What is the easiest way to make money online? I would have to say for me it was writing freelance articles. I signed up for Textbroker (although you could go to any number of similar services) and started banging out articles and making money every single day. They pay you via Paypal and I only rarely had an article rejected. When one was rejected, you just had to make some revisions and then you were generally good to go.
Is this the easiest way to make money? Maybe. You can actually make money online simply by sitting and clicking on stuff all day. For example, there is a service by Amazon called mechanical turk that has people doing small tasks each day for a few cents each. But this solution does not really scale very well, and I think people who have reviewed and tried to use it to make money could not clear minimum wage with their furious clicking. At the other end of the scale would be an affiliate education product like the Google terminator.
Then there is social media voting for money. This one has huge potential and I am not sure how it is going lately. There was a company called Subvert and Profit and the deal was quite simple….people could purchase votes for social media sites (such as Digg or Stumbleupon) and the votes that were purchased were all “crowdsourced,” which means that the orders were fulfilled by a random crowd of strangers. Since no discernible pattern was used, the social media websites had no way of preventing this level of gaming (at least initially, they may have defeated it by now). But the basic idea here is pretty legit, and should scale pretty well I would think. If people are willing to pay others to sit there and click on stuff, then I am sure there will be armies of people out there ready to take their money and click away. But I am not so sure that this can really make more than a couple of bucks per day, because otherwise these social media sites would recognize that excessive voting is coming from one user/one ip. So in fact it might not scale so well.
Bottom line is that the easiest thing I found to make money online was to write up some articles for other people. You don’t make a ton of money but if you put in a few hours every single day it will be more than what you are expecting at the end of the month.