Make Money in Your Spare Time Doing Simple Online Tasks

 Research Study/Survey Participant: Harvard Business School Computer Lab for Experimental Research (CLER): Participate in online studies, which typically take less than 15 minutes to complete and usually compensate you with a $5 electronic gift certificate. The studies ask you about decisions you would make in various business-related disciplines, such as economics and psychology. Additional options: Lightspeed Consumer Panel, Pinecone Research, SurveySpot.


Focus Group Participant: 20|20 Panel: Since 1986, 20|20 Research has been providing companies with qualitative research from focus groups. Recent calls for focus group participants include: an online study of cell phones usage that pays $60 (adults 18-44) and an online study of household products purchases that pays $150 (adults 25-65). Additional options: Focus Forward, Hagen Sinclair, AlphaBuzz.

Artificial Artificial Intelligence: Amazon Mechanical Turk: Yeah, that's a weird title. As a Mechanical Turk Worker (or MTurk), you complete odd jobs like looking up companies' hours of operation, checking translations, coming up with ideas for marketing projects, and so on. The pay can be extremely low — a couple of cents even — but the tasks can usually be done quickly and some tasks pay more. Additional option: ShortTask.

User Tester: UserTesting.com: Get $10 for visiting a website and providing live, honest feedback about it. Your reactions as you traipse the site are recorded by UserTesting's software. Additional option: uTest.

Tech Support Expert: FixYa.com: Put your knowledge to good use at FixYa and earn $2 to $6 for answering a posted question, $6 to $10 for helping someone in chat, $10-$15 if you do it by phone, or a variable amount for written tips and how-to's. Additional options: Support Space, JustAnswer.

Blogger: Commission Junction: If you maintain a blog already, you can monetize it by inserting advertising links or affiliate links from Commission Junction, LinkShare, Chitika, Smorty, and, of course, Google AdSense. There's no set amount you can make (and no guarantee you'll make anything at all), but if you write often and get a decent following, you can generate some nice supplemental income.

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