Great ‘Bit On The Side’ Hunt

susy_2

bcopie wrote:

Consumer research companies of this sort will also normally have products being tested long term. I have been testing razors for 3 1/2 years being paid £50 a week for 20 mins of my time 4 times a week. I got into this because I just kept ringing them up every month to ask if they had any studies on (pestering if you like).

I recently tested aspirin for one and at easter signed up with another on a long term study for the G.I. diet where I eat a product and test my blood (a tiny pin !!!!!!) every 15 mins for the next two hours for £20. This usually gets me £40 - £60 a week.

Hi bcopie,

You are obviously in the same line of work as I am, Market Research. I have been doing it for some years now, but I have to say, at the moment it is deathly quiet. Quieter than I have ever known it. How are you doing at the mo? You are in a completely different area to me.

The above is interesting. I work for many companies, but none of them do long term studies as you have mentioned above. Any more info?

Good luck with your jobs anyway.

sprinkle_2

Hi Bcopie and Suzy

Could you give me an example of a company I could call or how do I go about looking for companies to call.
Thanks

susy_2

Hi Sprinkle,

I fell into it by accident at first through a friend while I was at Uni. However, if you search on the internet for mystery shopping and market research, this will throw some names up for you. Off the cuff, I think Millward Brown is one of the largest companies.

You do not need training to become a mystery shopper, but many companies require you to be trained as a Market Researcher and some of these companies will train you.

Good luck

sprinkle_2

Those of you who are doing surveys can you tell me whether you have to pay a joining fee and what's the income like?
Many thanks
(Loving the thread)
Janet

WSO

irishspur wrote:

I'm a bit confused and don't understand how you can make money from a website without providing a service. Is it through advertising links?

New to all this, sorry!!!

In a word, yes...

Google Adsense is good for matching your content up with adverts and saves you having to find someone interested in advertising on your site yourself. You copy and paste some code into your HTML and they do the rest.

Amazon have something similar available but lots of people like to use Amazon because it offers a high level of custimisation via AWS/Amazon Ecommerce Services.

Some people have thought I sell books and have enquired about orders or ordering as I have a cart facility that will put Amazon items into a remote Amazon cart, when they come to checkout, I give Amazon the cart number and they take it from there... not sure if you class this as advertising but I get about a third of my Amazon money this way.

Of course there are plenty of other companies that pay commission or pay per click or ad impression, but Amazon and Google work best for me.

aliwatts

Hi to all of you great money savers,

I have been reading through all these great ideas and think they are great. I am really interested in creating my own website but am not very IT minded. Is it easy and who is recommended to get what you all keep calling web hosting from, is this for your web address?? Do you have to know much about HTML or is this quite automatic?

I have been a member of yougov for ages but don't make hardly anything there, havent had a cheque yet!!!!

Thanks for any advice given....

Ali

bcopie

Hi Sprinkle,

I too fell into it by accident a friend told me he was tasting some alcohol shots and they were desperate for people so I called and the rest is history, I was a student at the time and had lectures about 100 yards from the company.

The best place to find these companies is to go to yell.com and search for 'market research and analysis' for the area/ county you live in. There are 44 in Berkshire alone. I have been quite busy recently so I guess it depends where abouts you are and what companies you sign up with.

It doesn't usually cost anything non of the ones I am with charged me. They will have a database of people that they call when they do studies/ product testing, it is supposed to be done on a rotation system (although this depends on what criteria they are given) but I have found that if I call reguarly (every couple of weeks) they remember you a bit more.

good luck!

Bleg

I have read through all the links and I think they are brilliant

competitionscafe

Scottish_Saver wrote:

Thanks websiteowner
Have just applied to Google for our site, if all goes OK then may consider Amazon but that looks far more technical.

Scottish saver - lucky you living near Plockton (very beautiful part of the world)
Anyway, amazon is very easy and not at all technical - all you need to do is put the links they give you onto your website. To create a text link you would just add your associate id to the end of the url eg: take this book about adsense - you just take this part of the address:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321321146/

and add your id to the end where the XXXXXX is:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321321146/XXXXXX

So if your associate id was scottishsaver the link would be:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321321146/scottishsaver

easy!

Or you can just cut and past the code they give you from the 'build a link' page. Don't expect to earn a fortune though! If your site gets decent traffic you should make a bit of extra money as long as the products you feature are relevant to your site.

edit - just to add, amazon web services (mentioned by websiteowner) is more technical but you can just use their standard associate program links (as above) to start with and then consider more complex stuff later - to use their standard associate program links you just need to be able to cut and paste (like adsense).

competitionscafe

aliwatts wrote:

Hi to all of you great money savers,

I have been reading through all these great ideas and think they are great. I am really interested in creating my own website but am not very IT minded. Is it easy and who is recommended to get what you all keep calling web hosting from, is this for your web address?? Do you have to know much about HTML or is this quite automatic?

Hi Ali, yes you will need some kind of hosting for your web address (domain name) - as suggested earlier you could buy a .com domain at https://www.doteasy.com for $25 which is about £14 (for 1 year) and this includes web hosting for a whole year. They may not be the best host in the world but they are fairly reliable and for just over £2 a month for your domain name and hosting this is about as cheap as it gets. With a decent website which has good quality content, adsense ads and maybe a few relevant affiliate program links (amazon, etc) you should easily make more than the £2 a month needed to cover your costs and give you some extra cash.

Alternatively, you can buy a .co.uk domain name from https://www.123-reg.co.uk for £2.59 per year (minimum of 2 years) and then find a cheap UK hosting deal...or I think 123-reg do fairly cheap web hosting too from £1.59 per month (paid a year in advance plus £10 set up fee). (Not sure what it's like as I have never used it but I have bought domains from them with no problems).

As for html, if you don't know html you can use the free web site builder that doteasy.com have on their site. Or you could use free software - something like WebPlus 6 Free Web Site Design & Publishing Software: http://www.freeserifsoftware.com/software/WebPlus/default.asp (not used that myself so I don't know how easy it is to use but it looks quite easy?). Alternatively, if you can afford around £100 some software called xsitepro will help you build web sites without having to know any html: https://www.getxsitepro.com The advantage of this is that it also takes care of seo (making your site more search engine friendly so you get more traffic) and also automates the process of adding Google adsense ads to all your pages or making changes across your site automatically, plus a number of other things including lots of templates. (A template is a ready made web site, you just need to personalize it and add the content).

Having said that html is quite easy - you could probably learn the basics in a weekend from a book borrowed from the library (that's how I learned). (You don't need software to learn basic html just notepad will do).

Alternatively if you want to try learning the basics of html now, try this free online course which is a very good beginners intro:
http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_intro.asp
Just open notepad, follow the instructions and you should have a (very,very basic) web page up in about 10 minutes.

Hope this helps?