Legit Ways for College Students to Make Money Online

As a college student, you’re always likely to be short on cash and have trouble with finding jobs which fit within your class schedule. However, there are a number of ways for college students to make money online. In most cases, these are the same methods that anyone else can use to make some money online. Here’s what you need to know:

For Pocket Change

Those needing some easy, mindless work for pocket change have a number of options available to earn extra cash. You can for example work with Amazon Mechanical Turk, where you can do such mundane tasks as “liking” a Facebook page for a penny per like or answering simple questions.

Another option is to place a gig on a place like Fiverr. On Fiverr, you do need some kind of talent, however there are a lot of options available and you can potentially make money using some rather unusual options. For example, you could write someone’s name in the sand on the beach and offer to take a picture of it. You could sing a song or you could write a slogan. You could write simple software programs or pretty much any other idea you can think of.

Looking for a Part Time Income

Those searching for options for a part time income can also find a number of choices available. Again, while these options will work to allow college students to make money online, they really work for pretty much anyone else who may be interested in making some extra cash online too.

Work from Home at Elance/Guru/oDesk Etc.

The first option for college students who want to make money online is to work for employers at places like Elance, Guru and oDesk. These companies all arrange to match prospective employers with prospective clients. Unlike Fiverr, the work here tends to be more talent based, so you may get a job designing websites, writing articles or doing SEO work. There are also jobs for programming and pretty much anything else you can think of in terms of technology. These options can provide you with a part time income and they can allow you to work around class schedules, however be aware that many projects don’t pay very much at these websites.

LiveOps

Another great option for college students to make money online is to use LiveOps. In essence, this company will hire you as a part time phone operator working from home. You can generally use your dorm room for this purpose, as long as you can be assured of quiet during the time you’re working. Or, if you’re off campus, you’ll simply need to make sure your roommates know to keep things quiet when you’re working. The bad part is that you do need to schedule things so it’s a bit less flexible than other options.

uTest

Finally, for college students who love to test out new software, there are some great ways to make money from home by becoming a software tester. In essence, what you would do is to agree to become a kind of a beta tester where you test out new software programs and see if there are problems with it before it gets released to the general public. One great way to do this is to use uTest, which offers to arrange for college students to make money online (or really anyone who is interested) to test such programs and get paid for doing so.

George Gallagher writes for education and finance blogs.  He also works with students ot manage their finances, including finding not-for-profit private student loans.