Category: Other

Jon, who runs The Money Shed, recently got in touch with me and asked me if I’d like to join their forum about making money online. I had a brief look around and decided to go for it. It’s been a great decision!

From what I’ve taken away from it, The Money Shed is an independently run forum where people come together to discuss their money making efforts. Whilst you’re able to do this on the Money Saving Expert forums, you’re not able to provide links to your own site and referral links can only be posted in one particular area. The Money Shed does this differently – you can post your links in your signature and on the main posts, referrals included. People talk about anything and everything from online surveys to using YouTube to generate revenue.

Everyone is really friendly and people are willing to share advice, hints, tips and even answer questions for you. They make you think outside the box, encourage you and point you in the direction of things you’d never thought about. The membership is still quite small, with almost 250 members so far, but Jon is actively promoting The Money Shed, and you’ll see new members arriving daily.

I really cannot stress how brilliant this forum is, and how it is different to others out there. It’s a great starting point and the informal nature of it means you can’t really put a foot wrong. Here are my favourite posts so far:

• Skinnylatte makes videos for YouTube and details her earnings.
• Jon works for 63336 (I blogged about them).
• Me writing about Make Money Without a Job.

It would be great if you could head along and see whether The Money Shed is for you. You don’t need to be a member to view the posts and you may come away feeling very inspired.

I’ve been really busy in April, as I decided to develop and launch a new site – Make Money Without a Job. It’s been tough going – the domain I wanted wasn’t available, so I started the bidding process. And for some time I seemed to be splashing the cash anywhere and everywhere to get things exactly how I wanted.

But the site launched last week, and will be run in conjunction with From Aldi To Harrods and Bargainista Bride. It’s definitely a lot of work but I make no secret of the fact that I want to be supporting myself through my online ventures instead of having a job. Ideally within 24 months!

So head over to the introduction post – there’s also a Rafflecopter giveaway for a £20 Amazon voucher.

You see a penny (or any coin!) on the ground, do you pick it up, or walk straight past it?

We love picking up coins from the ground, and starting in January, we decided to dedicate one of our coin jars to what we’ve termed our “roadkill” – money we’ve found on the ground. Today, curiosity got the better of me and I had to count it up. Can you believe that we’ve managed to find £3.01 already?

Sure, it won’t buy us a portion of chips each (we’ll have to share!) but I’m impressed that this was free money, just laying around on the ground. I’ve also seen people just throw coins on the ground because they don’t like having coins on them. Crazy.

Great places to look for coins:

• The ground around car park payment machines.
• Change compartment at coin payment machines – car parks, train stations, etc.
• Around bins.
• Coin operated trolley bays.
• The ground near tills.
• Outside kiosks.

So will you be picking up coins you see on the ground?

The site & how to earn:
Bubblews is a site where, simply put, you write short posts (400 characters or more, which is roughly 100 words), and once they’re posted, you earn 50% of the advertising revenue the site gets from that post. Every time that you get a comment, a “like” or “dislike” or your post is shared on social media, you earn. So you want to make a lot of friends, called connections, and mutually interact with them. You are allowed to post 10 posts a day, and you can add your own photos. There are 15 categories to write in, and your posts can be pretty much anything as long as they’re in English and don’t use profanity.

Payment method(s) & thresholds:
You can then cash out via Paypal once you reach $50 (roughly £31). If you prefer not to receive Paypal cash, you can provide your address and a link to an item you want them to purchase on your behalf and have delivered to you. I’d opt for the Paypal cash. Once you hit that “redeem” button, expect to wait 10 days until it lands in your Paypal account.

My verdict:
I really, really cannot make up my mind about Bubblews. It can be really tedious – you can write a really good post with lots of photos and earn very little, then you can write a post saying that you’re going to bed and earn a lot. People either take their writing on Bubblews very seriously by calling themselves writers, copyrighting their work, adding a word and character count and running a plagiarism checker on all their posts, or people (like me!) post the most random drivel about their day, their lunch and anything else. The site is used by a lot of international users, who don’t have English as their first language, so you need to bear this in mind. But because of this, there are certain times of the day that are busier than others, and the website also seems to go down a lot in the day time.

It is all about connections and interacting with others, and up until I had around 300 connections I was sure that this blog post was going to be a negative one. But at around 300 connections I saw my earnings increase. It doesn’t seem to provide passive earnings – I’ve certainly not seen a great increase in my earnings when I’ve been away from Bubblews overnight. I’ve made $50.03 from 101 posts, so just $0.49 per post. I received my notification of e-cheque 5 days after requesting payout. I’ve seen some people mention getting $1+ per post, but I’m definitely nowhere near that. People have also mentioned being able to redeem once a week – again, that’s not something I’m close to achieving.

But Bubblews is definitely not a scam, it’s legit – even though tedious.

Do you use Bubblews? Do you have any great tips?

Want to see how I upcycled this beautiful dressing table from a £10 desk I bought on eBay? Of course you do!

Click here to head over to Thrift Week and read all about it – and my experiences using chalk paint powder.