Teaching Kids About Money

For some parents, when it comes to looking for work, the thought of having their kids dealing with strangers, or possibly knocking door to door, is just too much of a risk nowadays. Ok fair enough, but how can kids make money then? The attraction of earning pocket money on the internet definitely has the benefit of safety so you as a parent can make sure you child is safe.

There are many ways how to earn money for kids online, here are just a few

Paid Surveys

Many companies are out there trying to understand consumer behaviour – and your child probably represents one of the biggest category of consumer! To understand your kids, out of their marketing budgets companies are willing to pay for kids to answer questions so they can improve their marketing campaigns. Hence the birth of the paid survey.

In exchange for filling out their survey, your kid can earn a bit of pocket money for very little effort, possibly even picking up a few other bonuses/free gifts along the way.

I’ve included here a list of a few paid survey sites which I’ve found to be pretty good

• SurveyScout

• American Consumer Opinion

• Harris Poll Online

Blogging

Sometimes the easiest way how to make money as a kid, is to simply pick a topics that really interests you and start a blog on the topic. Sometimes its difficult as parents to understand how blogging could actually be a way of earning money for kids, but there are some key points which you need to know

• Having a website with relevant content, and frequently updated content is attractive to search engines. This means that under these conditions and website has a higher chance of getting on the first page of Google.

• Once you have a blog that is pulling some substancial traffic, there are many ways of turning this traffic into money
  • Google Adsense – by allow Google to display relevant advertising on your webpage, they will share their advertising revenue for allow them to share your webspace.
  • Affiliate Linking – if you are writing articles on your blog to recommend certain products, companies that own the product are willing to share some of their profits for any traffic that your refer to them.

Especially if your kid is into a hobby that is quite unusual or uncommon, the chances of earning some decent pocket money are really high, because these type of niche hobbies will have much less competition.

EBay

E-Bay is an awesome place to start an online business, you can start on a small scale selling a single item to test out the market, and if things seem to be selling easily you can decide to ramp up the number of items your selling.

A long time ago I know a friend who found that there was a big demand from people who were collecting Macdonald’s toys, you know the the ones you get with every Happy Meal? Anyway it turns out that these free toys were able to be sold at $20USD each to collectors who were frantically trying to outbid each other. Pretty good for a toy that was going to be thrown out huh?

E-Lance

Probably one of the most interesting ways how can kids make money is by using E-Lance. This site specialises in listing jobs that are exclusively online. There are a wide variety of jobs being advertised here and every job listed here can be done from the comfort of your own home.

So what sort of jobs are available?

Transcription

You have people who have audio files which need to be typed out into a word document and emailed back to the requestor. What I’ve found is that kids are naturally fast at typing, probably from years of practise using MSN and Yahoo Messenger no doubt. But because they’re naturally good at it, it is a fairly fun and easy way how to make money as a kid.

Translation

Does your kid know 2 languages, because the last time I checked there are heaps of small jobs to translate a document from one language to another. Definitely a good way for a kid to make some pocket money, and also improve their own language skills in the process. Most likely if they run into words that they don’t know how to translate, it’ll be up to you as a parent to help them out a bit, but at least you know that they are improving their mother tongue right?

Virtual Assistant

There demand for virtual assistants has increased dramatically over the last few years, and there is a flood of odd jobs which are being advertised. From people who need help maintaining their blogs, to others who need someone to ring a few hotels to make booking for a holiday. A virtual assistants role is basically the same as a secretary, but without the need to be physically present. In other words if its a job that only requires a PC and a telephone, then that’s a job for a virtual assistant.

In my opinion if you’re going to give any of these methods a try, definitely have a look at E-Lance you will be surprised to see the vast variety of work available.