English: Homework

Homework. It’s the worst, right? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When it comes to opportunities for making some extra money, usually I’d tell you to do your homework but, in this case, you’ve already done it. Everyone could use some more cash especially new graduates or anyone just trying to hold out until they get a new job. There’s a lot of ways to make money online these days but wouldn’t it be great to have one that was as little work as possible?

You probably have old school papers moldering away on random flash drives, in boxes at your parent’s house, or just sitting on your hard drive. Book reports, personal essays, term, research, and thesis paper, etc are all options for a little extra income. After all, you already did the work, so why not reap the benefits?

There’s lots of ways to earn income from old school work but here’s the four best ones:

  • Sell them to other students. There are hundreds of sites out there that sell terms papers and they get those terms papers from people like you who sell them their old ones. These sites can pay either per paper or based on a percentage of the final sale price and usually sell for $10 or more. A quick Google search for buy term papers or essays leaves you with hundreds of options to choose from. Just upload your paper and you are done without any extra work. It’s a booming business and can be a great money making opportunity for you. That said, for some, it’s ethically questionable because they sell these term papers to students in high school, college and grad students so, in a way, you’re helping those students cheat.
  • Re-purpose them as articles and sell them to publications online and off. While this won’t work for every paper, many research papers would make a good standalone article with just a little tweaking. Find a publication (from magazines to news websites that do features) that covers similar topics to what you paper was on and pitch it to them as an article. Term papers from the sciences are the easiest to repackage like this but you’ll find a wide variety of niche publications one of which may be perfect for that old project from any subject. There is even a market for personal essays (think How I Spent My Summer Vacation type life stories) if they are good enough. While this will take more work than just uploading it as is to a site that sells school work, you’ll probably get much more money for it and it will be a credit for your portfolio that will serve you in the future.
  • Self-publish them as shorts or compiled into a book. Someplace like Amazon Shorts welcomes essay length projects and other short work but, if you’ve got multiple papers on related content, you could easily compile them together into a full length book. It may involve some rewriting on your part to make your old work sound like a timely eBook but you can set your price and all the terms of the sale yourself.
  • Use them as blog posts. Even if you can’t find any way to sell your old school work, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still have value. Even things like old book reports can make great blog posts. Stockpile them for the weeks when you don’t have a new post to go up and that’s just more content to bring people into your blog and to help your SEO. And if your school work has nothing whatsoever to do with your blog’s topic so you don’t want to post it on your site, start finding blogs that would fit and offer them as free guest posts with credit. When that other blog publishes it, you’ll get a link back which will help with traffic and SEO for your website.

What are you waiting for? You’ve already done most of the work and you’ve got potential cash just sitting around that you’d probably forgotten about. Start digging through your old work and see what you can start making work for you before the dog eats it!