Back when we were in full lock down and I was on furlough, I wanted to try and earn some extra money to tide me over and to put towards my boyfriend and I’s weekend break to Milan.
I’ve always dabbled in earning extra money online through taking surveys but I’d never committed enough to earn a whole lot. I joined a subreddit all about ways to earn some extra money and found that although I’d earned some extra pocket money in the past for doing just a little, there was a lot more I could earn with just a bit more effort!
So I decided to challenge myself to try a few different venues in the space of a month and record my earnings. I also felt this would help me in future to see what venues worked the best. I recorded what I did every single day and using a small variety of websites, I ended up with an extra £268.40!
Here’s how I did it.
Read more: Apps that pay you real money (for barely doing anything)
20COGS – £80.75
I’d taken a look at 20Cogs a few times before but never used it because it involved investing some of my own money for things like free trials, bingo website deposits etc. However, when I read Rhian Westbury’s guide, I decided to give it a go. 20Cogs is a website that requires you to work through 20 cogs – or 20 ‘offers’ – to earn money back. These vary from, for example, signing up to a Hayu 30 day free trial to earn £2.50, or purchase 10 lines on Lotto Social for £1 to earn £10.00 in return. So when you make small purchases, you get a bigger return. Many of the cogs offer free sign up’s too – for a smaller return – but you need to remember to cancel your free trial. Each ‘cog’ turns from grey to orange once your sign up/purchase etc is tracked via them, and then from orange to green once it’s confirmed. Once all cogs turn green (within 30 days), you can then withdraw your money – which is added up with all the individual earnings.
TOP TIP: As well as setting up an earnings tracker (on Google Spreadsheets or otherwise), I also made a list of all my offers and sign-ups via 20Cogs – which included the final days of my free trials and any terms and conditions. This is something you should do to always ensure you cancel trials on time, otherwise, you may end up having to pay extra money.
The only downsides to 20Cogs is that you have to wait until all 20 offers are complete to withdraw – but as some of the offers have a good return, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You end up cashing out nearly £100 in the end! Now that I’ve completed my 20Cogs, I’m unsure of what to do next – there are additional offers but so far, none of them are relevant for me. Some offers won’t be, and some offers come up again, so you can’t sign up as a new user for each offer again. So 20Cogs is great, but I think only for a one time use.
You can sign up to 20Cogs and start earning here.
PEOPLE PER HOUR – £68.40
I’ve decided to include People Per Hour as it’s not necessarily something that is only limited to bloggers: as long as you’ve got a skill to sell, you can easily sign up and start earning. I tend to earn the most through data entry jobs, but I also offer blogging, proofreading and admin services too. I prefer PPH over other websites such as Fiverr as I find it a lot easier to use and you can have offers live on your profile as well as searching through jobs to bid on. It can be hard to win jobs as people apply quite quickly, but I find once you work on a few projects, it’s very easy to get more – people will leave great feedback and often work with you again for more projects. The projects vary too – it’s not just digital marketing. You can find my profile here, if you’d like to take a look.
SWAGBUCKS – £70
Swagbucks is a survey website site I’ve always come back to, as even though it has its issues, I find it the easiest to use. When I usually use Swagbucks, I tend to earn between £20-30 a month/£5 a week, picking it up when I feel like it. But this time I decided to use it every single day, as when you hit your daily goals one week, two weeks, three weeks and a month in a row, you get bonus points which then equal to an extra £5/£10 on top of that. I stuck to surveys mostly, but I also dabbled in their offers thanks to guides on Reddit. There was one offer where if I downloaded a game for free and reached a certain level, I’d get a return of around £35. This was a one-time offer and I also signed up when the points/Swagbucks were doubled. The game – once I understood it – was pretty easy in the end but it did take me a few weeks of playing for about half-hour each day.
Swagbucks is by far one of the easiest ways I earned money, but because I committed myself to hit my target each day for the extra points, some days were a drag. There are always days when you feel like you’re constantly screened out of surveys and cannot hit targets, so you end up grasping at straws by doing web searches, watching videos etc to get by.
In reality, once I joined the subreddit, I found many users take Swagbucks surveys as a last resort and earn most of their points on the website via downloading games or completing offers. I did just one game/offer and focused on surveys most of the time, so I’m keen to see how much I earn if I step it up and focus on the bigger offers!
By doing the bare minimum – jumping on maybe 20 minutes each day, you can easily earn £40ish a month. If you commit yourself to logging on every day, you can see this can very easily be doubled – and it is worth logging on daily as there are plenty of extra special offers to earn money.
You can sign up for Swagbucks and start earning here.
TOP TIP: If you’re looking at trying to earn money online fairly often, there will always be options for free trials, depositing on bingo websites etc. Set up a separate Monzo pot for this and have maybe £20 sitting in there which you can always dip into for these tasks. That way you’re not ever taking away money from yourself or your usual income. I now deposit most of my online earnings in there and watch it grow.
BLOGGING – £50
I also earned £50 through sponsored blog posts – although I’m aware not everyone reading this is a blogger so I’ll keep this part short and sweet! I get most of my sponsored blog posts from brands/companies approaching me, however, if I genuinely want to earn an income in any particular month, I always turn to Get Blogged. I find Get Blogged fantastic – their assignments are clear and concise and I always get paid within 24 hours. I also find it a great website to learn how to price myself depending on my DA, and a lot of clients posting assignments are repeating clients, which makes content much easier to write. I will note that I will only ever accept work if I feel it is a good fit for my blog. Finally, they’ve also begun sharing lots of great tips on how to build a better DA with your blog or how to pitch to brands, which I think is great.
MYSTERY SHOPPING – £64 (worth of free food…)
Finally, I just wanted to include Mystery Shopping! I didn’t earn money as such, but I did manage to go out for a couple of free meals. I have been Mystery Shopping for years now, as I love food – and I love free food even more! Mystery Shopping might sound complicated but once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty easy. I use Marketforce which has lots of assignments for chain food brands but also includes other smaller assignments like placing a bet in a betting shop or staying in a hotel (I have not yet been lucky enough to find an assignment that requires staying in a hotel though!). You can also filter out what kind of ‘mystery shops’ you do and don’t want to do. We tend to try and do two or three a month and I pay via credit card, as I know that money is guaranteed to come back – which then helps my credit score! Just remember to be discreet!
So that’s how I made over £250 just by sitting on my bum and doing tasks online in one month! I think £250 is pretty good going – although of course, it does depend on how much time you put in. I’m researching other ways to earn even more, but I wanted to share how pretty much anyone could earn a little extra cash to help them during these current times. I found it pretty easy to earn this extra money – the only times I struggled were a few days on Swagbucks where I found it hard to hit my daily target. On those days, I probably spent an hour max completing my tasks – but for the rest of the month, I never really spent more than half an hour each day.
Would you like to learn more or see a more detailed breakdown of how I earned £250+ online? Let me know!
*Please note, this post contains affiliate links.
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