Cashonthenet.co.uk

Sounds a bit like a dream really doesn’t it… but, there are companies out there who will actually give you a free holiday in their complex in order to get you out there and looking at what they have to offer you. 

Some of them are wanting you to buy a property in the area, others are wanting you to buy a share in a propery - like x number of weeks per year that you own that place for.   These can be quite a good idea, and it’s a great way of looking at your options and seeing what’s available and deciding if it’s for you.

They do want something from you while you’re out there though.  Usually it’s a fixed presentation, and perhaps a trip to one or two places that they think might be what you’re looking for.  In order to get the holiday for free, you do have to take part in these promotional presentations, and if you’re a couple it has to be both of you that go along not just one of you.

As you can probably imagine, they’re looking to sell you something, so they’re not going to give these holidays away if you don’t fit the criteria that means you could afford what they’re selling, so you generally have to be over a specific age and earning at least a specific amount in order to qualify.  They also have set rules often that say that it’s a max of one promotional offer per family per year, or that you can’t book theirs and someone elses at the same location within x amount of time.  This is to stop people from getting lots of holidays from them with no intention of buying.

It’s a good idea if you think about it.  They could get you to go to a presentation in the UK, but well that’s not really going to entice you anything like as much as you being out there could. 

One place that is offering just such a deal at the moment is Sumer Bay Resorts where you can get a free 5 Day/4 Night Stay at their resort in Andalucia, Spain.  All you do to apply is fill in your full name and your e-mail address and then they will contact you with more details.  As an added bonus, if you give the Claim code #SV908 you can receive an additional 5-nights accommodations at a Disney Planning Centre Resort when you visit a Walt Disney World or Universal Orlando Attraction.  They have terms and conditions on the site.

Pigsback is a site where you can earn points and then turn the points into either gifts, or gift vouchers.  Earning points can be done in a number of ways, from buying through their links, to signing up to newsletters and sending for information.  However, there are other ways to earn points as well.  Every week they have adverts on your personal pigsback page which are worth 5 points when you click on them.  You can also enter competitions where you can earn points if you win, and there’s a special betting section too where you can bet on all sorts of things from the football results to who’s going to win the latest big brother and lots more.  You bet some of your existing points, and if you win, you win a proportion of the pot based on how many people bet the same way you did.

Another way you can earn extra points is by writing things for the site itself.  There are a number of sections around the site where you can send in snippets of information such as beauty tips, or info on places to go in London and a variety of other things.  If your piece is used then you get some points - normally 50 to 100 of them.

Your points are kept in your piggy bank on the site, and when you have enough you can spend them on a variety of things.  Rewards vary from gift vouchers such as Boots, Topshop, Pizza Hut and many others (a £10 gift voucher costs 1150 points) to items such as pigsback branded items like mugs, shopping bags, soft cuddly pigs, keyrings and even a manicure kit.  The cheapest item you can opt for is a set of 5 branded pencils for 175 points, and the most expensive item is a half carat princess diamond 18ct white gold ring at 85000 points!  As you can probably imagine, there’s plenty in between to choose from too.

They also have a special section on the site where you can download coupons to print off.  These can be taken to your supermarket and will give you money off your shopping, and they’re free.  Not only that, but when you use them, you then get extra points added to your account as well, Not bad!

Mutual Points is one of those sites that falls partly under the category of cashback site, and partly under the category of other ways to make money.  The reason for this is that although there are a lot of retailers on the site where you can get cashback - in this case in the form of points - when you shop with them, there are also quite a number of other ways of building up your points.

Firstly Mutual Points sends out regular e-mails to it’s members that contain links.  When you click through the link to the site talked about in the e-mail you earn points - normally it’s 5 points for this sort of click.  They also send out e-mails with special offers in them such as sign up to this newsletter and earn points, or arrange a test drive in a car and get points.

When you’ve collected 3000 points, you can request a cashout and your 3000 points will be turned into £20 which is paid in the form of a cheque to you.

This is a bit of an oddball site really, as Qype is a review site, but not one where you earn money for your reviews.  Instead, you earn points for doing different things on the site such as writing reviews, and uploading pictures for them.  You also earn points when people rate your reviews as well.  The way this falls into the money making side of things is that when you hit certain milestones, you are sent a goodie bag.  The first one is when you reach 250 points, the second at 500 points and the third at 1000 points. 

These goodie bags are kind of an incentive to carry on with the site and a thankyou for sticking with it this far.  After 1000 points, you don’t get goodie bags, but you do get admitted to a kind of inner circle where you get invited to enter competitions and you get the chance to go to special events and things as well.

The first goodie bag contains amongst other things a qype top - mine contained a long sleeved top, some sweets, and a flask, sadly I wasn’t asked what size top I wanted so that’s going to have to be passed to someone else as it’s much too small!, but all of good quality never the less. - The second I’m told contains things like frisbee and a usb stick, and the third one is the coverted ninja kit which if it’s picture is correct gets you an ipod, a bottle of champagne and a soft toy.

So, overall, nope you won’t earn any cash, but you will get some nice goodies, and to be honest it’s a very easy place to earn points.  I reached my first 250 points in about 4 days on there.  The reviews don’t have to be long maybe 20-50 words or so unless of course you want to write more, and a friendly place.

Free DVD Club isn’t really strictly speaking a money making site, BUT, you do get something for nothing here, so it’s very much worth joining.

What you do is to join the site, and fill in their questionaire.  It IS rather long winded, but to be honest they don’t actually require you to fill in more than the first 3 pages.  Once you’ve filled in those, you can (if you want to) just leave the answers on all the other pages blank.  Obviously, if you want to help them out more, you will fill in more pages because that way they get better answers and so presumably will be able to keep giving away dvds for longer.

Once you’ve filled the survey in, you can choose from one of their free DVDs that they are offering.  One of the best ones on there at the moment is a set of four dvds - shawshank redemption, shivers, final scream, and witchcraft.  Not bad for a few minutes spent filling in a survey really.  Oh, and do make sure you use a valid e-mail address with this site as they now check by confirming with you, and if you haven’t used a real e-mail address, you won’t get the confirmation e-mail or the dvd which would be a shame.

Toluna used to be called Test & Vote, but has now changed it’s name to reflect the company that owns it.  Test and Vote was a more sensible name in my opinion as that’s what it’s all about.  You can sign up to test products (though people rarely seem to be sent anything to test), and you can vote on lots of different subjects on the polls on the website and write about things there and create your own polls too.  As well as these things - most of which earn you points, you’ll also be sent surveys via e-mail which can earn you lots of points.

Toluna works on a points system. You earn points for doing different things on the site as I’ve mentioned, and then you can save your points up and spend them on a variety of different things. There are a number of different gift vouchers that you can choose from, including Amazon, Sainsburys, HMV and CD Wow, and you also have the option to convert points into tickets for various prize draws that they run throughout the year.

Adding affiliate links to your website is another interesting way to make money.  If your website is interesting and has content that is added to regularly and gets lots of hits then you can earn a reasonable amount of money through affiliate links sometimes.  It will vary depending on the content of your site, and whether the affiliate links that you are adding are suitable for the site.  What I mean is that it’s no good having a site that is all about golfing and then putting affiliate links on that advertise sites for jewellery.  Whereas if you put links on that take people to places they can buy golfing paraphernalia, or book golfing holidays, then you are far more likely to earn money from it.

There are a number of affiliate sites around, but one that I like is Affiliate Future.  It’s one of the simpler one’s to use, and it has a lot of different merchants to choose from so it’s quite easy to find something that suits your site there.  This small banner ad is the sort of thing you can find on there, and in fact this one is advertising them, so to find out more or to join them, click on this advert:

Affiliate Future pays via bank transfer (BACS) when you have £20 or more in your account if you are in the UK.  If you are outside the UK, then they can pay by UK £ cheque but you have to accumulate £100 in your account before you can request payment.

Another affiliate company is My Shopping Arcade.  This works in a slightly different way to Affiliate Future as instead of directly linking to the shop or item with a banner, you have an arcade, or several arcades where you can include several shops that you think people might like to buy from.  Then you advertise the arcade as a whole.  If you look to the right, you’ll see that I have a ‘my shopping arcade’ link under the places to shop section.  If you’d like to create an arcade of your own you can do so here.  Myshopping Arcade also pays by bank transfer, but they have a lower payout level of just £5.

Ipoints is a site where you can do a variety of different things to earn points.  You can complete surveys, shop online, send for brochures and catalogues, sign up to newsletters, enter competitions, fill in mini surveys on the site, and sometimes even just click through an advert to another site to earn points.  Ipoints also sends out e-mails every week which contain links in them.  Clicking through these links will take you to another site for you to look at, and will earn you a few points.

Points can be spent on a wide variety of items, from small gifts costing just a few points up to very large gifts costing many thousands of points.  These gifts can be tickets for the cinema, gift vouchers, books, dvds, luxury items, charitable donations, and all manner of other things - far too many to list them all here.  Amongst the gift vouchers that you can choose from are HMV, Amazon and CD Wow, though there are many others too.

Ipoints is not the sort of site that fits neatly into a category which is why I’ve linked it to one or two places that seem to suit it best. 

Exodus 3000 is slightly different to most of the methods of money making on this site because it is actually a game.  Basically the aim of the game is to get strong, and make md’s (the game’s currency).  You do that by going north, south, east or west from your homestead and finding volcanoes to mine, ruins to dig, and other homesteads and settlements to attack.  The slight difference with this game is that if you can build up enough md’s (mars dollars), then you can actually exchange them for real money.  It’s american based, so again when they payout it’s in dollars. 

Payout is via paypal so it’s not hard to convert the money from US $’s to UK £’s or any other currency come to that.  The exchange rate from md’s to dollars varies, and you have to look at the site to know what it is, and personally I’ve never managed to cashout on this game.

You get 250 moves per day, and you can actually buy more (again through paypal) if you want to.   You can refer people as well and earn extra moves that way and if you refer enough people you can earn Amazon vouchers for doing so.  I have managed to earn one or two of these.

Shareapic is as it sounds a site where you can store pictures and share them with your friends.  The idea is that you upload lots of pictures to this site and then e-mail the links to your friends and family (or whoever) rather than having to send them the pictures in full, this means that it doesn’t take them ages to download the pictures or anything like that.

In terms of making you money it works by paying you a very small amount every time one of your pictures is looked at on the site.  It IS a very small amount - it works out to about $1.00 per 4,500 views (that’s about 50p in UK £’s) which sounds terribly small and hardly worthwhile, but if you think of it like this, you can see it will add up quite fast.  Pop 25 pictures on the site say from when you took the kids to the beach.  Tell 10 family members, all of who look at those pictures and that’s 250 views just there.  Leave them there, and maybe Aunty May views them and then when Uncle Jim comes in from work, she shows him as well, so you get them viewed again.  Post some more pics, maybe there’s some there you want to share with your online friends, so you add a link from your blog, or put it on a forum you chat on, everyone goes and looks at them, and there’s a load more views. 

Basically like many earning methods on the internet, this one is never going to make you a millionaire, but it’s a good way to store pictures and share them with people, and if you get into the habbit of using it regularly it can net you a small amount of money at the same time - and if this is something you’d do anyway, then getting paid any amount is better than not getting paid at all.

You will likely need to keep using shareapic for quite some time to reach payout as it’s set at $20, but they allow users from any country in the world, so no matter where you’re from you can use this site.  You can choose between Amazon vouchers, paypal, or eluxury vouchers when you select your payment method.