Lots of people look to home-based businesses for ways of making extra money. The general feeling is that they are usually underpaid and oversold. But is there really an easy way to make money from home?

For most of us, earning a few extra dollars a month can make a big difference in our lifestyle. But like most of us we work full time jobs, have busy schedules and don’t have the time to devote three or four hours a day to working a second job.

The one thing we all do have is opinions on almost everything, so why not get paid for having them?

There are over 7 million companies out there that are looking to find out what people think of their new products or how effective their advertising is. This information is incredibly important to these companies and they are willing to pay a lot of money to find out the answers.

Online Market Research is a $766 Million Dollar Industry. So why not get your share of this money?

Taking online surveys is the easiest way to make money on the internet. You can take these surveys at your convenience, any time day or night. They generally pay anywhere from $5 up to $250 for taking simple online surveys to participating in online focus groups.

There is generally a very small one time sign up cost anywhere from $25 to $45. Don’t let this deter you. You will make that money up after your first one or two surveys. This charge also eliminates the not so serious people from just signing up and wasting surveys that could be going to you.

An online survey is usually one or two pages long consisting of about 10 to 20 questions that take very little time to fill out. An online focus group takes more time and could involve a series of questionnaires to fill out but they pay much more.

Our guest author is Jim DeFazio, a full-time web developer and internet marketer. Visit http://www.takeonlinesurveys.com to learn more about how you can make money on the internet.

We have no financial interest in the author or the website.

Commercial blogging is not necessarily the same as business blogging. The latter means working for a corporation and blogging its products and services.

Commercial blogging is what this blog is doing. The Money Blog is part of a Web Network Magazine, called Syntagma. It lives, like its print counterparts, by selling advertising around useful content.

There are many types of commercial blogging. If you work alone, you are a “problogger” by one definition. If you work as part of a group, a commercial blogger.

Basically, we are what H.G. Wells called, Originative Intellectual Workers. In one sense, we securitize our talents and put them on a global market to sell to the highest bidder.

Originative Intellectual Workers (OIWs) face many challenges and opportunities in the new world of independent publishing. The opportunities come mainly from relatively cheap, universally-available means of publishing content. A short-list would include, print-on-demand books, ebooks, P2P file distribution, blogs, RSS, content management systems, Wi-Fi, and podcasting.

The challenges arise from the commoditization of information and the inevitability of supply overeaching demand. As Bill French put it: “… information nears the point of zero-price (not zero-cost).” In other words, how does one get paid? Many OIWs simply give away their content and rely on name-brand consultancy and speaking engagements to drive cash flow. Many writers are uncomfortable with that. Showbiz and the pen are not natural bedfellows.

Blogs have come into their own quite quickly. Although business blogging is still in its infancy (less than 1pc are business blogs), all the top OIWs are blogging. But why have blogs taken off in the world of business? Because, says Joyce Wycoff, they are

“Creating an environment where ’serendipitous types of conversations’ occur, a place where people from various disciplines bump into each other and start talking about possibilities.”

So we’re talking innovation here. In an uncertain world situation where educated Indians and Chinese are taking intellectual and software jobs from the West, OIWs are right to be on their guard. They are also right to think innovatively. The East may be good at playing catch-up but, as Tom Peters clearly believes, through innovation we can ensure that they’re always chasing the game.

Blogs play an enormous role in this process. By capturing new ideas and keeping them alive. And by chasing new uses for ideas and testing them in a fluid, receptive environment, they cut the mustard in unpredictable ways.

Blogs can build and drive an innovation factory with the slenderest of tools. Robin Good’s “RSS NewsMaster’s Toolkit” follows up his recognition of NewsMastering as the latest job chrysalis for emerging OIWs.

In Robin Good’s terms, RSS channels — even those originating from simple blogs — are “News Radars” for a new breed of independent publisher and content provider. A News Radar is “a constantly updated thematic channel of highly relevant web references that are gathered in accordance with specific, persistent search criteria.” In simpler terms they are a new means of publishing our work, which may be on “topics, people, opinions, products, news items, events or passions.”

Whichever role you wish to play online, you have to do it very well, because competition is fierce and growing and is not restricted now to the English-speaking world. The whole world is now the English-speaking world.

The most obvious way to make money online is through writing, i.e., becoming a “content provider”.

You might, for instance, sell your work directly to one of the many blog networks now out there. Or you might become a problogger, like Darren Rowse, which means tailoring your writing to specific niches so that well-heeled search traffic will find you and click on your contextual advertising, like Google’s Adsense. By adding to your “page views”, they will also make it easier to sell paid advertising off the site.

We’ll be looking at problogging later in this series. For now, I want to concentrate on direct publishing, selling your words themselves in a print format. Here’s an example that popped into my inbox this very morning:

Marti Lawrence runs a blog called Enter The Laughter, which rather speaks for itself. However, to monetize it further she has decided to put her blog posts into book form using one of the “free” publication tools now available on the internet.

Using Lulu.com Marti has stitched her posts together as: Queen Klutz - The Misadventures of a Very Clumsy Woman:

It takes a bit of work to do this, and it’s not as free as you’d think — an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) costs $99, for example. But Marti has done it, cheerfully confessing her lack of technical know-how in this field.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dave Sifry, head honcho at Technorati, the blog search engine, has given us another State of the Blogosphere assessment. Essentially he says:

* The blogosphere is now 100 times larger than it was 3 years ago.

* The blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days.

* 175,000 blogs are created each day — two every second.

* 70 pc of pings that Technorati gets are from spam blogs.

* Daily posting levels are at about 1.6 million posts per day (18.6 per second).

* English has retaken the lead as the most spoken language in the blogosphere (Japanese is only 1 pc behind).

All this shows what a great market the Web is for commerce of all sorts. Take the business behind this Website, Syntagma Media. Over on Syntagma, there’s an assessment of its growth in July:

In the month of July Syntagma Media’s basket of key indicators showed an increase of 20.8 pc. Annualized that represent a 250 pc growth rate.

July, of course, is traditionally a slow month for commerce, the exceptions being anything related to travel, tourism and vacations in general. So our true growth is probably somewhere between 300 and 400 pc — a rate that outperforms even Hong Kong in its heyday.

As we often say, blog networks — whether interpreted as geeky outlets for techy types, or online, distributed magazines, like Syntagma — are a good business to be in.

To press this message home, we’re going to be running a new series titled, Making Money Online.

Stay tuned for that one.