Having recently become funemployed a couple of months ago, I have spent an almost unhealthy amount of time on the internet in an attempt to earn some extra money and stop my bank account from shouting at me.

At first I earned basically nothing – a lot of the online “jobs” out there are massive scams, and a lot of others pay next to nothing for a huge amount of work. Now, I’ve settled into a routine that, when I spend a proper amount of time on it, will earn me a decent amount of money each month (yay!). 

So, here’s a list of resources and tips that I’ve cobbled together in the past month or so – I hope it helps you start earning too!

If you want to skip straight to the list of websites/links instead of reading the post – that’s fine with me! – just click on: list of money makers (link)

1. Reddit is your best friend

Make sure you’ve got a Reddit account and you’re following the below subreddits. Honestly, there are so many people out there who are either down on their luck and looking for a quick way to pay the bills or who are just like me and are trying as hard as possible to never leave the house. (Note: I know it’s weird and Not The Done Thing, but I capitalise my subreddit names because it’s easier for screenreaders to parse them!)

• r/BeerMoney, r/BeerMoneyGlobal, r/BeerMoneyUK and r/WorkOnline are all great for finding microtasking and survey websites for a steady influx of pennies. They tend not to pay any more than minimum wage to start with (usually much less) but they’re ideal for doing in front of the TV or on your phone in bed. r/WorkOnline may also point you in the direction of actual jobs (i.e. ones you have to interview for) that can be done from the comfort of your home, so definitely make sure you check for new posts often!
• r/ForHire and r/SlaveLabour are good places to go if you’re actively looking for people to hire you to do work. You can either scroll through and see if anyone is requesting someone with your skillset, or you can make a post offering to work for a certain rate. As you may be able to tell by the questionable name, r/SlaveLabour tends to be people doing things as cheaply as possible, so make sure you’re not underselling yourself too much.
• r/Freelance is the place to be for freelancers (or people who are considering freelancing) to get advice and read relevant articles etc. I’d recommend it as there’s lots of good advice in here about working too many hours for not much money, what to do if a company doesn’t pay you, how to do your taxes when you’re working for multiple companies and so on, and is generally a good place to go to ask your questions. If you make working online your full time job, you’re a freelancer!

If anyone has any more subreddits that they think I should be following, send them my way!

2. If you’ve got a phone, you can work from home

There is a surprisingly large number of microstasking and survey smartphone apps that don’t ever need you to log in on a traditional PC. You can literally lie in bed all day and do surveys for cash and watch the pennies roll in!

I prefer to do things on my computer (as I like to watch Netflix at the same time) but here are a couple of the apps that I do have:

• Clickworker – offers microtasks and surveys, and also has a desktop site. Payments are made in Euros via paypal and can take some time to “clear” before you can request to be paid. Tip: if you see any tasks entitled “Make Pinterest better” or similar, snap them up! They pay really well compared to all the others (about 30p per 5mins of work), are more or less infinite once you get in and are fairly mindless so you can watch TV while doing them. I made £25 in a couple of hours this way!
• AttaPoll – surveys only. This is probably the best way of doing surveys that I’ve found (apart from Clickworker) as it’ll notify you every time a new one is available and, if you get disqualified, it’ll automatically find one that you are qualified for so you don’t miss out on getting paid. You earn an amount of credits per survey and 1 credit = £0.01 so it’s easy to tell how much you’re earning.

3. You can get paid to do really random (and easy) things

Downloaded an app? Have £3! Registered for a free trial? Have another £5! Play this game until you reach level 15? By Jove, you deserve £12 for that!

Seriously, get yourself an email account just for random signups and go wild. Once your money/coins/credits have appeared in your account, you can delete whatever app you’ve downloaded and unsubscribe from whatever you subscribed to and you’re winning really.

Here’s a list of my favourite sites for this – sign up for them all if you can as they all have different offers (or will sometimes have the same offer but will pay different amounts):

Gain.gg (link)

A really cool site run by a nice couple of people, you earn coins for doing surveys and tasks and 1000 coins = $1USD. No minimum cash out but you have to get approved by an admin on cashout unless you’ve earned a certain amount.

TIP: this has an incredible survey system that will reward you even if you disqualify half way through the survey – take advantage of this! Once you earn 5000 coins you get permanent access to the higher paying surveys and some people on there make absolutely loads from that. It’s very social with a chat and user profiles so you can check how people are earning things and ask for help from admins and users alike 🙂 As of November 2019 it also has daily login bonuses so it’s definitely worth checking back every day!

GG2U (link)

Targeted at gamers but good for everyone, with great payout rates!

TIP: cash out every $7 you make as for every 5 times you cash out you get a “token” that lets you spin a wheel to win a random amount of cash. $7 is the minimum cash out amount so this is the most efficient – I earned it, cashed it, and received it in my paypal all within 12 hours of registering!

Swagbucks (link)

the OG GPT (“get paid to”) site. Honestly, Swagbucks is awesome if you want to do all of the above and you also do online shopping as it has a section that lets you earn SB for purchases made on pretty much every online shop.

TIP: There’s also a section for coupons that will get you money off and earn you SB, and they have a browser extension which will pop up on a site when there are offers available so you never miss out. I mostly use it to get discounts and cashback whenever I order takeaways, and I’ll definitely be using it for my Christmas and Birthday shopping from now on.

SERPClix (link)

get paid to paste keywords into Google and click on links. That’s literally it – easy money! Each search takes maximum 1 minute and you get $0.10 for each click. This is another one you can just leave sitting in the background until the browser extension tells you there’s something to do. It needs Firefox and I use Chrome, so I just leave a Firefox window open on my second monitor with my HideoutTV playing!

TIP: if a search takes more than a minute, you may as well give up and wait for the next task – your time is more valuable than that! You don’t get penalised for not clicking 🙂

4. Passive earning

This is the dream – money for doing absolutely nothing! I know there are quite a few passive earning methods out there but I’m still trying to figure out which are legit and which are too good to be true (hint: most of them). Here are a couple of the ones that I use and have been paid by (AKA they’re verified as not a scam!)

HideoutTV (link)

Get paid to watch videos! This gives you points per advertisement watched during videos and you can cash these points out to loads of sites, including the aforementioned gain.gg and GG2U (which is a great way to get up to your initial 5000 gain.gg coins to start doing the big surveys, by the way!).

TIP: this works best if you have multiple monitors as the window has to be active at all times – you can just put it on your second monitor, mute the tab and forget about it while the points climb 🙂

Honeygain (link)

Honeygain is a little app that you install on your PC or Windows tablet, which uses the internet bandwidth that you aren’t using to perform calculations and do marketing analytics and things that they aren’t able to do on a single machine. As far as I can tell, they aren’t doing anything that they shouldn’t be with my internet, and they’re not tracking my browsing history or anything like that, so I’m happy to keep the app running in the background!

It’s a slow earner for me as I don’t like to keep my computer on all the time (climate crisis etc.) but I’ve made about $20 a month so far which isn’t bad at all!

That was quite a lot of info, so here’s a quick summary of all of the websites I’ve mentioned above, plus a couple of bonus ones, which I’ll keep adding as I find them. (Note: these are mostly referral links, please forgive me as I try and earn pennies!)

Site/App	Type	Description
Gain.gg	Desktop Mobile	GPT – My favourite site. Works best on desktop with a mobile to complete the app offers.
Clickworker	Desktop Mobile	Microtasking & surveys – best tasks are the ones offered by companies like Pinterest who want you to check that their site works as expected.
HideoutTV	Desktop	Passive – Leave playing on second monitor for most efficient earning (but you earn more when it’s in focus i.e. when your cursor is on the video window). You may have you tell it that you’re “still there” or “not a robot” about once or twice a day!
Honeygain	Desktop	Passive – Leave the app running in the background and it’ll use a little bit of your unused internet to crunch numbers. It’s also very cute!
GG2U	Desktop	GPT – withdraw every $7 to get the special tokens that give you a chance to win more money
Attapoll	Mobile	Surveys – pretty good, will find you a survey even if you disqualify for the one you intended to do
Swagbucks	Desktop Mobile	Surveys, coupons & cashback – do all your shopping via here for the best chance to earn! Make sure you install the browser extension.
SERPClix	Desktop	GPT/Search – only works on Firefox but is fairly passive. Can leave on second monitor and it’ll let you know when there’s work.
Reddit	Desktop Mobile	r/BeerMoney, r/BeerMoneyGlobal, r/BeerMoneyUK, r/WorkOnline, r/ForHire, r/Freelance and r/SlaveLabour for links to GPT, survey, microtask and passive earning websites, as well as advice, job postings and other methods for earning money from home.
Quickthoughts	Mobile	Surveys – only pays in itunes store credit in the UK so I don’t use it but pays to PayPal etc. elsewhere.