Traveling costs are escalating, even with discount airline sites and fare bargaining. Food, accommodation, medical insurance, transport and incidentals are costlier than ever, given the vagaries of global economy and inflation. The only recourse open to people is to earn money while traveling, to abet costs. Here are 15 simple ways to do just that.

1. Start a Travel Blog

Another great way to use you travels to make money is to start a travel blog, or even write for a travel blog. It’s not tough – just watch out for great tourist spots and landmarks on your route, observe the culture, and post your travel articles on your blog. If you set up your blog and get the advertising going before you start your backpacking adventure, you can make quite a bit of money.

2. Submit Articles

Many blog owners, corporate companies and affiliate marketers need quality articles to generate traffic to their sites. If you’re a good writer, you can write for individual clients, companies, blogs, and writer groups and so on while traveling to different places. You will get to write on different topics that are assigned to you.

3. Use Your Skills To Make Money

What skills do you have that you can use to earn money while traveling? Are you a good hairdresser, a good masseuse, a good cook, web designer, home builder or photographer? Use your skills to earn your spending money.

4. Work Freelance through The Net

Use wifi hotspots along the way to connect with online clients and freelance your content writing skills, web design skills, programming skills and so on. You can get paid using an e-wallet such as PayPal, and withdraw your funds anywhere.

5. Take Up Affiliate Marketing

Sign up with Commission Junction or ClickBank and set up an affiliate product blog. You’ll be paid each time a user clicks a product from your website. You can do this while traveling and all your earnings will be delivered to you via PayPal or similar method.

6. Resell Items

If you are good at selling, you can be a sort of traveling salesman by buying products that are in demand and selling them at a profit. However, for this, you must know what products are in demand in your next place of visit.

7. Sell Pictures

Are you a skilled photographer? Do you know how much professionally taken pictures cost these days? Take pictures of wonderful sceneries and landmarks on your travel route, blow them up and laminate them. You can sell them as you travel.

8. Take Up A Summer Job

Take up a summer job to pay for your travel, such as bartendering, waitressing, working at gas stations, entertaining, ushering and so on. You’ll need a valid visa, work permit and the right credentials and references.

9. Take Up Internship

If you are a recent graduate, you might try for an internship abroad. Look for corporate and non-profit organizations that look for interns, and find out what the eligibility criteria is.

10. Work As A Consultant

If you’re traveling within the States, you can take up contracting jobs in different places, no matter what your skills are. Put up your skill set on Monster.com to know if there’s a market for your skills.

11. Do Handywork

People pay handymen to fix anything from their carpentry, electricity, plumbing and gardening needs. If you have any handyman skills, write up your skill set and see what jobs you find. You can make lots of money on referrals alone.

12. Write Reviews

Write reviews on the hostels and guesthouses you stay at while traveling. Study the facilities and get some feedback from people who’ve stayed there. Take a couple of pictures, and send your review off to travel sites such as BeforeYOUBackpack.com. You can earn anywhere from $5 to $20 per review. This is a great way to make some extra money while traveling.

13. Teach the English Language

If you have a zest for teaching and if your English is of teaching standard, then here’s a good way to make money. Take up English teaching jobs along your travel, at schools, clubs, summer camps and so on. Be sure you get accredited by TOEFL; you can get longer term jobs, perhaps as long as 6 months at a time.

14. Write Travel Articles

You’ll find many online travel communities requiring quality travel articles. If you’re not sure how to write a travel article, take the Travel Writing Course at Matador.com. You’ll get paid for your work and see things freshly.

15. Join Volunteer Groups

Volunteering positions are usually not paid, but some of them do offer a stipend, bed and board. If you are not sure of where your skills lie, volunteering is a good way to learn more about yourself and earn money.

Teena works for gifts for men Company that offers a large range of unique and thrilling gift ideas for men all across Australia.

Everyone wants to be rich. Just ask anyone, “Do you want to be rich?” And you’ll get a resounding yes. Anyone can be rich. That’s right. ANYONE. Your neighbor can be rich. Your office mate can be rich. YOU can be rich. The accumulation of wealth is not a circumstance. It’s a choice. In order to become wealthy you have to choose to be so.

There is a formula to wealth. This is a proven system that has been verified many times by multimillionaires around the world. And if you want your wealth to grow all you have to do is follow this system. Money may not be all that matters but it affects everything that matters: health, education, and your relationships.

Now what is this big secret to wealth?

It is this: Ride vehicles to wealth. Yes. It’s that simple! But how? And what exactly are vehicles to wealth?

There are 3 major money vehicles that can fast-track your way to financial freedom:

• Paper Assets. These are stocks, bonds and mutual funds. Most people see investing in the stock market as a huge risk. They think that the stock market is highly volatile and you could lose your hard earned money in a crash. And while this may have some truth to it, it’s not all there is to it. Yes, the stock market is unpredictable. But according to history it has an average growth rate of 18% per year. And what’s great is that you don’t have to be rich to start investing in the stock market. Just set aside 10-20% of your income each month to buy stocks. And in a couple of years you can retire a millionaire.

• Real Estate. This is one of the best investments there is. According to real estate multimillionaire Harv T. Eker, Don’t wait to buy real estate. Buy real estate and then wait. The best thing about investing in real estate is that land never depreciates. From the moment you buy it, the price only goes up. So when you do decide to sell it you can be sure to make a profit. Of course there are many ways to invest in real estate. You can buy an ugly property, renovate it and make it beautiful and then flip it for cash. That’s called retailing. Or you can buy a residential or commercial property and have it leased out. You might not be able to make a lot of money upfront but you can have passive income for as long as you like.

• Franchising. Now if you don’t have much business experience but have money to invest, franchising is the way to go for you. In franchising what you are buying aren’t really the products. What you are buying is the system. When you buy a MacDonalds franchise, for example, the franchisor teaches you everything you need to know about running a MacDonalds food chain. All you have you have to do is copy the system and you can be sure of success.

Premium rate telephone numbers have in the past attracted negative publicity because they were associated with fraudulent schemes such as bogus prize draws or premium services such as sex chat lines. But more recently, consulates and embassies have started introducing 190X numbers for incoming calls, and now individuals, communities and charities are discovering premium rate telephone numbers to be an ideal income generator for themselves. Here are some examples:-

Individuals – Register your premium rate telephone number with insurance companies, banks, credit card companies and all those other annoying people who call you up on the telephone and try to sell you something. You keep them on the phone as long as possible!*

For charities and communities, organize a free-ad web site or a news letter where the vendor’s telephone number is replaced by a premium rate telephone number which is linked to the vendor’s phone. This not only help to protect the identity of the vendor (who still deals with the incoming call and any transaction), but also raises valuable income for your organization.

Individually or collectively you could offer helpline facilities, host a recorded message service (for the weather, today’s horoscope, recent lottery winning numbers etc.) or simply form a community amongst yourselves where the proceeds generated from talking on the phone to each other are donated to a charity chosen between the participants of the group.

*Under current legislation, the maximum amount you can charge per minute is $5.50 with a ceiling of $38.50 per call. You will not get to keep all the $5.50 per minute for yourself, as income is shared with the service provider.

Details of premium rate services can be found by contacting companies such as www.mediatel.com, www.doatec.com or www.promotel.net or from your local service provider.

This is a guest article contributed by Melissa Tamura, who writes about online accounting degrees on the Zen College Life blog. She would love to hear from you at melissatamura@gmail.com

What are articles directories?

Article directories are websites that house free articles. These articles are usually put there by whoever owns the copyright to them as a promotion method. Each article has the owners byline placed under it so that those who eventually read the article will know who wrote it (or at least who owns it) and will be able to get in contact with or visit their website for further information.

How to make money from posting articles on article directory sites?

 Articles directories are a great place to put your articles so that they will make you money. By using this method, people who are interested in your product or service will see your article, view you as an expert in the subject, and will visit your website. Even if you cannot write or do not have any knowledge on the subject on which you are promoting (for example for you run an affiliate website), you can always hire a writer to do the work for you. Getting quality articles written will be expensive up front, but they will pay for themselves in no time, either through affiliate sales or selling your own services, and everything from then on is pure profit. Let’s take a real life example. Imagine that you are an accountant working from home. You write an article on an accounting topic and place it on various article directories. Those who are looking for the subject you wrote about will read your article, see that you have the knowledge and skill that is needed to do a job for them, and visit your website or contact you via e-mail. Your article just gained you a new client who may use your services regularly, but will definitely give you a nice profit at least once. Furthermore, since you have posted it on a free article directory, others who have affiliate websites about accounting will inevitably use your article for their website. Since they must attach your byline to it, this will bring you even more exposure for every website that re-posts your article. This because you will be benefiting of off the traffic that they get to their website. There are numerous article directories out there for you to utilize. Your best bet is to put a copy of each of your articles on every one for maximum exposure. It will eventually help to bring more traffic and customers to your website, which will lead to new orders and more profit.

Another way to make money from posting articles to article directory sites is to put affiliate links into the article. For example you might be a clickbank affilaite and write an article relating to a particular product on there. When people click on the link, they will be taken to a sales page and if they buy the product, you make money. It’s just that simple. Anyone can sign up to be an affiliate at Clickbank for free. There are also hundreds of other affilate programs to choose from such as Ebay, Amazon, Commision Junction, as so on. Making money by posting articles to article directories does not mean that you need a website.

We’ve all heard the saying, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”, but you might wonder if this is true in this day and age? Can you really still make money out of buying and selling junk secondhand goods? I know things have changed and gone are the days when second hand junk items used to hold a good price. But can you still make money? My answer is definately yes!

It all seems to be a chain reaction. New items are cheaper, therefore making them more disposable and easier to throw out, thus creating a treasure trove of junk. One particular type of person knows they can replace certain items easily and are careless about looking after it. There is another type of person that buys their junk, but values it highly, and does not even consider it junk. It’s a crazy world, but it will always be like that because we are all different.

So how do you make money out of buying and selling junk?

Junk value?

The first thing you need to be familar with is Value. The value of the item when it was brand new, the value of it second hand, and the value of it in it’s unique condition. It not good enough to know what people are trying to sell something for. Who cares about that. The only thing that matters is how much they actually got. That’s the going value of an item. For example a Nintendo DS Lite new would cost around $150. A good secondhand one should sell for around $110 but you might only get $100. If the screen is scratched you might only get $80. There are so many different values for one item. 

How to determine Value?

How do you determine the value of an item? The answer is research. You need to study brochures, catelogs, and the classifieds. If you like dealing with junk and making money then this won’t be a problem for you, it will be fun. You can also go to markets and places where they sell junk and check out the prices.

Where can you find junk to buy and sell?

Ok there are a million places because people are always getting rid of stuff. Here is a quick list for you to start with:

• Garage sales and Yard sales: Go to garage sales either very early when you get first choice of the bargains or very late if you want to offer to buy everything that is left.
• Markets and car boot sales: The best time to go to these markets is when it’s raining but the stalls are already there. The stallholder feels like they have wasted their time by coming in the rain. This is the time to really bargain with them.
• Your local dump/tip: Tips and dumps around us now have shops in them. They get the best junk out to sell, but don’t panic because it is still seriously cheap.
• Advertising: Put an ad in the local newspaper saying that you will buy entire household lots for cash. Every now and then you will hit the jackpot!
• Auctions: Auctions are great for junk if you are willing to sort stuff out. You can get a pallet of boxes with all sorts of stuff in them. If you buy in bulk you save loads of money. Don’t forget about transporting what you buy though.
• Roadside pickups: In Australia we have council pickups. People leave stuff on the kurbside to get picked up at a set date. I am not sure on the rules but if you have the guts to go up and ask if you can remove their pile, how can that hurt?

Where can you sell secondhand junk?

If you come across something really good then you can sell it on Ebay or in the local paper. Garage sales are also good because you can have the sale at your house, without having to cart anything anywhere. Bigger items are hard to sell on Ebay and therefore need to be sold at a market, the local paper, or a garage sale.

People have all sorts of hobbies that they love to do in their spare time.  Scrap booking, knitting, sewing, painting, surfing the net, or even blogging.  There are of course too many hobbies to mention them all and I will just say “each to his own”.

I have always participated in a hobby in my spare time, and have always ended up turning my spare time into cash.  I always find myself earning money from not only my regular jobs, but also anything else I seem to be doing at the time. For example when I was young my husband and I didn’t have much money, we scrounged the local tip for furniture and household goods.  Sometimes we would pick up a couch, or maybe even a timber coffee table.  We would often hit the “ jackpot “, as we called it, when we actually found something that worked or was useful to us.

This sparked, not only an addiction to the hunt for treasures, but it also ended up being a great little money spinner. We ended up with an overload of stuff and started having garage sales to earn extra money.  People would look at us strangely when I told them what we were doing and my answer to that was “If you saw a five dollar note on the ground would you pick it up?” They always answered yes to this.  Then I would ask them, “well why wouldn’t you pick up an item that will be worth $5 in the long run?”

This is just one example of how to make money from a hobby.  I really don’t think they let you remove stuff from the tip now days, but there is still the curbside pickup and I am sure there are other ways to collect free stuff.  When someone says they are throwing something out, grab it.  Appreciate things that can be turned into even one dollar.  One day I picked up a steering wheel bar lock but it had no key. My husband told me to forget it because it was useless without the key. Well I took it home anyway and put it in the next garage sale.  A guy came along and looked at the steering wheel lock and asked where the key was.  When I told him there wasn’t one he offered my $2 for it. Ah two dollars for free.  He thought he was getting a bargain and I just wanted to rub it in to my husband.

We also used to make small timber boxes from scrap wood. That was fun. We would make boxes with hidden drawers and locks. They just got better each time we made them.  However one day when we were selling our boxes at a local market, a customer asked if we made bedside tables.  I turned to my husband and asked him if we made bedside tables and he said yes… Well that was the start of something big.  We started making bedside tables, which led to TV cabinets, kitchen hutches, coffee tables, CD towers, and more… We had a Sales rep on the road and 4 people working to try and get the orders out each week.  What once was fun turned into a factory of mass production. We were supplying shops and retailing as well. We did this for about 10 years, until we finally got into other businesses that we wanted to try.

One main hobby that I have had all my life is computers. Building, repairing, ripping apart, and more…This hobby turned into a huge website http://www.tips4pc.com which can almost earn enough money for us to live off.

We did not always just snap our fingers together and make money from all of our hobbies. We tried others and failed. But the thing is we realized that they were not going to work and moved on… Get over it quickly so you can concentrate on the next venture.

Maybe you have an old fashioned hobby that you can bring to life again by making it trendy or in vogue again. For example knitting was outdated but now is very fashionable because people adapted to the market and supplied something that people can use rather than look at.  They make cool scarves out of weird furry wool, mobile phone pouches, and way out beanies or hats.  No more kettle warmers or toaster covers please!!!

Quick tips to turning a hobby into a money making idea:

• If you are making craft, make sure it has a use. People have cut down on buying things that just look good. It needs to be useful.
• When turning a hobby into a money making adventure don’t expect to be paid for every hour that it takes to create your masterpiece.
• Be realistic when pricing your item. Being handmade and quality crafted does not give you the big bucks unless your name is Picasso.
• Find a niche and go with it.  Do not copy people’s ideas because you think they are making money.  They usually are not making much at all.  It’s the unique items that sell the best.
• Try and source the material you need to make your items from a wholesaler or even free.  I know people that used to make wallets and tobacco pouches from scrap leather and suede from out of factory bins. They made a great profit because they didn’t have to pay for materials.  Also you can make lead light glass charms from scrap colored glass.. There is so much you can do.
• If you do not know how to do something ask for advice when buying your materials.  One day we decided to put a lead light window into a bedside table and didn’t know the first thing about it.  So I went to the lead lighting supplies shop, and while buying what I needed, I drained the guys brains on how to do it… I was there for ages. He wanted a sale and I wanted to buy the stuff but get lessons along the way…  Free lessons 101.  Then I went home and made a lead light piece to go into the bedside table.

You can also watch this video to see how one person turned their hobby into a money making project.

Let me know what hobbies you have and if you think you can make money from them.