With the holidays coming up, many people are looking for ways to come up with some quick money for presents for their family. Money is tight for a lot of people right now, so you might have to get creative. Here are just some of the ways I've come up with to make a quick 0 to help with your holiday shopping.
1. Sell something you already own and aren't using on Craigslist
Craigslist.org is perhaps THE top site for selling things quickly and locally. Forget about classifieds in your local paper. You want to focus on Craigslist. It gets more traffic than probably most classified sites combined and you can get interested buyers in your stuff very, very quickly. Find some electronic or computer equipment that you're not really using and put it on Craigslist for a decent price. Other things that sell well on Craigslist are furniture, certain collectibles, and exercise equipment. Hey, if you're not using that stair master...then put it on Craigslist!
2. Advertise yourself and offer to clean a house or do a move for someone
Elderly people are looking for help with house cleaning or moving all the time. If you're in good enough physical condition to help someone move for a day, you can easily make 0 (perhaps more). Yes, it's definitely harder labor...but you could clear 0 in a day or less. Tax free! Or offer to clean someone's house for 0. People will take you up on it, especially more affluent people who need their home cleaned for a party they're getting ready to have.
3. Sell books or DVDs on Half.com
Half.com is a heavily visited site for people selling books and movies. Other things are sold, but books are a large part of their site. If you have old textbooks, or even fiction/non-fiction books, then you could consider selling them on Half.com for some quick money.
4. Go to construction job sites (or residential sites that are renovating) and offer to haul away scrap metal
This is often overlooked, but collecting scrap metal (particularly aluminum and copper) can help you earn some quick money. Go visit a job site and see if they will let you haul away some scrap aluminum door or window frames. Load up a wheelbarrow full of iron pipe. If you have access to a pick-up truck, this would make things a lot easier to haul to the scrap yard of course. A couple of truck loads of aluminum, iron, or copper (which is certainly more difficult to come by) and you could be looking at 0 in a day's work.
5. Be an article broker
This idea takes a little more explanation, but the idea is that you buy articles (in bulk) from cheap sources and submit them to paid article submission websites, such as AssociatedContent.com, for a small profit. One way to do this would be to create a project on eLance.com asking for someone to write you 100 articles and you'll pay them $.50 per article. Obviously the quality isn't going to be that great, but you will find someone willing to do it. Chances are they'll be from a foreign country but you can ask for a small sample of their writing before agreeing to work with them. Once they're sent you the 100 articles (on whatever subject you want) then you can submit them to AssociatedContent.com. This is not the quickest turnaround because the articles have to (a) be received from your writer, (b) submitted to AssociatedContent.com, (c) approved by AssociatedContent.com, (d) and then you are shown what they will pay you per article. As of this writing, I believe the least amount of money they will pay you for an accepted article is .50. So if all of your articles are accepted, then you would make a profit of 0 for those 100 articles.
These are just a few ways to try and make a quick 0 but hopefully they will get your gears turning and you can come up with similar ways yourself. Good luck in your quest for extra cash!
