Questions and Answers

Thank you for all of the positive responses! We have received many emails from people that support our blog and what we are trying to pass along. We have so much more to share with you! We were only going to write the blog once a week, but as you can see, we are now writing a few times each week.

Several questions have also been sent to us, and we are going to respond to some of those questions here.

1. Are you two really utilizing the ways to make money that you post in your blog? Absolutely. There are many ways to earn a secondary income. We are only sharing with you what we are personally involved with. We even include the income figures and time involved to help you decide if it is something you'd like to be a part of.

2. Why do something like Amazon's Mechanical Turk that only averages $2 to $3 per hour? We just look at it as part of the income stream. It is so easy to kick back in our camper, shoes off, tunes playing and do some very simple online projects and get paid for it.

3. Why don't you add a "donation" button to your blog?  We support those that have donation buttons on their blogs or websites. We just choose to do it in a different fashion. Look around as you read both of our blogs. First, we have Google ads. Not a big moneymaker, only about $4.00 in the past year. We do place ads of products and services that either we personally use, or they have been recommended by friends. Let us give you some examples. We found our health insurance through eHealthInsurance. We now have dental plans that we found through DentalPlans.com. We signed up to receive surveys through the various companies that we've listed on our blogsite.

On our other blog, Workamping World Tour 2011, we show other ads. We have friends that use VacationRentals.com to rent out their home while on the road. They love it, and make a nice income from that. We spoke about going to New York when other friends of ours told us to get the New York Pass. We have also used FindLegalForms.com to download some documents that we needed.

We have an Amazon.com ad that shows some of our favorite books, and also some items that we've purchased for the camper. The folding shower rod is wonderful. The tankless water heater is priceless! The only item that we do not have that is listed there is the Frugillionaire book, and that was highly recommended to us by some other fellow workampers. We recently met another workamper that is an avid golfer. He keeps his costs down with
The Golf Card. We are not golfers, but he stated that it pays for itself within a couple of rounds.

So, if you see an ad that is of interest to you, then by all means, check it out. Will we make a few pennies? Yes. Is it a mentionable source of our secondary income? Not at all.

4. Do you participate in any charity work? Yes we do. We have volunteered for various soup kitchens, rescue missions and conservation groups. We are animal lovers, so the charity that we give to is the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA). We have personally seen them in action, and have friends dedicated to the work that they do. We have donation buttons for the WSPA on both of our blogs.

5. Why? This is a very broad, yet easy question to answer. One of our favorite movies is "Pay It Forward". This is our way of sharing ideas with others that they may not have known about. Pay it forward....what a wonderful concept!

Make Money Writing

In our last blog, we told you that we have some "heavy hitter" ways of making money. Here is our first one. Writing articles for money. Don't get scared yet! Craig never wrote a single article until about a year ago! So follow along, look at our examples and decide if it's something that you would like to try.

We both began writing for eHow.com just over a year ago. At that time, you could just pick a subject, write about it, submit it and you were done. As people read our articles, the pennies would start showing up. After a few months, our articles would move up on the pages of various search engines, resulting in more people reading our articles. The pennies turned into dollars. We only completed a few articles each that were directly published onto eHow. Take a look at those articles and you'll see that it is just not that hard to write. Here are eHow.com articles by Craig  and eHow.com articles by Karin.

Now, for the good news and bad news. The bad news is you cannot submit articles through eHow.com directly anymore. The website was purchased last year by a company called Demand Media Studios. So now you have to sign up and apply to be a writer with Demand Media Studios. The good news? Once approved as a writer, you can get paid for articles immediately once the article is approved by an editor. Here is the really good news: you can start off making $15 per article! AND, Demand Media Studios pays out twice a week!

If you decide to sign up and write for Demand Media Studios, then make sure you read ALL of the rules. They can be picky. At first it would take us three or four hours to put together an article. We got the hang of it, so now we can knock out an article in about an hour. We each write 3 articles a week. That comes out to be $360 per month between the two of us! Not too bad.

Here's another, actually easier way to make money writing. Have you ever heard of Blogsvertise? If you have a blog, then this may work for you. Here's how it works: sign up with Blogsvertise and they will send you offers via email to write about products within your blog. You can accept or decline each product. Once you accept a product, you only need to place a paragraph in your blog with 3 links to that product. The paragraph should review or talk about the product. Even negative or critical reviews are allowed. It is rather  easy to research the product on the internet. Depending on the age of your blog, you'll get from $5 up to $25 per product article. Once that article is on you blog for 30 days, then you'll receive payment. So sign up for Blogsvertise today.

We hope that these blogs are showing you that there are many ways to make some decent secondary income. We have many other ways that we will continue to share with you in the near future. We are also going to address other things that come into play when you live and travel on minimum wage. Health insurance and various travel expenses are hot topics. We'll share how we personally deal with these issues. Thanks for reading along with us!

Mechanical Turk

Are you ready for that next source of seconday income? We'll share that with you in just a moment. The objective is to get together many reliable sources that can each produce a small amount of money. Once you do that, you will find how easy it is to generate some additional income.

Have you ever heard of Mechanical Turk? This is a website operated by Amazon.com that lets you perform various tasks for money. These tasks are known as "HITS" (Human Intelligence Tasks). There are many HITS that you can perform. The HITS may include doing research, URL verification, search engine tests, writing an essay, or completing a survey. These HITS will pay you anywhere from one penny up to thirty dollars. But, be careful....and be selective. We'll explain why as we go.

Here is the process of how Mechanical Turk works. Sign up for an account at
Amazon Mechanical Turk. Next, you choose a HIT that you would like to complete. Once approved, the amount that the HIT was worth is deposited into your Amazon.com account. You can then purchase Amazon.com items directly from that account, or have it deposited into your personal bank account. It's that simple. But here are a few tips before you begin.

We personally stick with HITS in the .25 to $1.00 range. We are very careful at completing any HITS that are worth more than $1.00. Some are legitimate, and others are questionable. Some will offer you $25, but you (in our opinion) have to give way too much personal information, like cell phone numbers, addresses, etc. There are many college research labs that place various surveys on this site. Those are our favorites. Five or ten minutes spent to make .50 to $1.00. Each hour spent on the site usually earns about $2.50. Yes, way below minimum wage. But, we look at it this way. We perform HITS for 1 hour, about 3 times a week. That's 3 hours a week times $2.50, which equals $7.50 a week, or $30 per month. Wait, there's two of us, so we've generated $60 a month. Not bad.

Remember, take the small amounts that we can generate each month through various methods, and add them up. Hey, we will even keep a running tally for you as we share our secondary income methods. Mechanical Turk generates $60 a month for us. The other surveys that we spoke about in our last blog, between cash, dinner gift cards and other items, produce about $30 a month for us. So we are at $90 of secondary monthly income so far, for (honestly) doing very little. 

We have many other ways to generate income. We have some "big hitters" coming soon. We tried to start with the smaller income providers and work our way up. Stay posted...there's more coming soon! 

Making Money

Due to the overwhelming response to our travel blog, we have decided to start a separate blog. This blog will share the various ways that we make money while we travel. Yes, we have proven that you can "Live and Travel on Minimum Wage". While our primary income is from the jobs that we work at, we do have many other methods that provide us with some nice secondary income.

Our first recommendation is to take a look at a book. Yes....you may need to invest a little, but it is well worth it. Let us tell you why this book would be a good buy. We will share with you the various ways to "think outside of the box" to make money. If we tried to explain each and every avenue at this very moment, then it would take many hours of typing. If you want a shortcut instead of waiting for us to write each week, then look at this e-book.
Jason and Kelly Odom wrote a book:

Vanabode™ - how to happily camp, travel and live forever on $20 a day

This book has so much information. It helped us set up a plan to truly live and travel on minimum wage.

But if you want to pass on the book, then here is our first way to make a little extra income. Surveys.

Yes, you can sign up and perform surveys through your email. Some will pay you a few dollars per survey. Some offer gift cards, free hotel stays, entries into sweepstakes and more. We have earned money doing these surveys, a couple of restaurant and store gift cards, and some free hotel stays. If you follow our other blog, the hotel in Atlantic City was free with the coupons that we earned through completing surveys. Nice!

Here are the ones that we use:

ECN Research

Winning Surveys

Survey4Profit

Again, you will not get rich doing surveys. The trick to this lifestyle is to have primary work that you occasionally perform as you travel. Then put together many smaller projects that can generate a small amount of cash. When you have built up a nice portfolio of these "smaller" ways to make cash, then they really start to add up! How many do we have? Well, at this moment we have over twenty projects that all produce a small amount of cash. But when we add them up....well, now you should get the picture. It may not be too long before those smaller projects become our primary source of income!