No-risk matched betting
Hands down the quickest way to make a lot of money (well, without breaking the law). Lots of students have genuinely made £100s from this technique. It’s completely legal, risk free, tax free, and anyone can do it.
free bets from matched betting
It works by taking advantage of free bets regularly offered by betting sites (such as PaddyPower.com) through ‘matching’ them at a betting exchange such as Betfair.com. Matched betting eliminates the risk (you are betting both for and against a certain outcome).
This leaves you being able to squeeze out the free bet, which can be as much as £200! Multiply this by how many betting sites there are and you can quite easily come away with a profit of a few hundred pounds.
Owen walks you through how to make your first £15 profit (using a real life example) in this gem of a guide to matched betting. If you know of any better way to make £30/hr sitting at home, please let us know!
Online surveys
Searching on a laptopAn increasingly popular way for students to make money is to fill out online surveys in their spare time. Research companies are always recruiting new members to answer surveys and test new products.
For a few minutes of form filling, you can make a couple of quid which is paid as cash or in rewards. You can make up to £3 for some surveys!
A few good ones to try are: Toluna, Pinecone, IPSOS, Vivatic, The OpinionPanel, MySurvey, Valued Opinions, SurveyBods, Global Test Market, Hiving, PanelBase, Harris Poll, iPoll, Opinion Outpost, Mindmover, YouGov, New Vista
Also sign up for Swagbucks.com which rewards you for surveys as well as simply surfing the web, watching videos and playing games.
Update: See our new full guide to the best paid online surveys!
Paid for searching the web
Interested in earning cash for doing what you already do online? This has to be one of the easiest methods of making money online without really any effort or change in your behavior.
This innovative idea by Qmee.com rewards you for searching in Google, Bing or Yahoo. You just install a simple add-on to your browser and when you conduct a search there may be a few sponsored results alongside your normal search.
qmee paid search
Each Qmee result has a cash reward attached – if you are interested in it simply click on it and collect your reward.
The best thing is there is no minimum to cashout – for instance we just wired 72p to our Paypal account. You also have the option to donate it to charity.
Sign up now for free and start earning from your own searches! Click here to start.
Social Investment Networks
The historically hard-to-break world of investing in stock markets and currencies has been cracked wide open. Today there is no need to be a fat cat or fund the yachts of Wolf of Wall Street style stock brokers. You can do it all yourself with the help of free online market trading platforms.
Having spent many hours researching this new opportunity, I’ve been experimenting with eToro.com which recently featured in the Financial Times and has over 300m users worldwide.
etoro trading
So far I’m up 28% on my initial deposit, but of course it can be quite volatile and you can lose money, so don’t throw your life savings into it! Start trading with a small deposit and learn the ropes slowly. If nothing else you’ll learn a great deal about various investments and markets.
One of the best things on eToro is the CopyTrader feature. This lets you literally see, follow and copy the investments of other top performing traders. There’s also lots of training material and videos to help you out, and it’s free to create an account and use.
Mobile phone recycling
Sell My MobileSee how much you can get for your old mobile phone using our in-house mobile phone price comparison tool! Maybe ask your parents if they have any lying around too.
You can get some good money and help the environment by recycling mobile phones with certain companies listed on the comparison tool. Most phones are shipped off to Asia to be dismantled and we know of at least one student who received a £120 cheque in return.
‘Get Paid To’ sites
swagbucksSimilar to making money from online surveys, GPT sites reward you in cash and vouchers for completing various offers or activities online.
The most popular sites today are Swagbucks.com, Bank of Offers, InboxPounds and PaidOffers.
Exciting update! We’ll soon be launching our own GPT service for our readers. Invites will be limited and UK only, please join our mailing list if you’re interested in hearing once it’s live:

The ‘Disney Vault’ secret
To keep demand high across generations, Disney Studios carefully restrict the supply of some home release classics. They are locked away in the ‘vault’ for 8-10 years before being released for a short unspecified time.
Buy them in this window at normal retail price and you can turn a nice profit when they go off sale for another decade or so.
disney vaultFor example, in 2011 you could buy Beauty and the Beast on Blu-ray 3D for just £24.99. In just a couple of years it’s now on Amazon for a staggering £74.99!
Importantly, not all Disney releases are subject to the vault and only the true most popular classics will maintain such demand.
Right now there are just 2 titles out of the vault which I would recommend snapping up. They are Cinderella Diamond Edition Blu-ray for just £10 and Bambi Diamond Edition Blu-ray for £14.
Start your own website
mark zuckerberg facebookIf you’ve ever seen the film “The Social Network” then you’ve most likely had your brain spinning as to what website you can start-up to make you billions.
And of course there are lots of stories out there about successful students who have started a site while at university, or even bought a domain name and later sold it for 1000s.
In fact, Save the Student is one such example of a website started at university by Owen Burek in his first year, which has since grown into a full-time and successful enterprise.
Read Owen’s 4-step guide to setting up a website if you’re interested in finding out more. It’s really not that difficult to get started and there are plenty of opportunities to make money online.