Extra Income

Currently I am unemployed. Since I have no source of income except for my generous girlfriend, I have been searching for alternatives to make a few dollars. There are a lot of sites that offer advice on this. I will post about a few of them here and will continue to update on the success of these ventures.

The first thing is the advertising on blogs. I have a few of them that are still not receiving traffic, but I have yet to market them. I have been waiting to get some content on them first. There are a lot of sites that are free to register for and will give you the code to put on your site. The advertisements are usually geared toward your audience and usually pay per click or purchase. The one I use is Google Adsense and have seen some bloggers make a lot of money.

One thing I have started is something new to me. It's from Amazon and is called Amazon Mechanical Turk. Basically people post certain things that they need people to do, things called HIT or human intelligence tasks. These tasks are usually relatively easy and take very little time. There are thousands of them at any given time. The problem is that you get paid with pennies. Most tasks are between $.01 and $.05. So depending on how many you do, you can make a little bit of income.

Being unemployed isn't fun and I have been looking for work, but I think I may have found a business I can start in this small town. A pet sitting service. A couple of weeks ago my girlfriend and I went to Hawaii with her dad's family and needed someone to watch her four cats. It took up until the night before we left to find someone. This person graciously accepted after meeting us for five minutes. Her young daughters who were excited to play with the "kitties" helped persuade their mother and so we left for a week knowing our cats would be taken care of.

A lot of people go on trips and are not always able to take their pet with them. If their pets are anything like my cats, you can't just leave a bunch of food out for the time you are gone. They will eat it all the first couple days and be hungry for the rest of the time, so someone to feed them reasonable amounts of food a couple of times a day is necessary. So what I'm planning on doing is advertising on craigslist and in the newspaper to start building up some clientele. I will update on what happens.