Week 1 - Earn Extra Cash "Genius"? (Human)

Where to start?

One starts by being duped by the promise of easy extra cash by filling in online surveys. The ones we have all seen and, if you are like me, wondered about their potential. I didn't blindly just register on the first spam email I received, no I did my "due diligence": I googled it :)

The answers I got were a variety of "don't use this site, it's a scam, rather use this one: www.this_is_my_affiliate_link.com". Promises of "up to $dollars per 5-minute survey" and "earn up to $1500 a month extra". There is that word again, up to, it's so promising, and yet I should know better.

After selling my soul or less dramatically my email address and personal details I was registered on 2 different sites. The first thing I noticed was that there were no $10 surveys with the highest one offered to me being $1.5. Even those quickly became a fantasy as I never got further than the second screen and was told that I was not eligible. This became the norm and after a few hours of stubbornly trying even the $0.15 surveys, I embodied the sunken cost fallacy. I also realized that people will do stupid things for money, I am by no means desperate and the promise of easy money made me act out of character and ignore obvious pitfalls.

I started thinking about the problem logically and it led me to freelance work and sites like Upwork and Fiverr. The registration process was a pain and creating a profile is like applying for a new job. After hours of looking through job listings and seeing the hourly rates offered it hit me that I was just extending my working hours and that I needed to come up with a better plan. This is where my blog comes into the picture, I decided that I couldn't be the only person looking to earn an extra income and that while I'm exploring all these options I may as well document my process with the hope that it can also earn me some extra cash, the intention is not that it's the main source of extra income but rather one of many.

My wife works for her family and has extra time on her hands so when I looked at freelancing it made sense for her to also try that since she isn't working full-time. After all, my wife's time is also a resource we can use.

So what do we offer?

We plan to write about our efforts to earn an extra income as husband and wife weekly. Our perspective is from someone who has always worked for a salary and who is entirely new to the process. We endeavour to be as transparent as possible, detailing every aspect of income and expenses, every week. We have added a section to the site for statistics and intend to break it down by "husband" and "wife" to make a bit of a competition out of it!

Please join us on this journey and in the very likely instance that you know more than we do, please assist us, and in doing so assist anyone else who may be reading and interested in making some extra cash. Who knows, in the end, we may just earn the "Genius".

To add a twist to the process, we are going to consult with IA, one hybrid post where it rewrites our blog entry and one AI post where it's given minimal input. This achieves multiple goals: more traffic to our blog as it's "3 times the content", interesting to see what it comes up with and where it could improve our very basic writing skills and we can determine whether we even need humans anymore, what if the IA achieves the same hits/traffic as us? Potential existential crisis ahead!

In the weeks to come: Wix and its many subtleties, Upwork progress, AI and its role in our lives