There are the typical college student jobs – working the residence hall office, working in the library, working checkout at a grocery store, delivering pizzas, etc. The problem with these tried and true jobs? They take up your time. And when you’re in college, time is of the essence. You need a social life, and working nights and weekends will not cut it. After all, these are the best years of your life. This is where a dorm room business comes into play.

If you have a favorite hobby or something you are really good at, why not go into business? Create your own hours, charge your own prices and be your own boss. Need customers? You have, quite possibly, 10,000+ students walking your campus daily. And if you get involved in something related to your major, it can only help you in your job hunt after graduation – that is, if you need a job by then. Who knows, maybe your dorm room business will have flourished into an extremely profitable company! You could join the likes of Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Sergey Brin and Larry Page as successful college entrepreneurs.

Take some money from savings, ask your parents for money or take a small part-time (10 hours/week max) job to get some start-up capital. Once your business becomes self sustaining, quit the part-time job and expand your work into those hours if you want. You can quickly pay back any money you borrowed and start taking a salary out of your profits. Remember, though, to put some money away in the name of your business – if you are building computers, for example, you might lose a tool and have to buy a new one.

I know I wasn’t very clear with that rule early on, but I tried to make a note of it this time around on the submission page. Enacting this rule actually benefits both of us – it makes the carnival look less spammy and more credible. I know if it were me, I’d rather have someone plasma cutting my eyes out than see the same name a few times in a row submitting multiple posts.

If you got multiple submissions in this time, I’ll probably just use my discretion and choose the article I feel is most beneficial to the readers. If you try it again next edition, I’ll just exclude you since I’ll know that a) you aren’t reading the rules and b) you obviously don’t even read this blog since you missed this post.

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!

In this kind of dilemma, a site owner that makes use of key phrases may stand a better chance due to the smaller number of competitors. Key phrases allow for better targeting and higher conversion rates. Thus, using a generic keyword and adding specific words to it can produce the most important key phrases. The key phrase “EU budget hotels” would stand a better chance than “hotels”

Get real.

Bloggers can easily cheat with Feedburner to make their RSS subscriber count look much higher than it really is. All they need are two things: a blogger with a high Feedburner subscriber count and the ability to edit one line of code.

You can read more about this hack in this post from Ian Fernando. I’ll change the count back tomorrow.

Simple – I’m finding a way to get paid for doing something I’d do anyway.  In my case, writing posts and articles for this site.  I originally started beer.pizza.tech so that I’d have published work online for people to view.  If I’m up for an important internship or a job in the future, I’ll point them here.  Thanks to a few companies, however, not only am I doing something for my future, I’m getting paid now.

These companies look for established blogs to add to their roster.  After that, the blogger is asked to write a short article about a certain company or topic and link back to a certain URL.  Then the blogger waits to get paid.  You may think that sounds way too simple, but that’s really, truly it.  Some companies are:

• PayU2Blog
• Sponsored Reviews
• PayPerPost
• Blogsvertise
• Smorty

I’ve also made some nice spending money over at CashCrate.  Basically, you fill out some surveys and fill out some forms (to be put on mailing lists and such, set up a new email for spam) and you get paid.  My check last month was around $26 and this month is going to be around $11.  Bear in mind, I am busy with my writing (and college) and barely ever log on.  Who knows what you’d make if you put some more time in it.  At the very least, you’ll make enough to pay a bill or two.  Here’s a hint: look for the eBay offer.  All you have to do is sign up for an eBay account and bid on something – go for an item you know you won’t win.  That will make you $8 right off the bat.

Those are my two sources of income right now.  I’m not exactly rich, but I’m not exactly somebody’s slave, either.  Money might not buy happiness, but freedom does, and when you have both money and freedom you’re a pretty lucky person.  So if you’d rather work on the weekends and let college pass you by, feel free.  Or you can start up a simple little blog about something you like (yourself, even), sign up with some blog ad companies and do what you want, when you want.

Feel free to save this and post it on your own site if you’d like. And remember who hooked you up! Come back and visit sometime.