So, where we we, ah yes, the history of The Money Shed.
As I touched on in the previous posts one of the ways in which I wanted TMS to be different from other sites was that I wanted companies to also use it to find people they can work this. The first major stepping stone for this came in the form of StreetBees who contacted me very early one Friday morning in July 2014 with this email
Bingo! – This was just what I wanted to happen. I may have taken nearly a year but finally I had a company wanting to hardness the workforce that is available on TMS. Sure enough I requested help on the site (which you can read here) and the help came flooding in. Streetbees were happy, I was happy, and TMS users were happy as they were getting paid and getting access to work that wasn’t available elsewhere.
Soon after other work started coming in, we started hosting maps for Field Agent showing where work was going to be available that wasn’t elsewhere. Then we had companies contacting us to have a blog post or for us to run an advert on the forum. Things were starting to come together and best of all the members were the ones benefiting from it. When you are a company offering ‘working from home’ opportunities there aren’t that many collective places you can go to tap into an established market of people willing to do the work you want doing – this was our unique selling point to companies and it was benefiting everyone.
It wasn’t all plain sailing though. Plenty of mistakes were made along the way. I learned early on when a heated debate involving a text message company escalated and I got threatened with legal action from them to administrate TMS with my head and not emotions. Letting people have their say is fine, letting people have their say when it gets me into trouble. I spent more money than sense on advertising in that first year, I also spent a fair amount of time writing guest blogs on sites that just were nothing to do with my demographic but I again thought I could expose TMS to people who maybe hadn’t come across it before. I’ve bitten off more than I can chew plenty of times and had to farm work out to other people and pay them to help me. Kindly they have but it’s taught me a lesson in terms of trying to create a balancing act between TMS, my full time job and my own at home working that I do. I also had an issue with Facebook for the first year where they viewed my site as ‘untrusted spam’ and I blocked anyone clicking on links to TMS. I actually got around this is in the end by sending a letting of complaint, recorded delivery to their Ireland office!. I also in the first few months managed to ban ANYONE connecting to the site via Sky Broadband. Took me 2 months to realise that was happening lol!
I think another big event on The Money Shed was when we had our Elections thread and helped people find paid work around the General Election this year. I created this thread and basically tried to act as a recruitment agent for finding people work at their local Council working as a poll clerk during the Election period. This again was another example of people finding paid work through the site that other websites just weren’t bothering to touch.
The Blog
At the start of July in 2014 I made a decision that I wanted another outlet for content that I wanted to be more static. Threads on the forum moved quite quickly but what if you were just looking for information on something and didn’t want to go trawling through a 15 page thread to find it. I decided to create a blog to run alongside the fourm to fix this problem. Yes it was doubling my work load and yes it required me to come up with fresh and not just re-hashed content from the forum but I believed it would help people out and ultimately drive people to the forum once they have found the content on the blog.
By this point the forum was gaining traction and I had opened up lots of other subforums within the site to manage the MANY different ways people were earning online so it was time to turn my attention to a blog. WordPress, as many of you know is quite a beast one you get into it however I knew if I spent the time working on it I could get what I wanted out of the blog. Like many of you who run a blog, when you first start it is very hard to get feedback. You don’t get many views and it takes quite a while for you to learn your writing style. I wasn’t too fussed about views as it knew that logic says when you start at zero that the only way is up!. What I wanted yet again was a unique selling point. There are lots of blogs out there about saving money or making money but I wanted to try and put a different spin on things and wanted to give the opportunity for companies to speak directly to potential workers – I wanted to do that by featuring them in an interview style. Who are they? What are they about? What sort of work do they offer? How much do they pay? etc. Companies offering work jumped at the chance to be featured like this, it let them get free promotion right to the demographic they were trying to reach. People found out about opportunities and the companies got to sell themselves a little through the blog, it was win win for everyone.
That pretty much takes us up to where we are now. The site continues to grow with stats for both the forum and the blog heading in the right direction every month. Social media continues to grow as well in terms of Twitter followers and Facebook likes.
Thanks
While I may be the one behind the scenes running TMS but it wouldn’t be where it is now without help from lots of others. The likes of Chammy, TheRewardGuy, Kelzky, Backpepper1, SkinnyLatte, RedAlix, caledonia1972 and FromAlditoHarrods who were all instrumental at the start in setting the tone of the community within TMS and believed enough in the concept to stick around and keep posting. Then we have KatyKicker who has been fantastic with helping people further their earnings online around the site and helping to push people to earn more by running the monthly earning challenges.
I wanted to end this post by sharing what The Money Shed means to them.
TMS has helped me to increase my income online, give me more confidence in trying new things and given me allot of help that I would never have got elsewhere.
TMS has given me multiple ways to make money from the comfort of my own home. Having just moved into a new house and getting our new dog we knew we would need a bit extra each month and I can now earn that without having to commute and I can be flexible about choosing when I work and what I want to work on. Being part of an online earning community is very motivational, supportive and opens up a world of earning opportunities I wasn’t aware of before.
When my husband got ill I had to step up and find higher paying work, and thanks to opportunities and support found on TMS I am now able to be the main bread-winner, working 100% from home. It has given me the luxury of working from home, and means my husband can now work part time and look after his health better. It really has changed my life!
When I decided to leave work to stay at home with the little ones I knew I had to find a way to contribute to the household income, I did the usual things like surveys, selling things from around the house and looking for ways to save money, earlier this year I found The Money Shed and realised how clueless I actually was to the potential to earn money online.
Since I joined the forum I’ve earned enough to pay for Christmas 2015 and also managed to pay some extra cash off my debts. The support, motivation and inspiration from the forum members and the owner of The Money Shed has been invaluable !
Finding and becoming a member of The Money Shed meant I could stop hunting for what seemed the impossible; a job that fitted around a husband and child but still left time for us to be together as a family. It has opened up many doors for me and given me the confidence to try things that I’d normally have shy’d away from.
Without The Money Shed I would not be able to work from home.
I was trying to pay the bills using boring PTC and survey sites but now I’ve discovered far more interesting work that also pays a decent wage. Plus I can listen to Netflix at the same time
Not only has TMS helped me to earn extra cash, it has helped me to meet like minded people and make life long friends. Friends who offer great advice, have similar goals and encourage me.
TMS has helped me regain motivation and keep it whilst earning online. It has showed me new earning opportunities and is just a really friendly group of people who are all nothing but supportive to one another and that makes it such a nice community to be part of
I have had an amazing 3 months since joining The Money Shed. What started as a desire to find working from home opportunities has far exceeded my expectations. I have earned over £3000 in this period alone. 90% of the leads have been through The Money Shed. I have been pointed to the most up-to-date money making Apps and where the jobs will be. I’m only using a few of the recommended ways of making money and have started to branch out to other ways and the earnings continue to hike. I can safely say I can now pay for a holiday to see my family overseas at the end of this year from the extra I have earned because of TMS. TMS has been the best thing to happen to me this year.
TMS has helped me find lots of like minded individuals who don’t look down on me for working from home, for wanting to be self-employed and for wanting to earn money ‘sitting on my computer’. I’ve found new opportunities (despite being a pro at the money making game now) and best of all I love having somewhere to chat with others about money related goals for my life.
I am so glad I found TMS it has given me ideas above the normal survey route, some of which I have started some I am going to try when daughter back at uni.
Living in a rural area earning extra from home is great, and the site is friendly unlike some.
I used to think I’d only ever be able to earn money from home by either, selling handmade items, or joining an MLM scheme. TMS has opened up many other ways of earning – even when one didn’t work out there was multiple other options for me to explore. Now I’ve found something that works for me I can be at home with my two young children without having to worry about how we’re going to make it through the next month.
I was always under the impression that most of the ‘work from home’ sites were a scam. However The Money Shed has opened up ample opportunities for genuine working from home ideas – some things that I never knew existed such as super easy transcription, web site user testing and app task jobs.
I have to say I’ve been a bit unlucky in passing the exams to get signed up to those sites that seem to offer the most regular/higher money earning potential as a side line eg 63336/Leapforce etc. It was rather frustrating and I felt a bit deflated when I failed to get in at the last hurdles. However at least it goes to show these companies are legit and have standards that need to be met which can only be a good thing.
Location also plays a big part in some of the opportunities – eg Manchester seems to offer an abundance of the app based tasks on a regular basis, whilst I found that where I am based (the southeast/London area) surprisingly offers not so many. Always worth bearing this in mind and not comparing yourself to others earnings too much – it’s not always you, it can just be a postcode lottery so to speak!
It’s also good to feel part of a community in that everyone that joins the site is made to feel welcome and supported in their pursuits and queries. When I was working away working 24/7 with little daily contact with the outside world, it was nice to feel part of a group of like minded people when I logged online. So for me it was a learning curve and a positive experience!
A couple of years ago I signed up to a survey site and managed to make £20 in time for Christmas.
I was delighted that I had made some money for doing virtually nothing. This led me to try and find out a bit more about the possibility of earning some extra money on-line.
Through a host of different forums and websites I eventually stumbled upon The Money Shed.
I immediately became hooked. The help on this site is second to none, all the users are really friendly and always willing to point you in the right direction with no questions being scoffed at.
I have found various survey sites and Apps that help me make extra money and now with matched betting my on-line earnings should reach a new high.
I love this site and it is the first site I log in to each day.
I’ve only regularly started visiting TMS in the past 3-4 months, and its no coincidence that this has been at a time when I’m an impoverished mature student and my wife has been out of work, and is now expecting our first child.
Nonetheless, I’ve already lost count of the money-making opportunities I’ve signed up to since first hearing about them on TMS – Yoobic, Pickle, BeMyEye, Field Agent and Profit Accumulator off the top of my head.
The only downside is I feel guilty at not being able to alert TMS users to much else in the way of good stuff – normally someone has beaten me to it!
That shouldn’t detract from how superbly useful this site is though, and I can inagine that for some people on a low income and perhaps at their wit’s end, it’s not far off being a lifesaver.
It’s also reassuring to know that TMS and its community are always there for each other, waiting in the background with a pep talk or friendly advice should it ever be needed for a ‘kindred spirit’.
I’ve been a member of many forums, sites and groups over the years and have always had something on the go in terms of making extra money online. However, it wasn’t until i joined The Money Shed that i actually started making anything more than a bit of beer money. There’s a simple reason for that i believe; the community. I think there’s a real sense of community on this site, and what you see and read you know you can trust. That has led me to try more things, which seems to be working.
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