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Getting paid for doing nothing, or at least very little, has a universal appeal. On the Internet, there are generally three ways you can try to achieve it. Firstly, you can provide information to companies by completing surveys and questionnaires. Since surveys can be expensive to carry out, companies can save a lot of money by running them online, sometimes with a regular pool of users, and these savings can then be passed on to participants. Secondly, you can add adverts to your website or blog and earn cash whenever a visitor clicks the ad link or whenever someone completes a purchase with another site after reaching it through yours.

Finally, you can earn money from cashback schemes. These are potentially quite lucrative, and there's very little effort involved because you get paid for doing something you already do: shopping. With millions of pounds now being spent online by everyone who'd rather not try to beat the crowds on the high street, especially over Christmas and the New Year, it's a great time for retailers to use cashbacks as an incentive, and for customers to take advantage. There's a huge number of big-name stores working in conjunction with cashback websites to give you back a percentage of the price of purchases you make. Obviously, the idea is to sway you into buying more stuff, but if you can find the same goods you were going to buy anyway at the same price, you're making money. All you have to do is sign up and allow your transactions to can be tracked so that the website can repay a portion of what you spend into your online account.Needless to say, it's wise to do a bit of research before joining any site that offers you money. There are plenty of legitimate sites, but also unscrupulous players that have sprung up to cash in on their popularity.

If you're in any doubt about the authenticity of a particular site, take a look its rating on a review site such as Ciao (www.ciao.co.uk) or Dooyoo (www.dooyoo.co.uk) to see what other users think. Any services that aren't up to scratch are generally weeded out fairly quickly by negative reviews - although you should be aware that fake reviews, both positive and negative, aren't unheard of.

There is a fourth option, which is beta testing software for its makers. Before being launched on an unsuspecting public, every commercial program goes through a 'beta test' stage, where it's getting near being finished (the 'alpha' stage means 'not ready to let out of the building') but needs checking over and polishing up. Although it's rare to actually get paid to beta test software, it's a great way to get your hands on software before anyone else and without paying for it, and there are often free rewards at the end of the beta phase - although bear in mind that these don't always extend to a free full copy of the software, and your beta copy will time out a little while after the finished version goes on sale.

Most major software producers allow the general public to sign up for beta testing, and their websites are usually the best source of information. Microsoft Connect (http://connect.microsoft.com) is a way to test upcoming Microsoft products, if you're lucky enough to be accepted into a particular beta cycle. To find out about a huge range of publicly available beta software, visit BetaNews (www.betanews.com), which provides information about beta testing requests from software companies. Check back frequently.

Follow the money

With so many sites offering cashback schemes, it can be hard to keep track of them all. One way to stay informed about the latest offers is at It's Totally Free (www.its-totally-free.co.uk) which not only lists the most recent cashback deals, but also offers money itself in return for referrals to the site.

1 Gamble? Online poker has increased in popularity exponentially. The chance of striking it rich at a virtual card table, and the ability to play with people from all over the world at any time of day, has obvious appeal to the would-be card shark. Of course, you might also lose. In fact, pretty obviously, that's the most likely outcome. The odds do look better than you might expect, though, especially if you have a bit of genuine skill. There are often incentives to get you started: William Hill, for example, will pay you £5 an hour for up to five hours just to play a few hands. We're definitely not recommending this as a way to make money, just pointing out that if you want to gamble, it's worth shopping around and being the smartest sucker you can.

2 Get paid to shop No, you don't have to marry a footballer. Quidco (www.quidco.com) is just one of the services that'll pay you to shop online. Make the same purchases you would normally make, using the links from the Quidco site, and the retailer will pay a portion of the sale amount to Quidco, which is then passed on to you. Although there are no joining fees, Quidco members are required to pay back £5 of their earnings each year. You can see how this is a win-win situation: Quidco gets all the fivers, customers get the rest of the cashbacks, and the retailers get extra customers. With many merchants offering 5% cashback or more, a couple of purchases will more than cover this fee and leave you with a profit. While Quidco delivers hard cash for making online purchases, other schemes such as ipoints (www.ipoints.co.uk) give you 'points' instead. Rather like supermarket loyalty card points, these can then be used to make additional purchases, the catch being that you're never really quite sure how much a point is worth. Again, there's a range of well known names listed in the selection of retailers from which you can earn points, and you're still essentially receiving money for nothing, but to get the most from the system you'd need to try it out and get a feel for how much your points actually buy you.

3 Get paid to comment Everyone likes to voice their opinion, whether it's to friends and family, in a blog, on a chat forum or down the pub. Consumer options site Ciao offers money in return for filling in surveys. Join up at www.ciao.co.uk/paid_surveys.php, and after creating a profile you'll be sent surveys based on the personal details you've provided to help with market research. Each survey completed earns between £1 and £5, and money can be withdrawn from your Ciao account once it contains a fiver. It's possible to earn even more money by referring others to the site, but you don't have to do so. Take a look at www.freepaidsurveys.co.uk for information about additional paid surveys. There are also survey panels that operate by invitation only, such as www.ccb-research.com, so look out for 'junk' emails that contain genuine invitations - but do double-check the credentials of any organisation before providing your details.

4 Sell ad space on your website If you run a website or blog, it's possible to earn money without having to do anything other than add a few lines of HTML to the existing code that makes up your pages. Google and Amazon (as well as lesser-known companies) offer money-making services that each operate in slightly different ways. Google's money-making scheme comes in the form of AdSense (www.google.co.uk/ads). Companies pay Google to advertise through this service, and adverts are chosen to appear on your site based on its content and theme. You decide how much space to devote to Google adverts within your home page, and every time someone visits the page, relevant ads appear in that slot. Each time someone clicks an advert, you get money - it's as simple as that. As you'd expect, the amounts of money are very, very small, the idea being that, if you generate enough traffic, it'll add up to a worthwhile profit. The sign-up process is easy enough to work through, but acceptance into the programme isn't guaranteed: your site content must first be checked for suitability, which may lead to a short delay. They don't seem to be too fussy, though. The service is highly customisable, making it easy to tailor adverts to suit the look of your site and even opt to filter out certain types of ads if you don't want to be associated with them. If you create a blog at Blogger.com, which is owned by Google, it's particularly easy to incorporate AdSense without any fiddling with HTML. Amazon Associates (http://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk) is an affiliate scheme: you display specially formatted links on your website that link through to Amazon. You don't get anything just because a visitor clicks one of your links, but if they go on to complete a purchase at Amazon, you earn a percentage of the price, which is relatively good money. The service is free to join and easy to use; you choose how you want your links to look, or even set up your own 'bookshop' page, with a few mouse clicks, and the HTML code is generated for you, ready to paste into your web design program or blog template. Payments can be collected monthly, though unless your site has a lot of visitors it'll take you a while to build up enough cash to be worth collecting - but still, you're not having to do anything to earn it. Context Links will be available soon to generate suitable links for your site based on its content, in much the same way as Google AdSense. That'll be welcome, because manually creating links using the online tools can be time-consuming. On the other hand, if you're confident that you know your audience and can pick the right products for them, you can use your nous to increase your profit.