For most college students, nothing tops getting money for free. Unfortunately, aside from cards in the mail or a few pennies on the ground, finding free money is difficult. Or is it? I’ll clue you in on a few services I’ve come across that let you make some cash for doing pretty much nothing. I’ll also point you in the direction of some paid blogging sites – if you blog anyway, why not get paid for it?

Get paid to…

“Get paid to” programs pay you to do fairly simple things like watch ads, take surveys and register on web sites. As far as surveys and site registrations go, there are two pretty popular sites for this.

CashCrate is one I’ve started using in the past few days. I’m already up to $20.15, just from taking a few surveys and registering on some web sites (such as eBay). CashCrate pays you via check, with their minimum payout set at $10. Most surveys and sites I saw hovered between the $0.85-$1.00 range, so reaching $10 is not hard at all.

TreasureTrooper is another one, though I don’t have much experience with it. It looks to have many of the same offers as CashCrate, but with a site design that screams Indiana Jones. From the reviews I’ve read online, the consensus is that it’s a good site. If you try out TreasureTrooper and like it, let me know in the comments.

You can also make some (but not alot of) money looking at ads. AdBux forces you to visit a site for either 3, 10 or 30 seconds and pays you in relation to the time. Three seconds nets you $0.0015 cents, ten gets you $0.005 and thirty gets you $0.01. In my opinion, AdBux isn’t really that worth it – working minimum wage at $7.25/hr, you would have made about $0.06 in a thirty second timespan. If you don’t want a job and have time to watch ads every once in awhile, who knows, it might eventually add up.

Blog for bucks

Thanks to a few companies, you can now say you are paid to blog. There is a snag to this, of course – you will be blogging about products, web sites, etc. and not choosing your own topics. Still, the potential is there to earn some money doing something you love to do anyway – blog!

Blogsvertise is one that I’m registered with. They offer you assignments that usually sit around the $5 mark – all you do is type up your post, publish it and send them the link. If they accept it, you just made some money! Note that some of the categories in Blogsvertise are a bit slim in offers, so you might have to make your money out of what they call “the grab bag”. These assignments are ones no one wanted or ones that expired.

PayPerPost seems to be immensely popular with blog owners. At my last check, there were 199 opportunities available on various topics, some paying over $200 a post. There are a few requirements on PayPerPost, mainly that your blog is at least three months old and has a decent PageRank.

And there you have it.

Using one or more of these sites, you can make a little money without getting an actual job. Will you make as much? Not unless you are extremely dedicated, but that kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it? I am not an advocate of working while in college, at least not for “the man”. Unless you have extremely convenient hours, all it will do is rob you of your social life. So sign up for these sites or start your own dorm room business, and have fun in college!