Making money with webanswers

Webanswers won’t make you rich, but if you enjoy browsing internet forums and social media, you’ll probably find it fun.
Webanswers is my favourite casual money making website.

Although for the best results you do have to put in a small bit of work every day, with very little commitment you can soon be making a euro or so a day.

Because it works through a revenue sharing scheme based on Google AdSense, you can be certain your earnings are safe and guaranteed.

How to get started with webanswers
Webanswers is completely free to use. First, you’ll need to sign up for an account. You then have two choices:

• Ask questions

Have a question about anything at all? Type it up, post it in the appropriate category on webanswers, and wait for people to give you answers. Once you’re satisfied you’ve got the right answer, you can award someone with ‘best answer’.

• Answer questions

If you’re reading this, you’ll probably want to be answering rather than asking questions, as this way money can be made.
The front page shows a list of recently asked questions. Alternatively, you can go into categories, and browse questions by topic.

If you see a question that you know the answer to, just click on it and type into the box provided at the bottom before submitting.

AdSense
So how can you make money through answering questions?
Webanswers is a so-called revenue sharing website. Each page show ads, provided by Google AdSense. Every time a page with ads is viewed, the website owner get paid a few pennies. If someone clicks on on of the ads, the payout is bigger.

Webanswers shares its earnings through ads with the people who answer the questions. They keep 60 percent of the revenue, leaving up to 40 percent for you and me.

This revenue gets credited into your AdSense account. Once you reach €70 ($100), you can get the money paid directly into your bank account.

AdSense is a reliable, verified programme. Run by Google, you can be sure that it’s not a scam. As long as you don’t break their terms and conditions, you won’t have to worry about whether or not you’ll be paid, which makes any website that uses it, such as webanswers, a safe option.

Earning through webanswers
To actually make money out of webanswers, you’ll have to jump through some hoops first.

First of all, you’ll need to sign up for Google AdSense and link your account to your webanswers account. To do both, you’ll need to answer fifty questions first.

Second, there will usually be more than one person answering each question. This means that the user portion of ad revenue is shared. This is not done in equal measure between users.

Webanswers does not disclose exactly how revenue is divided, but the following certainly influence your earning potential:

• Quality rating of user and answer. Make sure your answers have good grammar and spelling. In addition, very short answers of one or only a few words will not work in your favour. Try to go into some detail and provide quality material.
• Level of activity of user. Try to log in every day, and answer a few questions. I usually aim for five, which generally doesn’t take long at all. If I don’t log in for a day or more, I almost instantly see my earnings drop.
• Seniority of user. The more questions you’ve answered, the more revenue you’ll get.

Awarded answers
What you really want to aim for, is to be awarded ‘best answer’. This means that for a full year, all of the user portion of the revenue of page views and ad clicks will be credited to your account.

For that reason, it literally pays to put in a bit of effort to your answers and make sure they are of good quality. Awarded answers are not easy to gain, but they’ll come once you keep active on the site. At 169 questions answered, I now have 6 awarded best answers.

International user friendly
Webanswers is fully accessible for those of us outside the United States. As long as you can get an AdSense account, you’ll be good to go.

That being said, it is clear that the website is based in America, and most of its users are too. This means that a lot of questions are US focussed as well, and difficult to answer for non-Americans. For example, apparently the questions with the highest earning potential tend to be the legal ones, but unless you happen to know a lot about US law, you’ll not get much out of them.

In addition, I have found the website is most active during US daytime, which means the majority of questions are posted when I’m asleep. As it can be a bit of a competition to be the first to get a good answer in, this can put you at a disadvantage. Then again, I never have any difficulties finding five questions I can answer each day.

My experience with webanswers so far
Webanswers won’t make you rich, let me make that clear. I got my fifty initial questions answered in about a week.

At the time of writing, my account has been linked with AdSense for about three weeks. In that time, I’ve averaged about a euro a day. Aside from a two day break, I’ve answered at least five questions a day and have now been awarded a total of six best answers out of 169.

I find that there is very little effort involved in keeping up my daily activity. I tend to spend a lot of time on social media and internet forums anyway, so I found I’ve diverted some of that time to webanswers instead. I do it in little chunks. Whenever the kids are asleep or otherwise occupied and I have a spare moment, I have a quick look at the website to see if there’s a question I can answer.

Most of the questions are actually really easy too answer; you have to wonder would it not be quicker for the asker to do a five second Google themselves! You don’t really need to have much expertise at anything although personally I enjoy answering those questions where I do actually know a lot about the topic.
I like webanswers, as I enjoy finding finding new information and see it as a challenge to research and write. It doesn’t take much time, and the fact that it brings in some money is a nice bonus. Revenue seems to be going up slowly but surely; we’ll see how that continues to develop in the future.

Referal links
The links I’ve posted to webanswers above are so called referral links. That means that if you use them to access the website and register, I get a small bonus. I’d appreciate it if you did. It won’t cost you anything. If you’d rather not, here is a ‘clean’ link to webanswers instead.

Please let me know if you’ve signed up, or if you’re already using webanswers and what your experiences are!

How to start working from home and become a WAHM - Roundup

In the last two weeks, I've published a series of post showing, based on my own experience, how to get started working from home and become a WAHM. For the sake of completion, here is a round up of all of the posts.

Part 1: Identify your skills and interests
Part 2: Investigate your options
Part 3: Identify your goals
Part 4: Make a plan and get started

Becoming a WAHM - Part 4 - Make a plan and get started

So you are a stay-at-home-parent and have decided that in your spare time you would like to make a little bit of money. Where do you start?

This is the fourth in a series of posts giving advice on how to get started making an income from home.
In the previous installments, I’ve shown how to:

• Identify your skills and interests
• Investigate your option for making money from home
• Identify your goals

Now, it’s time to turn the potential ways of making money of your skills and interests into a practical endeavour that works for your.

How committed are you?
There’s a variety of ways to make money from home. Some are casual, where you can drop in and out as you please, others involve a commitment either long or short term. This is why we identified our goals previously.

Aside from the answer to why you want to work from home in the first place, you’ll need to ask yourself these three questions:

• How many hours do you have to spare?
• How many hours are you willing to dedicate to work each day and week?
• Can and are you willing to make a long term commitment? 

What does it take?
Armed with that information, go back to your list of potential money earners. Review all the options on the list:

• How much time will each option take each day and week?
• How much money can I make doing this? And what is my potential profit/hour?
• Will I have to commit long term, or can I do it casually? 
• Do any of your options require any investments, such as materials or shipping costs?
• If you are thinking of selling anything, consider how much time you will need to spend marketing your wares. 

Business plan
What you're basically doing, is making a business plan. In the end, you want to make sure that your chosen option is profitable.

What you define as profitable, depends on what your expectations are. That's why we looked at your goals for working from home.

Do the math
Now you have all the information you need to do some calculations. Make sure that your expenses will not be greater than your potential earnings, first of all. And then consider how much of a profit margin you will actually have. Calculate what your hourly rate will be, and decide whether or not you're satisfied with that. If not, try another option.

The level of commitment is a very important point to consider as well. There are many ways, especially only, where you can make small amounts of cash with very little effort and no requirement to be consistent. On the other end of the scale, if you're thinking of starting a business, or taking on (freelance) work, you will have to commit to a certain number of hours each day and week, often over a longer period of time. Of course, the earning potential in this type of option for making money as a WAHM is generally greater as well, but you have to be very certain you'll be able to keep up with the commitment. And not just now, but a few months down the line as well, when the novelty of it has worn off!

Don't forget that your situation might well change! You might be able to commit to a freelancing job that will cover the next couple of months because the kids are in school, but then over the summer holidays, for example, you won't be able to do much other than casual work whenever you happen to have an unexpected hour or so to spare.

Example - My list
To show you an example of how to put the advice above into practice, we'll go back to my situation.

Remember, my main goal was not to bring in a lot of cash, but rather find a worthwhile occupation where I could use some of my skills to enrich my life and be more than just a mother and housewife.

Now back to my list of skills and interests. Were any of the realistic options for me?

Knitting
Knitting items for profit, it soon turns out, was not for me. Materials are expensive, it takes a relatively long time and people are not really willing to pay enough for handknits that would make it worthwhile for me.

It is also very difficult to market handknits. While etsy is great, is is, by all accounts very hard to get your items noticed.

Of course, it can work for some people. As a lovely commenter on the original post pointed out, if you find a very specific niche, you might be able to sell.

For me personally, I also concluded I'd get bored of knitting specific items. It's a hobby I use to express my creativity, if I turned it into a business I would no longer enjoy it.

I did discover that there is potential in selling knitting patterns. I'm keeping that option open as a possibility for the future, as I want to learn to design anyway.

Writing, research & translation
I'm addressing these together, as I'm approaching them in the same way.

From the start, this one had far more potential. Once I stumbled across elance and odesk, I pretty much knew this was what I wanted to do. A way of using real skills I have, while making a reasonable amount of money.

Of course, there are also downsides to websites like those. They really do pay under the market rate, and it can be a long and frustrating process to get noticed.

The other side to it is that once to accept a job, you do have to commit to getting it done in the amount of time agreed. When I started working as a WAHM in January 2013, I was able to commit to at least two hours a day, and knew I would be for the next few months.

I began bidding primarily on translating jobs, and got two of those. These were only small assignments, quickly completed.

Later, due to my credentials as an academic and historian, I was able to 'win' a job writing a large number of short articles on historical topics. This project took several months, and was a nice steady income for a while.

In the end, I made several hundred dollars doing freelance work. I enjoyed it, and I intend to continue building a career and a portfolio as a WAHM freelance writer in the future, but after finishing my first large writing assignment, I was no longer able to commit to work (even though the contractor offered me a repeat job). I was at that point seven months pregnant, so the time had come to take it a little easy for a while.

In late pregnancy and in the newborn stages, my focus will be on more casual writing work, such as at Webanswers. I've also begun this blog and started a Hubpages account. I'm not expecting to make much money, if any at all. For now, I'm content to keep honing my skills and keep myself in the habit of writing.

Cooking
I almost immediately knew that starting a food related enterprise wasn't going to be for me. In fact, I didn't want to start any enterprise. My children are still quite small, and I simply don't have the time to invest in starting an actual business. I'm not ruling it out completely for the future, when the children are in school, but it will be many years away if I ever do it.

I did consider blogging about food, or otherwise combining it with my writing skills, but in the end decided that while I am interested in the topic, I would not be able to keep up finding interesting things to write about in the long term. In addition, there are a lot of food blogs out there, and it would be very difficult to get noticed.

Your turn! 
Now you have the basic information you need to get started working from home and making some money as a WAHM.

Please do leave a comment, I'd love to hear from you.

This series was intended to give general advice on how to get started.  I'll be updating this blog further soon with more detailed looks at various ways of making money as a WAHM, so please stay tuned.

Becoming a WAHM - Part 3 - Identifying your goals

So you are a stay-at-home-parent and have decided that in your spare time you would like to make a little bit of money. Where do you start?

This is the third in a series of posts giving advice on how to get started making an income from home.

Previously we have identified our skills and interests and explored ways how to turn those into something profitable.

The next two posts will look at the practical side of things. It’s all very well to have plans to start running a big business from home, making thousands a month, but is it really a practical option for you? And are you actually willing and able to make the sacrifices needed to to it?

Let’s start with the second point.

Identifying your goals
We all become a WAHM for our own reasons. Think about why you want to start working from home. Do you:

• Want to supplement your household income with some much needed cash. If this is the case you are probably looking for a reliable source of income.
• Turn something you enjoy doing anyway into a source of income.
• Find something to do aside from looking after kids, house and home and is the potential income a nice bonus but not the primary goal.

These are typical examples of goals for a WAHM. Your own personal goal might be something different again. It is, however, very important that you know why you are doing it and what you are hoping to accomplish.

For me personally, it was really the third point, at least initially. I spent years in education, eventually getting a PhD, and while I enjoy being a SAHM, I also felt like I wanted to do something more with my education and skills. Plus, it is indeed very nice to have a small bit of money that I made. With my WAHM activities, I was hoping to make a bit of cash that was truly mine. Not that I can’t spend from my husband’s income at my digression (he never questions and frankly, barely notices charges on our accounts). It is still nice to have this bit of independence, tiny as it might seem. Eventually, when we were preparing to buy our first house, I was even able to contribute a small bit to our savings here and there. It felt good.

Overall, for me, therefore, being a WAHM is not so much about the actual money, but about the feeling of accomplishing something other aside from childcare and domestic chores. For other people, the balance might go far more towards the financial side of things.

So ask yourself this question, and answer it honestly:
why do I want to be a WAHM (or WAHD)?

Becoming a WAHM - Part 2 - Investigate your options

So you are a stay-at-home-parent and have decided that in your spare time you would like to make a little bit of money. Where do you start?

This is the second in a series of posts giving advice on how to get started making an income from home. In the first post, we identified our skills and interests.

Now we have to investigate how the items on the list might be turned into a WAHM venture.

Investigate your options
Take a another look at your list of skills and interests, and consider for each point on the list how you might turn it into a money earner. This is obviously the crucial bit, and you may have to do a bit of research.
As an example, we’ll go back to my list.

• Writing
• Knitting
• Translating
• Cooking
• Research

We’ll look at each the items in turn, and the various ways I could turn these skills and interest into something potentially profitable.

Writing
There are many possible ways to turn one’s skill at writing into money. You can try to write a book and sell it; in many ways this has become easier as it is now possible to self publish ebooks and sell them in a variety of places, such as Amazon or Smashwords.

There’s also blog writing. If you have a successful blog using a free platform such as Blogger you can use Google AdSense to put adds on your blog and bring in some cash. You can combine blogging with one of your other skills or interests too. In my case, for example, I might start a blog about food or history.

If you do not want to blog, you can write articles on a website such as Bubblews or Hubpages. Websites like these work on the basis of revenue sharing. The site’s owner gets paid for people viewing pages and clicking on adds. You get to have a share of the profits for the pages you create.

A final option for making money using my writing skill is freelancing. There are many ways of getting paid to write all manner of things. Elance, oDesk and Constant Content are examples of websites that basically act as a broker between those we require and offer written content. By the way, the first two of these are general freelancing websites and have contractors offering paid assignments for many things aside from writing, such as graphic design and coding.

Knitting
When I was looking into becoming a WAHM, my first thought was actually to turn my knitting into a business. It seems obvious; I’m already spending the time creating items that I know are of good quality. My thoughts immediately turned to Etsy, a website that allows people to sell their handcrafted items.

Cooking
There are some people who have managed to create a successful home business with food related items. Cupcakes seem to be a popular one these days. There was the possibility of turning some of my food related interests into saleable products. I considered farmers’ markets.

Translating
There is a number of agencies on the web that hire translators and broker services. As I’m not actually a qualified translator, however, I ended up looking at Elance, oDesk for this as well. There’s plenty of translation jobs on there, and though the rates can be low, contractors usually don’t demand qualifications aside from native level fluency.

Research
This was a difficult one. How do you turn a skill like internet research into money?

Again, I found Elance, oDesk offer opportunities.

A more informal alternative to those two big websites is Webanswers. This is another revenue sharing website. People can ask questions to which you can post answers, and ger so share in the page revenue through AdSense. where contributors share in as revenue for page views through AdSense.

WAHM Ideas
When investigating your options for making money, there’s a list of WAHM ideas to be found on this blog. It’s not complete yet, but I’ll be adding to it over time - suggestions are most welcome, by the way!

It’s a place to start, but depending on what’s on your list of skills and interests, you may have to do a bit of research of your own.

Use Google. You never know what a simple search term like “how to make money doing [your skill/interest]” will turn up. Don’t give up too easily, but if you get stuck, do post a comment here and I’ll see if I can give you a hand.

Next…
Your list of skills and interests should now have a list of money making possibilities to match. In the next article we’ll look at how to evaluate the realistic possibilities of putting our plans in action.

Becoming a WAHM - Part 1 - Identify your skills and interests

So you are a stay-at-home-parent and have decided that in your spare time you would like to make a little bit of money. Where do you start?

Identifying your skills and interests is the first step.

Make a list of your skills and interests
To start, consider what skills you have. Make a list things you are good at and enjoy doing. It doesn’t really matter what it is. It might not be practical to turn some of them into something profitable, but we’ll worry about that later. Keep your options open for the moment.
For me the list would be something like this:

• Writing

I’ve always been a decent writer, and while I’m certainly no genius, I do think I have a small measure of natural talent. My academic career also has helped me build up some considerable skill in the more technical aspects. Most importantly, I enjoy writing.

• Knitting

My number one crafty hobby. An important creative outlet for me, and a valuable tool to help me with the stresses of every day life. I knit anyway, and I turn out some pretty decent items, if I say so myself.

• Translating

I live in Ireland, and I think I can claim fluency in both written and spoken English. But I’m not a native English speaker. That gives me two languages I can quite comfortably translate between. I actually have some considerable experience translating text due to my research as an historian.

• Cooking and food

I’m responsible for family meals, but putting dinner on the table every day is not something I consider a chore. I love to cook and bake. I also take great interest in food, where it comes from and how it is made.

• Research

I think I’ve mentioned I’m an academic. As a result, I’ve got a lot of experience doing research. And I’m good at it. A historian by trade, I can quickly process very large quantities of in formation and find and summarise the relevant bits. I’m also very good digging out obscure bits of information from the internet.

Next step
With your list ready, the next step will be to investigate how those skills and interests might be turned into money is what we will look into in the next part.