to leave comments on blogs is spam. In fact - the less work involved - the more likely it is to be spam. If you are not adding value, be it by writing an interesting comment on some one else's article or submitting an interesting article to ezine or answering a question on Yahoo answers - or something similar to these - Don't do it!

But - reasonable promotion is fine. Add a link from your personal blog, send your Mum an email asking her to come read your page, leave a comment telling me how clever I am on one of my pages and add a link, write a few articles at ezine articles linking to your page - whatever - just add value when you do it.

To Promote or Not?

This is an example I want to share. I wrote two hubpages following my own guidelines. This one is 2,800 words long and this is the traffic history for the last 30 months since I wrote it.I did almost no promotional work for this hub - I added a few links soon after writing it and left it to fend for itself. As you can see - after quite a reasonable length of time the traffic is not coming in droves. Why not? When my recipe hub gets thousands of visitors? Easy - This subject has a lot more money in it and a lot more strong competition than the recipe one has.

Traffic for 30 months

A few months later, I wrote another article on the same subject - a little longer - this one is actually 4,000 words long. Once again, following my guidelines. Not appreciably any better than the first one, and covering much the same ground. The two articles have exactly the same title, similar tags, and the URLs are one letter different.

But - this one I promoted. I left comments on other people's blogs and added a link to this hub. I wrote articles and submitted them to article directories with a link to this page, I shared this page on my social bookmarking accounts - I did all the promotion I could without being a spammer. I linked to it from lots of my other hub pages and articles I wrote at other sites, but I only linked to it when it was appropriate to do so. This is the traffic for 18 months in.

As you can see - substantially different results and substantially more traffic. Plus this is the start of the traffic growth phase which usually lasts 2 years or so. I expect this hub to continue growing in traffic volumes and probably hit around 500 visitors a day when it peaks out. Generally - hubpages take some time to mature and reach peak traffic - 3 years to peak, in fact, according to Paul Deeds. I concur and expect this one to peak in another 18 months or so. This is why I stick to evergreen subjects mostly, and Market Samurai will help you to find them. I plan to be making money for many years with most of my work here.

Conclusions

By no means are these the only two ways to make money with a hubpages account, but for a beginner or relative novice - both will work well. The first way satisfies the writer's ego, but the second way is likely to produce more income. I personally now do a combination approach because that is what works for me, but I suggest taking one or other of these approaches to start with and then adapting it as you see what is working.

I have tried many other ways of making money on the Internet and I am not suggesting that you should not try any other ways - I have several different sources of income myself - but if you want the easiest way to make money online - these two are good starts.

I have given more than enough information for you to get started, but if you need a holding hand you can contact me through my profile page and I will personally walk you through all the steps required, whichever model you choose. I can guarantee you will be making reasonable money by month 3, decent money by month 6 and a reasonable income in the second year - But I don't work for free.

Have a great 2011 and good luck when your tax man cometh.

make easy money online using the internet

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Home Based Business Ideas You Can Start Today