How to Use Your College Resources to Make Money Online

College students are perennially broke and are always looking for new ways to make extra money. It’s especially helpful if you can use your college resources to make money online since you happen to have access to these things and using them simply makes sense. The following ideas are generally considered gray areas as far as making money because in many cases, your college will have rules that do not allow you to use their services to make money online.

Set Up a For Profit Blog

One of the best kinds of links that you can have to your own blog is a link from a .edu website. Now while you can’t create a for profit website using your college blogging account, you can make use of your blog and the blogs of your friends to create the all important backlinks which will allow you to get your for profit blog more highly ranked. In fact (and this gets into a gray area), you may even be able to sell link packages from your .edu blog and those of your friends to for profit blogs. They key is to ensure that you don’t overdo it. Ideally, you should also check on your school’s policy to find out what their rules are about the use of university blogging accounts.

Build Websites

As a college student, not only will you have full access to the computer lab, but you’ll also have full access to some truly amazing website design software. This will allow you to use your college resources to make money online by creating a business building websites. In essence, you’d set up an off campus website for your business but use the college’s computers and software to create your client’s websites. The issue here is twofold. First, your school may have strict rules forbidding the use of the school’s computers for the creation of websites which you sell. Second, the software license for certain programs installed on the computers in the computer lab will have a restriction on them which says that you may not use it for commercial purposes of any kind. Again, it’s best to check in with your school to make sure you are not violating any rules.

Use Your School’s High Speed Connection to Work for Businesses Online

Finally, another way to use your college resources to make money online is to take advantage of the ultra high speed connection that many colleges offer to their students for free. In essence, this means that you can use the computer lab to work at websites like Elance and Guru where jobs are available and you can use the high speed connection along with a quiet dorm room (if you can find one) to work for call centers which require people to become operators. You could also take work as a software tester, taking advantage of the resources that your school provides and finally, you can use the school library to research articles and content for various for profit websites which you may find work writing for.

George Gallagher is an education and business writer.  He is currently working with private student loans company cuStudentLoans to help match college students with not-for-profit student loans.