The WorkGroup

For a lot of us, making a few extra hundred throughout the month is the difference between sinking and swimming (or more literally, the difference between spending the weekends with your family, or slinging hash in a hellish environment normally reserved for teenagers who’ll do anything on earth to put gas in their cars.)

This is especially true if you’ve been unlucky enough to divorce and get signed up for child support. At that point, one job just isn’t going to cut it, and yet two real jobs — with their schedules, uniforms, customer service issues, little cleanups, exemptions and paperwork — leaves the average person drained dry after a while. Everyone needs a little R&R to make it.

That’s why those little opportunities to make a few bucks blogging, or writing articles on the various for-hire sites, is an appealing option that potentially adds up to a meaningful lifestyle difference (even if the shift in lifestyle only means you can buy organic veggies once in a while, or stop digging under the couch cushions when it’s time to fuel up your car).

Over the years I’ve tried quite a few things to make a few extra bucks on the side. Selling books on Amazon was a pretty lucrative proposition a few years ago, even for a rank amateur. Even though Amazon had made the process of selling books so easy it was almost impossible to screw up, a lot of people just weren’t plugged in. The number of sellers was low, and demand was almost as high as it is today, so people who got in early made pretty darn good money.

As with anything else, though, the market matured. Hordes of sellers jumped in the ring, and profits went way down. Good for the buyers, but not a great way to pay your utilities with minimal effort anymore.

You could tell this story over and over again. The key to making decent money on the side is to catch the opportunities as they come up. Nothing stays static for long, much less a chance to pull in some cash without risking any capital or leveraging any specialized skills. You need to keep your eyes open, and you need to go for them, and be ready to jump when the stream dries up.

I have a friend who’s made an art of catching these waves. She was one of the first to catch onto PayPerPost, way back when, and made pretty good bank. PayPerPost has since refined its business model and moved toward segmentation, which apparently is a way of rewarding blogs with high pagerank (which isn’t the same thing as a big readership). She’s moved on, and now she writes prolifically for one of the blog networks that uses the about.com model to generate affiliate sales and ad revenue. People like this are worth keeping an eye on.

Technorati Tags: child support, Amazon, PayPerPost, ad revenue