Modern Egg Money: How to Make a Little Extra Cash on the Side

Egg Money?

Back in the day when most of the country was agricultural, farm women often sold extra eggs or butter to make a little extra household cash. This small stash of spending money came to be known as “egg money.”

Nowadays, few people are in a position to literally sell eggs, but modern mamas can still earn the figurative kind of egg money in other ways.

None of the suggestions below will make you rich, but here are a few ways you can make a few extra bucks (or, in a couple cases, earn points to spend).

Blogging

I tried several paid blogging companies in the past, and was not impressed with most of them. PayU2Blog was good for a while, but then too many of their keywords got spammy. This form of paid blogging is fairly obsolete now, anyway.

Traditional blogging is not an easy way to make a little extra cash. Some people do well at it, but it’s really a full-time job if you want it to be a money-maker. There are a few people doing well on the “few extra bucks” front by using article-blogging sites like Minds and Medium. Personally, I didn’t find these all that useful, but your mileage may vary.

Stock Photography

If you have even a handful of good digital photos hanging around on your hard drive, give this one a try. (Keep in mind, though, that not all great photos are stock-worthy.) The way it works is this: you upload your photos to a stock site. If they accept them, the photos go into their database. Designers download them, and you make a little bit of money. When it adds up to a certain amount, you get a check (or PayPal payment, or whatever).

Considering that those photos would just have been taking up space on your hard drive, it’s a pretty good deal. You don’t even have to do anything once they’re uploaded, and they can keep making you money. For best results, submit to as many sites as possible. (Different sites will accept different things, so if one site rejects a photo, don’t necessarily give up on the photo.) Try:

As a largely casual photographer, I’ve had the most success with Shutterstock and BigStockPhoto, myself. (A few of these sites will also take vector graphics, if that happens to be your thing.)

Paid Searching

I’ve tried a number of paid-to-search engines, and never liked them. However, I did, for a long time, like SwagBucks. SwagBucks has browser add-ons, so you can search straight from the main search box. It used to pull results from Google, so the results were pretty good, which was my main beef with other paid-to-search engines: the results are cruddy.

Unfortunately, they seem to have updated their search inputs and the results aren’t as good as they used to be, so this might not be for you. But if you’re on the ditching-Google train, then it might be a viable option. (They now also have a SwagButton for your browser for cash-back shopping, but I don’t like it as well as other cash-back options.)

It’s nice that you don’t have to do anything you aren’t already doing, or go anywhere you weren’t already going, and still accumulate points that you can trade in for gift cards. (They have other ways you can earn additional points, but mostly they’re kind of spammy and I recommend just sticking with search, for the most part.)

MyPoints

A lot of people are wondering if you can earn money reading emails. You actually can…sort of. Really, you earn points, but those points can eventually be traded in for gift cards.

Here’s what I do: I have a filter set up in my email so that all emails from MyPoints go straight into their own folder. That way they never clutter up my inbox, and I can mass-delete them when necessary.

When I have a few minutes, I quickly click through the recent emails. Each email tells you at the bottom what you earn points for. Some of them require a purchase; others will give you a few points just for visiting a site. I click through on those. Be sure to let the page open fully in the browser, so it has a chance to register that you visited.

On occasion, one of the points deals is for something I can actually use in the immediate, so I obviously make use of those, too. Anything else, I just delete.

I also print my grocery coupons through them. Once you’re on their site, go to Coupons > Grocery Coupons. You can print Coupons.com coupons from there, and you make a few points for saving money!

So far, I’ve earned more than 16,000 total points, which is equivalent to around $160. That isn’t a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a little something.

Selling Scrap Metal

In general, companies where I live don’t pay for recycling, but a few places do pay for scrap metal – like soft drink cans. It isn’t much, but if you’re getting rid of this stuff anyway, you might as well make a few cents, right? Check Google for scrap metal dealers in your area, and/or call around.

You can even collect them from friends if they’re going to just toss them anyway, and maybe even help clean up along the highway or in local parks and kill two birds with one stone!

Selling Books, Electronics, or Other Things You No Longer Need

Not gonna lie: opportunities like eBay don’t work well for me, although some people have great success selling their old belongings this way. The old-fashioned yard sale/garage sale/rummage sale is a viable option for some people, too, although it’s a lot of work!

But there are some quick-and-easy options for reselling some things.

It might seem like sacrilege to us bibliophiles, but you can sell used books. (And, hey, if you make a few bucks you can buy some new books!) Along with the more obvious options, like Amazon, try World of Books.

You can sell old electronics through sites like Gazelle.

And it’s more hands-on for you than the previous sites, but you can sell off outgrown clothes through Poshmark. (If you want the same easy done-for-you method as with World of Books and Gazelle, you can try a Clean Out Kit from ThredUp. Personally, although I love shopping at ThredUp, I haven’t found them to be an ideal source for selling through, but your experience might be different.)

Taking Surveys

I haven’t had great success with many of the survey companies. Most of them take a lot of completed surveys to earn enough points for anything, the points have deadlines on their use, and I rarely qualify for a complete survey. Put those things all together and they add up to a lot of time invested for points that never add up sufficiently to use them for anything. A couple that I have, however, had success with in the past are:

National Consumer Panel (previously Nielson HomeScan) – You don’t have to worry about “qualifying” for surveys, and I have been able to trade in my points several times for some pretty nice things from their gift catalog. Unlike regular “survey” panels, for this one you use the scanner they provide, and you scan your purchases and transmit them over your internet connection once a week. (This works great for those of us whose buying habits are less-than-mainstream.
Harris Interactive – I always “qualify” for the surveys they send. As far as I am aware, my points don’t expire, and I have been able to trade them in for nice gifts a number of times.

None of these are actually for cash; they’re for points, but the points add up and can be traded in for gift cards and other gifts. Please note that I haven’t used any of these for a while, so I can’t vouch for their current usefulness, but they are all still current programs.

Cashback Shopping

This most properly falls under “saving money,” rather than “making money,” but depending on how you have your budget set up, you might count the cash back as “money earned.” Basically, the way this works is simply that when you’re going to be shopping online anyway, you check one of these sites to see if they have a deal through them for the site you’re planning to buy from. If they do, you earn cash or points back.

MyPoints and SwagBucks both have cash-back options. Sites like Rakuten (used to be Cashbaq/Ebates), and Mr. Rebates are set up specifically for cash back when shopping. My personal favorite, though, is Honey .