Aisa Villanueva
We’re all guilty of being technologically dependent. We have become so adept to technological gadgets that it is like second nature to us now, listening to iTunes, while checking e-mail, while checking celebrity what’s her face’s Twitter update, while Google-ing homework for the next day, all while announcing on Facebook,”doing homework.” Internet activity and online statuses have ingrained themselves so fully into our lives that a life without YouTube is just too unthinkable, painful even. Take advantage of the opportunities that it makes available to us, because in a world of American Idol stars and 3D movies like Avatar, it is now possible to make extra money off of being online.
Before you jump into the 0100101 binary online pool, please read on for a few words of caution about working online. First off, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Just because you find a legitimate Internet source for money doesn’t mean that it can pay all your bills. They are not panaceas, and work best only as supplementary sources of income. Secondly, if a neon-blinking ad promises you large sums of money with no training necessary, stay away and do not let it reel you in. You know what they say, if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. With my warnings now done and over with, let us wade slowly into the sea of hypertext markup language.
If you are like the many of us who use the Internet as a venue for personal expression, then www.seed.com is for you. It is a website under the bigger company of AOL LLC (America Online Inc.). Somewhat like the picture post-friendly www.tumblr.com that has become the “it” url where artists post their works for the world to view freely, SEED provides a venue for writers and photographers to showcase their works and at the same time get paid for them. They require interested artists to register (for free) and when SEED posts an assignment or a suggested topic and you respond to it, if it meets AOL’s publishing guidelines and AOL chooses to compensate your work, you can get paid through different ways.
They either acquire an Exclusive License or Limited Exclusive License to your work. If it is the former, the company gets an Exclusive License to publish your work on one of its network sites or a third party site for the price listed with the request that was responded to. If it is the latter, AOL obtains a Limited Exclusive License to your work for publication on one of their network sites and pays a Calculated Earnings share based on the profit it generates. As a registered SEED member, you can choose different ways on how you want to be paid (PayPal, check, or direct deposit).
If you are like some who just love telling the world of your personal affairs, Sponsored Tweets from Twitter is your best bet. It works like the ads present on web celebrity Perez Hilton’s site as on fashion lover Bryanboy’s website. You get paid depending on the number of views on your account and based on presses to your Tweet ads.
To get started, all you need is to have a Twitter account. Sponsored Tweets is a white-listed application that will use your Twitter credentials to create your account. There are two ways you can get paid. An advertiser selects and makes an offer to tweeters they deem relevant or tweeters write tweets that include links to an advertiser’s site. This option, though, is very dependent on the amount of your followers, so you better tap your social networks to make some profit of your life announcements.
In the end, just keep in mind that while all these options provide great options for additional income, they are still added ‘lavors’ to our love-affair with the Internet, and that it is best to be cautious of online money-making deals. With that, I hope to stumble onto one of you someday, optimistically famous due to SEED, or perhaps, Sponsored Tweets.
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