Here’s a story of how made over $3,000/m when I was 16, during a summer in 2012.

My first venture into making money online was generating leads for surveys.

You get paid when someone does a survey using your affiliate code.

Sites like ShareCash and FileIce.net (went out of biz) were the big platforms which offered you provide digital content and hide it behind a survey.

The biggest money maker was pronz site passwords. People would find a way to get real accounts (which often turned out to be fake), and put it in a text file. They would then promote these passwords on forums, and to get them you had to complete a survey.

Surveys paid out anywhere between $0.20 cents and upwards of $1-5 depending on where the user that filled out the survey was from.

People who filled out surveys from the US generally paid out higher.

But anyways, I didn’t get rich from pronz passwords. I found an even spicier niche.

I was searching one night on Google trends, and a certain book caught my attention. It was gaining a lot of popularity, I won’t say which book, but it was it was definitely in the adult/erotica category.

Seeing how successful the book was doing, I quickly spun up a website with the domain free[book title]download.com

I pirated a PDF copy from Piratebay and threw it behind a survey wall on FileIce and went to sleep.

The next morning, I woke up to the sound of “ding” “ding” “ding”. Because every time someone downloaded from your link, you would get a bell notification.

As the day went on, the dings just kept coming in nonstop. I was getting a download practically every few seconds.

Best of all, people were leaving comments that it was legit and instructing others on how to download. It was the perfect scenario.

Over the rest of that summer, I ended up making somewhere close to $5-7k. I ended up closing the site to focus on school, but with that extra money I got to enjoy that year a bit differently than your average teenager. Buying the newest iPhone, gaming computer and throwing a few epic house parties.

All for doing around 15 minutes of work!