How to earn money with taking notes in college

by Fleur van Rijn

Are you a well-prepared student who spends a lot of time writing notes and summaries of the study material? Then your summaries may be worth money! Is studying taking up a lot of your time and do you find it hard to work beside that? Then selling summaries and notes may be the perfect side job for you. Many students are already doing this and have definitely earned a substantial amount of cash. In this article, we will explain how you can get paid to write notes and summaries.

Writing summaries

Writing a good summary takes a lot of time. You are trying to put the content of a study book with approx. 400 pages into a summary of, let’s say, 30 pages maximum. This is not an easy task at all, since you are trying to only write down the key points. Once you’ve succeeded, you’ll read the summary a couple of times, try to learn it by heart and understand the content. This is how you learn: reading the book, writing a summary and learning the summary.

This way, when you have to take the exam, you are a little stressed but always proceed to get a good grade. In short, your summarizing skills are great and effective for acing your study! But what if we tell you that you could also make some money by sharing these summaries? Since writing them is part of your study strategy, little extra effort is needed to earn money. Who would buy those summaries? In our experience, there are many students that do not have the skills or the time to write summaries themselves. Often, they are willing to pay some money in order to be able to learn from other student’s summaries. You can profit from these students! Give your summaries a second life by selling them. This way, you can earn some money with work that you would do either way. By now, you are wondering where you can sell your summaries and our answer is: Stuvia!

Create an account

Creating an account on Stuvia is easy and free of charge. Only if you sell a document, a small commission will be paid to Stuvia. If you don’t sell anything, you won’t lose anything! This is definitely a win-win situation.

Upload your summaries

After you have uploaded your notes or summaries on Stuvia, the marketing machine will be put into motion. We often draw attention to the best notes and summaries on our website, which will enhance the likelihood that potential buyers see your notes or summary.

Determine the price

One of the advantages of using Stuvia is that you can determine the price for your notes or summary yourself. If you’re just getting started, building your brand might be a good idea: start with a small price. Keep in mind that students often do not have a very high budget. Once the word gets out that you sell awesome summaries, you can adjust the price to be somewhat higher. Students have one goal: passing their exam! And many students are willing to pay a little more money for that.

Cash!

You will be immediately notified once you have sold a document and earned cash! Because everything is digital, you can sell one summary many times. Especially during exam periods, thousands of summaries and notes are sold each day, which means: cash! The best summary is worth a lot of money at that time. By selling these notes and summaries, students can save up for holidays, evenings out and sometimes, they are even able to pay their college money with their earnings on Stuvia. Some people earn money with their documents even after graduation. This way, summaries you write now, can still be a source of income later. Without doing any extra work!

Extra cash?

After having uploaded several documents to Stuvia, you're ready to earn some cash without any extra work. But if you're willing to put in some extra effort, you're able to boost your income. You can easily post your documents in Facebook groups or on https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/. Try to look for topics on an upcoming test or questions about the courses you've uploaded for. Help students by answering questions and by sharing your work on Stuvia with them.

At Stuvia, you can sell summaries, class notes, theses and other study material of which you have the copyright. By writing and selling study material, having copyright is very important. If you have written your own summary, then the copyright is yours. Be sure not to plagiarize the study book: make sure that you don’t use literal quotes, images of tables directly from the book.

In short

Why should you sell your notes and summaries? This way, you help other students who don’t have the time or skills to write their own summary or notes. By writing summaries, you are automatically learning for your exam; earning money with something you would do anyway is an easy way to earn some extra money!