Welp MagazineAccording to Statista, 63 percent of the current global population are internet users – and reaching billions of people worldwide at the same time is nothing but a goldmine for various businesses and corporations. To them, these people are not just users and consumers but also an incredible workforce that can help improve their products and the web overall. After all, who’s better at shaping top user experience than an actual potential user?
In exchange for dedicating their time and energy to perfecting online experiences and products, companies are often willing to offer an opportunity to make money online. While this typically isn’t as profitable of a side hustle as, let’s say, active freelancing, it’s an excellent way to pad one’s wallet by making an impact on how the web will look and feel tomorrow.
User testing: eliminating hurdles before they go public
Quality Assurance (QA) and software testers are in massive demand around the world – however, thousands of companies are also looking for impartial user testers to review their websites and applications in their final stages of development.
Independent testers from outside the company are especially valuable when the product is aimed at the general public or less tech-savvy groups in particular. As a simple example, a grocery shopping app could lose a significant portion of potential customers if its payment process is too complicated or if the time the items are kept in the basket proves to be too short for a typical user to complete their shopping session. This way, user testers can help businesses discover and eliminate the issues long before their finished product gets introduced into the market.
No coding or testing experience is needed for user testing jobs: all a user has to do is to register on a website like UserTesting and apply for projects that can vary from a 3-minute test on a single feature to extensive video interviews. The duration and the complexity of a particular test are also what the reward is based on.
Questionnaires: impactful reviews with minimal time investments
Filling out various surveys and questionnaires is a rather popular option of making money online – however, it’s also a priceless opportunity to help businesses understand the needs and preferences of their target audience better. Therefore, whether organized in-house or by specialized market research companies, online surveys are extremely popular among all types of companies.
Receiving constructive feedback allows them to not only perfect their offerings but also improve their marketing campaigns, make informed distribution decisions, and effectively monitor user satisfaction. The data collected via surveys and questionnaires is, in fact, so valuable that thousands of companies are willing to pay their participants to complete them – and while the pay is typically low, it’s neither effort- nor time-consuming.
However, there’s a disadvantage to filling out surveys as an earning opportunity: due to unpredictable availability, it’s hard to have any reliable expectations when it comes to earnings. Different businesses focus on different target audiences, which means some people get chosen as suitable respondents more often than others simply because of their demographics, such as location or gender.
Bandwidth sharing: aiding web intelligence on a global scale
Despite being an option for a few years already, sharing one’s excess internet bandwidth still seems like a novelty to some. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not something that requires tech-savviness or powerful hardware: with most popular internet-sharing applications, it might be enough to have a smartphone with an internet connection. It doesn’t even have to reach incredible speeds: anything between 1–100Mbps is usually enough, as long as the connection is relatively stable.
But what does bandwidth sharing actually mean, and how does it benefit web users? As explained by the creators of the market-leading Honeygain application, millions of users worldwide sharing their excess bandwidth with the network allow the company to operate a solid and reliable web intelligence network.
Using it, verified companies can complete vital business processes like brand protection or ad verification campaigns, pricing data aggregation, etc. Basically, this means that an effortless action like leaving an app running on your device can help make the web a better place with fewer fraudsters – moreover, each user gets paid according to the amount of traffic they share with the app.
Due to modern technologies, there are a ton of options for making money online, starting with your usual 9-to-5 done remotely and ending with passive income apps that require little to no time and effort. There’s definitely something for everyone – and if your priority is making a positive impact on the world as you earn, the three options we presented might just do the trick!
