After we talked yesterday about Andi Peters Free Cash Friday, it got us thinking a little bit more about how to earn a bit of money on the side while COVID-19 has us all stuck at home until those clever scientists work out how to immunise us all!
We thought that we’d do a few posts over the coming days suggesting different approaches to supplementing your income, however large or small that might be.
Whether you’ve see everything dry up like us here in the openmusicscore.org team, or still could do with a few extra quid in the bank each month (who couldn’t?), we’ve come up with some nuggets that might just be able to help).
Let’s start in the same zone as yesterday, and talk sweepstakes, competitions, prize draws – whatever you want to call them, it’s all the same to us.
First and foremost, we are not advising anyone to pay for entry to anything here. Spending money you don’t have on a punt to get lucky is a bad idea, plain and simple. Yes, it probably comes off occasionally for someone, but the chance of that being you is tiny to non-existent.
On the other hand, when you’re time rich and money poor, a free online entry or two doesn’t do you any harm at all. Your investment is nothing more than a few moments of your time and then you can let lady luck work her magic.
For businesses (like ITV with Free Cash Friday), free entry contests are a terrific way to get your name out there and into the minds of millions of people who are looking for what you have to offer.
Whether it’s just a few words on your website or a sales pitch, getting your name out there and into the minds of those who are interested in what you have to say is a great way to generate some good money online.
You see, you don’t have to pay for entry contests that offer cash prizes, because that isn’t the goal here. The goal with these type of contests is to get people to share your website link with their friends and family (heck, we did exactly that for ITV yesterday), and to do that, you need to give them something of value. This might mean putting them to work or promoting their website in return, which of course would also cost you some money.
When you look at free entry contests that offer prizes of some sort, you will notice that they usually include some kind of advertising program that lets you use the information that you collect from the contest in exchange for some money. While this might seem like a scam to some people, you need to realize that it’s just a way for the company to get their name out there and to start generating traffic to their website.
If you are offering free advice or products to promote on your site, this can be another way that you can generate buzz and start generating visitors to your online store or company website. For example, you can offer to write articles for people who are trying to build a website from scratch, but who also don’t know much about computers or how to use them. Then, they will pay you to send them your article to publish on your site as well as pay you to advertise on your site for as long as they want.
When they pay you for advertising on your site, they are not going to actually buy anything from you and they aren’t going to have to worry about writing articles and posting them on your site for you to do all of the work for them. All they have to do is just pay you for the service and then you can send them their articles and post them on your site whenever they want.
These types of contests are great because it lets you reach out to people in your field that you otherwise wouldn’t have been able to reach through traditional marketing techniques. For example, if you have a blog and you offer free advice, you may be interested in reaching out to those in your niche that are having some problems, but who are also looking for help.
In addition to getting your name out there for free entry contests that offer prize incentives, you will also be able to get your name out there by having a list of links that people can click on to go to your site to get more information or to buy your products and services. This is one of the best ways that you can gain some additional exposure and bring in more visitors to your site. When they see that you have links on other sites, they will click on the links and end up coming to your site to learn more about your topic.
You see, with many of these types of contests, you never have to spend any money to enter them. There is no cost to you can simply put in a small bit of information and some of your contact information, and the only thing you have to invest is your time to fill in the form to enter.