When I was in college in 1989, we had only a few options to make a buck. Manual labor or selling products no one wanted to sell. After all, if a product was sell-able, all the experienced sales people would be all over it, leaving no open spots available for the inexperienced college student. But, the Internet has changed all that. Today, a college student only needs to look inside his or her own experiences to find ways to make money that older adults cannot invade.

1. Videographer - Sure, there are many video experts out there who are no strangers to the web. But, there are many business owners who would love to have video on their Web sites but don’t want to pay huge video production costs. Offer a video package deal that streamlines the process. The mobile device you use right now could be of high enough quality to post a fairly decent video for a business owner giving a short tour of their facility, for example. Offer uploading it to a YouTube account or their blog as part of the fee. Offer you could swing by once a week to record them on video and upload it to their blog or Web site or Facebook account. The list is truly endless if you add the word “video” into the mix. And, most business owners are scared to death of the thought of video although they know that’s where everything is happening online right now.

2. Setting up Social Sites – If you’re in your late teens or early twenties, you’ve practically grown up with MySpace and Facebook and all the cool ways and strategies to use those mediums. You probably can’t even imagine what life would be like without social sites! Business owners just think it’s “something they’d maybe get into if they had time.” You could offer a social media setup and training package where you do the setup and then offer training and support. This could be a package deal price or offer a monthly rate. Get 10 clients paying you even just $100 per month would be some pretty easy pay for you.

3. List Building – Tie in the social system with building the business owners newsletter list and even helping them with promotions. If you’ve used any html editors or even basic software, you would be able to figure out their email system like Constant Contact or other commercial email manager.

4. Affiliate Marketer – This one would just involve yourself working for you. You probably learned how to make a Web site in the 8th grade. So, use those early learned skills to promote some affiliate products. You don’t have to be a master of the industry and usually don’t even have to buy the product to start promoting it. Products abound in ClickBank.com and CommissionJunction.com where you can find products available to promote and you get up to 75% commission sometimes when one of your referrals buys. There’s a lot to starting to get involved in affiliate programs. I even created a free e-course for people in the business world who fear getting laid off and how they should start getting involved with the Internet before they lose their jobs.

5. Lead Generator - People refer business to me all the time. They don’t “sell” the client and get the order. They just tell people they know about my services and I get the phone call or they’ll go buy something on my Web site. When they do order, I pay commission on the sale to whoever referred the customer. This is even simpler than option #4 above because you don’t have to even worry about making Web sites. Simply find some companies that provide Internet promotion services (always a hot item with business owners) and offer to refer people their way for a commission on the sale.

If you go that route, I hope you would include my company in that mix. We have a particularly interesting package deal we’re selling called The Ultimate Blog Setup Package and it sells for $2500 a piece. There’s a lot of work we do on this end to implement the blog package, so we only pay 10% referrals. But, still that’s $250 just for a short conversation with a business owner, author or speaker you may already know in your network.

Imagine if you USED or expanded your network a little heavier and brought in 7, 8, 10 referrals a week for our blog package? Now you’re talking some bank.

This is just one of many examples you could use to refer prospective clients to web companies. The critical part is finding web services companies YOU can trust to get the job done…and get it done quickly. Be very careful with companies you pick to send your referrals to that they’ve been doing this for a while and that they really will pay you for those referrals.

So, that’s the scoop. 5 pretty solid and free ways any college student can start without spending a dime. And, because you’ve grown up with the technology in your back pocket, all of these will be simple for you to get into and start making immediate cash. The byproduct of course being that you will expand your education potential rivaling any college course for sure. Good luck and study hard!