Easy Ways to Make Free Money Online

One of the easiest ways to make money online is to sign up for a service sponsored by Amazon.com called "Mechanical Turk." M-Turk is an "articial intelligence" service. That's a fancy way of saying that it's a portal where people come and pay you to post to their forum, fill out a survey or submit to their directory. The only problem I have with M-Turk is that the price per task is usually very low. Most tasks will only pay you about 20 to 30 cents...some much less. If you calculate the time it takes to complete the task and get paid, you can only earn about 2 to 3 dollars per hour at most. That's not a very high return for your time... but it's better than nothing. The other good thing about Amazon's M-turk is that it's owned and operated by Amazon so you know it's somewhat legitimate and that you are going to get paid.

Another popular way to make free money online is by signing up for a paid survey service like Mindfield.com. These sites are promoted everywhere on the web including Craigslist. These sites promise to pay you for your opinion on new products and services. This is true... but there's a catch. First, they require you to give them all your personal information, which is always a bit concerning. Second, they pay you to test products--but you need to buy the product or subscribe to the service first. For example, last month I signed up for an online postage service. The survey website I signed up through promised to pay me 1 dollar to try the service for free. However, signing up for the postage service was a year commitment at $14.99 a month with the first month for free. They automatically bill your credit card for the second month unless you call to cancel. And yes, you guessed it: I forgot to cancel. Thus, I ended up getting charged $14.99 for something that only paid me $1. On one level it was my fault for not cancelling. But, in this busy world... it's easy to forget to cancel a monthly service like this and find yourself on the line for something you do not want or need. Thus, I recommend that you stay away from "paid survey" sites. They do work if you are diligent in cancelling the services you sign up for. But these sites make their money by banking on people signing up for the service and forgetting to cancel. In my opinion the risk is not worth the reward.

There is a third way to make free money online that we like very much. It involves opening up zero percent credit cards and creating an "arbitrage" situation for yourself. It is not as complicated as it sounds and works every time. But it is too long to go into here but, nonetheless, it does work. I've done it, and the money can be substantial.

So, the answer is yes! There are some legitimate ways to make free money online but you need to be very careful about which method you use. Be careful or you can end up losing more free money than you make online.